DemocracyThe God That Failed (40 page)

That this is largely true for the so-called neoconservatives does not require further explanation here. Indeed, as far as their leaders are concerned, one suspects that most of them are of the latter (evil) kind. They are not truly concerned about cultural matters but recognize that they must play the cultural-conservatism card so as not to lose power and promote their entirely different goal of global social democracy.
³
However, it is
also true of many conservatives who are genuinely concerned about family disintegration or dysfunction and cultural rot. I am thinking here in particular of the conservatism represented by Patrick Buchanan and his movement.
⁴
Buchanan's conservatism is by no means as different from that of the conservative Republican party establishment as he and his followers fancy themselves. In one decisive respect their brand of conservatism is in full agreement with that of the conservative establishment: both are statists. They differ over what exactly needs to be done to restore normalcy to the U.S., but they agree that it must be done by the state. There is not a trace of principled antistatism in either.

³
On contemporary American conservatism see in particular Paul Gottfried,
The
Conservative
Movement,
rev. ed. (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993); George H. Nash,
The
Conservative
Intellectual
Movement
in
America
(New York: Basic Books, 1976); Justin Raimondo,
Reclaiming
the
American
Right:
The
Lost
Legacy
of
the
Conser
vative
Movement
(Burlingame, Calif.: Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993); see further also chap. 11. The fundamentally statist character of American neoconservatism is best summarized by a statement of one of its leading intellectual champions, the former Trotskyite Irving Kristol: "[T]he basic principle behind a conservative welfare state ought to be a simple one: wherever possible, people should be allowed to keep their own money—rather than having it transferred (via taxes to the state)—
on
the
condition
that
they
put
it
to
certain
defined
uses."
Two
Cheers
for
Capitalism
(New York: Basic Books, 1978), p. 119 (emphasis added). This view is essentially identical to that held by modern—post-Marxist—European Social-Democrats. Thus, Germany's Social Democratic Party (SPD), for instance, in its
Godesberg
Program
of 1959, adopted as its core motto the slogan "as much market as possible, as much state as necessary."

A second, somewhat older but nowadays almost indistinguishable branch of contemporary American conservatism is represented by the
new
(post World War II) conservatism launched and promoted, with the assistance of the CIA, by William Buckley and his
National
Review.
Whereas the old (pre-World War II) American conservatism had been characterized by decidedly anti-interventionist (isolationist) foreign policy views, the trademark of Buckley's new conservatism has been its rabid militarism and interventionist foreign policy. In an article, "A Young Republican's
View," published three years before the launching of his
National
Review
in
Common
weal,
on January 25, 1952, Buckley thus summarized what would become the new conservative credo: In light of the threat posed by the Soviet Union, "we [new conservatives] have to accept Big Government for the duration —for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged . . . except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores." Conservatives, Buckley wrote, were duty-bound to promote "the extensive and productive tax laws that are needed to support a vigorous anti-Communist foreign policy," as well as the "large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards and the attendant centralization of power in Washington." Not surprisingly, since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, essentially nothing in this philosophy has changed. Today, the continuation and preservation of the American welfare-warfare state is simply excused and promoted by new and neo-conservatives alike with reference to other foreign enemies and dangers: China, Islamic fundamentalism, Saddam Hussein, "rogue states," and /or the threat of "global terrorism." Regarding this new Buckleyite conservatism, Robert Nisbet has noted that of

all the misascription of the word "conservative"... the most amusing, in an historical light, is surely the application of 'conservative' to the last named [i.e., the budget-expanding enthusiasts for great increases in military expenditures]. For in America throughout the twentieth century, and including four substantial wars abroad, conservatives had been steadfastly the voices of non-inflationary military budgets, and an emphasis on trade in the world instead of American nationalism. In the two World Wars, in Korea, and in Viet Nam, the leaders of American entry into the war were such renowned liberal-progressives as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. In all four episodes conservatives, both in the national government and in the rank and file, were largely hostile to intervention; were isolationists indeed.
(Conservatism,
p. 103) And on Ronald Reagan in particular, during whose administration the new and neoconservative movement were fused and amalgamated, Nisbet has noted that Reagan's "passion for crusades, moral and military, is scarcely American-conservative," (ibid, p. 104).

⁴
See Patrick J. Buchanan,
Right
from
the
Beginning
(Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1990); idem,
The
Great
Betrayal:
How
American
Sovereignty
and
Social
Justice
are
Sacrificed
to
the
Gods
of
the
Global
Economy
(New York: Little, Brown, 1998).

Let me illustrate by quoting Samuel Francis, one of the leading theoreticians and strategists of the Buchananite movement. After deploring "anti-white" and "anti-Western" propaganda, "militant secularism, acquisitive egoism, economic and political globalism, demographic inundation, and unchecked state centralism," he expounds on a new spirit of "America First," which "implies not only putting national interests over those of other nations and abstractions like 'world leadership,' 'global harmony,' and the 'New World Order,' but also giving priority to the nation over the gratification of individual and subnational interests." So far so good. But how does he propose to fix the problem of moral degeneration and cultural rot? Those parts of the federal Leviathan responsible for the proliferation of moral and cultural pollution such as the Department of Education, the National Endowment of the Arts, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the federal judiciary should be closed or cut down to size. But there is no opposition against the state's involvement in educational matters. There is no recognition that the natural order in education means that the state has nothing to do with it. Education is entirely a family matter.
⁵

Moreover, there is no recognition that moral degeneracy and cultural rot have deeper causes and cannot simply be cured by state-imposed curriculum changes or exhortations and declamations. To the contrary, Francis proposes that the cultural turn-around—the restoration of normalcy—can be achieved
without
a fundamental change in the structure of the modern welfare state. Indeed, Buchanan and his ideologues explicitly defend the three core institutions of the welfare state:
social security, medicare, and unemployment subsidies. They even want to expand the "social" responsibilities of the state by assigning to it the task of "protecting," by means of national import and export restrictions, American jobs, especially in industries of national concern, and "insulate the wages of U.S. workers from foreign laborers who must work for $ 1 an hour or less."

⁵
Buchanan and his intellectual allies want to abolish the federal government's control over educational matters and return such control to the level of states or, better still, local government. However, neoconservatives and most of the leaders of the so-called Christian Right and the "moral majority" simply desire (far worse from a genuinely conservative point of view) the replacement of the current, left-liberal elite in charge of national education by another one, i.e., themselves. "From Burke on," Robert Nisbet has criticized this posture, "it has been a conservative precept and a sociological principle since Auguste Comte that the surest way of weakening the family, or any vital social group, is for the government to assume, and then monopolize, the family's historic functions." In contrast, much of the contemporary American Right "is less interested in Burkean immunities from government power than it is in putting a maximum of governmental power in the hands of those who can be trusted. It is control of power, not diminution of power, that ranks high."

From the traditional conservative's point of view it is fat
uous to use the family—as evangelical crusaders regularly do—as the just
ification for their tireless crusades to ban abortion categorically, to bring the De
partment of Justice in on every Baby Doe, to mandate by constitution the imposition of
"voluntary" prayers in the public schools, and so on. (Nisbet,
Conservatism,
pp, 104-05)

In fact, Buchananites freely admit that they are statists. They detest and ridicule capitalism, laissez-faire, free markets and trade, wealth, elites, and nobility; and they advocate a new populist—indeed proletarian—conservatism which amalgamates social and cultural conservatism and social or socialist economics. Thus, continues Francis,

while the left could win Middle Americans through its economic measures, it lost them through its social and cultural radicalism, and while the right could attract Middle Americans through appeals to law and order and defense of sexual normality, conventional morals and religion, traditional social institutions and invocations of nationalism and patriotism, it lost Middle Americans when it rehearsed its old bourgeois economic formulas.
⁶

Hence, it is necessary to combine the economic policies of the left and the nationalism and cultural conservatism of the right, to create "a new identity synthesizing both the economic interests and cultural-national loyalties of the proletarianized middle class in a separate and unified political movement."
⁷
For obvious reasons this doctrine is not so named, but there is a term for this type of conservatism: It is called social nationalism or national socialism.

I will not concern myself here with the question whether or not Buchanan's conservatism has mass appeal and whether or not its diagnosis of American politics is sociologically correct. I doubt that this is the case, and certainly Buchanan's fate during the 1995 and 2000 Republican presidential primaries do
es not indicate otherwise. Rather, I want to address the more fundamental questions: Assuming that it does have such appeal; that is, assuming that cultural conservatism and social-socialist
economics can be
psychologically
combined (that is, that people can hold both of these views simultaneously without cognitive dissonance),
can they also be effectively and practically (economically and praxeologically) combined? Is it possible to maintain the current level of economic socialism (social security, etc.) and reach the goal of restoring cultural normalcy (natural families and normal rules of conduct)?

Samuel T. Francis, "From Household to Nat
ion: The Middle American populism of Pat Buchanan,"
Chronicles
(March 1996): 12-16; see also idem,
Beautiful
Losers:
Essays
on
the
Failure
of
American
Conservatism
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993); idem,
Revolution
from
the
Middle
(Raleigh, N.C.: Middle American Press, 1997).

⁷
Francis, "From Household to Nation, pp. 12-16.

Buchanan and his theoreticians do not feel the need to raise this question, because they believe politics to be solely a matter of will and power. They do not believe in such things as economic laws. If only people want something, and they are given the power to implement their will, everything can be achieved. The "dead Austrian economist" Ludwig von Mises, to whom Buchanan referred contemptuously during his campaign, characterized this belief as "historicism," the intellectual posture of the German
Kathedersozialisten,
the academic Socialists of the Chair, who justified any and all statist measures.

But historicist contempt and ignorance of economics does not alter the fact that inexorable economic laws exist. You cannot have your cake and eat it too, for instance. Or what you consume now cannot be consumed again in the future. Or producing more of one good requires producing less of another. No wishful thinking can make such laws go away. To believe otherwise can only result in practical failure. "In fact," noted Mises, "economic history is a long record of government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics."
⁸
In light of elementary and immutable economic laws, the Buchananite program of social nationalism is just another bold but impossible dream. No wishful thinking can alter the fact that maintaining the core institutions of the present welfare state and wanting to return to traditional families, norms, conduct, and culture are incompatible goals. You can have one—socialism (welfare)—or the other—traditional morals—but you cannot have both, for social nationalist economics, the
pillar of the current welfare state system Buchanan wants to leave untouched, is the very cause of cultural and social anomalies.

⁸
Ludwig von Mises,
Human
Action:
A
Treatise
on
Economics,
Scholar's Edition (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1998), p. 67. "Princes and democratic majorities," writes Mises leading directly up to this verdict,

are drunk with power. They must reluctantly admit that they are subject to the laws of nature. But they reject the very notion of economic law. Are they not the supreme legislators? Don't they have the power to crush every opponent? No war lord is prone to acknowledge any limits other than those imposed on him by a superior armed force. Servile scribblers are always ready to foster such complacency by expounding the appropriate doctrines. They call their garbled presumptions "historical economics."