Saturday Night Live Music: "Kayleigh"

Prog--particularly the tail-end of prog in the 1980s, like this here--gets an unfairly bad rap. It really does.

Saturday Night Live Music: "Sunset Grill"

It's been hot this week in Kansas--but still, summer's clearly at an end. Weary we are of the summer heat, but knowing we're going to miss it too. Either way, time to shut her down.

Explaining Sanders's "Socialism" to Kansans

[Cross-posted to Political Context]

I appreciate the kind attention which The Wichita Eagle recently paid to us local Democrats, progressive liberals, Christian socialists, and various others who are working to promote Senator Bernie Sanders's campaign for president. We're doing it for many different reasons: perhaps because we believe that Sanders would make an excellent president, and want him to win; perhaps because we believe that his focus on economic inequality is something our country's political culture desperately needs, and feel that supporting his efforts is a smart way to bring attention to that issue; perhaps because we believe that America's long dominant two-party arrangement desperately needs to be blown up from within, and that the nomination of an avowed democratic socialist by a major party just might do it; perhaps all of the above. Anyway, we're a merry little band of Kansans, and we're happy for the publicity.

We're not operating under any political delusions, I think. We know that Bernie's effort to win the nomination is a real long-shot, and that even if he does, he definitely won't win Kansas's electoral college votes. Registered Republicans and self-identified conservatives outnumber both Democrats and liberals by more than two to one in this state, and Sanders, bless his heart, surely won't be the one guy who could change those nearly century-old trends. All we hope for is little comprehension and respect; large numbers of actual votes, frankly, would just be an unexpected bonus.

To that end, though I realize the odds of it changing anyone's mind are quite small, allow me to comment briefly on the statement of Kelly Arnold, the chairman of the Kansas Republican Party, quoted in the above article. Stating with some glee that he'd love to see the national Democratic party be led by Sanders into the 2016 elections, he commented about how easy it would be to craft a message against him: “People in Kansas are hard-working--they don’t want somebody like Bernie Sanders coming in here raising taxes to give millions of people free stuff.”

Nothing surprising there. It's just a variation on the same Tea Party accusation that has been hurled at the "socialist" Obama for close to seven years now: that the ultimate goal of the political left is to tax hard-working Americans into oblivion while giving all sorts of other people free goodies. Is this kind of claim any more accurate now that we're talking about a politician who actually associates himself, by name, with "socialism"? Not really. But it does give us the opportunity to do a little instruction.

First of all, anyone who is at all curious about Bernie Sanders really ought to read the speech he gave this week at Liberty University, one of the main homes of politically conservative evangelical Protestanism in America. Besides rather bravely starting out with all the social issues that a progressive liberal like himself obvious disagrees with conservative audience about; besides quoting scripture and Pope Francis to the effect that Biblical justice is incompatible with gross economic inequality and suffering; besides all that--just what, exactly, did he talk about that would involve spending tax money on goodies? Well, guaranteeing access to health care as a right, for one. Also, requiring paid family and medical leave for and job protection to all parents, jobs programs for young people, wage supports for established workers, and a few other things. Granted, there's a lot more that Bernie has talked about elsewhere which didn't make it into the speech--investing in infrastructure, reducing the cost of college, etc. Still, that is the "free stuff" that he wants to spend tax money on. Seems like the sort of thing that might actually help many hard-working people (who sometimes get sick, who sometimes have little children that need a parent at home to raise them, and so forth) do their jobs even better, but perhaps that's just me.

(Incidentally, The Wall Street Journal recently made a splash claiming that Sanders's proposals would cost an outrageous $18 trillion. But that's mostly a meaningless scare number, since 1) the amount is spread out over ten years, during which time America's total GDP will be $228 trillion, and 2) most of that $18 trillion is attributed to a hypothetical single-payer health care system, like the one they have developed and refined in Canada and many other countries, as a replacement to our current health care spending practices, which even with the Affordable Care Act are likely to amount to $42 trillion over the next ten years anyway. So depending on how you cut the pie, given the the reality in America today--as opposed to the originalist fantasy of many fiscal conservatives--you're quite possibly talking about Sanders's plan actually saving America money...and that doesn't even consider the likelihood that a President Sanders would manage to avoid spending $2 trillion on a basically unnecessary war in Iraq as well.)

Second, look at what I just wrote about above in regards to Sanders's proposals: taxing and spending. Obviously, lots of folks have an instinctive dislike to that kind of public transaction; it's a deep part of America's history and political culture. But taxing and spending assumes an economy in which individuals and corporations--the ones that are being taxed--are accumulating wealth. In other words, I'm assuming an economy of private market transactions which self-interested businesses and individuals may obtain profits from--also known, in the usual parlance, as a capitalist economy.

Does that mean Sanders isn't actually a socialist? The truth is, like "Christian" or "conservative," "socialism" has a great many meanings. At its root, it simply refers to an economic arrangement where wealth is held and shared collectively, as a public resource. Thus, America's public school system, our interstate highway system--the parts that aren't toll roads, anyway--and pretty much the entire Veteran's Administration (with its hospitals, doctors, and innumerable guarantees) are all at least somewhat socialist. The scientific and often state-based socialist arguments of Karl Marx have been massively influential around the world over the past century and a half, obviously--but democratic socialism is a different animal. It's aim is not to force (or wait patiently for) a revolutionary overthrow of capital, but to democratically move select resources for capital accumulation away from individual owners and into the hands of society. That doesn't mean the end of markets, in other words; it means their socialization. This is something we're used to occasionally doing for veterans or artists or the elderly or small children--Sanders is talking about doing it for the sick and the poor, for outsourced blue-collar workers and debt-ridden college students, as well.

If someone wanted to be strictly ideological in assessing Bernie Sanders, his democratic socialist credentials are questionable--because, as anyone who looks at his actual proposals can tell, he really isn't talking about a great deal of economic socialization, with the exception of the areas of college education and health care. Rather, he's talking like a Scandinavian social democrat--or like a good old-fashioned Christian populist, of the sort Kansas used to produce more of than any other state. I realize that throwing out all that philosophical and political context is unlikely to move anyone's opinions of the man or his agenda one way or another, but this is too good of an opportunity to miss out on--the Sanders campaign, if nothing else, may help people get clear on what, exactly, they are accusing other people of.

The popular conservative, libertarian, and constitutionalist rhetoric here in Kansas has always associated any kind of government taxation and spending, for whatever reason, with "socialism," with the assumption that anything with that label can only mean robbing hard-working individuals of their due rewards and giving them, in turn, to lazy folks to don't deserve them. But this is simply wrong, for two reasons. First, because "socialism" isn't robbing Peter to pay Paul; it's a demand for economic justice that obliges us to ask just what sources of wealth we want to be risked, won, or lost on an unregulated market, and what sources of wealth (the education of our children, the care for our elderly) we do not. And second, because there are as many different types of socialists as there are capitalists. To be sure, there have been plenty of socialists throughout history whose goals have been politically tyrannical, and thus were much worth opposing. Sanders, in the judgment of myself and many other Kansans, isn't like that at all. He is, rather, the kind of socialist whose ideas are worth fighting for. And thus, to be able to actually do so, is, for some of us, a real political delight. You ought to join us--it's fun.

Saturday Night Live Music: "Treasure/September"

This guy Lounès is the real deal.

Whatever Happened to Communitarianism?

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Twenty years ago, the concept and label "communitarianism" was riding high, or at least as high as any broadly applicable yet intellectually coherent ideological movement usually ever does in the United States. There have been exceptions, to be sure: abolitionism, progressivism, prohibitionism, libertarianism, feminism--the American varieties of each of these transformed (or introduced new) political parties, challenged or changed social norms and expectations, shaped our interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, and overall left their mark on the history books. It seems likely that such will not be the case with communitarianism when non-academic histories of the 1990s get written, however. On the contrary, right now it looks like communitarian arguments are going to be about as well remembered as the populist arguments of the 1890s or the socialist arguments of the 1910s--that is, inspiring and important to those already inclined to see public life in those terms, but not socially important. Why is that? Or, perhaps, are intellectual appearances deceiving?

2015 is a good time to ask this question, since twenty years ago, in 1995, bookstores and the op-ed pages of dead-tree newspapers were filled with communitarian rhetoric and questions. Three books published that year stand out in particular in my memory: Alan Ehrenhalt's The Lost City, Jean Bethke Elshtain's Democracy on Trial, and Daniel Kemmis's The Good City and the Good Life. (Amitai Etzioni, who was an exhaustive cheer-leader for what he and his compatriots referred to as "responsive communitarianism," also published the important compendium New Communitarian Thinking in 1995.) As I recall, only one of these three books had anything like an actually discernible impact of public discourse--Ehrenhalt's--and none of them explicitly identified themselves as part of the communitarian intellectual movement, anyway (indeed, in retrospect, Elshtain's work may well be better understood as having contributed to a different intellectual package entirely). Still they all--supplemented by many other books and essays and op-eds published right around the same time (Michael Sandel's Democracy's Discontent, Jim Wallis's The Soul of Politics, etc.), not to mention the manner in which leading political figures throughout the English-speaking world in the mid- to late 1990s liked to position themselves as community-minded, "Third Way" politicians--made it seem as though communitarian thought was really going to be transformative.

Which most people today would probably agree wasn't the case. But those of us inclined to resist ideologies of individually grounded and thus essentially unlimited growth, choice, and rights--in other words, all the anti-capitalists and anti-statists and anti-globalizers out there--may want to reconsider that conclusion for a moment, if only to help ourselves see what might be beneficial movements in a genuinely communitarian direction...just ones that are taking place in a rather different key than was called for twenty years ago.

The heart of the communitarian argument--which was re-appropriated and re-played in all number of historical, theological, and other intellectual contexts--was essentially an acceptance of the moral anthropology of classical republicanism: because our full development as social creatures, fellow citizens, and simply human beings depends upon cultivating civic virtues and an understanding of responsible freedom which individualism often undermines, forms of economy, government, and personal behavior which give primary (or at least equal) consideration to community identity, integrity, and participation ought to be pursued. In other words, communitarianism began with the res publica (though one could just as easily say--as many did--the same thing in a Christian context, and talk of it beginning with Paul's the Body of Christ, or in a Confucian context, and talk of it beginning with the Five Bonds). Some have argued that republicanism and communitarianism ought to be recognized as historically distinct, but standing firm on that point requires, I think, too much dedication to rather particular historical reconstructions to be of much use publicly. Very (no doubt too) simply, the argument at the time went like this: if you saw the point of freedom as the achievement of opportunities for independent choice, you were some kind of philosophical liberal; if you saw the point of freedom as the ability to contribute to or deliberate about the common good (or at least common goods), you were some kind of communitarian.

Putting it in those terms might suggest a first, rather obvious answer to the question of why communitarian arguments faded away. After all, the 1990s--thanks to the spread of the internet, thanks to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the state socialist parties throughout the world which were aligned with its cause, thanks to the simultaneous explosion of both globalization and irredentism (famously diagnosed in Jihad vs. McWorld, also published in 1995 by another sometimes-communitarian author, Benjamin Barber)--was all about the celebration of and the empowering of individual choice. It was the end of history, after all; liberal marketplaces were on the march, and the Moral Majority was out of business. (In fact, it was during the 1990s that a suspicion of how the unfolding of individual rights would likely proceed in the U.S. led to a near-total re-orientation of Christian conservative concerns, one which continues to this day.) So obviously the language of communitarianism--collective responsibilities, not individual rights!--was going to be smothered by the dot-com boom, right?

But perhaps it was exactly all that choice which contributed to the vague discontent so many felt about and throughout the 1990s, despite the rise in their 401ks. Ehrenhalt, at least, took very seriously the possibility that, while those in the driver's seat of American culture and politics twenty years ago wouldn't figure out where they'd gone wrong or too far and change, their children perhaps would. They would respond, he suspected, to the expanding discontent around them by rediscovering the value of the authority, the structure, the narratives, and most crucially the limits that healthy communities and civic contexts provide. He concluded The Lost City writing:

[The rising generation] will come to adulthood in the early years of the next century with an entirely different set of childhood and adolescent memories from the ones their parents absorbed. They will remember being bombarded with choices, and the ideology of choice as a good in itself; living in transient neighborhoods and broken and recombinant families where no arrangement could be treated as permanent; having parents who feared to impose rules because rules might stifle their freedom and individuality. Will a generation raised that way be tempted to move, in its early adult years, toward a reimposition of order and stability, even at the risk of losing some of the choice and personal freedom its parents worshiped? To dismiss that idea it to show too little respect for the pendulum that operates in the values of any society, and the natural desire of any generation to use it to correct the errors and the excesses of the one before (pg. 281).

Of course, these adults I see around me, a decade or two my junior--the famous Millennial generation--also emerged from adolescence, journeyed through their universities and apprenticeships and grad programs, married and began their families (or pointedly chose not to), moved from one place to another, and started their adult working lives, in the midst of two huge developments that couldn't be more different from the drifting, discontented (but profitable!) year of 1995: the War on Terror, and the Great Recession. The social, political, and cultural consequences of those transformative events are many and diverse, but there are areas of overlap. Both privileged statist, nationalist, indeed civilizational narratives (obviously aided here by increasingly omnipresent, globally-interconnected technologies)--the primary community one was part of, the community which most threatened one's choices or preferences, the community one most need to win, was a big one. If the money-making exuberance, the talk-radio squalor, and occasional overall aimlessness of post-Cold War America in the 1990s made it a little easier (for a moment, anyway) for people to hear a message which called for the abandonment of business as usual and for a move towards a different, more communal and civic, way of conceiving the political stakes around us, then 9/11, the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Wall Street bankruptcies imposed--for many of us, anyway--an encompassing and divisive rhetorical structure in its place. The United States vs. worldwide terror, Bush vs. the UN, Obama vs. the Tea Party, Red America vs. Blue America, Christians vs. Muslims, libertarians vs. socialists, the West vs. The Rest. The fact that too many communitarian thinkers perversely ramped up their discussion of the res publica to world-historical and international levels, perhaps in part because they felt themselves obligated by this revived rhetorical posture to fight a culture war, didn't do the ideology any favors. If your typical educated American thinker in her 30s today looks back on these concerns from 20 years ago and finds it all somewhat intellectually strained, perhaps she can't be blamed.

And yet, maybe she is also somewhat persuaded by it all as well, without realizing it? Not that some of the worst excesses of communitarian thinking weren't subject to a pretty thorough rejection, whether the warning was listened to or not. Elshtain in particular, by emphasizing again and again the divided, contentious, multi-layered, and civilizing processes of democratic belonging (as oppose to the static fact of belonging itself), provided a strong rebuke to those who twisted the concerns of some of her erstwhile ideological compatriots into a too-casual defense of "community institutions" capable of "eviscerating any public-private distinction" in the name of a "a future perfect gemeinschaft" (Democracy on Trial, pg.49). In this, she was working the same intellectual theme as Christopher Lasch (whose final book, The Revolt of the Elites and the The Betrayal of Democracy was published in...you guessed it, 1995), who warned against a communitarianism that was more powered by a static nostalgia than by a populist drive to empower citizens, families, and neighbors to become capable and diverse community-builders, in the face of manifest (and growing) economic and social inequality. It's not that I imagine such theoretical arguments are widely acknowledged among my college students today or those that I've taught over the past 15 years. Still, in their life choices, in their opinions, in the directions many--not all by any means, but many--of them are taking, I wonder if somehow or another, some kind of careful, chastened, decidedly non-grand and quite diverse communitarian perspective hasn't managed to take root, and grow.

It's too easy to assume, for example, that the aforementioned unfolding of individual rights in regards to sexual morality has been entirely without any kind of communitarian awareness, without any kind of attention to social responsibility and permanence. The whole story of how it is that America's political and legal culture went from the Defense of Marriage Act to Obergefell v. Hodges in less than 20 years will no doubt be told and re-told many times from many different disciplinary perspectives--but surely there must be at least some significance to the fact that, among all the assaults upon what was long this country's default cultural understanding, the one which generated the greatest sturm und drang was not divorce or polyamory, but rather a push for marriage itself--a push that, therefore, ultimately invokes ideas (whether openly acknowledged or not) of sexual commitment and limits, not liberation.. The inability of many to see this--and I was once one of those many--reflects the difficulty of separating the evolving res publica from the historically specific publics we experience, many of which were and are conservative Christian churches. Still, despite the many reasons to be troubled by the sexual world which liberal individualism's apotheosis helped create, the reality is that our hypothetical average 30-something American intellectual today does not appear, in fact, to have thrown off the idea of this most intimate kind of belonging, but rather has likely strongly embraced--in an admittedly new way, in principle at least--the cause and the right of marrying and giving in marriage.

Similar arguments could be made about technology (how much contemporary screen addiction reflects complete isolation, and how much reflects new forms of social interaction, connection, and community-building?), work habits (might the rise of the DIY ethos and the resistance to long-term expectations for corporate work suggest not just resigned economic realism, but also a desire to carve out space for creative opportunities with one's friends and family?), living patterns (is the flight from the suburbs and the return to the city an embrace of individualizing anonymity, or actually a rebuke of exactly that?), and much more. This isn't, I think, a Panglossian attempt to see only the silver lining in our present moment--which clearly is, like all moments, a worrisome one. Rather, I lay it out as a set of developments which may reveal a crucial perspective on the whole communitarian perspective.

Michael Walzer once argued in an insightful article (first published as the 1990s began) that the communitarian attack upon liberal modernity cannot avoid assuming that either individualism had successfully remade the social order, or that it hadn't. If the former, then there is a problem with the many criticisms made against the contemporary prioritization of choice, because if the social infrastructure of attachment, tradition, and civic virtue really had been overthrown, what, exactly, can a defense of community be built out of? Atomistic individualism can't be persuaded to embrace limits and common goods, because it simply cannot find place within its philosophical worldview for such. So communitarians might as well admit the game is lost, and think about other options. (Perhaps this is the intellectual ground upon which the Benedict Option stands.) But if the latter--if modernity has not, in fact, defeated humanity's social anthropology, and the ability to perceive and pursue collective and stabilizing ways of life has not been entirely lost--then that must mean functioning communities haven't been lost either. They're still here, somewhere; we just have to learn how to see them where and for what they are. From that perspective, the rising generation which Ehrenhalt spoke of evinces more than a little communitarian evidence after all.

In his wonderful and too-little read second book, The Good City and The Good Life, Daniel Kemmis hardly made any explicit reference at all to communitarianism or republicanism or any other type of philosophical orientation--and perhaps, exactly because he didn't, going back to that book provides an insight to civic developments which those of us often too enamored of theory miss. His discussion of citizenship and the "civic wholeness" that a proper relationship to one's local natural and social environment--one's polis, in other words--effectively closes off any of the grand cultural narratives which came to warp much communitarian thinking, instead grounding the pressing need to belong in one's locality: "states and nation-states are abstractions to which we cannot easily apply any of the key concepts discussed here: not wholeness, not presence, not grace, and therefore not...citizenship" (pg. 25). Kemmis's arguments in favor of relocating our sense of attachment to the active, participatory city seem to anticipate the political dysfunction that, over the past decade, has come to seem normal for large, overburdened democratic states. For him, art and governance and a sustainable economy were most authentically realized in a city (preferably a small to mid-sized one), wherein "the web of culture comes down to earth in countless ways, situating people in a dynamic balance between their innermost aspirations and struggles and the world they find themselves inhabiting" (pg. 69). He was, in other words, years ahead of many others in looking back at Jane Jacobs to find his own particular kind of communitarian inspiration, predicting "the postnational renaissance of the city" (pg. 139)--a renaissance that finds evidence today in the proliferation of farmers markets and urban farming, in ways in which cities are challenging both state and national governments, in the movement of young families (straight as well as gay) and "suburban" concerns into parts of America's cities that were once progressive ghettos of gentrification. No, none of this particularly follows the often conservative and traditional models which many, in practice, regularly associated years ago with the attempt to foreground the common good and civic virtue. But the best communitarian writings always, I think, challenged those static presumptions, and invited us to see (in contrast to the nationalist, statist, and global capitalist narratives which have loomed so large over the past couple of decades) the diverse democratic and communal practices which the urban nooks and crannies of America still give rise to.

None of this is to say that liberal individualism and the rampant mobility and often militant nonjudgmentalism of American society today isn't still a problem; on the contrary, those of us who care about conserving a humane connection to our own communal nature need to constantly watch how we teach, how we live, how we spend--and just as importantly, where--in order to combat such ideas and practices. But as one form of attachment gives way, our mourning should not prevent us from noting other attachments which take its place. Communitarianism today, were another rash of books to be published proclaiming it in 2015, would likely be revealed as more local, less political, more sustainable, less ambitious, and both more and less conservative (in the familial and cultural senses, respectively) than was the case in 1995. But the essential focus of it--the res publica, the imperative of belonging to and bonding with the people and the rituals of a particular place--would be, I think, the same. And the refugees from alienating state-centric liberalism who might hear and respond to that focus might well look around themselves and find (in comparison to those of us who latched onto these teachings 20 years ago) that they are far less alone in feeling inspired by these materials than any of us may have thought.

Saturday Night Live Music: "New York Doll"

A stately and quietly sad tune, telling a stately and quietly sad story, about man who, to his credit, was none of those things.

25 Years Ago Today...

...we lost a master. Thank goodness the music survives.

Saturday Night Live Music: "Life's Been Good"

A hot, tired, but happy end to the summer here, folks. As another school year begins on Monday, I have to say, this overweight old white guy right here agrees with the other one: life's been pretty good, so far.

From the Distant Liberal Consensus, a Defiant Conservative Yelp

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

As I write this review, I keep hearing about Jeb Bush, campaigning for president, talking about how the invasion of Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein was a "pretty good deal" and castigating the Obama administration and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for failing to maintain (much less expand) America's involvement in Iraq and Syria. The ghosts of neoconservatism remain, I suppose--perhaps in part because their roots in a certain type of conservative thinking go so far back. This summer, I learned a little bit more about that.

Back in late May, a large group of local readers here in Wichita, KS--nearly all of whom very likely would identify themselves as "conservatives," though of a great variety of hues; only a couple of us were generally outsides to that identification, looking in--gathered (under the aegis of the Eighth Day Institute; many thanks!) to read and discuss James Burnham's last major writing, the rambling, revealing, often fascinating, sometimes frightening, and (I think, anyway) fundamentally mixed-up Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism. Published in 1964 (the same year that Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" came out, a coincidence which at least one of our members thought almost too good to be true), it is a frustrated and worried manifesto which insists on presenting itself as a clinical diagnosis of the liberal ideology, which Burnham believed not only dominated the Western world but would, unless reversed, result in its destruction. It is, in short, the sort of book which I suppose could only have been written in a world where the postwar liberal consensus seemed both utterly monolithic and utterly oblivious to the cultural and socio-economic and global consequences of its own beliefs (and who is to say that it really didn't seem so to an East Coast Trostkyist-turned-conservative academic in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s?). Unless you've never read anything except, perhaps, Chronicles magazine (and only the back issues at that), then you probably can't honestly see liberalism as such an intellectually elite and self-inclosed ideological position any longer--that accusation is made against it, of course, but anyone who has honestly considered the ideas of such liberal suspects as Lyndon Johnson, William Sloane Coffin, Martin Luther King, and Betty Friedan (just to pick some names which Burnham never mentions, despite all of them regularly making news as this book was published) can't believe that "liberalism" is a seamless, relentless unity. So reading the book was, among other things, an entrance for me into an old, mostly lost, and perhaps never really entirely real, slightly paranoid world.

A word about James Burnham. I've never made a study of the man's writings, but reading this book made clear to me the truth of the commentary on the man--both complimentary and critical--which points out that the common theme throughout all his writings over the decades was the place of "power" in any given system of thought. The man was more than a "realist" as they are commonly labeled in discussions of foreign policy and international relations; for him, it seems as though power--the wielding of it, the psychological comfort or discomfort with it, the moral appraisal of it--is utterly inseparable from any kind of political understanding, or perhaps any conception of social life whatsoever. Liberalism is a great many things for Burnham, nearly all of them bad, but the common denominator among all these bad things is that liberalism is weak. It lacks firmness. It fails to do and say and believe the hard and practical and disciplined and necessary things for civilization's survival. The fact that this kind of relentless focus on strength occasionally makes it difficult for Burnham to account for liberal successes, or makes a little disconcerting the way he deals with aspects of individuality which are not reducible to a Darwinian struggle, doesn't slow him down. Towards the very end of the book he lays it out flat: the most important thing is "military bases, strategic posts, and soldiers"; beyond or without them, "there can be no civilization, there is nothing" (pg. 344). I can only assume that John Derbyshire, Victor Davis Hanson, and other traditionalist conservatives of a particularly martial stripe are fans.

This isn't Front Porch-style localist and community-focused conservatism, that's for sure. The Cold War was a bad time for ideologies (thought really, are there ever good times?), particularly one that includes within it strands of thought dealing such humble topics and virtues as local knowledge and affection, community attachment, and so forth. Burnham saw liberalism as a world-historical force, and attempting to understand it obliged him, on my reading, to constantly reach for the civilizational, the global. He--and surely he wasn't alone--looked for some kind of systematized resistance to what he considered the essential weakness and irresponsibility of liberalism, and as a result turned (despite his protestation in the book that such was not his aim) varied particular elements of conservative thought into universal, logical necessities, the rejection of which can only be attributed to Western liberals "who hate their own civilization" (pg. 14). The result certainly included elements of traditional conservatism--Burnham unapologetically defends aristocracy and natural hierarchies, and is dismissive of broad academic freedoms and democracy, particularly when "uneducated or propertyless persons" are allowed to vote (pgs. 112, 137-140)--but while Burnham occasionally name-drops various Aristotelian or Hegelian or Christian philosophies that might ground and give contrasting meaning to those traditions, overall the feeling of the book is very programmatic, and intentionally so: there is the way things are, and then there are liberals, and figuring what why they believe the irrational things they do is a problem for him.

Who are these Western liberals? Burnham employs only a little sociology and less philosophy in constructing what he refers to as the "liberal syndrome," instead choosing to carefully build a constellation of liberal positions by examining people and institutions that "plain common-sense" tells you are liberal: Elanor Roosevelt, Eugene McCarthy, John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Republic, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the League of Women Voters, etc., etc. (pgs. 19-20). From this array of liberals and liberal doings, Burnham artfully constructs his case. I won't deny that his analysis often results in correct observations about liberalism generally: "liberalism rejects the essentially tragic view of man's fate," "most liberals...do not feel....that considerations of experience, habit, custom and traditions have any appreciable weight," "liberalism is logically committed to the doctrine...of epistemological relativism, " etc. (see pgs. 44, 57, 72). But because he does not really look seriously at liberalism as a philosophy with its own history (Locke appears only to have Burnham surprisingly express doubt in his liberal bona-fides, and the authors of the U.S. Constitution show up to be complimented for having apparently kept them mostly uninfluenced by liberal Europe's Englightenment--pgs. 41-42, 148), all these observations become reductive. Even when he recognizes the individualistic ontology that all varieties of liberal thought share, he cannot take those varieties seriously, instead insisting that shared assumptions about human nature automatically bring all liberals to much the same point on practically every possible question. He makes, in other words, the whole range of liberal ideas (incorporating all sorts of perspectives probably better described as socialism or progressivism or populism or egalitarianism) into a support structure for the mainstream Democratic party's postwar apotheosis. You can't fault Burnham for not knowing his own thesis, that's for certain.

Some chapters are better than others. When Burnham attempts to organize liberalism's "order of values" he gets, I presume unknowingly, all mixed up on the matter of "positive liberty," on the one hand denying that "improving the security and mobility" of persons can ever involve any benefit to "genuine individual freedom," while at the same time admitting his belief that becoming "more complexly and intimately related" to (and thus constricted by) bodies larger than oneself actually is an increase in one's individuality (pgs. 185, 198). Then again, his chapter on "The Guilt of the Liberal," though including a rather cheap swipe at "the abusive writings of a disoriented Negro homosexual" (clearly James Baldwin), includes some first-rate psychological investigation, very aptly pointing out how liberalism's "atomistic and quantitative" approach logically shouldn't be capable of attributing obligations to successful or rich individuals on behalf of poorer or suffering ones, thus suggesting that, when it comes to matters of racial justice or economic equality, liberals--secular ones anyway--are motivated essentially by a contorted and parasitic feelings of guilt, and not much else, so much so that they find themselves "morally disarmed before those whom the liberal regards as less well off than himself" (pgs. 218-221, 224-227). It's a strong enough piece of argument that I wonder if John Rawls, who famously attempted to create an entirely rational (and thus self-interested) scheme of liberal justice, ever read it and perhaps was influenced by it. So, while his effort overall is filled with missteps and a kind of defiantly unexamined obliviousness to the actual genealogy of belief of those liberals which so disturb him, there are plenty of sharp insights to be found throughout the book all the same.

Towards the end of the book, Burnham's near apocalyptic Cold War focus become pretty relentless. There is hardly a single postwar retreat from Western colonialism which he doesn't decry as a failure of liberal nerve in the face of communist expansion, and hardly a single example of the U.S. employing its power to shape political outcomes beyond its borders which he does not applaud. (The Spanish-American War in particular comes in for praise--pg. 293.) America's unwillingness to initiate some roll-back of international communism during the Hungarian uprising against Soviet domination especially troubles him, given that, in his view, "no better circumstances for some sort of move along the perspective could be imagined than those existing in November 1956" (pg. 306). (To Burnham, Eisenhower's weakness was clearly the fault of liberalism and not at all the fact that the Soviet Union was by then a nuclear power, since "changes in military, technical and other material factors are never able of themselves to account, causally, for policy"--pg. 313.) Ultimately, Burnham is convinced: those who subscribe to liberal ideas will spell the defeat of Western civilization because of their weakness in the face of multiple challenges, either "the drive of the communist enterprise for a monopoly of world power," or by "the explosive population growth and political activization within...equatorial and sub-equatorial latitudes occupied by non-white masses," or simply by "the jungle now spreading within our own society, in particular in our cities" (pg. 325). He gestures at the possibility of avoiding these fates by the West separating itself from liberal ideas, but doesn't seem to have much hope.

His arrival at this rather determined prognosis as a conclusion, after spending so much time attempting to develop an entirely clinical account of the liberal mindset in his book, gets me thinking: if those end points he comes to did not, in fact, occur, what does that mean? Complete aside from all the philosophically unsubstantiated and the many overly broad claims about liberalism in the book, can we say that, technically, he got liberals wrong? It would be interesting to consider the range of possible answers. Perhaps liberalism was overcome in time to bring about the Soviet Union (but then, would that mean liberalism made a comeback in America, and if so when)? Or perhaps liberalism got lucky and the USSR and international communism imploded, but Burnham's other two predictions continue to unfold? It is an interesting exercise in the sort of perennially improvable ideological debates we are all familiar with, only from the other direction: maybe liberalism can never exhibit sufficient strength to defeat its challengers, and we know this because challenges to the liberal way of life are still there. Fifty years ago is was the USSR, and today it is ISIS; the endurance of such challenges is, perhaps, all a Burnhamite conservative needs.

In the end, I think the mature Burnham, while certainly no liberal (much less a socialist of any stripe), was a poor conservative. His analytical but also anecdotal approach to ideology was fixated on broad categories of state, civilization, and race, leading him into seeing connections that simply aren't there, and by so doing moving his own often correct observations into a global framework that take conservative virtues and twist them--as the neoconservatives of the last 20 years have also done, flailing about to find some way to make sense of their diagnosis of liberalism after the Soviet Union's collapsed, and fixating on the "War on Terror." But conservatism, whatever it has to offer our pluralistic and secular world, loses its virtues (left-leaning ones included!) when it is turned into martial struggle against an ideological foe. Burham quotes Michael Oakeshott repeatedly on the epistemological dangers of "rationalism"; he and his descendants ought to be cognizant of how in attempting to undermine what they see as a comprehensive threat to the way things ought to be, they make the same thing out of themselves.

Saturday Night Live Music: "Look Away"

Big Country's best song? Quite possibly.