Thursday, March 29, 2007
The New Conservatism
--Sinclair Lewis
Who can deny that the above quote sounds mysteriously prophetic in regards to the Bush Adminostration?
David Brooks has written a column that should be a wakeup call to everyone--liberal and conservative alike--who cares about the future of this country. I don't pay for the New York Times, so I'll rely on Glenn Greenwald's and Andrew Sullivan's fiskings to get to what may very well be the heart of Brooks' piece:
Normal, nonideological people are less concerned about the threat to their freedom from an overweening state than from the threats posed by these amorphous yet pervasive phenomena. The "liberty vs. power" paradigm is less germane. It's been replaced in the public consciousness with a "security leads to freedom" paradigm...
The "security leads to freedom" paradigm doesn't end debate between left and right, it just engages on different ground. It is oriented less toward negative liberty (How can I get the government off my back?) and more toward positive liberty (Can I choose how to lead my life?).
This is the voice of the new "conservatism" (also known as "neoconservatism"), the one that constantly trumpets the threat from without in order to consolidate power in what I can only describe as the threat from within. This is the voice of "conservatism" that advocates executive privilege, the Patriot Act, McCarthyite witch-hunts against enemies of the administration (the Attorney-firing scandal is a perfect example of this), and the destruction of habeas corpus rights that have for more than two centuries served as the bedrock of our republic. Goldwater and Reagan are rolling in their graves.
Don't believe me? Here's Ronald Reagan, stumping for Goldwater in 1964:
If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.
You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right, but I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down--up to a man's age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order--or down to the ant heap totalitarianism, and regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.
Whe Reagan spoke those words, he was referring to the welfare state, which sought to re-organize and re-define American society in the model bequeathed to America by people who positioned themselves as the "elite" who knew better how to preserve American society than those pesky founders. In that day and age, the threat to liberty came from the left. Today it comes from the right. But it's not the right that I once knew. Which is why I am one of Rob Knop's "RUB"s--Republicans Until Bush.
Labels: conservatism, liberty, politics
