Positive Liberty

This is exactly why I think Brian Leiter is such an enormously overrated intellectual. He’s written some interesting and useful things, and when he’s bashing people who deserved to be bashed, there’s a little pleasure in that. But very often, Leiter is more interested in finding clever ways of calling people stupid than in actually presenting useful, or even true, statements. For a man who makes such hay condemning conservatives for allegedly being ruthlessly ignorant, statements like this ought to be particularly embarrassing. This time it’s: “the ‘conservatives’ of each prior era in America in the last century were, without an exception I can recall, on the morally reprehensible side of every major social and economic issue.”

This is obviously question begging writ large, since he’s just saying that “people who disagree with my statements regarding morality are immoral,” or “the people who believe things I consider evil are evil.” Without embracing moral relativism, one can see how pointless such an allegation is.

Moreover, the definition of “conservatives” is—well, he provides none. Does “conservative” in this context mean member of the Republican party? Does it mean followers of Goldwater, or followers of Rockefeller? Does it mean paleocons or neocons? Does it include libertarians? Or does he just mean, people who defend the status quo?

If the latter, you can see that, again, the statement is virtually meaningless, since most “major social issues” will consist of “reforming the status quo,” whatever that is. Since reforming the status quo will always put conservatives in the defense of the status quo, then this definition would mean that Leiter’s saying “people who defend things that others consider in need of reform tend to be on the wrong side”—again, a trivial, meaningless smear. Thus “conservative” would include people who oppose school vouchers, for example—a position most people associate with the term “liberal” instead.

Liberals complain when conservatives accuse them of not being patriotic because they do not support American military intervention in Iraq. Yet Leiter can get away with insinuating that conservatives cannot possibly be sincere in their praise of Rosa Parks?

Of course, “conservatives” denotes a group whose members do not always agree, and the membership of which changes over time. Remember Bob Dornan, the strident Republican congressman from Orange County? In 1963 he was in the march to the Lincoln Monument along with Martin Luther King. So was Charlton Heston. Barry Goldwater voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but not because he believed in segregation—because he believed its limits on the use of private property were unconstitutional. Conservative Rush Limbaugh was emphatically against the illegal, unconstitutional “corporate finance reform” bill that was signed by conservative President Bush, was put forward by John McCain, whose identity as liberal or conservative is utterly opaque, and which was supported on the Supreme Court by conservative Sandra Day O’Connor and opposed by conservative Clarence Thomas. Yet these differences are ignored in Leiter’s smear.

But down to brass tacks, as Will Baude points out, “conservatives” is usually the term applied to people who opposed the relentless expansion of communism in the twentieth century—communism being the single most evil thing ever created by man. Leiter, of course, does not endorse this last statement, and, as is so often the case with those on the left, has suggested that Lenin, Stalin, Brezhnev, Khrushchev, Tito, Hoxha, Pieck, Ulbricht, Honecker, Mao, Deng, Jiang, Castro, Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il aren’t “real communists,” and that their atrocities cannot be ascribed to “real communism.” That is to say, Leiter continues to this day to defend a political ideology that enslaved and continues to enslave more than a fifth of the world’s population; depriving them of the most basic human rights, including freedom of speech, freedom of religion, private property, economic liberty, and many others. Leiter would regard those who resisted communism as evil, which is to say, he is among those whom Robert Conquest called “fucking fools.”

Will Wilkinson points out the example of Social Security, a horrendous fraud on the American public, which today redistributes wealth from poor black men to rich white women at an astonishing rate. “Conservatives,” under the generally accepted definition generally think Social Security was a bad idea and needs to be overhauled or eliminated. Leiter would regard them as evil.

“Conservatives” generally opposed (at one time) the massive expansion of the regulatory welfare state, particularly the “Great Society” programs of Lyndon Baines Johnson: an expansion which has created a semi-permanent underclass, wreaked havoc on families, nurtured dependency, throttled self-reliance, and indebted the nation to an astonishing degree. Conservatives were behind the welfare reform programs of Governor Ronald Reagan and President Bill Clinton, programs which worked very well. Yet Leiter would regard such conservatives as evil.

Those called “conservatives” generally are opposed to racial discrimination by the government—discrimination that “liberals” refer to as “benign,” but which in fact punishes some people today for the wrongs done by other people yesterday, and, again, stifles the self-reliance and harms the self-esteem of its beneficiaries by telling them that they can’t do it on their own and need government favors because of their race. Leiter would regard these conservatives as evil.

Were conservatives the ones who instituted racial segregation in the South? Michael McGerr explains that segregation by law was instituted by Progressivism as an innovation intended to curtail racial violence. Among other Progressive ideas were forced sterilization and other eugenics programs, peacetime military conscription, the prohibition of alcohol, and forced government schooling, complete with a Pledge of Allegiance written by a socialist. Progressivism (which I take to be in many ways the ancestor of today’s liberalism, and certainly a word of which contemporary liberals seem fond) represented a massive attempt to make men good by force. It was profoundly evil, and profoundly anti-conservative.

More recently, those regarded as “liberals” have promoted a program of “multiculturalism” and cultural and moral relativism which teaches America’s youth that America and its founding principles are essentially evil, and that capitalism and individualism are the causes of environmental destruction, social oppression, and other social ills. I, for one, regard this as deeply wrong. Movements to purge American school textbooks of fundamental elements of American history, and to label important and great historical figures as evil, and to make martyrs out of people with questionable causes, have all been defended by “liberals.” Those described as “liberals” have included such propagandists as Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore—apologists for Islamic terrorism and foreign regimes of enslavement and misery, and defenders of people like Saddam Hussein. Of course, many other liberals, including even Senator John Kerry, have supported American efforts to eliminate dictators like Hussein and establish the most democratic regime possible in Iraq and in other places, so one cannot say that “liberals” are on the wrong side of this issue. At least, one can’t say that if one has more respect for accuracy and truth than Brian Leiter. And how about Israel? Iran, like many other Islamist nations, has literally called for a new Holocaust. Those who have endorsed that call in the past, who have supported terrorists who murder innocent people in Israel, and who have propagandized in defense of such terrorist kingpins as Yassir Arafat include, and find friends among, “liberals.” Of course, many conservatives have also held hands with murderous thugs, including President Bush, who recently said that Abu Abbas is a “man of peace” (a sentence that renders the word “peace” as meaningless as when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Arafat and Jimmy Carter). So one might accuse conservatives of being on the wrong side of that issue. Will Leiter say that? Was John F. Kennedy—a passionate anti-communist who promised to “oppose any foe” in defense of freedom around the globe with American military intervention, and who proceeded to try it in Vietnam—a conservative? Were libertarian opponents of American intervention in Vietnam, including Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand, conservatives? Were Democrats like LBJ who supported escalation in Vietnam liberals? Were its opponents like Jerry Rubin liberals? Leiter doesn’t care. He just wants to smear. And this is the mind regarded by so many bloggers as worthy of admiration?

Update: Perhaps I should make clear to those who don’t already know it, that I am most certainly not a conservative, and find much of conservatism to be revolting. I am a libertarian, and do not endorse most things that “conservatives” today believe in or do.