We enter a season in which the meaning of conservatism becomes the ping-pong ball du jour.  With not only an election, but the meaning of the “movement” in itself in the contention, people of various beliefs and commitments seek to lay claim to the word and thereby to the direction of the opposition to Obamacracy.  

For many, the main ambition remains to hold together the coalition that successfully vaulted Ronald Reagan to the presidency and created a competitive, indeed, governing Republican coalition (if for a time).  The most articulate recent defense on behalf of the viability of this coalition has been made by Peter Berkowitz in a recent column in The Wall Street Journal, in which he argues on behalf of a “constitutional conservatism.”  This minimalist conservatism, he argues, can draw together the commitments of social conservatives, economic libertarians and national security hawks around a classical conception of the constitution:  “The constitution it seeks to conserve carefully defines government’s proper responsibilities while providing it with the incentives and tools to perform them effectively; draws legitimacy from democratic consent while protecting individual rights from invasion by popular majorities; assumes the primacy of self-interest but also the capacity on occasion to rise above it through the exercise of virtue; reflects, and at the same time refines, popular will through a complex scheme of representation; and disperses and blends power among three distinct branches of government as well as among federal and state governments the better to check and balance it. The Constitution and the nation that has prospered under it for 220 years demonstrate that conserving and enlarging freedom and democracy depends on weaving together rival interests and competing goods.”  

What is being proposed by Berkowitz and others is the conservation of liberalism.  Ironically, if Louis Hartz could argue in the 1950s that there was only one tradition in America – the liberal tradition, in particular that tradition deriving from the thought of John Locke – it was by dint of historical and philosophical developments that this very tradition eventually came to known as “conservatism” in the face of redefinitions of modern liberalism.  In particular, even as Hartz was writing, increasing numbers of the American intelligentsia were being drawn to the allure of communism; liberalism was moving left, meaning that a space was created where the Left had once resided that now appeared to be to the Right of the trajectory of history.  The conservatism forged by Frank Meyer and William Buckley (as mentioned by Berkowitz) was one that rallied around the liberal tradition inaugurated by Locke and the Founders.  It was defined above all by what it was against – communism and the idea of human perfectibility – rather than what it was for.  

All along "conservatism" was never an "ism": it never was a philosophic checklist of positions like its various ideological opponents.  It grew up alongside and against ideology (namely and particularly the French Revolution); yet, it tended to move in opposition to increasing extremes, from the butchery of the French Revolution to the massacres of Fascism and the pogroms of Communism.  Conservatism is thus subject to drift, and that drift has necessarily been leftward in a modern world that has a decided tilt toward viewing politics as the realm of solutions (final or otherwise).  Thus, to find a foothold in a modern liberal America particularly in the fight against communism, "conservatism" adapted itself to an erstwhile foe - liberalism.

Yet, as a whole what this meant was that American “conservatism” became considerably anti-traditional.  In occupying the abandoned space of Lockeanism, it resided with the deep anti-traditionalism that lie at the heart of Locke’s philosophy.  “Traditionalism” is, of course, almost as meaningless a word in the abstract as conservatism:  what it most fundamentally seeks to signal is the legitimacy of authority – lodged in “the ancestral,” practice and longstanding custom, culture, and tradition – as the basis of rule and power.  That rule is represented by the paternal, the authority vested in an older generation by dint of their inheritance of tradition and their responsibility in its transmission to subsequent generations.  Locke’s mostly unread First Treatise on Government is devoted to a lawyerly (and very devastating) evisceration of the theory of Patriarchy as devised by Robert Filmer; while Filmer sought to meld parental authority with a defense of Kingship (i.e., that Adam was the first King and then-contemporary Kings were Adam’s heirs), the larger game that Locke was hunting was the de-legitimation not simply of hereditary monarchy, but of all forms of traditional authority.  As developed in the Second Treatise, legitimate authority could only be chosen authority.  Hence, even the authority of fathers and mothers eventually gave way at the age of “nonage”:  children no longer owed parents any filial piety once they reached the age of maturity, unless, that is, the children chose such piety.  Locke’s overarching ambition was the dissolution of all authoritative claims based in tradition:  because things had been done in some way by previous generations was no basis for its legitimacy.  The only basis of legitimacy was the free choice of successive new generations.  The authority of the ancestral was displaced by the authority of choice. 

In the context of 20^th-century history and philosophy it is possible to regard this position as “conservative.”  Compared to communism or theories of justice that hold the possibility of ever-greater moral perfection of human beings, Locke’s view of humans as endowed with a basic and unalterable nature – self-interested individuals – at least resembles aspects of pre-modern anthropology in retaining some recognizable elements of the Fall.  Lockean liberals and various (often religious) social conservatives could agree that the vision of humankind offered by progressive liberals and communists – one of human perfectibility – offended the more conservative or classical sensibilities about the unalterable nature of human beings.  As long as this alternative anthropology held attraction to intellectual elites, various stripes of conservatives could suppress their disagreements in their battle against a common enemy.  Politics, as ever, makes strange bedfellows.

While only a few noticed it amid the celebration of 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall sounded the death-knell of the modern conservative coalition.  Without the external threat of communism to hold together the disparate elements of conservatism, its incoherence became yearly more evident to one and all.  Libertarians grew restive with social conservatives:  indeed, not a few people noted that no less a leader of libertarianism than Milton Friedman declared years earlier that he, for one, was not a “conservative.”  Social conservatives began to balk at the idea that they were merely “conserving” liberalism, if liberalism meant the continued evisceration of the traditions of hearth and home.  Thomas Frank – in his book What’s the Matter with Kansas? – thought that he was exposing the great deception at the heart of conservatism, when in fact he was merely glimpsing its internal divisions. 

 The great and self-destructive paradox of modern “conservatism” is that there was very little that a “conservative liberalism” could ultimately hope to “conserve.”  If Frank was right that social conservatives were ill-served by economic elites who won most battles of the Republican agenda, it had more to do with systemic bias in a liberal regime than deceit and subterfuge.  In particular, the very system to which Berkowitz now calls for the old coalition to sign onto – “constitutional conservatism” – was designed expressly to undermine the claims of tradition and culture.  Its main ambition was to liberate individuals from the arbitrary authority of place, family, and folkway, and to permit them a life of material success amid an economic system that generated an endless bazaar of values and “lifestyles.”  One merely had to choose what one preferred.  Thus, even “traditionalism” was rendered itself into a choice (this is a point Peter Lawler likes to make – but, of course “front porch” traditionalism or “crunch conservatism” or “the Benedict option” becomes a “lifestyle choice”: the constitutional order was designed to make EVERYTHING into a choice – except the option not to choose).

 Growing numbers of social traditionalists (let’s not call them “conservatives,” lest we confuse the issue) are realizing that the coalition they joined was a devil’s bargain.  While communism was successfully combated, market capitalism did its work undermining most of the traditions that held together communities, folkways and customs.  Communities were undermined by multinationals while elite universities scoured the land for any talent that could be strip-mined from localities and turned into productive material in the international market system.  If you weren’t a winner in the cosmopolitan, meritocratic sweepstakes then you deserved some kind of welfare and re-education; the norm of success was defined by one’s distance from traditions and culture.  The conservation of liberalism has accelerated the demise of the viability of tradition’s claims.  Thus, I, for one, have a jaundiced eye toward the old bargain being offered in some circles:  rather, it seems likely that it is time to fight battles with erstwhile allies (even as new alliances are formed with some on the current Left, e.g. those with localist or somewhat healthy environmental views which stress conservation over techno-optimism) rather than sign back on to a lousy bargain that offers to allow us to “conserve” an anti-conservative "tradition."  The place to start – difficult as it will be – is to reject the various “isms” being offered in return for electoral success.  After all, what could be more conservative than opposition to an “ism” – even, dare one say, “conservatism”?

We seem to have picked up both our fair share of intelligent, articulate, reasoned commenters and our fair share of trolls here at PoMoCon. I’m interested in getting the takes of all of our readers on the following two passages, both from Frederiek Depoortere’s Christ in Postmodern Philosophy:

(a) The claim that truth can only be found in the particular should not be confused with the one that truth is merely particular, never transcends a particular narrative frame or does get beyond its being bound to a certain time and place. Attention for the particular character of truth claims does not imply that we are denying the fact that these truths do indeed lay claim to being of universal validity.

Second passage:

(b) … the particular character of truth claims does not mean that all such claims are equally valid and that we can therefore as well re-establish our own narrative as a master-narrative, rejecting every rational account of our own particular beliefs. In each case, the particular character of our truth claims does not mean that we can abandon the rational explanation of our own particular position. It is not because all truth claims arise from a particular context and that we have no God’s eye point of view, no non-involved perspective to judge these competing claims, that dialogue between different positions has become impossible or that people have to remain locked up in their own narrative, in their own ’separate universe of discourse’. This does not take away, however, that it is highly unlikely that this dialogue will ever result in a kind of Hegelian Aufhebung of differences in a higher unity, in a generally human consensus beyond the many particular positions participating in the dialogue. Or, to put it differently, we can only speak a particular language. Even if we would attempt to construct a kind of religious Esperanto in order to transcend the differences between particular religions, we are actually only creating one more particular language.

Modernists, premodernists, postmodernists: have at it!

Well, Christmas and New Years have come and gone and I didn’t have my usual two-fingers of Buffalo Trace. I did spend time with the beloved first-wife engaged in theological problems and recounting Christmases past with the house strewn  with desecrated wrapping paper and joyous daughters who have, alas, grown up and journeyed west with our grandbabies. The conversation inevitably took a melancholy turn and the wife dropped the matter knowing, I think, that her sentimental husband would not be able to abide too much of that.
I even had a moment remembering olde Buck, that GREAT DOG, fearless defender of the homestead, who was particularly fond of rolling in cowpies and abhorred being indoors. Buck of course was named after Jack London’s dog though my Buck was a far superior animal. I mention Buck in connection with another dog, a Golden Retriever named Trixie, who belonged to Dean Koontz the novelist whose selcouth stories habitually top the NYT Best-seller list. I’ve been reviewing Koontz’s work for several years and when Trixie died last year he sent me (and many others) a ten-page account of that sad incident.
Koontz is not only a dog lover, considerate gentleman, and talented storyteller he is an erudite thinker who loads his novels with multiple and highly differentiated interpretations of the metaxical experience where the tension "between the poles of time and eternity’ reveal the beauty of the ‘flowing presence of eternal Being."
In reading his books I’ve found that he has the ability to create this tensional (movement) experience where the flow of the readers’ mind latches onto the symbols he creates, allowing the reader, in some mystical fashion, to be constituted within the novel. This brings the reader into a unique literary experience where he is able to capture the insights that Koontz has hidden along the path and where in analyzing the story, begins to insert his own symbols to a point where they develop into a harmonious concinnity of plot, action, character developement and denouement. In essence the reader becomes a part of the novel as experienced; the logos irrupts momentarily into reality where to some degree the reader’s potential is actualized in the absolute present.
Like the true philosopher, as opposed to the philodoxer, Koontz confines his work within the metaleptic reality whereby his novels emerge as a contemporary dialectics with the various protagonists engaged in rescuing the truth of reality from either the lie or the distortion. Here, if Koontz became arrogant in his knowledge or allowed the metaxical experience to become opaque or sought a "cognitive mastery" over the knowledge of the Ground he would derail into eristical error. So far, Koontz has avoided that misfortune!
My review of his latest book, Your Heart Belongs to Me, is here:

http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id-4628&cn=140

I’ll confess to being a little bit dissatisfied both by Helen’s latest screed contra statistics and by Prof. Kenneally’s argument that science improperly understood ignores the qualities of our lived experience. Both have managed to say a lot of true things but neither, in my eyes, has addressed the real problem.

Helen’s post reminds me a bit of a centuries-old post by Noah Millman on the topic of free will. Millman makes a tragic misstep common to defenders of free will by retreating into a bubble of randomness in an effort to escape determinism. This is a misstep precisely because that bubble is always shrinking — Millman is effectively daring his philosophical adversaries to come and invade that bubble; staking it all on a wager that the human race just doesn’t have that much ingenuity. Seeing the locus of free will in randomness means that every advance in cognitive neuroscience or behavioral economics means a further defeat for free will. The entire philosophical fight has been conceded, all that remains is the long, slow, dreadful march of ‘progress’.

Far better, then, to take the philosophical offensive and rigorously contest the claim that prediction implies lack of freedom. Sure, compatibilism may not get our pulses racing; but it’s the only rhetorical strategy that’s sustainable in the long term. Similarly, Helen’s tongue-in-cheek claim that "[statistics] should not be collected" is a noble impulse; but in the World of the Possible they will continue to be collected in greater and greater volume and detail. The only question going forward lies in their meta-interpretation. Will the liberal orthodoxy which claims that all the information a policymaker needs can be collected quantitatively and in aggregate remain ascendant; or will we be able successfully to defend the sanctity of the ‘whole person’? "Your statistics aren’t good enough" might work for now, but "your statistics aren’t telling you what matters and never can" wins the game.

Given the fact that this latter line is exactly what he espouses; what then do I find lacking in Prof. Kenneally’s post? The point that science regularly and shamelessly oversteps its self-defined boundaries is an excellent one that has also been made by Nietzsche, among others. The trouble is that it is not scientific rationality itself that is making ridiculous claims; but rather a nearsighted and materialistic philosophical stance that likes to cloak itself in the garb of science in the hopes of absorbing some of science’s prestige. Arguing against such a philosophy by saying "you aren’t being very scientific" will not work unless the person espousing it is honestly convinced that he is putting forward a metaphysically wertfrei argument.

I remain open to the possibility that many so-called rationalists are deluded in just this way; but those who aren’t need to be hit with a rigorous argument to the effect that reduction is not equivalent to explanation, and a perfect impersonal description of lived experience is not equivalent to experience itself.

The claim "religious experience correlates well with certain brain cells firing" is a scientific one and non-threatening. The claim "religious experience is nothing more than certain brain cells firing" is a philosophical one, and must be combatted on that ground. Neither hoping that neuroscience fails to live up to its promise nor insisting that scientists remain scientists will save us in the end. The former may very well turn out to be a losing bet, and the latter identifies the wrong foe. As long as results and statistics are out there, it is in our nature to interpret them. The only question is how.

    "At the time and in the country in which the present study was written, it was granted by everyone except backward people that the Jewish faith had not been refuted by science or by history…. [O]ne could grant to science and history everything they seem to teach regarding the age of the world, the origin of man, the impossibility of miracles, the impossibility of the immortality of the soul, and of the resurrection of the body, the Jahvist, the Elohist, the third Isaah, and so on, without abandoning one iota of the substance of the Jewish faith."          
        -P. 231; from the "Preface" to Leo Strauss’  Spinoza’s Critique of Religion

Part of the problem of modern atheism, as Leo Strauss famously diagnosed, is that it explicitly presents itself as possessing a monopoly on the market of reason and that it’s explanatory scope is perfectly comprehensive. At the heart of modern science’s Cartesian pretense to be a mathesis universalis is the conspiciously unempirical or unscientific presumption that everything that is must be susceptible to scientific description–the ontology science is based upon is not itself scientifically demonstrable and therefore resembles the sort of faith claim it intends to render obsolete, at least in the caricatured form it presents faith.

The essential dogmatism of this presumption really becomes transparent when the substance of scientific hypothesis radically contradicts our ordinary experience. A good example of this would be contemporary neuroscience, which routinely claims to be at the brink of a fully comprehensive theory of all things but also must petition the help of postmodern narrative to soften it’s incredibly counterintutive accounts of human life and consciousness. Here, I argue that this is basically science’s way of acknowledging that if it stubbornly refuses to surrender its claims to be the whole of reason and perfectly comprehensive, it has no choice but to sacrifice the truth of our experience of ourselves, and ironically, turn to the myth-making of modern poetry. Apparently, this is superior to faith because it’s done with one’s eyes fully open–we create myths knowingly and therapeutically versus desperately and ignorantly.

Despite the common refrain from modern atheists’ that religious belief is borne of a benighted and dogmatic refusal to accept the dicates of reason, it is science that has historically resisted revising claims about the scope of its explanatory powers that are now clearly hyperbolic. Christianity, for example, is also a universal account but one that takes seriously the limits of human reason and the catalogue of things that it can properly comprehend.It is comprehensive but not reductionist in that it respects the real heterogeneity of our experience and realist in that it doesn’t reflexively privilege the abstract results of speculative theory over the character of lived experience. Scientific rationality would actually  be more reasonable if it admitted its shortcomings and stopped competing with religion to be a complete account of man–despite its protests to the contrary, science has done little to refute religion or to dampen our religious longings.


Last year, Richard Skinner and I published an article in a small British journal on the role of families in American national politics. With Caroline Kennedy’s recent “campaign” for the senate seat in New York, we thought this article would be of interest to some of the readers of this blog. As Caroline might have put it, what could, you know, be more conservative than, you know, the institution of the family?  Richard Skinner is a professor of politics in the Department of Government and Legal Studies at Bowdoin College and I am at the University of Virginia. JWC

Family Business

Politics in America has been called a business. If so, the market share that goes to the family enterprise has grown remarkably in recent years. The reports that Caroline Kennedy, despite having never held public office before, may be the next senator from New York illustrate the continuing importance of these ties. To be sure, the path to the presidency remains open to new entrants having no previous family connections. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton are all examples of self-made men from humble backgrounds. But it is striking to observe just how important a role has been played over the past century by a few family units, which have served as incubators of political careers. Think of the names of Kennedy, Bush, Gore, and Clinton. 

While Barack Obama’s triumphs over Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain (himself the son and grandson of admirals) would seem to have marked a respite for dynastic politics, Caroline Kennedy’s campaign to be appointed to the New York senate seat vacated by Clinton shows that a famous name can still open doors.



Is family influence of this kind something new? In a nation founded in opposition to hereditary monarchy, the dynastic principle has generally been regarded with suspicion. Some feared that George Washington, just because he was so virtuous, would be forced to accept the title of king. He would never hear of it, and it was only one more of the many gifts that this “Father of His Country” bestowed on his extended family that he never troubled it by having any biological children of his own.

Surveying the sweep of those elected president, the strength of family ties does not seem excessive. Only two presidents had offspring who followed them into the White House: John Adams (1797-1801) and George H. W. Bush (1989-93), fathers of John Quincy Adams (1825-29) and George W. Bush. Interestingly, neither father in these teams was especially popular or successful. Ditto for the sole father-grandson duo of William Henry Harrison and Benjamin Harrison. William caught pneumonia while delivering his Inaugural address and served only a month. The closest pair to a dynasty in terms of the attraction of the family name was also the most tenuous in terms of the family link: Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-45) was a distant cousin of Theodore Roosevelt (1901-09). Together, they held the presidency for almost a fifth of the twentieth century.

But the politics of the presidential campaigns over the last half century tells a different story of the growing influence of the family unit. The Kennedys led the way. Joseph P. Kennedy, an Irish-American self-made multimillionaire, entered politics as a supporter of Franklin Roosevelt, eventually becoming his ambassador to Great Britain.  But Kennedy’s defeatism during World War II destroyed his dreams of becoming the first Catholic president. With a singularity of purpose, he then transferred his ambitions on his children, pinning his hopes first on his son, Joseph Jr., who was shot down in a bomber over Germany. As if by the rules of primogeniture, the torch then passed to John F. Kennedy, who was elected to the House in 1946 and the Senate in 1952.  When JFK sought the presidency in 1960, his father’s wealth and connections played a helpful role, especially in the nomination race. But there was a down side as well. Many held the sins of the father against the son. Former president Harry Truman once declared, “It’s not the Pope I’m worried about, it’s the pop.”



JFK named his brother Robert as Attorney General.  Not only did this appointment arouse controversy, leading to a law banning nepotism in high government offices, but it also prompted immediate speculation that RFK would succeed his brother as president, which led to a enormous rivalry between the Attorney General and vice President Lyndon Johnson. After the assassination of JFK, the Kennedy name acquired an irresistible aura. Robert was elected to the Senate from New York State, a state in which he had never lived, and he entered the Democratic nomination race in 1968 following Johnson’s forced withdrawal. His campaign was cut short when he was shot dead in a Los Angeles hotel on the night of his victory in the California presidential primary.


The mystique of the Kennedy name, seared now into the national consciousness by these tragedies, achieved an epic status. Almost immediately, the youngest brother, Edward, who had been elected to the Senate from Massachusetts in 1962 at the age of 30 (and suffering many of the same criticisms as a lightweight that now afflict his niece), was widely seen as the likely Democratic presidential nominee in 1972.  But a 1969 auto accident on Chappaquiddick Island, in which a young woman died, kept him from running and cast a shadow on the rest of his career.  In 1980, Kennedy challenged Jimmy Carter, then seeking nomination for a second term. In a flawed campaign, in which questions of character linked to Chappaquiddick were never far from the surface, Kennedy’s bid fell short. Kennedy’s presidential prospects were now over, but he has continued to serve in the Senate and has become one of the giants in the history of that body.



No other Kennedy has sought the presidency since 1980. The family has remained politically prominent, with a son of both Robert and Edward having been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.  Both have run into difficulties. The stylish John Kennedy Jr. was mentioned for a time, mostly in gossip columns, as a possible future presidential candidate, until he was killed in a plane crash that he piloted, along with his wife and sister in law. The magic of the Kennedy name seemed to have died with him — until his sister Caroline, previously known as a New York socialite who avoided politics, became a close associate of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and one of Barack Obama’s most fervent supporters.  When Obama named her to chair his vice presidential search committee, it became clear that another Kennedy was on the rise.  But the spotlight cast upon her has illuminated many of the less appealing features of dynastic politicians — arrogance, lack of preparation, a sense of entitlement, a lack of familiarity with everyday existence.  Indeed, Caroline’s "you know"-filled interview with the Associated Press brought to mind her Uncle Ted’s fumbling attempts to explain his 1980 presidential campaign in a chat with TV newsman Roger Mudd.



The Bushes have exceeded the Kennedys’ political accomplishments, though without the glamour or drama. Son of a U.S. Senator from Connecticut, George H. W. Bush became a successful oilman in Texas after World War II and then a Republican congressman in 1966. Following a failed bid for the U.S. Senate, Bush served in a series of high-level posts under Presidents Nixon and Ford.  Despite jibes that he had a “resume, not a record,” Bush sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1980 and finished second to Ronald Reagan, who in a surprise move aimed at uniting the party tapped the more moderate Bush as his running mate.  After two terms as vice president, Bush was elected president in 1988. 



Bush failed to win a second term in 1992, and the family name became an ambiguous asset.  In 1994, his son George W. was chosen governor of Texas, while brother Jeb was chosen governor of Florida in 1998.  George W. Bush proved to be a successful and popular Governor, and the Republican Party united behind him in the 2000 campaign.  But his low public standing meant that the name and family connection now ironically have worked to the disadvantage of Jeb, who, as perhaps the most accomplished governor in nation, took himself out of the running for 2008. Even if the streak ends here, the record of offices held by the Bush family (starting with Prescott) may never be surpassed: three presidential terms, two vice presidential terms, five national campaigns for the presidency, four gubernatorial terms in two of the nation’s largest states, two senate terms, and two terms in the House. Jeb’s apparent interest in running for the Senate in 2010 will provide an important test as to whether the Bush name still carries any weight with the public.





The other family still standing athwart American politics is, of course, the Clintons.  It is a link of a different sort, sealed by marriage rather than blood line. Neither Bill nor Hillary profited from a parent opening any doors for them, but their political careers have been deeply intertwined with one another, for good and ill.  Bill went so far during the 1992 campaign as to remark that if you “buy one you get one free,” which some considered to be suggesting a co-presidency but which the Clintons evidently also thought of as a possible four term dynasty. Hillary Clinton presented herself as a different kind of First Lady, a policy activist rather than a social hostess, and quickly became a polarizing figure. Some voters admired her, others loathed her. She found herself involved in one controversy or scandal after another.  Ironically, it was the largest scandal of the Clinton presidency that gradually rehabilitated her image, when she displayed stoical endurance during her husband’s (and her own) humiliation in the Lewinsky affair. In a show of both independence and dependence, Mrs. Clinton ran and was elected Senator in New York State in 2000, where she, like Bobby Kennedy, had never resided. Bill Clinton played a significant role in her presidential campaign, raising money, soliciting support from leading Democrats, and speaking on her behalf.  But he also proved to be a distraction, criticizing Obama in what many saw as racially tinged language, and repeatedly clashing with reporters.  As a result, he was mostly sent to smaller communities, away from the media spotlight, where his celebrity status could wow locals.  While both Clintons enthusiastically endorsed Obama in memorable convention speeches, and Hillary hit the campaign trail repeatedly for the Democratic ticket, her husband still seemed a bit wary and half-hearted in his support.  When Obama nominated Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State, it took days of negotiations to untangle the messy finances of her husband’s charities.  While Hillary’s days as a presidential contender may be over, the popular support she amassed in her run remains a formidable asset, and her Cabinet post gives her a global platform.  And their daughter, Chelsea, who had previously avoided politics, emerged as a doughty campaigner on her mother’s behalf; despite her youth, she is now being mentioned as a political prospect in her adopted home state of New York.

 Could we be seeing a new rivalry in the future between a Kennedy a Clinton?

While 2012 is far off, at least one scion is already prominently mentioned as a presidential contender: Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, made a credible bid at the Republican nomination in 2008, and is widely expected to run again. His father, George Romney, first achieved fame as chief executive of the now-defunct American Motors, and parlayed his CEO reputation into six years as governor of Michigan. He sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1968, until a gaffe made him a national laughingstock (he said that a trip to Vietnam had given him a “brainwashing”). His son Mitt followed in his father’s path, building a successful business career before entering politics and mounting a losing but respectable challenge to Senator Edward Kennedy. Romney then burnished his managerial reputation by taking over the administration of the troubled 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City. He returned to Massachusetts to be elected governor, where he began a shift to the right, which continued during his bid for the Republican nomination last year. Mitt Romney shows many of his clan’s more positive attributes - good looks, a knack for business (an asset in troubled economic times), a large personal fortune, an appealing family — but it remains to be seen whether his devotion to Mormonism will serve as an obstacle, now more to those on the Left than evangelicals, to his further ambitions. 




What can a family bring to the business of politics?  The answer is different forms of “political capital.” American politics is more individualistic than the more party-oriented systems of Europe. The family label offers a “brand name” recognizable to voters, which can help a candidate get over an important initial threshold. The name is rarely enough, however, to get an individual very far without showing merits of his or her own. Only the Kennedy name for a time seemed to impel family members further than at time they might even have wished to go. Another form of capital comes in the shape of a network of supporters that can assist in fundraising and in putting together a campaign organization. This benefit is greatest where the time span between elections is not very long.  Both the Kennedys and Bushes, and now the Clintons, have benefited from armies of vassals and courtiers willing to support the latest heir to the throne. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, family members see and learn from what others in the family have accomplished. Getting into a business and opening an horizon are important obstacles that block so many from trying to enter. Being a member of a family enterprise makes this all seem less than insurmountable.





 Since my name is now on the masthead, perhaps an introduction is in order.  My name is Patrick Deneen, and - like a few other people who write here - I am by trade a political theorist.  I teach at Georgetown University where I hold a chair in Hellenic studies and nearly three years ago founded a program - The Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy - devoted to the fostering among today’s students a deeper understanding of the American and western traditions. 

Two years ago I launched a small outpost in the blogiverse that I entitled "What I Saw in America."  In addition to posting a number of my quasi-academic writings - for instance, essays on G.K. Chesterton (for whose book recounting his travels in America the blog was named), Mark Twain, Christopher Lasch, Wendell Berry, Allan Bloom, Peter Lawler, Kurt Vonnegut, and my teacher, Wilson Carey McWilliams, as well as musings on American democracy - I also commented frequently on the state of American and modern life with special emphasis on the a-moral or immoral dimensions of the modern economic order.  Believing we were poised at once for a trying time of declines in non-renewable energy sources that undergird every aspect of modern life, combined with an unsustainable way of life that highlighted consumption, debt and short-term thinking, I posted a good many essays in which I asked my readers to consider a better way.  Connected to these concerns were regular critiques of the modern educational system - particularly higher education, the domain I know best - which is deeply implicated in perpetuating and feeding a modern consumptive economic system and forming a modern corps of deracinated cosmopolites who were encouraged to be citizens of nowhere and everywhere with devotions to everyone and no one. 

I expect I will continue commenting in these areas, but think, too, that this new venue will lend itself to thinking and writing in some different directions.  I am honored to be joining a site that features the thought of several colleagues whose work I have read with great profit - Peter Lawler, James Ceaser and Ralph Hancock in particular.  For those who only know these gentlemen as occasional bloggers, I recommend their prolific corpus of published writings if you seek a deeper understanding of the philosophy that underlies our civilization.   We are privileged to have them as commentators on this medium that infrequently features thinkers of such depth.

As for the title of this blog - Postmodern Conservative - it is a label that I can accept only under protest.  It is a phrase that is inspired by Peter Lawler’s efforts to recommend a "postmodernism rightly understood" - a period that may or might arrive after the passing of the modern order.  Thus, it is not to be confused with the trendy (or, really, tired) postmodernism of modern academia inspired by such thinkers as Derrida, Foucault and Lyotard.  It is instead a rejection of modernity in the name of the insights of premodernity - Thomistic and Aristotelian "realism" in particular.  That said, it is a postmodernity that also wishes to retain a good number of the boons of modernity - Starbucks, McDonalds, suburbs and exurbs, the interstate highway system, orthodontic dentistry, etc….) - while rejecting its excessive materialism, individualism, liberalism, atheism, etc.  I can sign onto the "postmodern" critique but have more difficulty accepting that we can easily retain all the good stuff (so called) while jettisoning the bad.  My deepest suspicions are that it’s a package deal, and so I’m not sure I can fully accept the label "postmodern conservative" and might rather consider myself to be a premodern radical.  With that understanding, I expect we will have some interesting conversations here, and I’m happy, pleased and honored to be here.  I will be posting a short essay here weekly - beginning, and continuing on Tuesdays - and look forward to what lies ahead. 
  

I finally read THE PROBLEM OF GOD—a neglected classic by the great Jesuit theologian and political thinker John Courtney Murray (1904-67).  Here’s the contribution Murray makes to our understanding of postmodern conservatism or postmodernism rightly understood.

Distinctively modern thought is constituted by a will to atheism.  That will to freedom understood as complete autonomy is prior to any modern science or theorizing.  Modern man (and woman) fell in love with himself or what he creates for himself.  He aimed to will into being an anthropocentric world, a world made up of free beings who no longer have any need for God or anything given.  Modern man was determined to impose his will on nature, to create a world worthy of who he is.

The modern will to atheism has displayed itself in three ways.  The first Murray calls “aristocratic atheism.”  That’s the intention of a philosophical elite to explain everything without the “hypothesis” of God. The inability of aristocratic atheism to achieve definitive success produced “bourgeois atheism.”  Its intention was to show that people could live happily and comfortably without God.  But, as Rousseau, Marx, and Freud (among others) showed, bourgeois men and women are in certain ways more anxious and miserable than people have ever been.  The failure of bourgeois atheism produced “political atheism”—the effort to impose a wholly secular political unity upon naturally anarchistic beings.  Political atheism was the remedy of the Jacobin French republicans, as it was, in different ways, of the German Nazis and the Soviet Communists. These forms of atheism have a definite logical relationship:  The movement is from the relatively theoretical efforts of the aristocratic atheists to the intensely practical or wholly willful and ruthlessly forcible efforts of the political atheists.  But all three forms of atheism exist simultaneously in the modern world. So it wouldn’t have surprised Murray to see, with the collapse of Communism as the extreme or logically consistent form of political atheism, revivals of aristocratic and bourgeois atheism.  Our basically neo-Darwinian “new atheists”—such as Dawkins and Dennett—are really aristocratic atheists. They believe that they can explain everything without God, and that our real problem is that fundamentalist Americans are too dumb and scared to affirm their wisdom.  We also have our “bourgeois bohemian” atheists, who claim to have made bourgeois success compatible with personal self-fulfillment. 

And we even have our Rawlsians or soft political atheists.  They say that religion is nothing but a private fantasy that has no place in “public reason.” They wouldn’t kill those who speak as if God is real, but they would marginalize or ostracize them.

It’s Sartre—or the insistent existentialist—who saw, according to Murray, the truth about modern atheism.  It’s rejection of all natural and divine order in favor of the unlimited human will is basically absurd.   Sartre still affirms the absurdity as definitive evidence of our freedom from all "essential" determination except our own, arbitrary impositions  There’s something quite Biblical, Murray observes, in Sartre’s thought that the willful rejection of God culminates in absurdity. 

For Murray, postmodernism begins by a decision against willful atheism, a decision that’s quite reasonable in view of the obvious failure of every modern effort to solve or explain away or willfully negate the problem of God.  Modern human beings, as Pascal saw at the modern world’s beginning, are miserably anxious—or experience themselves as absurd leftovers–in the absence of God, partly because that absence is only willed or not real or merely a diversion from what we really know.

Via Hit & Run, I see that Reason is revisting the controversy over the South Korean massage industry. The nutshell version is that Korea has traditionally regarded massage as a vocation exclusive to the blind, but sighted masseurs have in the last few years been lobbying for massage licenses. Blind masseurs, of course, protest that sighted masseurs are overturning a valuable paternalistic tradition and driving them out of the only job open to them. Reason’s take:

. . . Blind South Koreans claim they’ll be forced out of the market and into the streets by seeing therapists if the courts find the current law unconstitutional. But it turns out the two groups are already competing. According to Park Yoon Soo, a leading opponent of the current law, there are at least 120,000 illicitly practicing seeing therapists in the country, outnumbering the 7,100 licensed blind therapists by a ratio of 16 to 1.

The National Human Rights Commission has stated it believes the court should uphold the law, even though many opponents believe it confines the blind to "a vocational ghetto" and undercuts their ability to pursue other careers.

The last paragraph is particularly hilarious; as if custom were responsible for the "vocational ghettoization" of the blind, not the simple fact that not being able to see is a literal disability!

As I pointed out in my first Pomocon post ever—oh, the memories!—the reason there are so many sighted masseurs in Korea right now is that the government offered free massage training during the Asian financial crisis.

I can understand how a libertarian publication would want to frame the debate as one of free markets vs. state restrictions, but let’s remember that every market exists within a cultural framework. You can be a libertarian (as I am, sometimes) and still admit that unrestricted avarice has negative consequences; a libertarian needs only to add the caveat that culture, not the state, should be responsible for curbing its excesses. When the state destroys the norms that make capitalism work well ("well" in this case meaning "humanely"), it may be necessary for the state to repair its own mess.

Still, as a sop to libertarian readers, I’ll add this Burke quote as a parenthetical warning against carrying this logic too far:

The language [of the North administration was] the language held by those who had gained the estates of minors by dice and hazard. "You lost your estate at the gaming table—go there again; there it is, that you must look for another estate!"

What the state has done must be undone by the state—sometimes.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. - H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

Noah Berlatsky’s fantastic article on C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy has got me ruminating on the genre of Gothic Horror. Berlatsky is correct, of course, to point out that all good Science Fiction is an exploration of ourselves and our self-understanding, with ray-guns and aliens serving to place human beings in contexts so unfamiliar that we witness exactly how human nature breaks down when taken to the limits of human experience.

That said, I draw the line at horror or, more accurately, at Lovecraft. Berlatsky is correct to say that: "The gothic tradition on which much of sci-fi rests is about doubling; about recognizing one’s own twisted visage in the face of infinity." What makes Lovecraft different and, I might add, truly horrifying, is the way in which he systematically subverts this convention of the genre.

Certainly, Lovecraft’s works contain the obligatory shambling and degenerate pseudo-humans — made all the more transgressive for modern readers by the author’s overtly racist agenda. The really horrible creatures, on the other hand, are merely a physical manifestation of the existential horror associated with true understanding of man’s insignificance in a pitiless and meaningless universe. As such, they represent the shattering of the liberal dream of knowledge of and mastery over nature.

Imagine, then, the sheer magnitude of ironic distance required for we enlightened moderns to get a thrill out of Lovecraft’s spooky monsters while chuckling at his self-consistent and all-too-familiar worldview. Perhaps it’s the campiness that saves us — any message is easier to ignore when contained in prose as overwrought and baroque as Lovecraft’s. Nevertheless, the fundamental point remains — all horror is a series of footnotes to staring into the black abyss of space and knowing that nothing human is staring back.