By Kevin D. Williamson
Wednesday, January 27, 2021
Politics is supposed to be a means of solving problems
that do not have their origins in politics but instead arise from what Hobbes
called the “state of nature.” How do we
go about protecting ourselves from marauding bandits? How do we prevent our
crops from being stolen by the people across the river? How can we solve
disputes about property or injuries without resorting to vendettas and blood
feuds? If we build a wall around our village to protect us, how should the
expense be borne? These are the original problems of politics.
Eventually, politics reaches a point of sufficient
entrenchment where it begins to create severe problems of its own, which is
where we find ourselves at the moment.
Politics sometimes is thought of as a kind of lid that
sits atop the boiling pot of society. That is one assessment of modern
liberalism, cynically (or pragmatically) understood as a system in which the
well-to-do and the powerful share just enough of their wealth and power to keep
the peasantry from rising up in arms against them. You heard a lot about that
over the summer, in those ancient days when our friends on the left still were
lionizing mobs and armed militias that destroyed life and property for
political ends and worked toward the overthrow of government. Riots, they
lectured us, are the weapons of the powerless, and justly wielded. That is what
is meant by the slogan, “No justice, no peace.”
But if justice
is to mean anything other than the state in which those most willing to engage
in political violence are given what they demand, then justice must be defined
— which is another way of saying we must put limits on it. (Defined comes from
the Latin definire, meaning to impose
limits.) The need for such definition is the reason we write down our laws
rather than putting every dispute and controversy to a plebiscite, and it is
why we have constitutions — which is to say, it is why we have limited government.
Limited government is not some libertarian concoction —
if you prefer to keep the Bill of Rights, then you believe in limited
government. If you prefer unlimited
government, then history and a few unhappy corners of the modern world offer
many examples.
The long project of making the king subordinate to the law
was the great achievement of British political thinking, and it laid the
philosophical foundation for the American founding, in which British subjects
in North America did away with kings altogether and substituted a different
model of political life. It is that model of politics that American
conservatives seek to conserve — not necessarily in its every jot and
tittle (we did away with the Articles of Confederation, slavery, and much else,
and it has been a good while since the U.S. government has issued letters of
marque and reprisal) but in its principles, its philosophy, its intellectual
structure, and, especially, its constitutional architecture. And here it is
regrettably necessary to distinguish between conservatives per se and the Right
more broadly, many of whose current leading lights and ascendant radical
factions take a distinctly kingly view of presidential power and understand the
law as just another instrument of domination.
Some of our political disagreements are about ends, but most of them are about means. Most of us desire widespread
prosperity, physical security, social mobility, peace, a clean environment,
well-administered courts of law, the happiness of minority groups, etc. But how
do we achieve those ends? Conservatives believe that peace and prosperity come
from organic social development enabled by a foundation comprising individual rights,
including, especially, property rights; the rule of law, with legislatures
acting within the bounds of well-defined constitutional limits and independent
courts committed to the law itself rather than a freelance socio-political
agenda; prudent and thrifty public administration; a thriving civil society and
religious life that provide the things government cannot, such as community and
moral orientation; entrepreneurship, free enterprise, and trade; and the
distillation of ancient human experience that we call tradition.
When Senator Elizabeth Warren proposes to effect a soft
takeover of American corporations, dictating to them everything from the
composition of their boards to the range of their political activism,
conservatives object — not because we are worried that Microsoft’s shareholders
will get a raw deal, but because Senator Warren’s proposal represents a
fundamental change to the property-rights regime upon which American economic
prosperity is founded, a fundamental change in the relationship between citizen
and state. Conservatives who object to “cancel culture” are mindful of the
legal distinction between private corporate action and state censorship, but
are also mindful of the fact that civil society can be made into a cat’s-paw of
politics, and recognize that what is proposed by Representative Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez et al. would constitute a kind of soft Jim Crow for political
minorities. Our solicitousness of the undemocratic
character of many of our institutions — the Senate, the Bill of Rights, the
Electoral College — is rooted in an understanding that there is more to peace
and justice than majority rule.
Against this, the progressives offer ad-hocracy,
willy-nilly social engineering in response to whatever the demand of the second
is. That is why we went from “Nobody is
talking about gay marriage!” to “Gay
marriage is a constitutional mandate!” to “We’re going to put you in jail if you won’t bake a cake for a gay
wedding!” in about ten years. The times, they are a-changin’: Planned
Parenthood was founded by a dedicated eugenicist who claimed to abhor abortion
and has become an organization of dedicated abortionists who claim, somewhat
dubiously, to abhor eugenics — and both
positions were considered, in their respective times, the incontrovertibly
rational position of scientific progressivism. Self-evident truths freshly
minted yesterday and bolstered by a Vox
article headlined “Study says . . .” are not good enough on their own, because
we have seen them come and go.
So of course we conservatives are always repeating ourselves. History repeats itself. We must always begin, and begin again, at the beginning.
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