Why Conservatives (Still) Can't Govern

Dani,


Some brief responses to your reply.

The Founders’ idea of an elite republic was doomed from the start. Had the country never expanded off the Eastern seaboard we probably would have gone through the same fights about expanding the franchise as Britain. Kentucky and Tennessee changed that. The small landowners who settled and then organized the over-the-Appalachian states weren’t about to establish constitutions which disenfranchised them. Once (more or less) general suffrage became the norm over the hills, people in the seaboard states took a look and said, “waitaminnit, we want that too” and the notion of elite republicanism died fast.

Good thing too. The history of elitish rule doesn’t recommend itself as any better than the huddled masses.

As for modern vs. classic conservatism, George Will described it best as a fight between Western and Southern Conservatism. Western conservatism is built around the sanctity of private property as is small-government, socially libertarian. If you wanna fornicate with a monkey, that’s sick but just don’t do it on –my- property. This is the Founders’ Classic Liberal philosophy transported to Wyoming and Montana. The Social types hate government except when it’s enforcing how you’re supposed to live your day-to-day life. Will finds a marriage of convenience between the two because of similar views on taxes and support for business. (Kind of life internationalist liberals and U.S. Out of Everywhere liberals in the Dem Party who generally agree on domestic social and economic policy.)

Conservatives couldn’t govern after 1994 and then 2000 because they could never offer any credible alternatives to the on-the-ground issues the liberal welfare state was set up to meet. Facing down abstract “big government” was easy. Staring down dedicated earmarks to the home district and the widows and orphans cruelly thrown out onto the street by domestic program cutbacks (bad for re-election, you know) proved well beyond them. In short, as Will and others note, it was a failure of nerve. They just didn’t have the eggs to do it.

Which proves that conservatives are really just a bunch of sissies.


Terry Preston

-----------------------------------------
From: Dani Renan
Sent: Saturday, October 21, 2006 11:35 PMTo: Terry Preston; Alice Mercer
Subject: Why Conservatives Can't Govern

Terry, Here's some observations on Alan Wolf's excellent article Why Conservatives Can't Govern posted on the July 8, 2006 of your blog. Feel free to post it. For everyone else Terry's blog is: http://fromthemountaintop.blogspot.com/and the the original article is posted on http://www.geocities.com/leroys_dad/conservatives_cant.htm

Dani==============================================================Alan

Wolfe's Why Conservatives Can't Govern in the July/August 2006 edition of Washington Monthly (July 8, 2006 ed. of Terry Preston's From the Mountaintop blog) was illuminating in the historical and philosophical reasons behind the blatant obvious unmitigated disaster known as the Bush Administration (or lack there of).

The article shows Wolf's detailed knowledge of modern American history. However, it also shows the problems in American academia of dividing and compartmentalizing American history (and pretty much world history) into the history of America until 1865 and then into another compartment from 1865 to the present.

There are courses given for each period, and usually by different professors. With such a universal division comes totally different emphasis on the analysis and then the approaches to the analysis ending up in totally different paradigms and often different language. It is obvious that Wolf's expertise is in the more modern period. Unfortunately his brief analysis on the period of the founding fathers projects modern terms back and the labels mistakenly attribute ideas or philosophies to individuals that incorrect and at the time would have been considered libelous. This is not an attack against Wolf. It is to the academic system. In fact, Wolf is an exception to the norm, which is near total ignorance outside their fields. Wolf's mistakes are few and clear so that they are easily pointed out.

His statement Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall wanted to see a strong national government created to improve America's economic prospects, even if they retained an aristocratic sense that only social superiors should control that government is only partially correct.

Yes, they did want to see a strong central government. But so did James Madison who was the third author of the Federalist papers, and a "liberal" Jeffersonian Democrat-Republican. All agreed to the basic notion of Federalism, sovereign States that gave up some of their sovereignty to the Federal government. The question was how much and in what fields. All agreed for the common defense. Nearly everyone (except later J.C. Calhoun) agreed to have the Federal law as supreme.

As far as that only social superiors should control the government, that is a stretch. Because if it were based on birth, Hamilton, having been a bastard from St. Nevis, would have been excluded. If it included people such as Hamilton based on social mobility, that was no different from Jefferson's Aristocracy of Merit. The idea of social mobility was well established in most states, especially in the South and in Mid-Atlantic states. In Virginia suffrage was based on land ownership. But a study showed that during the late colonial period some 85% of white males owned land within 10 years of immigrating to the state. In the mid-Atlantic states, especially New York.with high immigration social mobility was very pronounced.

As Wolf explains, Conservatism has usually been linked to supporting welcomed the intervention of a state_affiliated clergy in politics. However, as he noted, those that tried to inject religion into the public forum soon ran up against the skepticism of the Founding Fathers and conceptions of religious liberty associated with dissenting Protestantism.

Alexander Hamilton, as far as I know, left no polemics on the subject. However, his actions show a high distain for any organized religion, in either the public or private forum. His personal history, being a bastard that was refused entrance to any schools (which were all in the hands of the various churches) in St. Nevis, ended up being educated in the local synagogue, apparently influenced his views on the subject. He could, at most, be considered to be a Conservative in the mold of Barry Goldwater in regard to this subject. His statement that John Adams outdid them on behalf of a strong executive; he thought our first president should be addressed as a monarch is also a misnomer. It is true that Adams wanted the President to be addressed as Your Highness or Excellency or something more monarchial. But that was because he had been an Ambassador in Europe, and wanted the President to be viewed as equal to the European monarchs.

He considered "Mr. President" to be rather insulting, something that one addressed the President of the local fire company or cricket club. He was astonished at the claim that he was a closest Monarchist, since he believed that his credentials as a republican were beyond reproach, that in fact he was instrumental at creating the republic (based on David McCullough's work John Adams). Adams was a strong believer in the Rule of Law, to the extent that he defended the British troops that fired on the crowd in the "Boston Massacre," no small feat for one who was already an active revolutionary. His split with Jefferson was over the reaction to the excesses of the French Revolution.

Jefferson was accepting of the terror in that the ends justifies the means, and Adams was horrified. These political traits are definitely not those that Wolf classifies as a Conservative. (Jefferson later recanted to Adams). In his latter years Adams wrote a pamphlet called "The First American Revolution" in which he explains that the original Revolution was social - the 30 to 50 years before the political-military phase, in which the American people began to view themselves as separate and establishing institutions and manners that were local and knowingly different from Mother England. These included the political local representation to the change in moving the fork to the right hand after cutting, in table manners. The egalitarianism was pronounced if not exaggerated to differentiate from the haughty English class society. Again not hallmarks of Conservative analysis and ideology.

It is also interesting to note that the term Democracy was avoided during and in the aftermath of the Revolution. To our founding fathers, who were well schooled in classical history, the model for Democracy was the Radical Athenian model, which was a complete failure and which they considered characterized by mob-rule. Even Jefferson emphasized the term Republican eschewing Democracy in fear of the "mob."

It took nearly a generation for the republican institutions to sink in and be accepted, in order for people to be comfortable with the term democracy.

But as he noted, things, and even terminology and ideology changes. It took conservatives, who in the 18th and early 19th century supported quasi_feudal states and distrusted the instabilities of the market, a hundred years to become advocates of laissez faire. And under the imperatives of the K Street Project, it took them just five to abandon their belief in laissez faire to support a corrupt business_government partnership bearing striking resemblance to feudalism.

This review of Wolf's brief analysis of the politics of the founding fathers, shows that Wolf takes the "conventual wisdom" about our founding fathers for his analysis. Interestingly, a deeper look at the political Zeitgeist of the early Republic shows that so-called conservatives of the American Revolution were quite liberal, and would be an anathema to most modern Conservatives, strengthening Wolf's basic argument.