The New Right's failure
Boesche, Roger
Economics & moral revival NEW RIGHTS FAILURE A SHAKY ALLIANCE WITH CAPITALISM Sometimes a non-event is as newsworthy as the events reported in detail by newspaper and television. One example...
...From Sir Francis Bacon, who grew weary of waiting for the next world and sought to use science and industry to make a paradise here on earth, to Adam Smith, who assumed the central preoccupation of life would be the consumption of goods and pleasures - capitalism paid homage to religion, all the while endeavoring to carve out a secular world of commerce and industry, wealth, and pleasure...
...Nevertheless, he predicted that the passion for wealth would gradually "sweep everything along in its course": self-interest would make religious demands seem unreasonable...
...informs us that "the free-enterprise system is clearly outlined in the Book of Proverbs" and that "competition in business is Biblical...
...Whereas evangelical Christians may well think moral fervor determined the elections, in fact business interests may have simply used moral issues to promote conservative economic reforms...
...And yet he noted that religion, public participation in communities, and a work ethic that demanded postponement of gratification, all seemed to restrain the love of wealth...
...Perhaps economic difficulties have simply postponed the appropriate legislation, which is mostly still mired in committees...
...And the secular world of the marketplace had always demanded an acquisitive ethic appropriate to it...
...Indeed, Falwell's book Listen, America...
...While capitalism proudly unleashes the forces of self-interest, Falwell tells us that societies in which "every man did what pleased himself" have decayed, and one author in Christianity Today proclaims that "self-centeredness" is Godlessness...
...Once economic reform has been completed, business may shed its religious ally either by diluting moral legislation or by discarding some of it altogether...
...Americans wanted "a more assertive America on the world scene, and on the domestic front a serious campaign to fight inflation and refurbish American industry...
...The fact is that the acquisitive ethic and the moral revival of evangelical Christians are natural rivals, not allies, and the acquisitive ethic shows every sign of dominating society...
...Eventually a world inundated by selfishness, a world without any sense of public duty, would emerge...
...This marriage too may end in divorce...
...Actually the argument that capitalism's economic self-interest will relentlessly undermine Christianity's demand for self-sacrifice on behalf of others is not new...
...Two constitutional amendments, one dealing with abortion and the other with school prayer, have received administration backing, but both are far from the government's "front burner...
...But that misses the central point: if society rewards people who are aggressively individualistic, self-seeking, consumer-oriented, and possessed with an ideology summed up in the phrase "freedom to choose," society will have insurmountable difficulties - disregarding any possible merits of moral reform - in subsequently informing those people that they cannot choose abortion, they must postpone sexual pleasure, and they cannot read pornography...
...Despite such confidence, the assertion that competitive capitalism and Falwell's "moral revival" are compatible rests on faith, not argument...
...What ever happened to the New Right's promise to restore morality to what Jerry Falwell calls a "sick" country, "one of the most blatantly sinful nations of all time?'' After an agenda of economic reform, the conservative alliance - between free-market capitalists and evangelical Christians - was supposed to advance confidently to a second agenda of moral issues: in particular, restoring prayer to public schools, restricting abortion, curbing pornography, limiting activity of professed homosexuals, and allowing parental review of textbooks...
...One example comes to mind...
...One who praises fierce economic individualism will have trouble forcing moral conformity...
...Many authors have pointed out the inconsistency of demanding that the government refrain from interfering in our eco-,nomic lives, while encouraging the government to increase control over our private lives by eliminating pornography, denying the choice of an abortion, and so on...
...Thus the alliance between free-market capitalism and religious revival is a shaky one at best...
...We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love...
...and abundant wealth would convince people that self-denial and postponement of gratification were unnecessary...
...the obsession with private business affairs would constitute a centrifugal force that would destroy the habit of participating in communities...
...ROGER BOESCHE (Roger Boesche, who teaches political science at Occidental College in Los Angeles, has written extensively on the political thought of Alexis de Tocqueville...
...Falwell even admires Solzhenitsyn's disgust with "the West's fantastic greed for profit and gain...
...That is the extent of their political conservatism...
...One would see only men and women "incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives...
...A century and a half ago Tocqueville, whom conservatives like to quote, noted that the dominant passions in the United States seemed to be the love of money and the pursuit of self-interest...
...This argument would strike the Moral Majority as astounding and heretical...
...But quite possibly there is a more fundamental problem in the the alliance between competitive capitalism and evangelical Christian morality...
...What happened...
...While our economy teaches us to be consumers of goods and pleasures, the evangelicals decry "hedonism," "permissiveness," an obsession with "self-gratification," and "materialism...
...The Puritan work ethic may have assisted the birth of early capitalism, but capitalism, since its inception, gradually but persistently has been shedding its religious assistant...
...Where our society admires individuals who resolutely compete with others, who seek to maximize self-interest, and who ultimately manage to surround themselves with consumer goods and modern pleasures, the evangelical Christians talk of sacrifice for others, duty, loyalty, discipline, love for one another, cooperation, and even submission of wives to husbands as a means to prevent divorce...
...Let us reflect what must be the state of things," said Rousseau two centuries ago, "when men are forced to caress and destroy one another at the same time...
...The writings of Falwell and the articles of a leading evangelical magazine such as Christianity Today reveal convincingly that capitalism's acquisitive ethic - however much it has brought prosperity to the nation - rests uncomfortably beside fundamentalist moral reform...
...To begin with, competitive capitalism dictated that self-interest be the tie that links human beings in this marketplace...
...It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner," said Adam Smith in a typical and famous passage, "but from their regard to their own interest...
...Even in the 1980 elections, according to the survey analysis of social scientists Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, moral issues played at most a secondary role...
Vol. 109 • June 1982 • No. 11
