Letters to the Editor
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RLE:
I think you've misread what he means by the “security leads to freedom” paradigm. He is talking about domestic politics and policy, not the Orwellian constant threat of terror that the Bush Administration uses to keep their critics in line. The
What you claim Brooks meant is the opposite of what he said:
Today the big threats to people’s future prospects come from complex, decentralized phenomena: Islamic extremism, failed states, global competition, global warming, nuclear proliferation. . . .
Brooks is just a garden-variety Weekly Standard neocon who doesn't believe in limits on government power because they get in the way of the neoconservative agenda.
I agree that column was intellectually honest. He's describing in very blunt terms excactly what neoconservatism is. I said that in the first paragraph and it's why I thought the column was so notable.
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Wealth Creation
"Economic freedom" is the more up-to-date mantra, and studies by Freedom House, Cato, Heritage, etc., have found that social democracies such as Finland and Sweden are among the best places on earth to enjoy economic freedom, and to create wealth. (And note that these studies were weighted in favor of the economic freedom of capital, not that of labor, since labor freedom isn't of great concern to those "libertarian" institutions.)
So, to assert that one is against social democracy because one favors economic freedom is simply a mark of ignorance or dishonesty.
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Conservatives
The fundamental underlying mind-set of conservatives today is fear. In the 70's, there was nothing to fear but the Soviet Union; all we had to do was be stronger than the Russians and we were okay. Today's challenges are much more complex, founded in economics rather than who's-the-toughest-guy-on-the-block. Thus, the fear is harder to confront and like someone in a dark cave hearing bats all around, the conservative neocons are lashing out in every direction in terror. Little brown and yellow people are gnawing away at our God-given right to supremacy and that scares the shit out of them. Sorry, folks, we're only as strong as our institutions and our willingness to work hard; we can beat up other people only so long before the reality -- that we cannot continue to be the world's biggest consumer, living in luxury and security beyond the dreams of most of the rest of the people on this planet unless we earn that luxury through hard work -- starts to crumble. They do not accept this reality and will hasten our decline in their desire to fend it off by any means they can muster.
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Ha Ha prunes
I love the internet tough guys. If we meet in real life, you'll teach me a lesson, blah blah blah. I've read these kinds of comments from you before, thinly veiled violence-threatening comments to those who disagree with you. I'm sure you're as macho a librul as there is, which isn't saying much but hey, it's something.
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"security leads to freedom"
This is much like "being a good believer leads to heaven".
What better example is there for an all-intrusive, authoritarian, brutal, self-serving, non-caring, glorious regime than "God's Kingdom" ?
Bush and his followers are simply modeling their "movement" after "God's movements". To them it is a no-brainer...
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"Security Leads To Freedom"--The Non-Orwellian Version-Pt 1
I have long been struck by how so many lies can be packed into such a tight space, which is, so far as I can tell, the one defining characteristic of the otherwise oxymoronic term "conservative intellectual" dating from the rise of William F. Buckley. So let me try to cut to the chase:
(1) There really is nothing new in all this. Yes, it looks quite new. (And yes, its naked emergence has, unquestionably, reshaped our political spectrum.) But that's only because the conservatives have the power right now, and were dumb enough to assume they'd have it forever. They have been just as thuggish and authoritarian anytime they have had so much power.
(A) Slavery, segregation and legalized discrimination kept black Americans locked into police-state conditions throughout most of our history, a condition that still persists when one considers the vastly disproportionate statistics for incarceration of young black males.
I'm sorry to say this, Glenn, but only a white person could have written the post you did. Authoritarianism is as American as apple pie--and only white folks seem capable of ignoring this.
(B) McCarthyism terrorized America for well over a decade--starting well before McCarthy, with J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon--and lasting well after his censure, until the rising liberatory radicalism of the 1960s dissolved the climate of fear McCarthy left in his wake.
(C) The chief reason that American conservatism has so regularly embraced "states' rigthts" is because America's conservative elites are most naturally organized at the state level, unlike Europe where they are generally organized at the national level. However, as the Fugitive Slave Act so clearly demonstrated, "states' rights" activists could always turn on a dime when the underlying interests so dictated. Conservative ideology has always been about safeguarding the power and perogatives of the few, and the rationalizations of ideology have adjusted themselves accordingly.
(D) You were headed in the right direction when you noted parenthetically:
(of course, the federal-government-expanding, rule-of-law-ignoring Reagan presidency itself frequently deviated from these lofty, abstract "Goldwater/Reagan" conservative principles, but those deviations, for the Bush-led right-wing, have become the animating principles themselves)
In fact, Reagan's principles were best reflected by what he did, not what he said. Even Bush continues to give lipservice to balancing the budget, spreading freedom, etc., etc., etc.
What's changed is simply that further changes in degree have come to register with many--such as yourself--as a difference in kind. But there really is an underlying continuum here, not a radical departure. The now-recongized-as-radical element has always been there, and has been been the animating heart of the conservative movement. It is not the same as what most everyday Americans understand by "conservatism" for a variety of different reasons. But it is what movement conservatism has always been about.
(2) The "Goldwater/Reagan" construct is itself highly deceptive. Reaganism was deeply wedded to the religious right specifically, and social conservatism in general. Goldwater could not abide that, and spoke out frequently and vociferously against it. At the end of his life he was repeatedly aligned with the ACLU against Reagan conservatives.
There is far more continuity between Reagan and Bush than most anyone is willing to allow, because Reagan's sins have been buried and the man has been cannonized. But his cheerful support for genocidal foreign dictators like Guatemala's Rios Montt cannot be expunged from history simply by pretending it didn't exist. If Reagan had had the institutional support that Bush enjouyed 20 years later, the differences between them would have shrunk dramatically further. It's far more accurate to speak of Nixon-Reagan-Bush representing a continuous trend in American conservative governance.
(3) Brooks is completely wrong in his explanation.
(A) As you note, Brooks speaks deceitfully on behalf of "normal, nonideological people"--he uses the construct as his sock puppet. The claims he makes have no grounding whatsoever in public opinion data. For example, the comprehensive public opinion data gathered by the General Social Survey showed only a modest decline in support for the welfare state in the mid-late 1970s, reversing itself quickly in the early 80s.
(B) There is a very clear non-Orwellian sense in which security leads to freedom, a sense which left-liberals have always understood: "Hungry men are not free." (The same could be said of fearful men, as every authoritarian leader knows all too well.) This is the very essence of the "New Liberalism" which emerged in Britain in the 1870s, the intellectual roots of American New Deal liberalism. FDR expressed this view quite clearly when he spoke of the "Four Freedoms"--freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear.
Conservatives have dogmatically denied the very existence of freedom from want for as long as liberals have asserted it. They have repeatedly ridiculed the idea that security leads to freedom. This denial has been at the core of their ideology for as long as anyone can remember. And now, they suddenly discover it, now that they are able to give it their own perverse meaning.
This sudden discovery/perversion that security leads to freedom points toward the real nature of movement conservatism, which is not a political ideology in the same way that liberalism is, or even in the way that "commonsense conservatism" is. It is, rather, a parasitic ideology, which takes on whatever words, phrases, ideas or rationales suit its purposes for the moment.
Movement conservatism is especially fond of taking on the guise of eternal principles precisely because its real intellectual commitments are precisely the opposite--so ephemeral that two contradictory principles can easily be ennunciated in virtually the same breath, if the occassion calls for it.
(cont. below)