Conservatives are weird (via):
The conservative alternative to libertarianism is necessarily more complex. It is the teaching of classical political philosophy and the Jewish and Christian traditions that true liberty must be appropriate to human nature. The freedom to enslave oneself with drugs is the freedom of the fish to live on land or the freedom of birds to inhabit the ocean — which is to say, it is not freedom at all. Responsible, self-governing citizens do not grow wild like blackberries. They are cultivated in institutions — families, religious communities and decent, orderly neighborhoods. And government has a limited but important role in reinforcing social norms and expectations — including laws against drugs and against the exploitation of men and women in the sex trade.
Gerson seems to hint at possibly making alcohol illegal as well. How can Taliban conservative coexist with Kochheads like Nick Gillespie within the same political movement? I realize that part of this is that they pretend that they’re not part of the same political movement. Even so….
Rick
“How can Taliban conservatives coexist with Kochheads”.
That’s an easy one. If you have enough money, restrictions on your freedom (in the name of freedom) don’t apply to you. You can have all the blow and hookers you want, even if they remain illegal.
BTW — this sounds a lot like modern conservative Catholicism. Screw social justice because people should be free of burdensome taxes, but you know, freedom has its limits.
Raenelle
I didn’t read Gerson’s article, but from what you quoted, it sounds like classic Burkean conservatism, i.e., not weird at all but rather a principled philosophical difference from those who trust human nature more.
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
Bust out the cellos, call up Jeff Lynne. Conservatives are entering their I Am The Walrus period.
Jim C.
I love it when the first response (in this case by Rick) nails the answer.
Conservatives in this country are about one thing and one thing only: Money.
Everything else is so much smoke and mirrors and cynical manipulation of “cultural” conservatives too stupid to find their ass with two hands and a flashlight.
Chris
It’s an old line on the right: you have the freedom to be the way we want you to be. One of the more popular quotes in defense of this is John Adams’ “Our Constitution was made only for a religious and moral people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other,” which, coming from John Adams, must therefore be right.
Never mind that their “moral and religious people” are as much a work of fantasy as the New Soviet Man, and that you can’t make people better just by legislating for it. You’d think people who harp about “social engineering” every time a public school opens would understand that better.
MattF
And add the neocons and the oligarchs to the mix. They all despise each other but they hate libruls even more.
Just Some Fuckhead
Scratch a libertarian, find an authoritarian every time. They can coexist because libertarians don’t mind all the rules as long as they imagine they’re above them.
cleek
i’m fairly certain i could get a decent amount of any drug i wanted, within a day, maybe two. i know who knows the right people and i have the money. but i am not addicted to any of those drugs. neither are any of my friends. i don’t even use any addictive drugs (except the legal ones: caffeine and alcohol).
if the police “looked the other way”, nothing would change about that situation except i wouldn’t have to speak in code, if i wanted the aforementioned drugs.
but somehow the fact that drugs are easy to get for those other people is the reason addiction is widespread. no other factors.
easy to get for everyone i know: no addition.
easy to get for those people: addition.
clearly knowing me is the deciding factor.
Mark S.
Gerson is accusing someone else of contempt for the weak and vulnerable?
And while I don’t favor legalizing heroin, I would rather my government treat me as an adult and not like a child. I would have thought that was the more conservative principle, but I guess Strauss is the new, purer form of conservatism.
Chris
@cleek:
Also, if the police looked the other way, how is it that our prisons are overflowing with people jailed for minor drug offenses?
Jim C.
Speaking of the Washington Post.
From Greg Sargent, is anyone surprised that the number of people who think that torture gained critical information that lead to the killing of Bin Laden is a rather magical number…
27%.
Where have we seen that number before?
gex
They need the culture wars to draw in votes. The fiscal conservatives on the right executed the Southern Strategy and invited the Christian coalition in to get the votes. They can’t ditch them because they need the votes. For straight white male libertarians, these are not big compromises.
Jim C.
washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/whos-winning-the-torture-argument/2011/03/03/AFbw26qG_blog.h…
Chris
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Libertarians are terrified that people will realize their beliefs ultimately come down to “if it feels good, do it.” Which would make them no different from the DFHs they loathe and despise. And we can’t have that.
David Brooks (not that one) is a dickhead.
Note their appropriate of motherhood and applie pie to imply that wee liberals (I always think of David Steel when that phrase is used) don’t believe in those things.
Even Burke said some good things. And:
This.
zeitgeist
Do I go with snarky?
So it appears, Mr. Gerson, so it appears.
Or with hypocrite bashing?
This is different than H. Clinton’s reviled-by-the-right “It Takes a Village” how exactly?
Amanda in the South Bay
Wow, its hard to reply to someone who writes a fact free piece of journalism.
When conservatives talk about freedom, it simply means the opposite of what any normal person thinks it means. Freedom for upper class folk to have lower taxes, freedom for corporations, freedom for…gas guzzling cars and living in the suburbs?
I also imagine there’s some class based snobbery at work as well-I tend to doubt Gerson would strongly condemn upper class white Republicans who have skeletons in their closets.
Zifnab25
It’s the freedom to say anything that will get you elected. Koch-backed candidates aren’t ushering in a new era of drug liberalization and prostitution. They union busting. Gerson GOoPers aren’t passing family friendly health care laws or funding clean streets and good schools. They’re pushing tax cuts.
The rhetoric is different, but the votes all go the same way.
David Brooks (not that one) is a duckhead.
(looks like my new tag puts me in moderation hell. Trying a meta-tag).
Hunter Gathers
To everyone with small children: make sure to love your little critters and tell them so every day. If you don’t, they’ll turn into Michael Gerson, or to a lesser extent, Rush Limbaugh.
David Brooks (not that one) is a richard skull.
Nope.
fhtagn
Conservatives define freedom as:
“Free for me, and not for you/Why would you care, whose wife I screw?”
Amanda in the South Bay
I think its pretty obvious that if you follow Gerson’s logic, alcohol and tobacco should be made illegal.
cleek
@Chris:
overflowing with black people… that is
Mark S.
@Amanda in the South Bay:
If you follow his logic, government should be in the censorship business.
Chris
@Amanda in the South Bay:
What they call rights are actually privileges (their privileges), and what they call privileges are actually rights (e.g. everyone else’s rights). Simple enough. The conservative base believes your right to have a nose ends at the tip of their fist-swinging radius.
...now I try to be amused
@Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel):
“I buried Paul.” (Ryan)
srv
Harlan @ Top:
My definition of sociopath is someone who is comfortable with Cognitive Dissonance.
jon
Libertarian® is just a marketing term to get teenagers who hate their parents and teachers to be Republicans.
jon
Libertarian® is just a marketing term to get teenagers who hate their parents and teachers to be Republicans. Also, they seem to be mad they can’t smoke around my baby.
Bulworth
Fixed.
Bulworth
It’s different in every way because shut up that’s why.
Comrade Dread
Which is, generalizing, what parts of the Sermon on the Mount and the book of Romans state.
You can, at best, control some people’s outward behavior, but you can’t stop or remove the desire for things, no matter how hard you try.
jon
@Chris:
Libertarians don’t believe that. They believe that if it feels good to *them* then do it. If not, it somehow violates the Transcendental Principles of Freedom.
Tony J
@Chris:
Is that from Gerson’s article? Boy, I know he’s a dirty Liberal (according to ‘Real Conservatives’) but is he really saying that Libertarians are into witchcraft? As in, they follow the Golden Rule of Modern Wicca? True, most of the self-labelled Libertarians I know from the S. M. Stirling site love the bones of his Wiccan characters, but that’s because they’re all self-sufficient in a post-technology world, hard as nails, and very, very white.
OTOH, reading the quote again, I’m curious – is his problem with the “Do what you will” part, or with the “As long as no one gets hurt” part? Then I remember who Gerson is, and I’m pretty sure I know the answer.
Chris
@Comrade Dread:
Oddly, they understand that perfectly when critiquing Marxism and talking economics (“people like to own things,” “greed is part of human nature,” “you can’t make people selfless just by making selfishness illegal,” “if you make all greed illegal things will fall apart.”)
Which makes it that much less logical that they make a 180 from that position when it comes to other forms of sin and other human urges.
Uloborus
Just one little thing:
Fish DO have the freedom to live on land and birds in the ocean. This will kill them. Nevertheless, no one is suggesting they’re not allowed to try if that’s what they really want.
Citizen_X
Yglesia’s post, linked to, above, asks “Does [Gerson] Know That Penguins Can Swim?” I would also add: does Gerson realize that we are, essentially, fish that adapted to live on land?
PurpleGirl
@Chris:
Libertarians are terrified that people will realize their beliefs ultimately come down to “if it feels good, do it.” Which would make them no different from the DFHs they loathe and despise. And we can’t have that.
A caveat. They would be socially the same as DFHs but they would still be against taxes and any government action except enforcing their contracts.
Comrade Dread
@Chris:
Which is odd, because the New Testament is pretty clear about sin that it has both a mental component in addition to its external actions.
That was one of the central tenets of Christian theology, that even with a moral guideline laid out for us, we’re still damned and in need of salvation because God looks at the heart and the outward actions.
So any sort of spiritual revival that many crave will never occur because of a government decree. You will simply drive the behavior underground.
Dan S.
“the freedom of the fish to live on land … — which is to say, it is not freedom at all.”
Really, I knew that the current crop of conservatives want to turn back time – to the 1950s, 1850s, or possibly 1150s … but I didn’t realize they wanted to undo the Devonian!
(ie, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiktaalik – granted, if one doesn’t accept evolution, there’s no obvious connection between fish living on land and, well, us.)
quaint irene
Well, they have bee claiming that they’re trying to cultivate a big tent!
Bob Loblaw
What’s so weird or objectionable about that land fish and blackberry shit?
You should wish that conservatism actually functioned like that. It’s a hell of a step up from its current function of enriching the plutocracy, reinforcing white supremacy, and dehumanizing women.
Dan S.
@Dan S.: And @Citizen_X beat me to it.
Well .. not just penguins. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_ducks
Personally, I think buffleheads are adorable. Though not in a way that would get me into trouble in Florida…
Andrew
I think the conversation goes something like this:
Conservative 1: People should be free to use drugs
Conservative 2: But drugs harm people, and society needs to protect them
Conservative 1: Let’s just split the difference and cut taxes for billionaires
Conservative 2: Deal!
Georgia Pig
Because the Koch brothers write the checks for both? It’s about power, not principle.
Turgidson
Libertarian wankers and the American Taliban both hate liberals a lot. That might be all there is to it in the end.
El Cid
Many “libertarians” are much bigger into the whole ‘gubmit don’t tech mah munee’ thing than worrying about the god-botherers fucking with women and poor people and drug use.
They may hate the drug use thing, and a lot of more authentic ‘libertarians’ (meaning, property-emphasizing libertarians) do work hard against the drug war, personal drug use, and overly coercive law enforcement.
But the big name ‘libertarians’ are, as is constantly pointed out, mainly there to argue for government dedicated to making rich people richer and disabling government powers to assist the majority which elected it.
Mark S.
@Bob Loblaw:
I don’t think Gerson is advocating spending any money on these problems. That would be soshalism.
agrippa
Libertarianism does not interest me. I consider it to be an abstraction, which has no business being applied to human beings.
I found Edmund Burke to be the most sensible conservative that I have read. A conservative political party is an organized hypocrisy. Disraeli was right about that; and, he may the second most sensible conservative that I have read.
Chris
@Turgidson:
I think it is, actually.
Modern conservatism is a disparate coalition of people who gradually got pissed off at the post-1932 liberal state, and wanted it taken down – Krugman outlines it pretty well, for those who’ve read “Conscience Of A Liberal.”
The original ideological core of new conservatives, the William F. Buckley types, was actually pretty small. Over time, they added small businessmen who had troubles with union demands; big businessmen who saw an opportunity to restore Gilded Age era power and wealth; Cold War hard-liners who felt that liberals had gotten soft after Korea/Hungary/Cuba/Vietnam/pick-crisis-here; social conservatives pissed off by the changes in society caused by the 1960s; the list goes on. (The critical mass, of course, was when they were able to rally the former Dixiecrats and quite a few non-Southern voters outraged by the civil rights movement).
All those guys have very different reasons to hate liberalism, but the bottom line is, they really effing hate liberalism, and that’s why they all coalesced together over time. The fact that they don’t agree often comes out when, for example, the ideologues try to privatize Medicare and something like half of their voters (who hate liberals but not because of Medicare) refuse to follow them.
Jay in Oregon
What, this far and no one quotes John Scalzi?
whatever.scalzi.com/2002/03/22/i-hate-your-politics/
Juicetard (FKA Liberty60)
As the Rick first comment noted, people like the Koch Bros don’t give two shits about abortions restrictions; if one of their females needs one, they will get one, in a first class medical facility, even in South Dakota.
So teamng up with the Talibangelicals who want to sniff everyones groin for illicit activity is perfectly fine by them.
Not much different than places like Saudi Arabia, where if you are the right sort of people, porn, drugs and whores are easily available.
Stefan
“Wild Like Blackberries” by Michael Gerson:
The freedom to enslave oneself
with drugs
is the freedom of the fish
to live on land
or the freedom of birds
to inhabit the ocean
— which is to say, it is not freedom at all.
Responsible, self-governing citizens
do not grow
wild like blackberries.
They are cultivated
in institutions
— families, religious communities
and decent, orderly neighborhoods.
And government has a limited
but important
role in reinforcing
social norms and expectations
— including laws against drugs
and against the exploitation
of men
and women in the sex trade.
Stefan
From Greg Sargent, is anyone surprised that the number of people who think that torture gained critical information that lead to the killing of Bin Laden is a rather magical number…27%. Where have we seen that number before?
OK, this is getting to be kind of spooky. Does anyone else think the Universe is trying to tell us something in code?
chrismealy
“How can Taliban conservatives coexist with Kochheads”.
They are united in their love of the rich.
Chris
@Juicetard (FKA Liberty60):
Yeah, this.
If the elites don’t give the social conservatives any goodies when they’re in office, it’s so they won’t lose their reason to turn up at the polls. But if push came to shove, they could live with religious right laws. At that level of wealth and power, the law doesn’t affect you the same way; you can circumnavigate it in ways the average citizen can’t.
(And you don’t even need to bring corruption into it, though that would happen too. It can be as simple as flying your daughter to Canada for an abortion or traveling to Holland for drugs).
David Brooks (not that one) is a richard skull.
@Stefan: people who think that torture gained critical information that lead to the killing of Bin Laden is a rather magical number…27%. Where have we seen that number before?
OK, this is getting to be kind of spooky. Does anyone else think the Universe is trying to tell us something in code?
max hats
More hilariously, if you read Reason comment threads, the folks there overwhelmingly blame the drug war on. . .the liberals.
Dennis SGMM
Yes, we should all, no matter what our situation, look and act like the White middle class in the 1950s. Yes, the corporations did send a lot of those old middle class jobs overseas and, yes, the Masters of the Universe did bet on 00 too many times and then convinced us to make good on their bets.
Neither of those is a reason that we shouldn’t behave ourselves with decorum; there is to be no standing someone against the wall, no hanging from lamp posts and no ass-raping of banksters, and absolutely no tax increases on the wealthy.
It’s the decent, orderly thing to do.
twiffer
does this:
mean that penguins aren’t free?
pragmatism
a 40 oz to freedom is the only chance i have to feel good even though i feel bad. now i just need to decide whether to go with st. ides, king cobra, classic old e or mickeys.
Omnes Omnibus
@twiffer: Penguins are quite expensive. And they have a very fishy flavor.
Tonal Crow
The freedom to subject others to modern conservative ideology is the freedom of the slavemaster to decide how to treat his chattel.
Villago Delenda Est
“Libertarian” is a marketing term. Like “National Soshulism” is.
They’re actually all authoritarian assholes, neo-feudalists. If they were actually in favor of maximum individual liberty for all, not just a select few, they’d be rabid wealth redistributionists.
Tonal Crow
@Raenelle:
If “Burkeans” really distrust human nature, then they should especially distrust their own tendency to subjugate others. It seems that what’s really going on is not distrust of human nature, but envy — especially envy that unregulated non-conservatives might have more fun than conservatives.
PWL
It’s simple: the only thing all conservatives can agree on as being good is money. And more money.
Tonal Crow
@Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel): Hahahaha. And to rub it in: America needs modern conservatism (and modern conservatives) like a fish needs a bicycle.
Triassic Sands
In the same essay Gerson wrote:
Yeah, because the Modern Republican Party has such deep concern for the well-being of the “vulnerable.” He must be referring to the rich people who are vulnerable to having their taxes raised and the suffering that increase would cause when they have to buy the sixty foot yacht instead of the seventy-five footer. Because it certainly doesn’t have anything to do with poor people who need health care or disabled people who struggle to get by.
And a Republican criticizing someone else for practicing Social Darwinism is simply astounding. The Modern Republican Party could change its name to the Social Darwinist Party and nothing would be lost in the translation.
Gerson goes on:
Yeah, real complex. The libertarians say people should be allowed to do what they want as long as no one else gets hurt. The conservatives say people should be allowed to do anything they can afford to do and if not being able to afford something (like health care) causes suffering or death that’s just too bad. That’s real complexity.
Tonal Crow
@Just Some Fuckhead:
FTW! Or, if “libertarians” really meant it, the ACLU would have 10 times the membership it does.
beergoggles
The Talibangelicals are there to control the populace via ignorance and fear while the invisible hand of Koch loots their wealth and labor.
It’s Straussianism in a nutshell.
elm
Which particular Christian traditions? Roman Catholicism? Mormonism? Russian Orthodox?
For that matter, which Jewish traditions? Are both Reform and Orthodox schools of thought to be included? Why include any of them when they’re so theologically different from Christian traditions?
Gerson needs to make up his mind. Either he’s got a correct religion or he doesn’t. In either case, he ought to come clean. If he does know the correct religion, they why admit other incorrect ones? If he doesn’t know the correct one, then how can he exclude other potentially-correct traditions? Perhaps the Buddhists, Hindus, Sikh, or Jains are correct. Maybe we should worship the jackal-headed Anubis or Morrigan, goddess of war and fertility.
TheStone
Conservatives want the freedom to tell you how to live. Period. but that’s not as popular anymore, hence the death-defying antilogical acrobatics they are forced to engage in when trying to explain themselves. BTW, I am pretty glad that some fish decided to exercise their freedom by climbing up out of the water, so I can sit on this here sofa today.
Duncan Dönitz (formerly Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
I wonder about that. I’ve thought a lot about this, and it seems like there is bound to be tension, even outright fighting, butween what I call the “fundamentalists” and the “fascists”. Even worse for them, there are at least two brands of fundamentalism within the party, the talibaptist religious fundamentalism and the Norquist-drown-the-government-in-the-bathtum economic fundamentalists.
The fascists are the teabaggers and other violent, racists like them. They don’t trust intellectual; politics is more or less tribal to them. Sarah Palin is a fascist politician; so is Bachmann, I think. Politics to them is about us and them, and beyond that, I don’t think there’s a whole lot of coherent ideology to it.
The fundamentalists are intellectual, in that they spend a whole lot of time on matters of doctrine and dogma, and they’ll boot you from the movement if you question even the pickiest little thing about the Truth that they’ve worked out.
I don’t know how long a personality-driven, visceral, emotional, anti-intellectual fascist strain can work with an oversystematized, sterile, excessively esoteric fundamentalist strain, nor how long the differing fundamentalist strains can work with each other.
Cermet
Last I checked, Lung Fish can live many months to even a year on dry land and some other species live on land for a day or so, no problem. Then of course, Penguins normally live in the ocean – are all thugs that stupid that even something children know these so-called writers dont?
jake the snake
@Stefan:
Maybe Deep Thought had the wrong answer after all.
Instead of 42, it is 27.
gnomedad
@Andrew:
We have a winner. I am so stealing this meme.
Matt
@Amanda in the South Bay:
Don’t forget the all-important freedom to die due to inability to pay for care, the all-important freedom to starve to death and the freedom to sleep under bridges. ;)
Triassic Sands
@Matt:
Those are the “inalienable rights” Jefferson was referring to in the Declaration of Independence. And Republicans will fight to your death to ensure that you maintain those rights. They’re all about sacrifice.
Origuy
@Chris:
I’d never heard this quote before, so I looked it up. I suspect that conservatives rarely include the two sentences before it.
gex
@Stefan: I’m just glad the answer isn’t 42 in these instances.
Bill Murray
@chrismealy: I think the blood of liberals is the tie that binds conservatives and libertarians
Bill Murray
@twiffer: penguins ain’t hard
Bill Murray
@max hats: Patton Oswalt blames much if this on the children of hippies
youtube.com/watch?v=iV1K5_BGPMs
Mandramas
Nahh. conservatives and libertarian are analogous. Any conservative sentence can be rephrased as an libertarian sentence. Just add freedom in somewhere.
mclaren
We need a War On Green Tea, a War On Caffeinated Beverages, and a War On Tooth-Rotting Candy.
Then we can move on to the War On Sparkly Ponies, the War On Overly Cute Cat Pictures, and other major offenses.
Clearly America doesn’t have enough people in prison. More of our population must be thrown into dungeons to rot for 40 years with no parole! MORE! M*O*R*E*!
Just Some Fuckhead
@mclaren: How about a War On Clown Car Chickens Careening At Cliffs?
Chris
@Duncan Dönitz (formerly Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.):
The intellectuals, IMO, are all the traditional established branches of the party (religious right, big business, neocons, etc). The teabaggers are the base, the ones who’re getting restless going “yeah, okay, when do we get to the part where we win and these people get screwed over?” Us-versus-them-athon.
Which ultimately is indeed what fascism is: a bunch of people goose-stepping to power to the dual slogan of “Go Us” and “Fuck Them.” Welfare state? Absolutely, but only for real Germans. Property rights? Absolutely, but only for loyal Germans. Policy programs? Who needs policy programs? We’re Germany, the awesomest country ever. The only policy we need is to Be Ourselves, and the only thing we need for that is to get rid of everyone who’s not really One Of Us.