David Brooks | October 5, 2007
Modern conservatism begins with Edmund Burke. What Burke articulated was not an ideology or a creed, but a disposition, a reverence for tradition, a suspicion of radical change.
When conservatism came to America, it became creedal. Free market conservatives built a creed around freedom and capitalism. Religious conservatives built a creed around their conception of a transcendent order. Neoconservatives and others built a creed around the words of Lincoln and the founders.
Over the years, the voice of Burke has been submerged beneath the clamoring creeds. In fact, over the past few decades the conservative ideologies have been magnified, while the temperamental conservatism of Burke has been abandoned.
Over the past six years, the Republican Party has championed the spread of democracy in the Middle East. But the temperamental conservative is suspicious of rapid reform, believing that efforts to quickly transform anything will have, as Burke wrote “pleasing commencements” but “lamentable conclusions.”
The world is too complex, the Burkean conservative believes, for rapid reform. Existing arrangements contain latent functions that can be neither seen nor replaced by the reformer. The temperamental conservative prizes epistemological modesty, the awareness of the limitations on what we do and can know, what we can and cannot plan.
Over the past six years, the Bush administration has operated on the assumption that if you change the political institutions in Iraq, the society will follow. But the Burkean conservative believes that society is an organism; that custom, tradition and habit are the prime movers of that organism; and that successful government institutions grow gradually from each nation’s unique network of moral and social restraints.
Over the past few years, the vice president and the former attorney general have sought to expand executive power as much as possible in the name of protecting Americans from terror. But the temperamental conservative believes that power must always be clothed in constitutionalism. The dispositional conservative is often more interested in means than ends (the reverse of President Bush) and asks how power is divided before asking for what purpose it is used.
Over the past decade, religious conservatives within the G.O.P. have argued that social policies should be guided by the eternal truths of natural law and that questions about stem cell research and euthanasia should reflect the immutable sacredness of human life.
But temperamental conservatives are suspicious of the idea of settling issues on the basis of abstract truth. These kinds of conservatives hold that moral laws emerge through deliberation and practice and that if legislation is going to be passed that slows medical progress, it shouldn’t be on the basis of abstract theological orthodoxy.
Over the past four decades, free market conservatives within the Republican Party have put freedom at the center of their political philosophy. But the dispositional conservative puts legitimate authority at the center. So while recent conservative ideology sees government as a threat to freedom, the temperamental conservative believes government is like fire — useful when used legitimately, but dangerous when not.
Over the past few decades, the Republican Party has championed a series of reforms designed to devolve power to the individual, through tax cuts, private pensions and medical accounts. The temperamental conservative does not see a nation composed of individuals who should be given maximum liberty to make choices. Instead, the individual is a part of a social organism and thrives only within the attachments to family, community and nation that precede choice.
Therefore, the temperamental conservative values social cohesion alongside individual freedom and worries that too much individualism, too much segmentation, too much tension between races and groups will tear the underlying unity on which all else depends. Without unity, the police are regarded as alien powers, the country will fracture under the strain of war and the economy will be undermined by lack of social trust.
To put it bluntly, over the past several years, the G.O.P. has made ideological choices that offend conservatism’s Burkean roots. This may seem like an airy-fairy thing that does nothing more than provoke a few dissenting columns from William F. Buckley, George F. Will and Andrew Sullivan. But suburban, Midwestern and many business voters are dispositional conservatives more than creedal conservatives. They care about order, prudence and balanced budgets more than transformational leadership and perpetual tax cuts. It is among these groups that G.O.P. support is collapsing.
American conservatism will never be just dispositional conservatism. America is a creedal nation. But American conservatism is only successful when it’s in tension — when the ambition of its creeds is retrained by the caution of its Burkean roots.
Mr. Scourtes #49:
“Make the rich pay their fair share or the country goes broke. That is the choice.”
That is a false choice. Spending cuts, or changes in how money is spent, could help, too.
Jim H. wrote:
Anecdotal evidence does not an argument proof make.
I could provide a whole series of “anecdotal proofs” of local schools that have failed foreign students, who now find themselves, not PhD candidates at Yale, but rather janitors and maids.
I would suggest that the telling evidence of the failure of American schools can be shown in two areas. The first being the demand of the high tech industries for foreign engineers and scientists because of not being able to find enough qualified Americans for those positions. And the other reason is the declining number of Americans in American graduate schools. Both of these areas are strong indication that the American public education system is failing to meet the needs for a future America.
Mr. Scourtes:
By the way, at what income does one qualify as rich for tax purposes, in your opinion? How much redistribution of wealth is necessary to achieve fairness? Who do you propose should answer these questions?
D. George – It is not a false choice. You are assuming that the nation’s spending needs are static, and if we cut the waste (which I totally agree with you is there) we will have enough money to avoid raising taxes.
The nation’s spending needs are not static however, but will be climbing sharply for a number of reasons:
1) As Reich pointed out, it will probably cost a trillion dollars to fix the Alternative Minimum Tax, originally designed for the rich, but now reaching down and raising taxes for middle class families, because it contains no adjustment factor for inflation.
2) Repairing the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. Do you remember that bridge in Minneapolis that fell into the Mississippi river? Well there are hundreds more in a similar state of disrepair.
3) Caring for an aging population. As Reich pointed out, the government hase been able to mask the size of the deficit by boorowing against the social security surplus. However as more Baby-Boomers retire in the next ten years and the size of the social security surplus decreases we won’t be able to borrow against it anymore.
4) The Rising cost of health care. Since conservatives like you are unwilling to make the hard choices that need to be made to reform our health care system it looks like health care costs will continue their trend of rising at two and three times the rate of inflation in the decades ahead. Since 40-50% of all health care is funded through the Medicare and Medicaid programs this means that the cost of those entitlements will also grow sharply refelecting the trend health care hyper-inflation overall.
5) Funding New Energy technologies. The era of cheap gasoline is over and there is no going back. The nation faces a choice of either making huge rising expenditures for foreign oil, creating a massive trade deficit, or developing new technologies for powering automobiles and generating electricity. Governemt can and should accelerate the R&D process with funding.
6) Rebuilding our military after the huge drain of Iraq. Hopefully President Hillary Clinton will begin the process of removing our troops from Iraq and then the military will have the challenge of attracting new personnel to replace those exhausted by multiple 15-month tours in Iraq, restocking badly-drawn-down supplies of ammunition, repairing and replacing equipment and rebuilding our Navy. The Navy is an essential element in projecting US power throughout the world, yet we haven’t built or added many ships in the last decade, in comparison with Russia and China who have added many ships.
So clearly, the nation’s spending needs are set to rise dramatically and it is going to take more than cutting out some wast to pay for them.
D. George: How do you define rich? For the purposes of taxation Robert Reich sets it at an annual income of $500,000. I would go higher than that for the very reasons Reich provides:
http://robertreich.blogspot.com/2007/10/logic-of-taxing-rich-and-why-dems-are.html
Not only is the wealth of Americans increasingly concentrated among the rich, but among the rich, wealth is increasingly concentrated among the hyper-rich. In other words, if you looked at the distribution of wealth among the wealthiest one percent of Americans you would see that wealth is concentrated amonth the top tenth of the top one percent, rather than evenly distributed.
Therefore even raising the income level of the top tax bracket to a million dollars wouldn’t cause revenues to decline that dramatically.
Reich notes that some of the hedge fund managers are earning close to a billion dollars a year. Can you really argue that paying a 50% tax rate and still being left with $500 million in take home pay is a hardhip, or punitive? If so I would be happy to show you what real hardship looks like.
Note 50: D George, you have to look at more than just what political party is running any particular city to determine the cause of crime (which is caused by numerous and complex factors).
Crime tends to be higher in big cities due to the anonymity and ease of escaping into the woodwork, so to speak. There are also more opportunities due to the larger population. How many door-to-door muggers do you know of that travel in the suburbs like vacuum salesmen? Blaming crime on Democratic ineptitude (not that it doesn’t exist) is overly simplistic.
I think we also tend to mythologize the past: crime waves are cyclical. It was low in the 40s and 50s, began to rise around ’63 and then declined in the 80s. Right now, the “United States is currently in the midst of the longest period of decline over the entire period shown, with a 1998 crime rate of 4,615 per 100,000 population, the lowest since 1973, when the rate was 4,155.”
There’s just not as much correlation as people here would like there to be. For instance, we would expect religious sensibilities to decrease the likelihood of criminal behavior, yet we know that this is frequently not the case. Asian-Americans are generally not Christians, yet they make up a disproportionately low percentage of the prison population.
Mr. Scourtes,
If rich is over $500,000, just how many rich people do you think there are to support the grand schemes you speak of? Would you say they are the upper 1% – 5%? Do you think there are enough of the rich to get the funds you need w/out leaning on the middle class?
When you talk about hitting those making above $500,000 are you referring to just individuals or are you referring to small corporations, businesses, etc?
Regards,
CP
Tom C writes: “Jim, you post something like this and then expect to be taken seriously? I have not been comfortable with how Christopher throws around the troll accusation, but maybe there is something to it.”
My man, cut me a little slack. So I’m up at 5 a.m. and notice Missourian’s assertion that Democrats are worse than the plague. I have a hard time taking that stuff seriously; to me it’s comparable to “religion is worse than the plague,” etc. So I decide to throw out an offhand remark that basically says that you can slice and dice things in different ways and get different results. Not very profound, but then what I was responding to wasn’t very profound either, in my opinion.
Please keep in mind that I have posted things here that took literally hours of research. For example, I’ve read virtually everything I can on the Schiavo case, pro and con. I’ve read books on medical ethics. I have read every possible legal and medical document I could find related to that case. When it comes to theology, if someone says “look at this video,” I look at the video. If it’s “read Athanasius,” I read Athanasius. In the past Fr. Hans recommended books to me. I read the books. Beyond that, I have read several other books on Orthodoxy. For me, hanging out here is not a trivial thing. I’m not Orthodox, but I have tried to “pay my dues,” as much as a non-Orthodox person could. The home team may not believe that, but there it is.
Some things provoke umbrage around here and some don’t. In that regard the home team are allowed a lot more latitude than us outsiders. That’s Ok. They’re the home team. I can live with that. The home team have the luxury of just asserting their positions. Correct, incorrect, wise, goofy, it matters not. They speak, and it is so.
It’s different for the outsiders. Out feet get held to the fire. We’re supposed to have facts and figures. Of course, if any of our sources are “liberal,” those are often dismissed. When we manage to get non-liberal facts, those turn out to be “irrelevant.” If we hit a nerve then its “how dare you say that on an Orthodox web site!” Most of the rest of what we have to say is “materialistic.” And any more, the mere act of disagreeing with someone on the home team is perceived as an act of “trollhood.”
Michael thinks the home team are hard-pressed here, but I gotta tell you, for outsiders, trying to navigate through the trip wires and mine fields of these discussions without offending someone for some reason is just about impossible. So all I would ask is cut me a little slack. Not much, just a little.
JamesK #56:
I think you have me confused with Tom C.
Mr. Scourtes #54:
“fix the Alternative Minimum Tax”
Yes, this will cause some trouble. Better yet, why not scrap the income tax, which is complex, easy to cheat (about 30% cheat the system), and costs us billions of dollars in tax lawyers/accountants/bureaucrats, and use a national sales tax like Europe does? The cost savings and efficiencies realized, not to mention bringing cheaters into the tax system, would probably allow us to avoid an increase in the tax burden.
“Repairing the nation’s crumbling infrastructure.”
This is not solely a federal issue, and much expense could be defrayed through tolls. Perhaps that would get more people onto busses.
“Caring for an aging population.”
This is the problem with a pyramid scheme like Social Security, when one generation decides not to have kids and aborts a sizable percentage of the kids it did conceive. It isn’t even a good pyramid scheme because it delivers a negative undiscounted rate of return. I could put that >6% of my pay in a CD every month and be much better off.
“The Rising cost of health care.”
As already debated under other topics, there are solutions to the root causes of this problem. The costs could be mitigated without massive taxation or nationalization of the health care or insurance system.
“Funding New Energy technologies.”
More hyperbole. The price of gasoline is equivalent to what it was in the 1950’s, adjusted for inflation.
“Rebuilding our military”
Yes, this will be an expense, but don’t place all of the blame on Iraq. The military spending reductions you complain about (shipbuilding, etc.) were implimented during the Clinton years. As for lack of volunteers, thank our leftist educators for discouraging any sense of patriotism or duty among the most recent generation.
#55: “For the purposes of taxation Robert Reich sets it at an annual income of $500,000.”
So, whatever the “cut-off” is for being rich, at what rate would you tax them?
“If so I would be happy to show you what real hardship looks like.”
You shouldn’t be so condescending. Just because I may disagree with you on tax rates or methods doesn’t mean that I am less familiar with poverty than you. And revisiting a point I made earlier, the “poor” in America are better off than the “rich” in some countries.
#58 Jim
I’m not sure why the “home team” beats up on you so much. While I disagree with much of what you write, it seems to me that you operate in good faith and do your best to answer questions put to you, read the materials, etc.
Now, regarding the Red/Blue state comment. C’mon, a “Red State” is one where, for example 53% of the populace voted for Bush and 47% voted for Kerry. That does not mean that every person is a Republican and that all policies reflect Republican priorities. Nor does it mean that an individual city is comprised of Republicans and operates by Republican principles. The whole idea is so specious, like so much of the Red/Blue state rhetoric that it doesn’t deserve any ink or bandwidth.
The Conservative National Review challenges a widespread conservative assumption:
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZjI3OTQ5ZWJkNWI3YTIwMWRjN2Y4Zjk2N2YyZGFkYzU=
.
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZjI2NjhlMjBjZjAzMDk0N2EyNjE4ZjIxZmExMDg4NDk=
Mr. Scourtes,
There is a flip side to that statement, did you read it? Also, the material that you reference is from 2006 and opinions change. Follow all of the links. It is not that I automatically dispute everything you say/post; I just see a need to view everything of yours with a healthy dose of skepticism.
Regards,
CP
#58 Jim
You wrote
I have pretty much stayed out of the Schiavo case because I am not informed on it. I’m curious, though, why you did not comment on this article that Fr. Hans put up
https://www.orthodoxytoday.org/blog/2007/09/25/the-lights-on-but-is-anybody-home/
since it deals with the issue of what can be known about the interior life of a patient that displays the same sort of behavior that Mrs. Schiavo did. Isn’t this of tremendous relevance to the issue, and isn’t it the sort of hard scientific study you claim was not forthcoming from her defenders? Why the silence?
Tom C writes: “I have pretty much stayed out of the Schiavo case because I am not informed on it. I’m curious, though, why you did not comment on this article that Fr. Hans put up . . . since it deals with the issue of what can be known about the interior life of a patient that displays the same sort of behavior that Mrs. Schiavo did. Isn’t this of tremendous relevance to the issue, and isn’t it the sort of hard scientific study you claim was not forthcoming from her defenders? Why the silence?”
Two reasons. First, I have posted extensively on the Schiavo case in the past. So extensively in fact, that I suspect that a number of regulars here would be quite happy were the name “Schiavo” never written by my electronic pen again. So I determined not to post on that case unless there were a compelling reason to do so.
Second, in order to meaningfully discuss medical cases, we have to know the specifics of the case. Every case is unique. With Schiavo there exists an extensive medical and legal record, vast portions of which are available to anyone who wants to do a little research.
In the Salon article — that I read before it was posted here — the patients are not identified by name, and we do not have access to the medical record. The Salon article is written at the popular level, and at that level important distinctions between unconscious, coma, and PVS are often not maintained. In addition, the reason for the condition – stroke, brain trauma, and anoxic brain injury — is extremely important, but at the popular level is typically is not reported.
The definitive diagnosis of PVS is not simple. It requires scans and personal examinations over a period of time, as well as a comprehensive medical history. When I read in the Salon article that someone was diagnosed in a PVS, I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what kind of brain trauma the patient had. I don’t know when the trauma occurred. I don’t know the physicians involved. I don’t know the basis of the diagnosis. I don’t know the extent of brain damage. I don’t know the EEG results. And so on. Please note that the diagnosis of PVS goes beyond behavior.
The Salon article talks about MRI scans. But Terri Schiavo did not have an MRI because an experimental brain stimulator had been implanted. Note also that Terri Schiavo had massive loss of brain tissue. So this is a very different kind of case from a typical trauma or stroke.
Certainly the results reported in the Salon article are interesting. But I simply do not know how they relate to the Schiavo case. As the philosopher Wittgenstein said, “whereof I cannot speak, thereof I must be silent. So I was silent.