WEBVTT NOTE Up From Conservatism 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:07.000 By the way, if you notice that my shirt's a little bit wrinkled this morning, it's because I basically trust Jeff Tucker on everything that involves fashion. 2 00:00:07.000 --> 00:00:14.000 And last night, in order to justify the fact that he had a very wrinkled shirt, he explained that these were status wrinkles. 3 00:00:14.000 --> 00:00:21.000 And so I imagined myself last night ironing wrinkles into my shirt, but it turned out not to be necessary. 4 00:00:21.000 --> 00:00:32.000 Well, unfortunately, I don't have much time for jokes here, and plus, apparently, we have a potentially global audience, thanks to this incredible technology. 5 00:00:32.000 --> 00:00:45.000 And it made me think that this is obviously a very, very important event with the live broadcasts and everything, so I decided that this one's no drinking before the lecture. 6 00:00:45.000 --> 00:01:15.000 I have two tiny, tiny 30-second each plugs to make for myself, if I may, because this event, unfortunately from my point of view, is scheduled really three months too early, because I have two books coming out in the next three months, it's just a fluke that they're coming out at the same time, but at the end of the next month, they have a book coming out called, The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, and it's under the constraints of a very severe word count limit, I pretty much overturned as much as I possibly could. 7 00:01:15.000 --> 00:01:20.000 and at the end I have a bibliography directing people to reliable sources and so on and so forth. 8 00:01:20.000 --> 00:01:23.000 It's available to be pre-ordered on Amazon. 9 00:01:23.000 --> 00:01:27.000 The cover is going to be different, the book description is sort of screw-napped, 10 00:01:27.000 --> 00:01:30.000 but there is a page there so you can pre-order it. 11 00:01:30.000 --> 00:01:36.000 I've heard a story about a guy who pre-ordered five copies and wanted to give some to his friends. 12 00:01:36.000 --> 00:01:40.000 Then the next day he woke up in bed surrounded by precious gems. 13 00:01:40.000 --> 00:02:10.000 These results are not typical, but nevertheless, the second brief plug is for a book I have coming out that stirred up some controversy months ago before it was even ready, called The Church and the Market, A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy, which there's a flyer about it back there on that table, and I mention that because that book developed out of a paper I gave at the Austrian Scholars Conference two years ago, 14 00:02:10.000 --> 00:02:30.480 When Ronald Reagan died in June, Republican tributes to his memory were an awkward thing 15 00:02:30.480 --> 00:02:32.440 to watch. 16 00:02:32.440 --> 00:02:36.340 Republican politicians who had long since come to boast of their expansion of federal 17 00:02:36.340 --> 00:02:45.340 The Federal spending heaped praise upon Reagan, the man who, at least in his rhetoric, had poured such withering scorn upon the moral and material pretensions of government. 18 00:02:46.340 --> 00:02:57.340 These were men who had voted for a deeply immoral expansion of Medicare, the Wild Left Behind Act, which they would have been howling about if the current president's predecessor had dared to propose it, and so on and so forth. 19 00:02:58.340 --> 00:03:05.340 The 18.6% increase in non-defense discretionary spending that occurred during the 107th Congress of 2002-03. 20 00:03:06.340 --> 00:03:09.700 was by far the greatest such increase in decades. 21 00:03:09.700 --> 00:03:12.660 The Bush administration said the Wall Street Journal has been 22 00:03:12.660 --> 00:03:17.580 the most profligate since the 1960s. Bill Clinton was the very model of 23 00:03:17.580 --> 00:03:19.500 fiscal restraint by comparison. 24 00:03:19.500 --> 00:03:24.340 Meanwhile, Republicans cheer and embrace federal programs they used to condemn. 25 00:03:24.340 --> 00:03:27.820 And of course, we're reminded of the 26 00:03:27.820 --> 00:03:32.460 notorious and famous phrase and sentence of Stan Evans who once said that 27 00:03:32.460 --> 00:03:35.020 conservatives who come to Washington know it is a sewer, 28 00:03:35.020 --> 00:03:38.020 The trouble is most of them wind up treating it like a hot tub. 29 00:03:40.020 --> 00:03:43.020 For the most part, the present slate of self-described conservatives 30 00:03:43.020 --> 00:03:47.020 possess none of the older conservative appreciation for the limits of politics. 31 00:03:47.020 --> 00:03:51.020 They write books with titles like An End to Evil. 32 00:03:52.020 --> 00:03:56.020 They give speeches like this one, delivered by Republican Senator Sam Brownback 33 00:03:56.020 --> 00:03:58.020 at this year's Republican convention. 34 00:03:59.020 --> 00:04:03.020 From the HIV AIDS patient in Uganda to the 14-year-old girl 35 00:04:03.020 --> 00:04:10.020 From the down syndrome child seeking an education, to the prisoner working to turn away from a life of crime, this nation and this president will fight for you. 36 00:04:10.020 --> 00:04:17.020 From the man held in a foreign prison for practicing his faith, to the Sudanese refugee attacked for the color of her skin, this nation and this president will fight for you. 37 00:04:17.020 --> 00:04:24.020 Well, while Sam Brownback is promising that the American people will fight for you, 38 00:04:24.020 --> 00:04:39.020 Well, while Sam Brownback is promising that the American Messiah will right every wrong in the world, Federal promises to the American people are in deep trouble. 39 00:04:39.020 --> 00:04:51.020 To take just one example, as of last year, Medicare was underfunded to the tune of $27 trillion, nearly four times the entire national debt, in terms of future promises versus projected tax receipts. 40 00:04:51.020 --> 00:04:56.980 Shoots. A report issued last year found that the average male reaching age 65 could expect 41 00:04:56.980 --> 00:05:02.700 to receive $71,000 more in benefits, mainly Social Security and Medicare, from the federal 42 00:05:02.700 --> 00:05:07.740 government than he had paid in. The average 25-year-old male, on the other hand, could 43 00:05:07.740 --> 00:05:13.700 expect to pay $322,000 more in taxes than he would ever get back from federal transfer 44 00:05:13.700 --> 00:05:19.220 programs. The conservative response to this situation, apparently, is to add an extra 45 00:05:19.220 --> 00:05:35.220 Alvaro Vargas Llosa, who has a stronger stomach than I do, tried to make sense of the state of conservatism by attending this year's Republican Convention and speaking to some of the delegates. 46 00:05:35.220 --> 00:05:41.220 What was there for conservatives to cheer about a budget-busting administration like this one he wanted to know? 47 00:05:41.220 --> 00:05:47.220 Well, the delegates appear to believe that increases in spending were due to homeland security measures and the war. 48 00:05:47.220 --> 00:05:51.220 But spending is in fact way up across the board, 70% in education alone. 49 00:05:51.220 --> 00:05:57.220 Even John Kerry was able to criticize the president in the last debate for not having vetoed a single spending bill. 50 00:05:57.220 --> 00:05:59.220 You're in trouble in that situation. 51 00:05:59.220 --> 00:06:04.220 Well, that doesn't really matter to these conservatives, since according to many of the people Yosa spoke to, 52 00:06:04.220 --> 00:06:09.220 more important than working towards smaller government is using the federal government to promote moral virtue. 53 00:06:09.220 --> 00:06:19.220 would have been unthinkable to, in effect, educated normal conservatives who would have thought that this is the sort of thing that churches do, localities do, not the federal government. 54 00:06:19.220 --> 00:06:33.220 But even here, the delegates aren't exactly consistent. According to Yosa, many of these same activists saved their loudest cheers for two moderate politicians not known for pursuing a traditional social agenda, Rudolf Giuliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger. 55 00:06:33.220 --> 00:06:35.220 War trumps all. 56 00:06:35.220 --> 00:06:49.220 This belief in the promotion of moral virtue as a function of the federal government may help to explain the enthusiasm among some conservatives for the president's proposal to spend one and a half billion dollars to promote healthy marriages in America. 57 00:06:49.220 --> 00:07:02.220 Now, I don't know about you, ladies and gentlemen, but when I think healthy marriages, I think Washington, D.C. 58 00:07:02.220 --> 00:07:05.220 Now, one presidential advisor said, quote, 59 00:07:05.220 --> 00:07:11.220 This is a way for the president to address the concerns of conservatives and to solidify his conservative base. 60 00:07:11.220 --> 00:07:12.220 Well, there you have it. 61 00:07:12.220 --> 00:07:15.220 So ignorant are they of their own principles and tradition 62 00:07:15.220 --> 00:07:18.220 that the people who comprise the president's conservative base 63 00:07:18.220 --> 00:07:22.220 think it's a great victory for their cause when the federal government hires secular therapists 64 00:07:22.220 --> 00:07:26.220 to teach interpersonal skills to young couples. 65 00:07:26.220 --> 00:07:29.220 The conservatism of yesteryear, whatever its faults, 66 00:07:29.220 --> 00:07:36.220 The Social Leftism and Foreign Policy Adventurism of so-called conservatism today, on the other hand, sound more like the bellowings of a fraction of the world's most powerful. 67 00:07:36.220 --> 00:07:43.220 It is impossible to imagine such luminaries of yesteryear as Russell Kirk, Eric von Knoll-Ledeen and Richard Weaver supporting the juvenile jingoism of the kiddies who dominate the movement now. 68 00:07:43.220 --> 00:07:51.220 Still less would they have accepted the suggestion that objecting to leftist utopianism made them unpatriotic. 69 00:07:51.220 --> 00:08:03.220 The social leftism and foreign policy adventurism of so-called conservatism today, on the other hand, sound more like the bellowings of a frat party than a serious community of scholars and statesmen. 70 00:08:03.220 --> 00:08:12.220 In an article I wrote for lewrockwell.com, I quoted neoconservative writer Jonah Goldberg and asked people if they could imagine Russell Kirk saying this. 71 00:08:12.220 --> 00:08:13.820 Jonah Goldberg said, 72 00:08:13.820 --> 00:08:18.460 Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country 73 00:08:18.460 --> 00:08:23.460 and throw it against the wall just to show we mean business. 74 00:08:23.460 --> 00:08:26.340 There's the great intellectual movement you have there. 75 00:08:26.340 --> 00:08:28.340 Wonderful. 76 00:08:28.340 --> 00:08:30.820 Right, that sounds very much like it. 77 00:08:30.820 --> 00:08:37.460 Actually, no, this is a Goldberg quotation, but in a way they sort of morph into each other, don't they? 78 00:08:37.460 --> 00:08:41.140 Older conservatives wrote books that we still read and profit from today. 79 00:08:41.140 --> 00:08:48.140 Few of us who have read something by Connolly Dean or Richard Weaver have not benefited from those books. 80 00:08:48.140 --> 00:08:59.140 The present generation, on the other hand, produces forgettable collections of platitudes whose brief, if flashy, shelf life is followed by their rapid and merciful consignment to oblivion. 81 00:08:59.140 --> 00:09:02.140 Now my talk is called Up From Conservatism. 82 00:09:02.140 --> 00:09:15.140 Now, the sort of secret of these talks is that, at least in my case, the title was given to me, which is fine. It's wonderful. That way I don't have to think anything up. I can take the topic they've given me and then develop it. 83 00:09:15.140 --> 00:09:28.140 But I think Jeff Tucker probably was trying to get me to say, you know, go further than I had gone before in my condemnation of conservatism, and I think I'll take him up on that invitation. 84 00:09:28.140 --> 00:09:38.140 I trust that the title of the talk is based on Bill Buckley's book, Up From Liberalism, in the 50s, and so now we're going up from conservatism. 85 00:09:38.140 --> 00:09:45.140 It's a fitting title for a talk, because as somebody who in the past, at least, has described himself as a conservative, 86 00:09:45.140 --> 00:09:52.140 I feel that every time somebody asks me for my political affiliation, if I say conservative, then I immediately have to follow it up with, 87 00:09:52.140 --> 00:09:56.640 You follow it up with, but wait a minute, I'm not a lunatic. 88 00:09:56.640 --> 00:10:01.540 It's very difficult. It's very difficult. Now libertarians have a similar problem, not quite as bad. 89 00:10:01.540 --> 00:10:05.140 You say you're a libertarian, people immediately make certain assumptions about you too, and you have to say, 90 00:10:05.140 --> 00:10:10.440 no, wait a minute, I have a job, I'm successful. 91 00:10:10.440 --> 00:10:18.140 So I don't know what word, I wish I had a new word for us, Rockwellian maybe is a possible word, I don't know. 92 00:10:18.140 --> 00:10:22.140 But nevertheless, what is the way up from conservatism? 93 00:10:22.140 --> 00:10:28.140 Well, for one thing, I think there is a lot that can be learned from the Austrian School of Economics 94 00:10:28.140 --> 00:10:35.140 and from the tradition of thought that Lew Rockwell and the Mises Institute represent. 95 00:10:35.140 --> 00:10:40.140 Now, I still think of myself, at least culturally, as a conservative. 96 00:10:40.140 --> 00:10:42.140 And it seems to me that in the course of the 20th century, 97 00:10:42.140 --> 00:10:48.140 In this century, the state really revealed itself as the most powerful threat yet seen to traditional societies. 98 00:10:48.140 --> 00:10:56.140 Whether it's wrecking neighborhoods with forced busing and urban renewal, undermining marriage and the family through its crushing tax burden, 99 00:10:56.140 --> 00:11:02.140 or through welfare state programs that encourage dependency on the state instead of dependency on family and community, 100 00:11:02.140 --> 00:11:10.140 or seeking to marginalize or supplant all other social institutions, Burke's little platoons of society, 101 00:11:10.140 --> 00:11:13.140 The statist assault is there for all to see. 102 00:11:13.140 --> 00:11:18.140 Then there are the increasingly visible, even macabre, spiritual pretensions of the modern state. 103 00:11:18.140 --> 00:11:24.140 How else can we describe what we are presented with at the Democratic and Republican conventions, 104 00:11:24.140 --> 00:11:28.140 other than the cultivation of a messiah figure? 105 00:11:28.140 --> 00:11:31.140 The other day, John Edwards said that if he and John Kerry were elected, 106 00:11:31.140 --> 00:11:36.140 people like Christopher Reeve would walk again. 107 00:11:36.140 --> 00:11:42.140 Why don't these guys just try to multiply some loaves and fishes while they're at it? 108 00:11:42.140 --> 00:11:46.140 In my book, The Church Confronts Modernity on American Catholicism and the Progressive Era, 109 00:11:46.140 --> 00:11:51.140 I point out an overlooked aspect of progressive ideology, namely the desire to substitute 110 00:11:51.140 --> 00:11:57.140 what the progressives expressly called a religion of the American way of life in place of traditional religion. 111 00:11:57.140 --> 00:12:02.140 American intellectuals during the Progressive Era were trying to construct a new American ethic 112 00:12:02.140 --> 00:12:06.440 in which the citizen's primary loyalty was to the national community, by which they essentially 113 00:12:06.440 --> 00:12:11.820 meant the federal government, rather than to states and localities, and to a new non-dogmatic, 114 00:12:11.820 --> 00:12:14.900 non-denominational ethic, instead of to any revealed religion. 115 00:12:14.900 --> 00:12:19.600 According to one scholar, progressives held that all social knowledge deserving a hearing 116 00:12:19.600 --> 00:12:23.420 must be cosmopolitan in origin and national in import. 117 00:12:23.420 --> 00:12:28.220 They invented a conception of citizenship, moreover, that stipulated that the possession 118 00:12:28.220 --> 00:12:38.220 The question of social knowledge entailed reflecting on and articulating ideas of national public good unmediated by party, interest, region or sectarian religion. 119 00:12:38.220 --> 00:12:41.220 All these things were to be shunted aside. 120 00:12:41.220 --> 00:12:44.220 Yet to hear these arguments today, do we turn to modern conservatism? 121 00:12:44.220 --> 00:12:46.220 The question answers itself. 122 00:12:46.220 --> 00:12:53.220 We look instead to intelligent libertarians like Hans Hoppe, who shows in his indispensable book, Democracy, the God that Failed, 123 00:12:53.220 --> 00:12:57.220 that the state is always at war with so-called intermediary institutions. 124 00:12:57.220 --> 00:13:06.220 This is a point, by the way, that a traditional conservative like Robert Nisbet repeatedly made but, of course, the typical Fox News viewer has never heard of Robert Nisbet. 125 00:13:06.220 --> 00:13:11.220 Unfortunately, he has never heard of Hans Hoppe either. That's a real shame, though. That's a real shame. 126 00:13:11.220 --> 00:13:19.220 Oh, that's good. Well, that's true. Tom de Lorenzo watches Fox News just to make fun of them and criticize them on the blog. I'm talking about the cheering people. 127 00:13:19.220 --> 00:13:26.220 Likewise, Professor Hoppe argues that purely private communities can supply everything that cultural conservatives seek. 128 00:13:26.220 --> 00:13:31.220 Likewise, the Austrian School, particularly in the work of Rothbard, Hoppe, Walter Block, 129 00:13:31.220 --> 00:13:35.220 shows that the usual distinction made in mainstream economics between public goods, 130 00:13:35.220 --> 00:13:38.220 that by their nature must be supplied by government on the one hand, 131 00:13:38.220 --> 00:13:44.220 and private goods, capable of being produced on the free market on the other, is without foundation. 132 00:13:44.220 --> 00:13:48.220 In other words, they show us how much of life can be arranged through the normal channels of civil society, 133 00:13:48.220 --> 00:13:55.220 The more familiar we are with Austrian literature, the more impatient we become with the state and its ceaseless path of destruction. 134 00:13:55.220 --> 00:14:00.220 And the fact of repeated government failure is only half the story thrives on failure. 135 00:14:00.220 --> 00:14:04.220 We well know how this works when it comes to the welfare state and fostering dependency. 136 00:14:04.220 --> 00:14:09.220 The bureaucracy measures success by how fast it increases the number of people on the rolls. 137 00:14:09.220 --> 00:14:14.220 An attitude no charitable institution relying on voluntary contributions could possibly afford to hold. 138 00:14:14.220 --> 00:14:21.220 One scholar of welfare cites a candid description of the system by a social security official in a Midwest field office. 139 00:14:21.220 --> 00:14:25.220 In the field, I was a supervisor out there for years and years. 140 00:14:25.220 --> 00:14:30.220 Your staffing, your budget for supplies and your awards money for the employees was based on work units. 141 00:14:30.220 --> 00:14:33.220 Now work units were assigned based on the number of claims you took. 142 00:14:33.220 --> 00:14:38.220 So we would sit around and figure out how we could get more people on the SSI roles because it would benefit us. 143 00:14:38.220 --> 00:14:43.220 The more applications we took, the more work units, the bigger the staff we could build up an empire. 144 00:14:43.220 --> 00:14:46.220 Well, rarely do you get so frank in admission. 145 00:14:46.220 --> 00:14:50.220 But Murray Rothbard said in a wonderful transcribed quotation 146 00:14:50.220 --> 00:14:55.220 that somebody very kindly reproduced on the Mises blog recently, 147 00:14:55.220 --> 00:14:57.220 he said this, he said, 148 00:14:57.220 --> 00:14:59.220 In general, I urge everybody to look at a government measure, 149 00:14:59.220 --> 00:15:05.220 not in terms of a tragic failure to achieve the common good, public interest or general welfare, 150 00:15:05.220 --> 00:15:11.220 but rather as a conscious agency for doing all sorts of monopolizing, cartelizing and other restrictive things. 151 00:15:11.220 --> 00:15:14.420 In other words, the government is not that dumb, says Rothbard. 152 00:15:14.420 --> 00:15:18.020 That's exactly right. They want this. This is the outcome they desire. 153 00:15:18.020 --> 00:15:21.820 Likewise, he said, there's a rational conspiracy view of history 154 00:15:21.820 --> 00:15:25.920 and an irrational, sort of sloppy conspiracy theory of history. 155 00:15:25.920 --> 00:15:28.320 The sloppy view only says qui bono and then says, 156 00:15:28.320 --> 00:15:31.520 aha, these guys are responsible. They're evil and so forth. 157 00:15:31.520 --> 00:15:34.620 The rational conspiracy theorist looks more deeply and asks, 158 00:15:34.620 --> 00:15:37.720 who caused these men for them? Who continues to lobby for them? 159 00:15:37.720 --> 00:15:41.020 This makes him a scholar instead of a hopped-up paranoid. 160 00:15:41.020 --> 00:15:52.020 And then my favorite line, so scholarship is essentially confirming your early paranoia through a deeper factual analysis. 161 00:15:52.020 --> 00:16:00.020 So this institution, the state that wrecks communities and rips us off while it's at it, needs to be dramatically demystified and delegitimized. 162 00:16:00.020 --> 00:16:10.020 Norman Cantor, a scholar of the Middle Ages, reminds us that in fact, a person in the Middle Ages, which many conservatives have great place in their hearts for the Middle Ages, 163 00:16:10.020 --> 00:16:13.020 Here's what Norman Cantor says about the state then. 164 00:16:13.020 --> 00:16:16.020 He speaks about the relative unimportance of the state. 165 00:16:16.020 --> 00:16:21.020 He talks about the family, the arts, learning and science, business enterprise and technological progress. 166 00:16:21.020 --> 00:16:25.020 These are the work of individuals and groups and the involvement of the state is remote and disengaged. 167 00:16:25.020 --> 00:16:30.020 It is the rule of law that screens out the state's insatiable aggressiveness and corruption 168 00:16:30.020 --> 00:16:33.020 and gives freedom to civil society below the level of the state. 169 00:16:33.020 --> 00:16:37.020 It so happens that the medieval world was one in which men and women worked out their destinies 170 00:16:37.020 --> 00:16:44.020 So it seems to me conservatives ought to forget looking to this institution for anything. 171 00:16:44.020 --> 00:16:51.020 Getting the state out of the way, conservatives could promote the values they cherish through the channels of civil society, as Cantor says they did during the Middle Ages. 172 00:16:51.020 --> 00:16:59.020 Finally, last year I got a call from a semi-prominent traditional Catholic asking what I thought of the idea of fielding a good traditional Catholic for president. 173 00:16:59.020 --> 00:17:01.020 I'm involved in a lot of Catholic circles. 174 00:17:01.020 --> 00:17:04.020 And I said all we'd have to show for it would be millions of dollars wasted. 175 00:17:04.020 --> 00:17:11.020 I said, what if we took that money and used it to endow a good, non-leftist, non-social justice oriented Catholic university? 176 00:17:11.020 --> 00:17:15.020 That would do more good than all the quixotic presidential candidacies in the world. 177 00:17:15.020 --> 00:17:18.020 The channels of civil society are open to us, let's use them. 178 00:17:18.020 --> 00:17:21.020 And when I put it that way, he agreed. 179 00:17:21.020 --> 00:17:31.020 So ultimately then, it seems to me that the way up from conservatism is an attitude that admires and appreciates the public sector 180 00:17:31.020 --> 00:17:37.020 and that seeks a cultural, at the very least, a cultural and moral secession from the state.