A Review of Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed, Part I

Patrick Deneen's new book, Why Liberalism Failed, has caused a bit of a stir, largely because it implicates thinking of those on both sides of the political spectrum on the problem of what is wrong with our culture. It won't make those who call themselves conservatives happy and it won't make those who call themselves liberals happy either. And the reason for this is that conservatism—at that strain of conservatism that fashions itself "libertarian"--shares the same basic assumption as the liberals.

The difference between liberals and libertarians—as I have said many times—is only three or four letters.

In fact the reason I'm blogging on it now, is my recent Twitter exchange with Andrew Walker, the former Baptist ELRC director who recently left that organization to return here to Kentucky to take a position with his alma mater, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Andrew and I worked together as lobbyists several years ago, and so we know each other well. I took the opportunity of yanking his chain about a tweet with an endorsement (and link) to Paul D. Miller's "Against 'Conservative Democracy'," an article which was remarkable largely for its lack of insightfulness. I see he has since redeemed himself by tweeting a link to the far more insightful thinker, the British philosopher Roger Scruton, even though what Scruton says and what Miller says are quite different, if not completely inconsistent.

Anyway, it prompted me to ahead and start on Deneen's book, which I will be reviewing in several posts over the next week or so.

Deneen takes an admittedly hard line against our twin liberalisms, one espoused by Democratic progressives and the other espoused by people who call themselves conservatives but whose thought bears little similarity to the thought of Edmund Burke and T. S. Eliot, the thinkers between whom Russell Kirk sandwiched the history of conservatism in what remains the greatest book about conservatism yet written: The Conservative Mind from Burke to Eliot. Most people who call themselves conservatives in the United States, in fact, are no different in their fundamental assumptions about politics--a prominent theme of Deneen's book. 

The central tenet of the book is that liberalism is immolating itself in the flame of "freedom" and more liberalism will just feed the fire. The problems with liberalism are inherent in its very nature, and cannot therefore be solved by anything within liberalism. "Liberalism," he says, "has failed—not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself." The "ruins it has produced are the signs of its very success."

The aspect of this book that I suspect will be most suspect—at least among conservatives—is the implications of his analysis for America itself. America "is the first nation founded by the explicit embrace of liberal philosophy, whose citizenry is shaped almost entirely by its commitment and vision."

According to Deneen, what we are seeing now in what all sides of the political spectrum recognize as, if not a crisis, at least a problem, is the breakdown of an ideology, and the kind of breakdown common to all ideologies:

Among the few iron laws of politics, few seem more unbreakable than the ultimate unsustainability of ideology in politics. Ideology fails for two reasons—first, because it is based on a falsehood about human nature, and hence can't help but fail; and second, because as those falsehoods become more evident, the gap grows between what the ideology claims and the live experience of human beings under its domain until the regime loses legitimacy.

Deneen argues that this is indeed what is happening: Liberalism is based on a false view of human nature and now in a crisis of confidence in politics, economics, education, and science and technology.

We'll talk about how in the next post.

Suffice it to say for now that the book is about not just the failure of liberalism and the inevitability of that failure, but also about the nature of true conservatism.

CPAC's Pays the Price for Political Promiscuity

My recent post on Milo Yiannopolis being invited--and then disinvited--to CPAC at Intellectual Takeout:

Movement conservatives are finding out that the enemy of their enemy is not necessarily their friend. In fact, the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) seems to be finding out that they are themselves their own worst enemy.

After just having invited Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at its annual conference, it was revealed that right-wing gay provacateur had publicly defended sex between adolescents and older men.

Within twenty-four hours of CPAC inviting him, he was dis-invited. Now the only pearls you'll see worn at CPAC will be worn by women ...

Read the rest here.

When Conservatives Could Talk Intelligently: Where is William F. Buckley when you need him?

Compound Sentences. Subordinate clauses. Conclusions with supporting premises. Eloquence. They were all once a part of conservative rhetoric, a rhetoric now become imbecile and associated with the nominee of this nation's nominally conservative party, the extent of whose wit is embodied in insults and thoughts that (perhaps fortunately) do not extend beyond 140 characters.

Instead of advocacy and criticism informed by a knowledge and understanding of the long tradition of American and European political philosophy, we get lengthy disquisitions on the optimal tonnage of beauty contestants. Comments once strewn with quotations from Edmund Burke, Alexis de Toqueville, Lord Acton, and Russell Kirk are now more likely to make reference to the words and actions of people whose chief public exposure is in People magazine. 

There are a few relics left. Charles Krauthammer, Brett Stephens, and, to some extent, Jonah Goldberg and Russ Douthat at least speak grammatically and prosecute a good argument, but they have proven themselves (to use the British term) wets when the going gets tough on social issues like marriage.

Today's conservatives breath with only one lung. They are all economics and no culture. Yes, you can find frequent and justified ridicule of the latest PC outrage on Fox News, but once the liberal tide rises, they just position themselves higher on the beach. And as the waters rise, the retreats pile up and the conservative territory diminishes. And no one wants to do the hard work of dealing with the more enduring problem of the rising sea of ideology.

Where once we had spokesmen who were Burkeans because they had read and agreed with Burke, we now have Machiavellians who not only have not read Machiavelli, but don't even know who he was.

If you want to understand better the low estate into which the conservative mind has fallen, you need to see PBS' new documentary, "Best of Enemies." It is about the public confrontations between William F. Buckley, Jr. and Gore Vidal, the two intellectual leaders, respectively, of the conservatism and liberalism of the 60s and 70s. They spoke at a level which would be incomprehensible to today's generation of voters, educated as they were in public schools where the traditional content of history and literature have been set aside in order to make space for test preparation, fun projects, environmentalism, and political indoctrination.

But in their time, Buckley and Vidal were a huge television draw. They were rock stars before rock stars were, well, rock stars.

"Best of Enemies" focuses on the television debates on ABC during the Republican and Democratic national conventions of 1968. It was a time when CBS and NBC ruled the ratings, with ABC a distant third. While the two more popular networks focused exclusively on the 1968 convention, ABC decided to throw the dice, and put Buckley and Vidal on the same set to see what would happen.

It was a tremendous hit filled with tremendous hits.

Buckley, editor of National Review, the magazine that put conservatism on the American political map and the host of PBS' weekly "Firing Line," and Vidal, the brilliant writer of lurid but popular novels like Myra Breckenridge, squared off in a series of televised flame wars that put to shame the sallow political discourse of today. They didn't like each other, but, with the exception of one now famous incident (which the documentary spends most of its time building up to), Buckley and Vidal engaged in informed political argument only peppered with insults, not, as today, insults peppered with ill-informed political argument. 

This is public television, of course, and so they can't keep their ideological fingers off the facts. Between the mostly accurate historical narrative, we are treated to a litany of disinformation on Buckley's conservatism.

We have Andrew Sullivan, for example, remarking on how elitist and anti-democratic Buckley was. Mind you, this was the Buckley famous for saying that he would rather be ruled by the last three hundred names in the Boston phone book than the entire faculty of Harvard University, and Sullivan and his fellow liberals the ones who applaud every time unelected elite liberal judges take issues out of the democratic process and decide them for the rest of us. 

And then there is the customary civil rights rhetoric, where conservatives in general and Republicans in particular are cast as the ones in favor of discrimination and segregation despite the fact that it was the Democratic Party who supported segregation in the South, that housed Lester Maddox, George Wallace and (to this day) Lyndon LaRouche, and that offered the greatest opposition to the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s, voting against them in much higher numbers--and percentages--than Republicans.

Then we have Sullivan speculating that Buckley's opposition to homosexuality was the results of Buckley's fear of his own homosexuality. Thoughts like this are, of course, a great comfort to gays like Sullivan, whose insecurity not only demands that everyone else agree with him (by force if necessary), but that everyone else must be like him deep down. And so we say unsubstantiated and--let's face it--stupid things like this.

And we are also given the impression that Buckley lived in the shadow of his emotional outburst when, after Vidal called Buckley a "crypto-Nazi," Buckley called him a "queer" and threatened to punch him in the face. In fact the whole program works up to this moment. And when it comes, it cuts to 5-second shots of the liberal commentators, silent, thinking apparently, how terribly, terribly sad it was.

Tsk, tsk. Such a shame.

That Buckley would regret losing his temper and calling Vidal a homosexual (he was, although he consistently refused the "gay" label) using a term that gays themselves use (check out the "Queer Studies" discipline at your local state university) was something Buckley regretted doing. Conservatives have, not only standards, but consciences. But Vidal's charge that Buckley was a "crypto-Nazi," a term no conservative uses of himself, goes unlamented on the show.

No five-second camera pauses focused on the pained faces of moralistic liberals pondering the tragedy of it all. No moralistic lectures from Andrew Sullivan. No grim voice narrating how Terribly. Unfortunate. It was (queue the footage of the face of the perpetrator, in slow motion).

Maybe that was because Vidal, apparently lacking an operative conscience, never regretted hurling his own epithets, and had no journalists to feel guilty for him.

But despite all of the obligatory liberal finger-wagging and head shaking, the glory that was Buckley comes through. In fact, maybe it was good that Buckley called Vidal what he in fact was on live national television and created such a legendary moment. If he hadn't, PBS might never have done such a show, and we couldn't have seen these great old clips of Buckley practicing the art of polemic, an art increasingly falling into disuse, and one which, if conservatives fail to revive it, will be their undoing.

It's the End of the Conservative World as We Know It

Paul Gottfried

There is one conservative blog (other than, of course, Vital Remnants) that will put the current election in excellent perspective. It is a conservative oasis in the sea of nonsense. It is the Imaginative Conservative. Today's article is a great example of why this online magazine is a light in the conservative darkness. Paul Gottfried, one of the great modern conservative writers reflects on the state of modern conservatism, so-called:

[E]very time I hear the term used to describe a GOP position on just about anything, I have to wonder what makes that position “conservative.” Why for example is nation-building abroad, which involves imposing the latest model of American democracy on populations that are culturally quite different from the present American ruling class, a “conservative” position? And why is letting American working communities languish while our jobs are outsourced a “conservative” policy? The obvious answer is such stands are talking points deployed by the Republican Party as it works to hold on to certain constituents. These stands also happen to be those of the GOP donor base.

... I am convinced that the designation “conservative” is losing any substantive meaning, except for attachment to Republican operatives and donors and the label that particular media personalities choose to give themselves. 

In going back and reading Russell Kirk, as I have had the occasion recently of doing, I am reminded once again of how far gone modern so-called conservatism is. Real conservatives are trapped between a presidential candidate and his followers who hold many positions consistent with conservatism but who, when asked to defend them blindly repeat that the want to "Make America Great Again," and establishment Republicans who hold many positions at complete odds with conservatism.

And, worse, both factions have abandoned the long tradition of social conservatism. On Trump's end you get an immigration plan that would only let in people who support the agenda of radical gay rights groups (maybe that's the reason he opposes letting so many Syrian Christians into the country):

Recently he discussed how he would make Muslims entering the United States undergo “extreme vetting,” which would include making sure they had favorable attitudes toward gays and affirmed full gender equality. I’ve no idea why this test is something associated with the Right. It looks like something that came from editorial board of the New York Times or from some other publication that is now attacking Mr. Trump as a fascist.

On the other side you have the New Conservative Establishment, who were waving the white flag on marriage even before the ink on Obergefell had dried:

Popular “conservative” journalists Jonah Goldberg and John Podhoretz are high on gay marriage, which they argue promotes family values. National Review‘s rising star Jillian Kay Melchior wishes to see the United States become more fully engaged in Ukraine against Vladimir Putin, lest transgendered Ukrainians come under reactionary Russian sway. Other conservative journalists have berated the Russian president for not allowing gay pride parades in Russian cities.

As Kirk pointed out, conservatives in any time are almost necessarily relegated to the status of a Remnant, and we probably need to embrace that role, which means keeping our powder dry in elections like this one.

Eunuchs in the Palace of Liberalism: Modern conservatism and what Ailes it

Sean Hannity, conservative ideologist.

I still, unaccountably, hear people who consider themselves conservatives talk about how much progress conservatism has made over the last ten to twenty years and how much that is attributable to media institutions like Fox News.

The first thing to say about this attitude is that it is utterly preposterous. Yes, there is a conservative media that didn't exist before the mid-90s, but what needs to be explained is why the rise of the supposedly conservative media has been accompanied by an almost complete loss of the culture.

Clearly conservatism is NOT winning. In fact, the influence of conservatism on our culture has ebbed to such an extent that if it were an animal, it would have to be put on the Endangered Species List.

So why do some conservatives like these think that conservatism is somehow thriving?

The reason is that for them (and this is perhaps the central problem with modern conservatism), conservatism is an ideology. In order to tell whether it is winning or not, one need only tally up the political offices inhabited by Republicans, compare that number to the offices held by Democrats. If the former number is bigger than the latter (or if it is growing in relation to the latter), then conservatism is in good shape.

This is malady that infects conservatism as it is represented by Fox News: The idea that the way conservatism wins is to gain political power. The more control conservatives wield over the engines of government, the better off everybody is—particularly conservatives.

This is Sean Hannity Conservatism. Roger Ailes Conservatism. It is the conservatism of the neoconservatives who have, for all practical purposes, dominated the Republican Party since the departure of Ronald Reagan from the political scene. 

Reagan himself was not of this sort. Reagan was the product of the National Review conservatism that produced him. National Review, which until the 90s was the flagship conservative voice in America, particularly when it had in its stable of writers people like Russell Kirk and Joseph Sobran, and to a certain extent its editor William F. Buckley, could be said to have had a soul, a soul that left the body some time, oh about the time that Reagan's vice president George Bush, Sr. took office.

What Reagan and the old National Review conservatism recognized was that politics was the effect in relation to which the culture was the cause.  

Go back and look at a copy of the old National Review (I have boxes of them in my attic). Note the prevalence of social commentary, film criticism, and book reviews—reviews of books of every kind, including poetry, fiction, literary criticism—in addition to books on policy. Then compare it to today's conservative publications (including National Review), which, if they don't actually harbor writers who suffer from it, at least appeal to readers who are poorly read and largely unfamiliar with the Western culture that magazines like NR were founded to defend.

It was the culture, stupid—the culture which has served as the battlefield on which conservatives have been completely routed—on marriage, on education, on bioethics, on sexual ethics—in addition to the size and scope of government.

Conservatism now shares the liberal impulse to achieve some sort of earthly utopia, the only difference being that for liberals this utopia consists in a thoroughly administered life through the agencies of government while for conservatives it is realized in a free market economy.

If you listen to someone like Sean Hannity, you'll hear the eschaton being immanentized (something the conservative political theorist Eric Voegelin and his cheerleader Buckley spurned) on a daily basis. The purpose of political theories, in this reading, is to write and implement the program by which heaven can be brought to earth. It is the substance of ideology, which is, as Russell Kirk, whose book The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot single-handedly founded the conservative movement, pointed out is political religion.

How many times have you heard a conservative spokesperson use the expression "conservative ideology" as an expression of approval? If you were to say this in the presence of the old conservatives, they would lift their aged heads and fell you to the earth.

Not only is the expression "conservative ideology" an oxymoron, it is blasphemy to the ears of a real conservative. It is the unwitting declaration that conservatism is merely another political religion designed to give us secular salvation—through "the market," or the Republican Party. It implies that, as liberalism has always maintained, if we can just get society structured properly, we can all live in peace and contentment, free of external evil (the only kind of evil liberals believe in).

It is the denial of Original Sin, the doctrine which Chesterton maintained was the only Christian belief that could be empirically proven, and the denial of which underlies the fatal conceit of political utopianism.

Conservatives have ceded the culture to liberals, and think the way to fight it is to get their hands on the levers of power. They are sorely mistaken.

What Fox News has done is to redefine conservatism so as to hide the defeat. For example, the network did little to stand up to the judicial fiat by which the legal doctrine of traditional marriage was swept away—a judicial fiat it would have been called by its proper name in the days when Robert Bork was still alive. It holds tenuously to the prolife position only because it has to appease its more culturally conservative audience. And not only is homosexuality fully accepted on every program its runs, but it now regularly refers to the "transgender community," an expression pregnant (if one can use that word in such a context) with ideological assumptions no conservative could ever accept.

Modern conservatives are Eunuchs in the Palace of Liberalism, having been culturally emasculated and reduced to doing the bidding of their liberal overlords, and are receiving the appreciation they deserve.

What Obama's education chief knows that many "conservative" education policymakers don't

One small sliver of light in an otherwise pretty dim Obama administration has been the people heading the U. S. Department of Education. Arne Duncan, who was far from perfect, was at least willing to take on the teachers unions and push charter schools.

Duncan's replacement is John B. King, Jr. I don't know much else about him, but his first comments as Secretary of Education indicated that he is in favor of, get this, "a well-rounded education." Get out!

He is also against the Cult of Testing that plagues education from sea to shining sea. 

King's remarks place him in stark contrast to the many voices on the Materialist Right who want to shun the arts and humanities in favor of math and science. If you listen to prominent Republican policy voices on education, it is clear they think STEM is the answer to our education problems, when, in fact, the chief education problem is that we are not passing our culture on to students--a culture that is best passed on in our history and literature.

I'm sure King, who was the head of New York State schools, has other beliefs I would not be quite as sympathetic toward, but his one idea--that education should be broad--puts him head and shoulders above the mindless STEM rhetoric we are constantly hearing from people who clearly got a poor education in the arts and humanities.

Low Intelligence Isn't the Answer: Donald Trump, National Review, and the collapse of serious conservatism

What can you say about a movement of people that stands and applauds the incoherent babbling of Sarah Palin in her endorsement of Donald Trump and then blindly dismisses the serious and reasoned arguments of twenty-two veteran conservative thinkers writing in the flagship conservative magazine without even addressing what they said?

What we are witnessing is a wholesale repudiation of thoughtful conservatism by a substantial faction of this nation's conservative political party. The late William F. Buckley, Jr., the founder and long-time editor of National Review said in the early 1980s that "all the philosophical action is on the right." He was right then. But he could not say that today, not in a national party that can't seem to understand any political thought longer than 140 characters, and which thinks that the assertion "It's going to be great" constitutes political eloquence.

The writers of National Review's special issue "Against Trump" wrote articles. Employing more than 140 characters. Using competent English. With subordinate clauses and multisyllabic words.

Jeb Bush may be low energy, but low intelligence isn't the answer.

Maybe that's the problem: Maybe the people supporting Trump have rendered themselves illiterate and simply can't understand what the National Review writers are saying. One piece of evidence for this thesis is that not a single Trump supporter critical of the National Review issue even bothered to offer a response to anything the writers actually said in the magazine. 

Not one.

On Fox News last night, no one criticizing National Review took up anything any of its  writers actually said. Instead, all the survey-addled commentators (and anchors) could talk about was how the National Review issue politically helped Trump. Someone on Bill O'Reilly's show asked something like "What did they think they were doing?" as if the publication of the issue was the mere product of some misguided campaign ploy to shoot down Trump's candidacy on the eve of Iowa.

It apparently didn't even occur to these people that there are serious, thoughtful conservatives out there who think that maybe, just maybe, rational arguments have some relevance to the discussion about who the party should nominate as its standard-bearer and that articulating these arguments in a careful and measured way might actually contribute to the immediate well-being of the party and the ultimate well-being of the country—or at least be worth addressing.

[WE INTERRUPT THIS ARTICLE TO APOLOGIZE TO THE TRUMP SUPPORTERS READING THIS FOR THE GRAMMATICAL COMPLEXITY OF THE PREVIOUS PARAGRAPH WHICH CONTAINED MORE THAN ONE SIMPLE CLAUSE. IN FACT, WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE PREVIOUS SENTENCE, WHICH CONTAINED A GRAMMATICAL TERM ("CLAUSE") WITH WHICH YOU MAY NOT BE FAMILIAR. YOU MIGHT WANT TO GO BACK LISTENING TO SARAH PALIN, WHERE THE RULES OF GRAMMAR SIMPLY DON'T APPLY]

This is what happens when you trade in your critical thinking faculties for the kind of mindless populism that is willing to trade in principle for political success.

In fact, none of those commenting on the accursed National Review attack on Trump seemed aware that not only was William F. Buckley's National Review almost single-handedly responsible for the modern conservative movement, but that that few of them would even be conservatives at all if it wasn't for NR. As a matter of fact, the very forum in which they were voicing their Twitter length thoughts, Fox News, wouldn't even be in existence if it weren't for the influence of NR in the 60s, 70s, and 80s.

Here was Donald Trump's response to the multiple arguments—most of them fairly cogent, all of them serious and thoughtful:

The National Review is a dying, dying paper. It's circulation is way down. Not very many people read him anymore. People don't even think about The National Review. I guess they want to get a little publicity. But that's a dying paper. I got to tell you, it's pretty much a dead paper.

The first problem here is that it isn't even true, not that that ever stopped Trump from saying anything. In fact, even if it were dying, it isn't now. Their criticism of Trump (and the criticism of them by Trump) has gotten them more attention than anything they've published in recent memory. But note, like the conservative commentators who are now having to confront their consciences (unsuccessfully, I might add) in the face of the Trump juggernaut, that there is not a single response to anything the writers said in their articles. 

Trump's response is of the "neener-neener" variety of political rhetoric commonly encountered on elementary school playgrounds that now passes as competent argumentation among people who think that Frank Luntz is an objective political analyst. 

This is the state of conservatism in 2016. Conservative Republicans who still think that ideas matter can be excused while they weep for their party.

No wonder Putin likes Trump: Pro-Ethanol Mandate #DonaldTrump is a conservative. Keep repeating it to yourself.

The very day after Sarah Palin endorsed Trump, calling him a "conservative," Trump came out for even higher ethanol mandates. It's about the most anti-free market move a politician could possibly make.

I'm no worshiper of the free market, but ethanol subsidies are one of the worst examples of special interest government policy. They're the government mandate version of government spending earmarks.

It's enough to give pandering a bad name.

But don't expect his supporters to back off support for Trump because of this--or anything else. He could come out for collectivized farms, an extensive prison system for political opponents in upper Minnesota, and a conversion of the stars and stripes to the hammer and sickle and people like Palin will still be calling him a conservative.

Look for Trump to being proposing 5-year plans anytime now. Prepare for bad winters.

#PopeFrancis vs. the Materialist Right: If you thought liberals were against religion in the public square, you ought to see the conservative reaction to the #Pope

If you thought liberals were against religion in the public square, you ought to see the conservative reaction to Pope Francis.

The conservative meltdown in response to the visit of Pope Francis has reminded me once again of the sorry state of conservative thought in America today. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and other titular leaders of modern conservatism are what I like to call the "materialist right." WHAS-AM's talk show hosts Leland Conway (getting closer to home) and Mandy Connell, as well as commentator John David Dyche, lapse into this mode frequently.

The leaders of the Materialist Right are card carrying members of what Edmund Burke, the original conservative, once called the "sophisters and calculators." They worship "The Market." They're concerned with the economic bottom line. They're all about stuff. They exemplify the modernist tendency to think that something is valuable only to the extent that it can be quantitatively measured.

These are people who seem to think that the moment the GDP has a one percentage uptick, every family in America pauses at their desks or their dish-washing or their dinner, feeling one percent better.

This why they have fortitude breakdowns when it comes to social issues. With the possible exception of Limbaugh, who has hung surprisingly tough on the marriage issue, most of these people begin to swoon when it comes to having to defend traditional conservative social positions. They are in dire need of a personal assistant to stand by whenever they are forced into a discussion about a values issue, ready to administer smelling salts.

When it comes to economic issues, they're Julius Caesar; but when comes to social issues, they're Ferdinand the Bull. If the issue is whether there should be a new government program, they're unlocking the gun case; but if the issue is traditional marriage, they're out smelling the flowers.

If I hear one more self-professed conservative talk show host ask of a caller defending traditional marriage (as Leland and Mandy have done repeatedly), "but how does it affect your family?" I think I'm going to lose my lunch.

When PBS Nightly News asked me that question in the interview before the Supreme Court rewrote the 14th Amendment last year, I just questioned the assumption behind it, which was that it's all about me. It's the idea that we have no standing to take a position on any public policy issue unless we can quantitatively demonstrate that we will sustain some concrete personal benefit or harm. And, of course, the only kind if proof that would be accepted would be some kind of financial or economic gain or loss.

You're asked why you believe in traditional marriage and you're expected to produce your bank statements. This is the state of conservative thinking in the early 21st century. What do these people do in their spiritual lives? Is that decision too made according to some kind of strict individualistic, economic calculus?

The common good is now a weed in the conservative garden that must be rooted out so the economic plants won't be threatened.

The other thing about America's high profile conservatives is that, to them, everything is political--or at least everything important. Traditionalist conservatives like Russell Kirk used to warn against "immanentizing the eschaton"--in other words, of thinking that, through political ideologies, we can have salvation in this world.

It used to be the liberals who were the utopians. But now we have conservatives who seem to think that, once we have a free market, we will have reached Nirvana.

It's fine to think that the free market is the most efficient economic system. I believe that too. But when that is made the be all and end all of your political position, when you subordinate every other political and cultural issue to that one, you make it into an ideology, which is to say, a political religion.

I'll state this bluntly (as I have before): The self-professed conservatives (particularly libertarians) who worship "The Market" are radicals--in the same sense to the same extent as the people to whom they are always applying that label.

And that's ironic, because real conservatism is anti-radical.

Because of this conservative ideology (a contradiction in terms), when the Pope speaks on something from the perspective of, say, the Christian responsibility to be good stewards or how we should treat immigrants, it is immediately seen as some kind of political policy statement, and criticized in the same manner.

And, of course, the reaction of some conservatives has been to try to draw some hard and fast line between religion and politics. It's a rather ironic statement for Republicans to make at this particular time, given the high profile of religious issues in the presidential primary, but there it is. Marco Rubio, I am sorry to say, is one of the people who has said publicly that the Pope should stick to religious and moral issues and leave other issues alone.

In other words, His Holiness can go ahead and talk about peripheral values issues, but when it comes to the important issues (economics and foreign policy), he needs to take his censer and go burn some incense somewhere and leave things in the hands of the politicians--which, come to think of it, is even more ironic given what everything else they've said this year about politicians.

Of course, Rubio grew up Catholic, became a Mormon, and now goes to both a Catholic and a Protestant church. It's a good thing he doesn't have to observe immigration restrictions in his church life--or maybe the dual citizenship he apparently possesses gets him out of those restrictions, it's hard to tell.

It's one thing to disagree with the Pope. I might disagree with him on the Global Warming thing myself, although I haven't read Laudato Si yet, so I can't really say (I have learned to refrain from comment about what any Pope says or believes until I read what he actually said). But it is thing another to say that he has no business to say it. I'd rather a pope say something false than to think that he has not standing to say anything on other important issues--particularly when the people telling him to keep quiet are the very ones most responsible for screwing things up.

Why Matt Walsh is Wrong about America

Matt Walsh is a very popular conservative blogger, and justly so. But he is wrong about America.

In a post today, titled, "No, America is Not Great," he gives a litany of the cultural atrocities Americans are committing: moral relativism, abortion, gay marriage, pornography, sexual promiscuity, recreational looting, illegal immigration.

He is right so far: Americans are doing really bad things―and lots of them. Some of them are even done in the name of America. But, just as he has gotten a good list of symptoms, he lapses into a bad diagnosis.

In fact, the disease metaphor is an apt one, since he is basically blaming the patient for his sickness.

G.K. Chesterton once argued that the best argument against Christianity was Christians. But what Chesterton did not do is to blame Christianity for it. What would we think if someone gave the litany of sins that professed Christians commonly engaged in and said, "No. Christianity is Not a Great Religion."

I know what I would think.

Is America's greatness suspect because of what Americans do? This is Walsh's thesis, but he is wrong, and here's why.

Walsh's mistake is that he fails to make an important distinction: that between America as an ideal and America is a practical reality. If the problem is the practical reality, which in this case it is, it is not the fault of the ideal. In fact, the whole problem is the failure to live up to the ideal, and you don't reject the ideal because people fail to live up to it.

Walsh quotes Chesterton in making his case, but Chesterton would have disagreed with him. Chesterton talks about what he calls "primary loyalties." What is a "primary loyalty"?

A primary loyalty is a commitment we must have to a thing, and it is a loyalty over which we have no choice and may not even be aware. It is not the result of any commitment we may have consciously made or that we can ever escape from. It is something we are born to, in addition to being born into. There are various primary loyalties in our lives. Our family is one of them. If we are Christians, our Church is another. Another primary loyalty is that to our community or nation.

To be an American is to have a primary loyalty to America, a primary loyalty from which no one's deviation from its ideals can detract. And the contrast to that ideal should make us more, not less loyal to it. In fact, it is only by contrast with that ideal that we can say these things―abortion, pornography, same-sex marriage, looting―can be considered wrong at all.

If we do not have an ideal which we expect our nation's action to live up to, then we have undermined our ability to criticize the actions of its citizens at all, since we have no standard by which to criticize it.

In fact, the very passage in a Chesterton essay Walsh refers to to bolster his argument is in complete contradiction to his point:

I’m a patriot, but to borrow from Chesterton, a patriot who is uncritical of his country while it teeters on the edge of total destruction is like a son who doesn’t warn his mother that she’s about to fall off a cliff. In this case, however, we already fell off the cliff. We are shattered on the rocks below, and I’m truly not certain if we can be repaired.

Chesterton's essay was written precisely against such despair:

On all sides we hear to-day of the love of our country, and yet anyone who has literally such a love must be bewildered at the talk, like a man hearing all men say that the moon shines by day and the sun by night. The conviction must come to him at last that these men do not realize what the word 'love' means, that they mean by the love of country, not what a mystic might mean by the love of God, but something of what a child might mean by the love of jam.

If we are to take Walsh seriously (as I hope Walsh himself does not), then we are led to the conclusion that Walsh loves America like a child loves jam, and not like a grown man loves God: He doesn't like the way it tastes and so he throws it on the floor.

When hard times come, we don't reject God, although we may argue with him like Job. Maybe what Walsh needs is a voice out of the whirlwind.

Chesterton provides it:

It is the essence of love to be sensitive, it is a part of its doom; and anyone who objects to the one must certainly get rid of the other. This sensitiveness, rising sometimes to an almost morbid sensitiveness, was the mark of all great lovers like Dante and all great patriots like Chatham. 'My country, right or wrong,' is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober.' No doubt if a decent man's mother took to drink he would share her troubles to the last; but to talk as if he would be in a state of gay indifference as to whether his mother took to drink or not is certainly not the language of men who know the great mystery. 

What we really need for the frustration and overthrow of a deaf and raucous Jingoism is a renascence of the love of the native land. When that comes, all shrill cries will cease suddenly. 

Contrary to Walsh, we should share our countries troubles to the last, partly by pointing out how its so-called supporters ill serve it so badly.

Same-sex marriage, for example, was not mandated because of anything American (like the Constitution), but precisely by something that was un-American (judges violating the separation of powers).

This question comes up in my work with classical education, which studies the cultures of Athens and Rome. Some people point out that there are some pretty bad things that Greeks and Romans did. My response is always the same: that we admire these cultures―and judge them―on the basis of their ideals, not by their failures to live up to them. We judge Rome on the basis of Rome, not on the basis of Romans. And we do the same with Greece and every other civilization. Why would we not do this with America?

The problem with Matt Walsh is that he thinks what is wrong with America is America. What he fails to see is that what is wrong with America is only Americans. "[T]he point is," said Chesterton, "that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more."

What libertarianism has in common with Marxism

I have observed before that the difference between libertarians and traditional conservatives lies in the fact that libertarians see freedom as an end in itself, whereas conservatives see freedom as the means to the end of the common good.

This is, by the way, why libertarianism militates toward pure democracy, something the founding fathers eschewed, while traditional conservatism naturally inclines toward republican forms of government like that of the United States. In this sense, libertarians are at odds with, rather than inclined toward American constitutionalism.

As Aristotle points out in his Politics, each form of government has its unique aim. The aim of democracy is freedom. Republican forms of government, on the other hand, contain mixed aims, since a republic is a hybrid form of government.

This is why I think you will see (as we already have) so-called "libertarian conservatives" supporting Internet voting and multi-day elections and other means of "democratizing" the election process. And the next time the electoral college becomes an issue, just watch libertarians—who talk a good game on the Constitution, but don't seem to know much about why it was written the way it was written—line up in support of changes to make it a purely popular election irrespective of the role of the states.

The founders put all kinds of complicating factors into the system to balance it and keep it stable and to protect it from the destabilizing forces of pure democracy.

In any case, since libertarians have largely appropriated the "conservative" label these days, it is probably useful also to point out one way in which libertarianism is similar to Marxism.

Under Marx's "materialist dialectic," it is material factors that determine socio-political realities through socio-economic factors. In this sense Marxism is all about economics. Economics determine everything.

Under traditionalist conservatism, non-materialist values have played at least as much, perhaps a larger role in the well-being of a society. This is why values issues have always loomed large in conservative political rhetoric—always, until recent years.

For traditionalist conservatives, values matter, because they shape events more than material factors. But if you listen carefully to libertarian rhetoric, which now focuses almost exclusively on pocketbook issues, you will detect the implicit assumption that values don't matter (unless they are "market values," whatever that means). In fact, many so-called "moderate" Republicans say this outright: politics is exclusively about material issues.

This is why libertarianism can be referred to simply as the "materialist right." It is the materialist right that, unlike traditionalist conservatism, has given up on the culture.

Now as you listen to the campaign leading up to this next election, note the almost complete dependence of Republican rhetoric on economics—even among candidates who are ostensibly traditionalist conservatives.

This is also why, by the way, the Republicans will lose again—because they have given up on the heart issues. Voters vote their hearts, not their pocket books. That is why Reagan won—and Obama (It's also why Obama won re-election—right in the teeth of an economic crisis).

Just watch it happen again.

Why I would be less bothered by a new mosque in my community than a new state college

The conservatives who are so worried about the threat of Islam should look a little closer to home for the real enemies.

If you asked most conservatives to identify the greatest threat to America, they will inevitably point outside the United States, usually to ISIS. Undoubtedly ISIS is a threat, and could some day actually affect the U.S., which it doesn't seem to be able to do right now.

And then there is always the lurking suspicion of Muslims in the United States who, almost without exception, mind their own business and don't bother anyone.

It is hard to figure out why liberals are so indulgent toward Muslims. My theory is that it is easy for liberals to be magnanimous toward Muslims. Unlike Christians, there are not a lot of them. And because of their low representation in the population they don't affect the culture much. In the United States, they're pretty harmless.

Christians are dangerous because they are still culturally influential. That's why Muslims are tolerated and Christians aren't.

But this inordinate fear of Islam is rife among rank and file conservatives. How many times have you heard someone say they believe Obama is a Muslim? Every time I hear a friend say this my response is the same: "We would be a lot better off if Obama were a Muslim. Think about it: He would be pro-life, against gay 'marriage,' and impatient if not condemning of the mindless egalitarianism he and his liberal friends are using to destroy the culture. No Muslim would take the positions Obama takes on issues of cultural significance.

And this brings me to my main point, which is this: We have a lot less to fear from Muslims from faraway places than we do from liberals right here at home.

It isn't Muslims who are destroying American culture: It is liberals who are destroying American culture, which leads me to a corollary observation: The average conservative American has far more in common with the average Muslim than he does with the liberal anchor of the news program he watches every night, or with the liberal professor at the university down the road, or with the liberal bureaucrats who run our government, or with the drug-riddled, serially monogamous, animal rights activist celebrity who appears on his television set every night. 

In fact, one uncomfortable fact we don't want to face is that many of the excuses used by radical Muslim groups to oppose the United States are perfectly valid. We hear all about how how Arab Muslims are upset with the United States because of our over-involvement in their internal affairs. But that is not the main reason America is hated overseas by so many people—Muslims and non-Muslims.

When I hear people talk about "exporting democracy" to other countries, I just laugh. Is that really what we export to the world? Here's what we export to the world: pornography and rap music written by misogynist thugs. And then we give them lectures on how to treat women!

If you are a person in a traditional community living in a foreign country and you saw the garbage America was sending into your country, how would you feel? The world—and the underdeveloped world in particular—has become the cultural trash dump for America.

This is not a justification for the violence perpetrated on Americans. If Americans are killed, we should go after the perpetrators and destroy them. But it sure does make it a lot harder to occupy the moral high ground when you are giving these people legitimate reasons to stir people up.

The only thing saving us from being hated worse than Isis is that Isis cuts peoples heads off and enslaves women and doesn't apologize for it. Fortunately most people think that's worse than self-righteous Americans who simply corrupt their culture and pretend they're doing them a favor.

I mentioned to a friend the other day, after having seen a very large new mosque just outside of Toledo, Ohio, that I would be less bothered by a new mosque moving into my town than by a new state college. Even if the mosque contained Islamic radicals, it could not come close to matching the cultural destruction perpetrated by the class of people occupying academia who seem determined to destroy the very beliefs, traditions and customs that have always held our society together.

I'm less concerned about what Hillary Clinton let Al Qaeda radicals do to Americans in Libya than I am about what Hillary Clinton would do to America from the Oval Office.

Go watch a Muslim wearing a burkha, bowing down and peacefully saying his morning prayers. Then go watch a man in a gay pride parade, in dark leather and metal spikes (before the police crack down on him for public lewdness). And then ask which thing bodes most ill for American culture.

Are you more disturbed to know someone is shouting "Allah Akbar" 5,500 miles away, or someone saying "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture's got to go!" a half an hour down the road?

The barbarians aren't at the gate. They're inside the gate pretending to manage the defenses.

No, You're Not Like Ronald Reagan: Why most "conservative" leaders need to stop comparing themselves to the Gipper

I recently ran in to an old acquaintance and we got to talking politics. During the course of the conversation, I expressed disagreement with some policy position he had, which he said he believed in because he was a "conservative libertarian."

I winced at the historically oxymoronic expression, and thought of similar linguistic formulations, such as "square circle." I informed him that I was a traditional conservative in the mold of Russell Kirk.

"Who's that?" he said.

At this point, I made a mental note to write a blog post on old acquaintances I run into who think they are conservatives but who really aren't.

To say you are a conservative who doesn't know who Russell Kirk is is like claiming to be a baseball fan and never having heard of Babe Ruth, or a scientist who's doesn't know who Einstein was.

Let me state this plainly: If you think you are a mature conservative but you do not know who Russell Kirk is—or Edmund Burke or T. S. Eliot, then you are mistaken. You are not a conservative and you might as well face the fact. Look in the mirror. Admit it to yourself. This is the only way healing can begin.

Take off your Republican campaign buttons, put down your ghost written Sean Hannity book, stifle the delusion that Sarah Palin is the second coming of Margaret Thatcher (or for that matter whose name even belongs in the same sentence) and sit down for a minute. Use the pages from the Hannity book as cage lining for your parakeet—unless your parakeet has intellectual scruples that prevent him from deigning even to poop on them, in which case you should just throw them out.

And try to extricate from your mind the belief that culture doesn't matter and that an economic policy suffices for a political position, through surgical means if necessary.

For the benefit of the conservatively illiterate, Kirk was the author of the The Conservative Mind from Burke to Eliot, as well as the best modern statement of traditional conservative belief ever written: The Politics of Prudence. Michael Aeschliman called him "the most substantial American conservative man of letters of the last 75 years."

When you have finished reading these, read every other book Kirk ever wrote, especially The Roots of American Order (and if you can't handle that, then the short version of Roots, a book called The American Cause). In fact, there is a good introduction at National Review's website: "The Moral Imagination of Russell Kirk," by Michael Aeschliman.

And after that, sit down with an honest glass of bourbon (or, if you are Islamic—the only historically valid reason to be a teetotaler, a glass of water) and begin reading Edmund Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution. Spend a whole year on it. At least.

Burke, for those who don't know, almost single-handedly faced down the corrosive and malignant rationalist secularism of the French Revolution, saving England from its worst effects. Would that we had a Burke now to face down the malignant Cultural Revolution of our own time.

Libertarianism is not only not conservatism, it doesn't even amount to a political philosophy. It is, instead, an ideology, a true modern "ism." Like every other illicit modern world view, it takes one part of the truth (in this case, the free market), isolates it from all other truths, and demands that every other part subordinate itself to that one.

We should admire the free market, but we should beware the reductionist ideology that has been constructed in its name.

Which brings me to Ronald Reagan.

Despite all the libertarians and neoconservatives who claim the Reagan mantle, Reagan knew who Russell Kirk was, conferring on him the Presidential Citizens Medal in 1989. Reagan cut his teeth on the old National Review magazine, run by William F. Buckley, who, although he went through the Libertarian Temptation in his later years (something Kirk allegedly saw coming), was for the most part a Russell Kirk conservative.

Before about 1988, no functionally literate conservative would have said "Who's that?" when Russell Kirk's name was mentioned.

The old National Review made Ronald Reagan (and Reagan, as I recall, actually says that somewhere), and Russell Kirk helped make National Review.

The fashionable conservative leaders fleeing the cultural battlements on issue after social issue with their tails between their legs and invoking the name of Ronald Reagan as they do so should be pelted with rotten vegetables at every available opportunity. Reagan would never have done this.

On the great moral issue of late 20th century—abortion—Reagan never backed down. In fact, I think he brought it up in every State of the Union address. The liberal control of the media at the time (this was before conservatives took over talk radio) was universal. It didn't matter, Reagan never gave up.

I can't imagine what he would have said if he had known how so-called conservative leaders would surrender so easily in the fight for traditional marriage.

There needs to be some conservative agency that monitors false claims to Reaganism. It would be a full time job.

Yuval Levin: How today's so-called "conservatives" think like liberals

I have said more than once that we are all liberals now―either what Allan Bloom called left-wing liberals or right-wing liberals. As much as modern conservatives think they are different from the people who call themselves liberals (at least in America), they are really using the same basic philosophical playbook, which consists of worshiping the abstract rights of the choosing individual.

Every pimp and drug dealer, if he knows little else, knows at least this: "I got my rights."

For liberals this means expanding government to protect the rights of atomistic individuals; for so-called conservatives, this means contracting it. They come to different conclusions, but they use the same basic premises. They are two sides of the same coin.

If you are a conservative who is confused about what it is to be a conservative (which is most conservatives today)―or a liberal who wonders why you believe what you believe, then you need to read Yuval Levin's new article in First Things magazine: "Taking the Long Way," one of the most cogent and insightful recent essays on what it is to be a conservative--and a liberal progressive.

A sample:

For many decades now, America’s political life has been divided between people who call themselves “conservatives” and people who call themselves “liberals” or “progressives.” This suggests that Americans are moved to conserve the good we have and to champion liberty and progress, which might make us better still. These are noble aspirations. But unfortunately, the left and right alike seem confused about what liberty and progress really mean and require. Our ­conservative party is confused about what it should conserve and our liberal or progressive party is confused about what it should advance. The two are not misguided in exactly the same way, but both tend toward radically deficient visions of the life of a liberal society.

Read the rest here. It is behind a firewall, but you can buy the article online for $1.99. It will be the best two dollars you ever spent.

A critique of the patron saint of libertarianism

John Stuart Mill is the patron saint of libertarianism (a word Americans use for what Europeans more correctly--and historically--refer to as simply "liberalism"). Mill's Enlightenment rationalist view of freedom has exercised a mischievous influence of American political thought.

The always excellent Imaginative Conservative has an excellent critique of Mill:

As long as there have been “libertarians,” there has been hero worship of John Stuart Mill. This Nineteenth Century utilitarian author, most famously of On Liberty, has been looked to as a kind of fount of holy writ for individualism. And Mill was an individualist. Unfortunately, he was not a supporter of liberty in any meaningful sense.

It is somewhat odd, frankly, that Mill should enjoy the reputation he does, given the depth and breadth of the written record of his opinions and proposals advocating an administrative state with unchecked power to regulate people’s daily lives. What is more, excellent studies by Joseph Hamburger and, more recently, Linda Raeder, have shown the character and statist intentions of his life’s work. Still, some of the many passages so frequently quoted from his works might give evidence, to those who do not read more and with moderate care, that he was a friend to individual freedom and reasoned, principled service to mankind ...

Read more here.

Kalb Speaks: What do traditionalists and progressives really disagree about?

James Kalb, author of two excellent books of political and cultural analysis―The Tyranny of Liberalism and Against Inclusiveness―is one of those rare people who can tell you why people think the way they do. He has another excellent essay on the divide between traditionalists and progressives in the always excellent Crisis Magazine:

A recent account of moral sentiments, proposed by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon, 2012), has attracted attention for its explanation of the difference between progressives and traditionalists.

According to the account, moral judgments typically have to do with six dimensions of concern: care versus harm, fairness versus cheating, liberty versus oppression, loyalty versus betrayal, authority versus subversion, and sanctity versus degradation. Surveys show that progressives, by and large, are concerned with the care, fairness, and liberty dimensions, while traditionalists are concerned with all six. So it appears that the “culture wars” have to do with the moral status of loyalty, authority, and sanctity. Traditionally minded people accept them as morally important, while their more progressive fellows do not.

But why the difference? It appears, although Haidt’s concerns lie elsewhere, that the difference lines up with the opposition between the modern tendency to view man as radically free and the world as technological, and the traditional, classical, and religious view of man as social, and the world as pervaded by intrinsic meanings, natural ways of functioning, and natural ends.

Read more here.

Why libertarianism is not conservatism

Thomas Hobbes

It's not hard to imagine why it is that more and more conservatives are converting over to libertarianism.

For one thing, it's a whole lot easier to be a libertarian. Like every other ideology, libertarianism dispenses with all other principles than one. It eliminates the need to think about anything other than the one political doctrine. In many ways, it's the path of least resistance.

Libertarians are the political world's One-Note Johnnys: Johnny can only sing one note/And the note is this: freedom of choice.

Freedom of choice has the political advantage of being a procedural belief. It is mechanical rather than organic. It is a political and social mechanism into which you can put a substantive belief on one end, and automatically get a specific policy prescription out the other. In this respect it is in complete alignment with the scientistic spirit of our time.

Classical conservative political philosophy requires thought and wisdom, but libertarianism, as a fully Hobbesian position, involves no real substantive thought at all, only a political calculation.

This position has gotten popular recently because by lopping off any substantive principles addressing the common good (such as those concerning marriage and the family) from their body of belief, they are absolved from having to engage in the difficult job of defending these essential institutions. Freedom of individual choice alone is insufficient as a basis for their defense and from this perspective marriage and the traditional family can be thrown to the political wolves with perfect political consistency and in seeming good conscience.

It also dispenses with the need for any intellectual heavy lifting.

Libertarianism cannot be considered a conservative political philosophy. A conservative political philosophy cannot be reduced to one axiom, to which all other considerations are subordinate.

Reductionist in its essence, libertarianism is an ideology, not a philosophy. In this respect, it is closer to American liberal socialism than to conservatism. In socialism's case, the one exclusive note is social justice (or, rather, their version of it) and to that one note the rest of their song must submit.

Libertarians are stillborn conservatives―as are socialists. This is what Allan Bloom meant when, in The Closing of the American Mind, he referred to "right-wing liberals" and "left-wing liberals." Libertarians are not conservatives at all: They are right wing liberals.

Libertarianism differs from conservatism in that it considers the freedom of the atomistic individual as an end; whereas conservatism considers freedom a means to the end of the common good. Libertarianism is John Locke for the non-thinker; it is Thomas Hobbes for Dummies.

The other means by which the common good is brought about include, among other things:

• a belief in an permanent and perennial moral order that transcends the individual;
• that tradition and custom are better indicators what is and what should be because they reflect the wisdom and knowledge of men over time and cultures rather than the narrow perspective of those who happen to be living now;
• that political solutions require long-term thinking, not just a surrender to the individual whims of the hour;
• that what works in one time and one place may not be the best thing in another time and another place;
• that man is morally flawed and therefore Utopia is impossible;
• that economic freedom presumes the respect for private property;
• and that a properly operating society requires more than just the government and the atomistic individual, but also voluntary associations like the family, the church, and the civic group

These are, of course, restatements of Russell Kirk, the father of the modern conservative movement. But the Russell Kirks of conservatism have disappeared or fallen silent in the United States, and their place has been taken by the libertarian ideologues.

But libertarianism is an universal political solvent that will eventually destroy itself, largely because to justify itself it cannot depend on a calculus. It must have a substantive reason to ground its belief that the interest of the atomistic individual is supreme, but it cannot supply it.

Conservatives and the Religion of the Free Market

Russell Kirk often used to make the point that conservatism (properly so called, as George F. Will would say) is not an ideology. This was implicit in his deeming of conservatism as the "politics of prudence." An ideology is a political philosophy operating like a religion: It is apocalyptic, messianic, utopian, and radical.

You know you are a ideologue if, solely on the basis of your political views, you can fill in the blank of the following question: "The world will be brought to perfection when ____________."

A conservative can complete this statement on the basis of his religion, but he cannot answer it on the basis of his politics. From a political perspective, he has to completely beg off. The world, until it is redeemed by something transcendent, will never be perfect. It is the place of imperfection. It is a place of good and evil and the good we can only see through a glass, darkly.

Modern left-wing liberalism has always been ideological in this sense. They can complete the statement above. For them, the world will be perfect when the society no longer interferes with our advance toward self-fulfillment. There can be a utopia if we take radical action to bring it about. It will be established in that Last Battle, when the forces of political darkness (conservatives) are defeated by the forces of the political light (left-wing liberals). In the meantime, we must settle for passing government programs.

This is what William F. Buckley (quoting Eric Voegelin) meant when he accused liberals of "immanentizing the eschaton": They want to bring about in the here and now what can only be brought about in the afterlife or in the religious apocalypse that will ensue before a Last Judgment they don't believe in.

Left-wing liberalism being a religious belief masquerading as a political one, it only makes sense that its most central belief would be theological: The denial of Original Sin. Left-wing liberalism is the political analog of the Ghost Dance movement, the cargo cults, and the Shakers, only without the religious trappings. They all sought a heaven here on earth and thought that through their actions they could either prepare for it or help bring it about.

Jean Jacques Rousseau, not Karl Marx, is the left-wing liberal's patron saint. Rousseau's "natural man," uncorrupted by civilization contrasts with the conservative idea that civilization is the only thing keeping man from destroying himself and everybody else.

Left wing liberalism's view that utopia is possible and that man is perfectible--and that all this can be accomplished through the right policies--is an idea that is increasingly characteristic of modern conservatism. And this is why we had the knee-jerk reaction of so many so-called conservatives to Pope Francis' comments that the free market was not sufficient to accomplish what needed to be accomplished with the poor.

The idea of the free market now serves the same role for many conservatives as government action serves for many liberals: It has become the policy by which we can reach an earthly Nirvana. Conservatives now seem to see the right set of policies as the route by which we can reach terrestrial perfection. The way to do this, they say, is a completely free market.

Traditional conservatives do not view the free market in this way. It does not view it as a cultural panacea. Free market capitalism is indeed the most efficient economic system, but that doesn't mean that it's perfect. It is the worst economic policy ever developed by mankind, to borrow an expression from Winston Churchill about systems of government, except all the other economic policies that have been developed from time to time throughout history.

All the Pope was trying to say was that the free market was not a panacea and it didn't release us from the obligation to help the poor. Many conservatives interpreted this as the Pope attacking the free market per se. But an attack on the idea that the free market is not a panacea is not an attack on the free market. It is an attack on a mistaken belief about the free market.

It is a plea from a religious leader not to make politics (or economics) into a religion.

This is why many conservatives do what traditional conservatives would never have done: called their political position an ideology--a "conservative ideology." They too place celestial faith in earthly things. Conservatism is not an ideology and when it becomes one, then it isn't conservatism any more.

It's Not About the Pope: Modern conservatives need to get back in touch with their traditional economic selves

The Pope's comments in an official Vatican document yesterday are being portrayed as an indictment of free market economics by the liberal media—and the misrepresentation has been swallowed whole by many conservatives. They're wrong. In fact, it isn't the Pope who's a liberal: It's conservatives who have abandoned their own traditions and whose liberalism on economic issues is now being shown up.

Any school of philosophical thought suffers from popularity, and conservatism is no different. Ever since conservatism grew out of its remnant status about 35 or 40 years ago, it has been in a process of degradation that continues to this day. It has been victimized by its own success.

The conservatism that produced Ronald Reagan and that in large part dominated the old National Review magazine until somewhere along in the 1990s has been beset with what can only be called a liberal infection.

The conservatism of Edmund Burke has been quietly traded in by modern conservatism for the liberalism of John Stuart Mill, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke. The problem is aggravated by the fact that, due to almost universal philosophical illiteracy, most modern conservatives don't even know who these thinkers are.

Utilitarianism has replaced respect for custom and tradition. Raw libertarianism has replaced ordered liberty. Free market ideology has replaced a common sense economic liberty that once understood the difference between the empirical laws of economics and the normative obligations of a Christian culture.

The process has been helped along by conservative talk radio and now Fox News. People like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, right as they are on many issues, are now seen as the standard bearers for conservatism when, in fact, their political philosophies are at serious odds with the conservative tradition itself.

A large part of the problem with modern conservatism has to do with the fact that conservatives have forgotten their own tradition. Just look at the most popular conservative books (and weep). No movement that takes as its chief intellectual nourishment itself on people like Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Bill O'Reilly deserves to be taken seriously.

This was not the case with the old conservatism. There were no popular conservative authors back in the conservative day, so we couldn't be corrupted by them. We had to resort to Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, Michael Oakeshott, and F. A. Hayek, and T. S. Eliot for our political nourishment. Even the conservative journalists were intellectuals, not former disc jockeys and beauty queens: Wilmore Kendall, Frank Burnham, Joseph Sobran, and William F. Buckley, Jr.

These were people who a) knew what they were talking about, and b) actually authored the books that they claimed to author.

Modern conservatives can see conservatism from their house.

I have a simple rule for any conservative who wants to learn better what conservatism is: Don't read any book by anyone claiming to be a conservative that purports to explain it who didn't actually write the book that bears their name.

That would eliminate just about every popular conservative author with the exception of Charles Krauthammer, a liberal-turned-conservative (what we used to call a "neoconservative") who only had to change half his political philosophy in order to fit in to the new modern "conservatism" that is only half conservative. And we'll make an exception for Ann Coulter, any of whose lapses from true conservatism are more than made up for in sheer wit.

Allan Bloom once famously divided the political public into right-wing liberals and left-wing liberals. Modern conservatism is right-wing liberalism.

And this is why so-called conservatives have a problem with Pope Francis: He has challenged the liberal element within their thinking that has developed during a 40 year-long gestational period and has now experienced a coming out like the monster in the movie "Alien."

Conservatism has traditionally fought for a proper balance between justice, order, and freedom; and a belief in an economy that is free, but still subordinate to these goals. They believed freedom was a means, not an end.

What modern conservatism has done is to subordinate every other aspect of political conservatism to one thing and one thing only: free market economics. Everything else is dispensable.

Marriage for example.

Just look at the number of "conservative" leaders who, as soon as the political winds changed, abandoned ship on conservatism's central cultural position. It's pretty sad.

You can take my culture, but don't mess with my free market economics.

Once upon a time, conservatives advocated ordered liberty—both as a political and an economic principle. They were never in favor of unrestricted market actions. Never.

What the current critics of Pope Francis who think they are conservatives need to do is take account of Russell Kirk, the author of the most influential and authoritative book on conservatism, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (the Ur text of modern conservatism), and legendary defender of the free market, who writes in another book:

Sometimes, indeed, vociferous American devotees of "American capitalism" and the "American standard of living" do more mischief and benefit to their own cause, generating more heat than light, and substituting facile slogans for first principles ... 

... We ought not to exaggerate the importance of our economic arguments or of our American economy. In many ways the free market economy of the United States is a good thing in itself; yet it is not the whole of life. No economy, however productive materially, could be a good thing if it were founded upon injustice, disorder, slavery, and dishonor. The slave-labor camps of the Soviet Union were efficient, after a fashion—but only because they took no reckoning of human lives or moral principles. Thus our American economy, though good in itself, is important not merely for its own sake: its real importance is the contribution it makes to our justice and order and freedom, our ability to live in dignity as truly human persons. Our "standard of living," though often enjoyable in itself, is not the be-all and end-all of life. Economic production is merely th e means to certain ends. One of those ends is the satisfaction of man's material wants. And there are other ends served by this means of economic production: the satisfaction of certain profound desires in human nature, such as the desire for fruitful work and sufficient leisure and hopeful competition, for one; and the maintenance of a decent society for another.

Now take this view and the read what Pope Francis said again, and ask yourself where there is any contradiction between this and what the Pope said.

Modern conservatives have made a religion of the free market in a way traditional conservatives never would have done. The free market is not the sum and summation of conservatism; it is rather one principle to be balanced with others. As C. S. Lewis once said, "Second things suffer from being put first." This is what modern conservatives have done with economics.

Conservatism is not an ideology, it is a set of political first principles in constant tension. There's a big difference.