Wolking’s World

This brouhaha regarding Rush Limbaugh’s speech at CPAC has now received almost a full week of news coverage, with the “drive by media” creating as much controversy as possible. RNC Chairman Michael Steele was suckered into demeaning Rush, which of course entailed an apology afterwards, which has let the DNC and Obama White House run wild with their accusations that Rush is the true leader of the Republican party, which of course means that Republicans hate America and want everyone to starve to death after the stock market crashes, especially black people.

It is quite obvious that there is a struggle currently being waged for the soul of the conservative movement. Some frame it as a fight between highbrow and lowbrow conservatism.

Rod Dreher took Rush to task the day after his speech, and provided an argument I have been mulling over ever since:

Take a look at this passage [from Rush's speech], and please tell me what is conservative about it?:

Let me tell you who we conservatives are: We love people. [Applause] When we look out over the United States of America, when we are anywhere, when we see a group of people, such as this or anywhere, we see Americans. We see human beings. We don’t see groups. We don’t see victims. We don’t see people we want to exploit. What we see — what we see is potential. We do not look out across the country and see the average American, the person that makes this country work. We do not see that person with contempt. We don’t think that person doesn’t have what it takes. We believe that person can be the best he or she wants to be if certain things are just removed from their path like onerous taxes, regulations and too much government.

This is a comforting lie. It is Rousseau conservatism: the idea that man is born innocent, but corrupted by society, or government. Remove the chains of government, and man will return to his natural, good state, which is one of limitless possibility. This denies two bedrock truths of philosophical conservatism, which are that 1) human nature is fallen, and 2) man must learn to live within limits. A conservatism that is not founded on a conscious recognition of those two truths is a false conservatism, and has a shaky foundation from which to criticize liberal utopianism.

As someone who attended Rush’s speech and sat through all 85 minutes of it, in person, I must admit that the portion Dreher quotes here was my absolute favorite part. Limbaugh’s words here embodied exactly what I believe to be conservatism, and I remarked the same to a friend at the exact moment he said it. But to me, someone who abhors Rousseau’s state of nature philosophy and believes it to be antithetical to the true nature of man, i.e. sinful and depraved, Dreher’s words came as a shock. And I think that to arrive at this conclusion about “Limbavian orthodoxy,” as Dreher likes to call it, is to fundamentally misunderstand what Rush is saying.

Rush does not believe man is born innocent. If this were the case, why wouldn’t he trust him to govern fairly, morally, and without pride or self-interest? No, Rush knows, just as most conservatives do, that man is no angel, and that more often than not his governments are overreaching in their power and oppressing in their self-righteousness. The conservative knows that God is man’s absolute authority, and that it is the government’s responsibility to ensure that man is as free as is orderly possible and that his God-given rights are upheld. Ultra conservatives would hold that government has no proper role outside of this function.

Russell Kirk wrote in The Roots of American Order: 

[M]odern liberalism and democracy are contemptuous of the whole concept of moral authority; if not checked in their assaults upon habitual reverence and prescriptive morality, the liberals and democrats will destroy Justice not only for their enemies, but for themselves. Under God, the will of the people ought to prevail; but many liberals and democrats ignore that prefatory clause. In America, particularly since 1825, there had been distressingly obvious a tendency to make over the government into a pure and simple democracy, centralized and intolerant of local rights and powers, upon the model of Rousseau… This would be a change from a civilized constitution to a barbaric one.

A pure democracy where the will of the people is free from under the authority of God, is barbaric. It is what James Madison described and the Rousseau-fueled French Revolution demonstrated: turbulent, contentious, and incompatible with personal security and property.

Kirk then quotes Orestes Brownson: ”[T]he humanitarian democracy … scorns all geographical lines, effaces all individualities, and professes to plant itself on humanity alone.”

The humanitarian presently will attack distinctions between the sexes; he will assail private property, as unequally distributed. “Nor can our humanitarian stop there. Individuals are, and as long as there are individuals will be, unequal: some … have natural advantages which others have not. There is inequality, therefore injustice, which can be remedied only by the abolition of all individualities, and the reduction of all individuals to the race, or humanity, man in general.” …

The humanitarian, or social democrat … is by definition a person who denies that any divine order exists. Having rejected the supernatural order and the possibility of a Justice more than human, the humanitarian tends to erect Envy into a pseudo-moral principle. It leads him, this principle of Envy, straight toward a dreary tableland of featureless social equality–toward Tocqueville’s democratic despotism, from which not only God seems to have dissapeared, but even old-fangled individual man is lacking.

But erasing individualism leaves people equal to cattle and flies in the face of our seal’s inscription, E pluribus Unum. Out of many individuals formed one nation, dedicated to the precepts of equality, liberty, and other God-given rights. For the liberals and “humanitarians,” it is inconceivable for infinitely different individuals to unite around these universal principles.

More of Rush’s speech:

So here we have two systems. We have socialism, collectivism, Stalin, whatever you want to call it, versus capitalism. Admittedly over on the right side capitalism there will be unequal outcomes because we’re all different. And some of us care more and have more passion and we know what we want to do and others are still struggling for it. Some people are just going to work harder than others. Okay. You get what you work for. Those who have a genuine inability for whatever reason are taken care of. We’re compassionate people. On the left side when you get into this collectivism socialism stuff, these people on the left, the Democrats and liberals today claim that they are pained by the inequities and the inequalities in our society. And they believe that these inequities and inequalities descend from the selfishness and the greed of the achievers. And so they tell the people who are on different income quintiles, whatever lists, they say it’s not that you’re not working hard enough, you could have what they have, perhaps, if you applied it. They’re stealing it from you.

Limbaugh recognizes the same class envy propogated by liberals that Kirk described.

Barry Goldwater surmised that the conscience of a conservative is pricked by anyone who would debase the dignity of another individual. This was the crux of Rush’s speech:

Ladies and gentlemen, there ought not be any poverty except those who are genuinely ill equipped. But most of the people in poverty in this country are equipped for far much more. They’ve just been beaten down. They’re told don’t worry, we’ll take care of you. There’s nothing out there for you anyway; you’ll be discriminated against. Breaks our heart to see this. We can’t have a great country and a growing economy with more and more people being told they have a right, because of some injustice that’s been done to them or some discrimination, that they have a right to the earnings of others.

Rush denounces the corrupting forces of government upon “innocent” man, to use Dreher’s terms, because he agrees with Frederic Bastiat:

God has given to men all that is necessary for them to accomplish their destinies. He has provided a social reform as well as a human form. And these social organs of persons are so constituted that they will develop themselves harmoniously in the clean air of liberty. Away, then, with quacks and organizers! Away with their rings, chains, hooks, and pincers! Away with their artificial systems! Away with the whims of governmental administrators, their socialized projects, their centralization, their tariffs, their government schools, their state religions, their free credit, their bank monopolies, their regulations, their restrictions, their equalization by taxation, and their pious moralizations!

And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works.

Thus, I believe Rush’s position is very much rooted in the two bedrock principles Dreher identifies: 1) human nature is fallen, and 2) man must learn to live within limits.

Human nature is fallen, thus we believe that power corrupts him and that his government must contain checks and balances so as to contain his ambition, lust, and greed. Most importantly, government must remain small and limited.

Man must learn to live within limits, thus we believe that he is under God and subject to his principles of truth and justice.

Liberalism afflicts our society like a bloated leech, seeking at every moment to swell the numbers under its influence, restricting the activity of free people in the name of equalization and social justice. Conservatism, in acknowledgment of man’s great potential yet also the finiteness of his character, stands athwart this insult to man’s nature as an ideology of freedom, choice, and responsibility.

“The Conservative,” wrote Goldwater, sees “politics as the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consitent with the maintenance of the social order.”

For today’s liberal, this belief is essentially reversed. A fair and perfected society is the ultimate end, artificially created and maintained by whatever means necessary—even force and the gradual elimination of individual liberty. Thomas Jefferson rejected the early manifestations of this abomination outright: “We have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.” Imagine the words he would have for our welfare behemoth now.

Conservatives understand that every individual’s development, personal or material, is his own responsibility, and is no business of another human being or legislative body. “The choices that govern his life are choices that he must make,” affirmed Goldwater. This was Ronald Reagan’s ideal of rugged individualism, the initiative and resolve American backbones have been gladly carrying since the dawn of our shining city on a hill. Thus, the conservative seeks to conserve the immutable privileges of choice and responsibility for everyone, understanding that this is the only justice, the only fairness, the only society worth keeping. Egotistical organizers may think they embody the change we need, but Goldwater described the solution very differently: real change will come when we entrust government to men who understand their first duty is to divest themselves of the power they have been given.

Dreher mocks Rush’s assertion that conservatism is a set of unchanging principles:

We have a challenge. We’ve got factions now within our own movement seeking power to dominate it, and worst of all to redefine it. Well, the Constitution doesn’t need to be redefined. Conservative intellectuals, the Declaration of Independence does not need to be redefined and neither does conservativism. Conservativism is what it is and it is forever. It’s not something you can bend and shape and flake and form.

Because, what, it was handed down from Sinai? One hardly knows what to say to this. Do they really believe politics is dogmatic religion? They must. And if so, they’re hopeless.

In a sense, all correct and virtuous principles were handed down from Sinai. Does Dreher really believe that political principles can be separated from religious influence? That political conviction is created out of nothing in a universe separate from morality? We are conservatives because we believe it is a principle consistent with the laws of nature and of nature’s God, are we not?

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness: John Locke claimed that to offend a man’s property was to offend his life. The founders understood that the principle of property was connected indissolubly with the God-given right to life. Thus, high taxes aren’t just bad for the economy, they are immoral, and that is the primary reason to oppose them. When the government forcibly relieves an individual of a majority of his labor’s fruits, it is legalized theft, and it is a violation of his life. When Rush states that the Declaration of Independence does not need to be redefined, this entire argument is implied. This is why conservatism is a set of principles that “are forever.” And this is why we believe it is right.

Rush may be bombastic. He may be crude. He may be lowbrow in the opinion of Rod Dreher. But his conservatism is certainly not related to Rousseau, and the principles he espouses are not something he has created on his own to the tune of millions of dollars. Rush’s conservatism is just as intellectual as Goldwater, Buckley, and Reagan, Kirk and Bastiat. It is simply disguised in the language of someone who preaches for three hours a day to what Dreher would refer to as the lowbrows. It is packaged by a capitalist who has mastered his artform and keeps millions coming back for more.