Looming Red

I often tell people that I am a consequentialist rather than a conservative. This is not to shy away from Burkean Conservatism, but rather to be more descriptive of what I am trying to conserve. I am a Conservative, a very ardent one. My only argument against Burkean conservatism would be that one cannot be Burkean with socialism because it is the oposite of Republicanism. So, I have to go further than the generic conservative label, that can be understood by anyone to be any and everything.

Were the label of liberal, in the Madisonian tradition, not so mutated to mean its opposite, I would be conservative, conserving classical american liberalism. The label has been long-destroyed by subversive, mal-contents, to where we must bid it adeu. The next label I want to use is Libertarian, because it was originally a replacement for the lost label of liberal. Yet again, I cannot use it, because it has also been captured by reformed leftists, who have come from the dark fiscal side, while holding onto their social permissivism. So much of libertarianism is really just repackaged objectivism which I object to. So, what do I have left?

I come from the direction that the label, at that moment of pinning it on yourself, should be a teaching moment. Conservative is too general to help with this. So, again, what do I call myself? I will not start with hyphenated conservatism, because it implies that there is something that must be modified about conservatism when that is not the case. For instance, one need not attach compassionate to conservative, since letting people hold on to their freedom and inspiring them to make something of themselves is more compassionate than any alternative. So, I am a consequentialist when I am being conservative. That is that best, most descriptive label.

People are born free. They must choose for themselves and between themselves without interference by a third party who cannot point to a direct interest. If I have dealings with a restaurant, a car manufacturer, etc. that do not concern anyone else because it is my life and my money that is doing the dealing, then no one may insert themselves in the middle of this deal to “protect me”. If I a make a bad deal, then I will accept the consequence. I am of sound mind and I am an adult.

This is conservative in the Burkean sense, because history and the civil society tell me what it means to be of “sound mind”. The culture, created over the eons of man’s dealing with man are rules and definitions that are only codified into law after the civil society creates the underlying culture of the laws. The reason, that a conservative must be a social one is that societies are build socially. A conservative smells the foul oder of social subversion a mile off without having to define why, because of the civil society that has taught the conservative.

For me, unfortunately “you’ll know it when you see it” is not enough of a label to fight socialist subversion. You must counter the subversion, because it is aimed at muddying the culture that creates civil societies. Every moment must be a teachable one to counter the muddied culture. I am a conservative and that means consequentialism.

Consequentialism is at the heart of the Declaration of Independence, because it’s authors made only reference to natural law, knowing that they were going against the written laws. Those natural laws that were trampled, were consequentialist laws. The king could not simply insert himself into the lives of free men, he needed their representation to do anything with and to them, but also, no matter how much submission he would get from representatives, there were lines that could not be crossed no matter what. All of those lines were consequentialist lines. So many times, people will confuse the montra of “no taxation without representation” as being what the declaration was about. This is just not true, it was about the liberation of individual sovereignty from the state, which is a consequentialist argument in the sense that individual sovereignty is derived from the freedom to deal without interference of third parties.

The constitution is also consequentialist in that it enumerates powers agreed to and reserves the rest of the powers to individuals. The constitution does not grant to the state anymore than individuals granted to it on the day of its ratification. In a says, the constitution is a statement of those powers that relinquished by individuals whom were all free to do so. These enumerated powers relinquished unto the federal government by the individuals whom did so by their natural sovereignty represent a barrier that, when breached, is an intrusion of the sovereign minority of one. State constitutions are this way as well.

If I am a free-roaming creature on the plains of Earth, encountered by others, anything taken from me without my consent through consequentialist dealing is an act of agression. That I am powerless to overcome the agression is no disqualifier that it is still agression. Mandating anything on me where I do not impose my will on others, even if it is seen to be in my best interest, is as much an act of agression as two people taking from one by force.

I am a consequentialist, because I recognize force can only be applied where parties are directly effecting others by their dealings whom have not been involved in the dealings. I am consequentialist, but from now on, maybe I will just say I am a conservative to help the brand be understood as the consequentialism that it must be.

In this Heritage Center speech by Evan Sayet, comedian, commentator, and former writer for Politically Incorrect with Bill Mayr, the concept of Liberalism (with a capital “L”) not being liberal at all is well covered. It is not about the liberation of individual sovereignty from the coercion of the state. The Progressive-Liberalism movement is merely a permissivism movement. It is neither liberal, nor progressive.

Evan Sayet calls modern Liberalism “a cult of indiscriminateness” or in other words a movement surrounding the concept that everything classically moral is immoral. He says that this comes from a core belief in the systemization of discrimination by former generations, making all moral standards immoral on the grounds that they could only have been arrived at by discrimination against behavior, belief, or difference. So, the only standard to judge something immoral is whether it has any legacy tradition.

Thus, in the 60′s you got, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” Anyone over 30 is set in the old ways. John Lennin’s song, Imagine, comes straight out of this core belief. If there is nothing like a heaven, nations, religion, and all the people are living for today then there can be no moral codes that come from discrimination. What do you have to fight for if you have nothing to believe in. There is no wrong or right, because you can only arrive at wrong and right declarations through discrimination. And the only way that one can be discriminate is if one has beliefs. If you don’t believe in anything, then you don’t discriminate against anything.

The reason that an ideology as objectively condemnable as socialism and communism or actually marxism will not be condemned by a left that witnessed with the rest of us Tiananmen Square, gulag prison camps, Stalinist show trials, and the Berlin Wall is that what is immoral to us in the west is only immoral because of some unfairness from the west inspired by discrimination. To accept condemnation of the obviously objectionable evils of the world is simply to concede to the discrimination of our society. Terrorists only terrorize because of what we did to them. Cuba only communized because of the capitalist tourism that took advantage of their island. Abortion is moral because it gives power to the woman who is disadvantaged by sexist society. There is no ambiguity in a feminist who is against the war in Afghanistan.

This speech finally put a voice to the one thing I have been trying to identify about the left. They are permissivists not liberals, that is true, but it is that they belong the cult of indiscriminateness that makes indiscriminately permissive. This means, in a constitutionally defined small federal government nation like ours, they can but only be for the opposite of statist centralized government. That is why “Yes We Can” chanted by millions does not invoke even the slightest irony that it had nothing to do with what those chanters could do but what a handful would do to further state control with government takeovers of private companies, the co-option of the healthcare industry, and nationalization of the banking industry.

The above is a fairly lengthy but enlightening, uplifting, edifying speech by Clarence Thomas on the subject Lincoln, jurist prudence, and slavery.

In this speech Justice Thomas talks about Lincoln’s famous rebuttal of the support of the Kansas-Nebraska act extending slavery to the Louisiana purchase territories. Many people think that Lincoln used the phrase “House divided” in reference to the civil war, but it was well before the civil war and even before he was president.

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.

I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided.

It will become all one thing or all the other.

Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new–North as well as South.

The battle against slavery that had begun in the very beginning of the federation during the constitutional debates, culminated in the civil war. Then after the civil war, the quest for equal civil rights based on rights culminated in the civil rights movement. In each case, the journey to equalize the house divided took 80 to 100 years.

In the 20th century, the Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and FDR administrations began to divide the house again. We will either become fully socialist as it was called by the progressives of the Wilson era or we will re-liberalize our individual sovereignty back from the state and be fully the nation that we fought for in the revolutionary war.

I fear that Lincoln’s words are prescient for our time as well. On the issue of Marxism in America “I do not expect the Union to be dissolved–I do not expect the house to fall–but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”

One of the greatest fallacies of the modern era is to use the term of Liberalism to label those whom we call liberal today. I think that we do this, because they themselves claim the appellation of liberal and we simply concede the use. Those on the other side of issues from “liberals” often convert the term to a pejorative to diminish its positive impact. The loss of this term in its original and historic use within the American tradition has been a loss of understanding of the American Ideal of true classical liberalism.

In the classical sense, Liberalism is the rejection of sovereignty in the state in favor of the concept of individual sovereignty in the people. Up until the liberal period in western society, sovereignty was usually vested in a monarch, parliament, or some other state entity. All individuals within the dominion of the sovereign were nothing more than subjects of the sovereign. Their own natural sovereignty was not recognized or granted to them by the sovereign of the state.

Many philosophers and political thinkers began prior to the liberal era to theorize and later declare that all people were born sovereign and that their sovereignty had been commandeered by those in whom state power was then vested. This radical idea was treasonous in many nations and was only theoretical until a state would arise that would challenge the old notions of vested power. The moment that allowed the theory of liberalism to become practice arrived in an attempt of colonists subject to a distant power to retain liberty that had only been obtained by accident on the part of the host state.

The British crown at the time of the American revolution may have been under the authority of a liberal constitution established in the Cromwell rebellion, but it never gave the people living in the homeland of the empire the kind of individual sovereignty that the colonists enjoyed only through the inability of the crown to restrict them across the Atlantic. When the restrictive power of the crown increased through the expansive influence and power of the growing British empire, the American colonists would not concede the liberty they came to appreciate was theirs.

The declaration of independence and later the constitution named a liberty that had already been part of the American tradition. Subsequent movements of abolitionism of slavery and reconciliation with the native populations with time bore fruit. The journey had been hard and bloody.

Growing along side the expansion of true classical liberalism, modern “liberalism” also grew. It has always been mislabeled, because it has nothing to do with the liberation of individual sovereignty. In fact, the liberal acceptance and experimentation of anything counter to normative culture often pursues expansion of the state in its favor. One can see that liberals so called are neither liberal nor open-minded. They are only counter-cultural and permissive of anything counter-cultural. They are illiberal.

Illiberalism, if further named could be called permissivism. Permissivism is a term that must be used, because it explains it all. If you would like to permit abortion, the left is your ally. Want to have gay marriage, the left is your ally. Activist courts, Czars instead constitutionally reviewed cabinet members, money confiscated from one citizen to give to another, expansive administrative bureaucracies bound by no one and no constitution, indoctrination in schools, state-sponsered healthcare, and on and on. The ideology of permitting anything as long as it is new, expansive, and will solidify your life statement of not being like your parents is the leftist’s ideology.

When Mussolini first became an international political figure, he was celebrated for his new ideas. Socialism was stale and unworkable to many leftists. After all, the government must take over all industry for it to work. The political and logistical implications of such an implementation were seen by many un-constrained permissives as impossible or at least improbably executable. Mussolini’s idea of simply regulating businesses into large corporate entities that would be easier to infiltrate, influence, or bully was so much more practical.

Mussolini himself was a died-in-wool socialist from birth getting even his given name, Benito, from the mexican socialist revolutionary Benito Juarez. Benito Mussolini was lionized in American and western culture for brief time as his ideas were fresh and had not yet been carried to their only conclusions. It was the permissives that called themselves progressives that simply loved these new and unusual ideas.