Winning the Peace to Win the Future

Will be in Texas the 11th – 24th. Internet access will be spotty, and I have exams to take. This is my last post for The Irate Nation for some time.

Thank you for your patience with me.

How Conservatives Can Win the Peace
Ashok Karra

Irate Nate asks, quite rightfully:

Why do i have to pretend the left actually gives a damn about my family, my values, my religion, my pay checks, my freedoms, my choices.

Similarly, Right Wing News has said about Ann Coulter that she should be allowed to say whatever she wants to say as long as the Left is given a free pass on statements about killing the VP.

This is an excellent opportunity to address some really deep issues, issues that will never be addressed by any candidate out in the open, and that we are the better for talking about, even if we disagree. I’m not going to be shy about it: the issues raised here are a whole other way of thinking about politics – politics not as a battleground, but as a duty where we can be truly free and happy. I should say that for the years I’ve been on the Internet, not once have I seen a sustained, thoughtful debate about what we want America to look like, and how we want to get there. Everything in terms of the way we conduct politics on here is a form of complaining. (Even the good news from Iraq is a way of complaining about the MSM.)

There is a very deep reason for this: Constitutionalism presupposes a “spirit of negation” (cf. Montesquieu, Hegel) where the passions of people aren’t channeled into having a real debate about what is Good and how we can get there, but rather used to pass judgment on what is absolutely wrong. Congress is set up to battle with itself, and then do battle with two other branches, which are set up to battle it. Furthermore, the very size of the United States is counted on by Madison in Federalist 10 to produce “factions,” which he sees as a direct result of liberty, and which only exist of course to battle other factions, and factionalize some more. The logic of “special interests” is written into the Constitution – for the most cynical of reasons, McCain is wrong: poor man probably really does believe in a greater unity for Americans.

Now there is a great blessing to the mechanistic politics which define our order: we’re free, we’re safe, and we can govern ourselves on a higher level if we want to. This is a great country, absolutely worth defending tooth and nail. But to get to that higher level, we have to make sure of two things: 1) that this order is preserved and 2) that we understand the limits of the order and where we can ask questions and where we need to set limits for ourselves.

Not everyone agrees with me, of course. Newt Gingrich disagrees with my priorities. He sees the future of conservatism as connected with the issue of prosperity: for him, we need to be a “future oriented movement,” where we do not “ignore the moral challenge of those Americans who have been left out of the American dream.” He sees policy as directly tied to the ability to communicate to individuals: government is a servant that is constantly working to aid that communication and find ways to help. He also thinks that principles learned in private enterprise can directly inform our larger concept of freedom, and that Washington’s elitism has to go for this to happen.

I don’t see the issue as one of prosperity, even though I agree with a lot of what Newt is saying. I don’t see it as an issue only about the future, either.

The issue is one of character for me, and that involves a respect for the past.

Speaker Gingrich talks about “a new birth of freedom” characterizing our helping as many as possible as we achieve a new prosperity. But what if we don’t have a new prosperity? What if we really are in imperial decline? Does that mean freedom is only worth the money it produces? If China becomes more powerful than us, does that mean America never meant anything?

This is not about “a new birth of freedom” in Newt’s sense, not yet. This is about citizenship in its most fundamental form. And to examine that, we need to turn to Lincoln’s Lyceum Speech.

In Lyceum, Lincoln is clear: the end of constitutional government can be plainly seen when mobs are taking justice into their own hands. A mob might be perfectly just, and still, the future is doomed, because extra-legal mechanisms that resort to violence show the law to be useless.

Now we are a long way from civic decline similar to the sort right before the Civil War, even though we still have riots, and some people do feel their identity best expressed by “gangs” or “crime syndicates” more than tending to their country. Those are exceptions to the rule, of course, but in a broader sense, we do have a problem: speech is rapidly becoming nothing more than violence in this country.

Look at the way we argue: we batter with statistics, with examples – we batter others with the sheer weight of stuff, as if “evidence” could ever substitute for principle. Of course, evidence is dependent on the principle one articulates, but many of us can’t articulate our principles, for the most part. Speaker Gingrich wants us to have more math and science education, and I wonder if he realizes that a lot of the people on DailyKos and Reddit are nutcase Lefties that are really good with computers and technology and terrible at seeing the foundation of moral reasoning – since we have different notions of the Good, no one principle, even at the highest level, is absolutely right. Notice how open a statement “love one another” is – it leads to an enormous number of possibilities, it can’t be used to beat others down.

It’s amazing how many resources we devote to teaching people how to do, and how little we devote to cultivating thought.

I would submit to you that the same mindset that aims for the conquest of nature via proven scientific principles also aims to be absolutely right regarding the things that define us as human. There is no real respect for the fact we are free creatures, but rather an emphasis on power purely.

More problematic regarding the speech/violence connection is how it has infected the practice of law. There’s no doubt in my mind that Scooter Libby was set up – how was that one juror who was joking about him being pardoned even let on? – and that the two Border Patrol agents who are being beaten in prison were also set up. Speech is used to slander, and that’s fine in a court of law nowadays, because hey, Michael Moore does it, and some exaggeration is OK if you’ve got a cause, right? And a prosecutor is paid to do a job, and the job is prosecute, so? – The only reason why one would use speech, after all, is to exercise power. That’s it. -

If you see how much we’re wrecking the idea that speech can be a force for good, by lowering it to “say whatever you want, that’s free speech,” allowing all sorts of consequences to flow from that, well – you see exactly why I’m so worried about the future. There are huge issues on the table, like which technologies we will consider acceptable, how we will get the prosperity Speaker Gingrich wants us to have, how we will be just and fair to all Americans and strong and benevolent the world over.

How are we going to address any of those issues if we use speech as a weapon only, and that is the only conception we have of it? How, over the long term, are we going to stay united as a people in any sense other than “we kinda live near each other?”

I submit the death of speech is the death of self-government, and the proper attitude to speech alone can allow for a greater number of goods to be had. I don’t want to romanticize speech too much – at some point, action and solving problems is necessary. But action and solving problems without any prior, proper use of speech is a state of war: animals take action and solve problems, many times more effectively than we do. And if I wanted to be at war with everyone for my own interest purely, truth be told, I’d have signed up with the Left. I’m here because America is great, and can be even better.

I don’t know the exact remedy for dealing with the Left’s blindness: our system is not set up so that we trust one another. And to some degree, we can’t afford to pretend that they care about any of us. At the same time, if you want a higher politics, something that actually holds promise for the future, there are Leftist thinkers like William Galston that really do care about America and where it’s going. I personally choose to pretend that people do care, unless they make it clear that self-absorption is their number one priority. It’s a tough call, and we might have to be tough to get the proper uses of speech back. But I don’t really want to lose those proper uses fighting with those on the Left who never cared for them anyway.

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