If one listens to the commentators, American politics is going through so many splits it’s amazing her crotch muscles are still intact.
The temporary shutdown of most state business may well be followed by the country defaulting on her debts, with unforeseeable consequences for global economy. Gloom is here, with doom soon to follow.
Depending on who’s talking, this unfortunate situation is blamed either on Obama’s health policies, rightly perceived as going against the grain of the American ethos, or else on the bloody-mindedness of the American Republican Right.
The American Republican Right is thereby split away from the American Republican Left, both are split away from the Democrats of any description, who too are split up among themselves.
All commentators without exception are ascribing such fractiousness to minor transient differences or else to jockeying for electoral position. All these are no doubt a factor, but the problem may well be more fundamental than that. If so, America is yet again teaching us all a lesson, this time in how not to do things.
The fact is that the USA has rightwing politicians galore, but it has precious few conservatives. The difference between the two points at the crucial problem of today’s politics everywhere in the West.
Conservatism starts from an intuitive predisposition, which a man then relates to various aspects of life. In each case he must answer for himself the lapidary $64,000 question: “What is it that I wish to conserve?”
A conservatively inclined American can find cultural outlets for his inner inclinations without much problem. Even social life wouldn’t be unduly unreceptive. But what about political outlets?
Here America and France have the same problem: both are constituted from birth as revolutionary republics inspired by Enlightenment principles. An American who answers the crucial question with “the Constitution of the United States” thereby reaffirms his commitment to the destruction of every aspect of Christendom, including its political legacy.
A revolutionary republic suffers from a congenital, incurable defect: it doesn’t reach all the way up to heaven. It thus lacks, if you will, the eschatological legitimacy of a monarchy, which may claim it’ll end in heaven because it started there.
Burke, the guiding light of what passes for American conservatism, was unequivocal on this point: God willed the state. De Maistre put it more cautiously and possibly precisely: the origin of a monarchy goes so far back that we can’t trace it all the way to its inception. Therefore we may as well believe it’s willed by God.
The philosophical ambivalence of American or French conservatism explains its practical weakness. At least in France it’s possible to look back nostalgically at the glorious history of the pre-revolutionary state. Americans doing the same thing would in effect be denting the country’s sovereignty, which is no longer possible.
This explains why for all intents and purposes conservatism doesn’t exist in America, certainly not as a discernible political force. Filling the hole thus formed, various simulacra of conservatism step in. Alas, the hole turns out to be bottomless.
Falling into it are economic libertarians, the closest an American can come to conservatism. To justify his intellectual existence, a libertarian has to attach undue importance to commercial activity, relying on it as a be-all and end-all.
Yet we see time and again that what I call ‘totalitarian economism’, when it’s not underpinned by universally accepted metaphysical dicta, sooner or later begins to resemble a snake biting its own tail.
This is the true origin of both the 2008 crisis, the current one, and of the suicidal debt most Western countries have had to run up to keep up with their post-Enlightenment egalitarianism. Conservatively inclined Americans look to sound bookkeeping as a solution to their economic ills. Instead they should be looking to sound metaphysics – everything else will follow.
Other faux conservatives, the neocons, are simply frauds. Their politics is much closer to Trotskyism. Specifically, they are committed to the aggressive proselytising of the American secular religion of democracy – and only to that. Any such effort presupposes an increasingly powerful central state, which is about as unconservative as it’s nowadays possible to get.
In the process the neocons mouth utter gibberish along the lines of ‘conservative revolution, ‘conservative welfare state’ and so forth. They have neither the mind nor the taste to detect the oxymorons there. More worryingly, the public doesn’t possess such admirable qualities either.
The American, or any other, Left, on the other hand, has a coherent promise to make. It may be utterly stupid and subversive, but it is indeed coherent. Whatever wording leftwing politicians prefer, in effect they are saying, “Don’t worry. If your own efforts don’t enable you to keep up with the wealthy Joneses, we’ll look after you.”
Such promises are backed up with cash – hence the US national debt of $16.7 trillion. All those libertarians who call themselves conservatives react to this outrage churlishly by tossing their toys out of the pram. Deep down they know that promiscuous spending will always be popular with a large, and growing, part of the population.
Reducing the whole argument to dollars and cents means losing it. It also means that complete nonentities like Obama can not only win elections but justifiably claim high intellectual ground.
They are trying to help those who won’t help themselves, and what are the ‘conservatives’ doing? Courting economic collapse with their brinkmanship.
Hence all the acrobatic splits that so excite the imagination of commentators, who then propose all sorts of ad hoc solutions. None will work, not in the long term, in the absence of a proper conservative platform from which effective opposition can be launched.
Such a platform is impossible to build in a revolutionary republic, and it’s becoming increasingly unlikely even in what’s left of British monarchy. On this pessimistic note, I’ve got to split.