What Must a Conservatism for the 21st Century Look Like?
I do not always agree with Tom Friedman. Often he is way too glib and enamored of catchy phrases for my tastes. But in this particular article, I think he strikes a reasonable chord.
We cannot continue piling domestic benefits onto our already rickety entitlement structure without sacrificing our ability to be the great stabilizer of the world. For better and worse, that is a position we have been in since arguably the end of the Second World War and certainly since the end of the Cold War. I have blogged on this many times.
However, the loyal opposition, the Republican Party, cannot simply be the party of “No” as he makes quite clear. There are new challenges in the 21st Century and an overreliance on nostalgia for President Reagan and the 80s is not going to cut it anymore.
What will a new conservative position look like? I have argued this previously as below:
“One key to statesmanship is to understand how to do what is necessary when necessary and face the consequences even when undesirable. This means a resounding no to naive utopianism. But another key is to recognize the need to prudently and cautiously move forward, taking advantage of opportunities as they present themselves while looking to create new ones.
In an age desperately needing renewal to set the stage for the future, the road forward is to have universal aspirations, while never losing sight of parochial necessities. It is a balance of realism and idealism. One cannot be all one or the other without coming to ruin. Possibly we cannot be "American" citizens without being "World" citizens as well. Should this be so, then the reverse must also be true. One could be a citizen of any nation, but to be a citizen of the world, one must truly be "American."
If we decline or stumble, the world will suffer incalculably. Best for us to do all we can to avoid this, but to avoid it with more than just a glint of hope and a reservoir of cynicism. We must have a reservoir of hope, tempered by reality, but expectant of great things.
Vacuous promises of change and hope must be met with tangible promises of change and hope. This is the message for Republicans. Not "Change We Can Believe In", but "Hope We Can Believe In."
Republicans must be the party of:
- educational innovation;
- embracers of small business entrepreneurs;
- pro-immigration contingent upon assimilation;
- pro-tradition (including second amendment and pro-life);
- pro- strategic free trade combined with a renewal of industrial policy vis a vis potential strategic competitors;
- pro infrastructure development based on rational calculation and not raw and political pork barrel spending;
- pro-military and unwilling to make the false trade between “guns and butter;
- and pro-reform of entitlements so there is a safety net not a “safety couch.”
Basically, the Republican Party must become the Party of effective government that does not stifle freedom, does not promote the irresolution born of wanton immorality, but can still look to the future and not be accused of expressing the decaying beliefs of trogdolytes.
If
Categories: Conservatism Future Philosophy Politics
Tags: Conservatism Future Philosophy Politics
Piffle. You're a split-the-difference conservative. I see little creativity in your ideas, and it's too bad.
This is a typical pseudo-profundity, I fear. "One could be a citizen of any nation, but to be a citizen of the world, one must truly be 'American.'" Even were I sure of your meaning I surely wouldn't agree.
Sorry I can't be more congratulatory.
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I understand where you might be coming from. I will readily concede to not necessarily being a doctrinaire conservative, however, conservatism itself is not really a doctrine anyway, so is that necessarily a sin?
Edmund Burke was a classical liberal who believed in progress, but believed it to be a slow moving process, not a radical, revolutionary movement that eradicates the tradition accumulated over generations in order to enshrine abstract principles in the halls of power where they end up often devouring, quite literally, human lives.
I think this describes part of my perspective. The progressive movement is dangerous because of its hubris and because of its ignorance of flawed human nature. At the end of the day, it believes in eventual perfectability, I think a more conservative position believes in some movement up the "culture" scale, but ever mindful of the very limitedness of any concepts of "perfectability."
The rest of my perspective, and probably the most influential part of why I write the way I write, is simply what I articulate in this piece regarding virtue. A people that loses its virtue, and I do mean Platonic, Judeo-Christian virtue, is a people that no longer really understands freedom and may be incapable of governing itself. I fear greatly that this is where we are headed. This is the realm of the Nietzschean "Last Man" which is actually a rather pathetic creature to follow in the footsteps of the giants of human history.
I want to conserve this Greatness, even if it is a pat greatness, in the face of the levelling of man that modernity, and certainly post-modernity, heralds. However, to do this requires some type of aspirational goal, even if it might, at first blush, appear to be bizarre. "
One could be a citizen of any nation, but to be a citizen of the world, one must truly be 'American.'" This should be perceived as aspirational and desirous of enobling Americans to take on challenges that the newer generations may not appreciate due to their own disconnectedness to their past. Instead of buying into vauge, fuzzy cosmopolitanism, we attempt to concretize a reverse cosmopolitanism that brings people to us rather than seeking to homogeneize Americansby dispersing our values into the vast milieu of the "global commons."
I am fully aware there is no universality, at least not temporally, however, again, we must enoble and seek to find greatness once more rather than mere technical skill, which seems to be ever more popular as the sine qua non of success in this world. From another of my postings:
"To be a conservative is to recognize the limitations of man and be willing to even take pride in some of the very things that make him parochial. This doesn’t mean we should remain standing in one place forever with feet of clay, but it should sober us to the prospects of what is the best that can happen in this world.
Progress appears; often only in retrospect, to be linear, but really occurs in fits and starts. Two steps forward and one back. There are no “final solutions” that will ever be final. That is the central tenet of conservatism.
Civilizations die when their youthful vigor peters out. This happens because man becomes so convinced of his “solutions” to the exigencies of the moment that he fails to remain connected even to shards of tradition and memories that stir deeply in the unconscious. In a sense, the desire to seek unbounded “progress” destroys the foundations necessary for society to exist in a healthily functional way. A void emerges like a Black Hole that eventually will suck all goodness and hope into its infinite vortex.
Perhaps, then, civilizations are the most ironic of human constructs- both the highest culture and the beginning of the end of that culture.
Globalization is not universalism, “westernization”, or “Americanization.” It is merely a tool that can be used by any number of cultures. Some will reap its fruits more than others.
Fundamentally, the question is- will globalization bring man together or will it find new ways to tear him apart? An unyielding adherent to progress will believe it to bring man together, a conservative anticipates the absurdity of this “final solution” to history’s grand problems and recognize the transience of the moment. A conservative will also smell decay long before the rot has decimated the structures underpinning their civilization, because it as an odor only tradition and history rightfully appreciates.
A conservative must defend what has been great, because to defend what “may be great” is a leap of faith more difficult than believing in God and far more likely to sow seeds of bitterness when the inevitable disappointment saps that once youthful vigor. At that point, a rootless, existential ambiguity consumes those once well meaning hopes.
Tradition is posterity and the cumulative total of history’s lessons. Losing tradition will kill civilization."
We must become young again and in America's youth, there was a certain element of prosyletism in its dream of being a "Shining Beacon on a Hill." Indeed, I may be trying to recapture a past lost long ago, but, to me, that is my brand of conservatism even if I can acknowledge it to be bordering on the quixotic.
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