David Lindsay does not get American conservatism, and until he does he will remain "The Reason."
When I was an undergraduate in college, a fellow student of my acquaintance had the nickname "The Reason." (I am being as vague as possible to protect the innocent.) This young man was a really nice guy, but was not, shall we say, particularly hip. He belonged to a certain fraternal organization. This fraternal organization also had the reputation for being, shall we say, less hip than many other fraternal organizations on campus. You can see where I'm going with this. Now why this young man was allowed to pledge this fraternal organization, organizations which typically pride themselves on their hipness, I do not know. Perhaps it was because he was a legacy. Perhaps it was because this particular fraternal organization happened to cater to a certain ethnic and religious minority and they were therefore duty bound to accept all comers who were also members of that ethnic and religious minority. Perhaps they just had a big heart. Again, I do not know. But whatever the case, whenever the less hip status of this fraternal organization was brought up, the fellow student of my acquaintance was cited as . . . well you guessed it . . . "The Reason."
David Lindsay is a sometimes right, often frustratingly wrong, but always interesting blogger at the American Conservative website. David Lindsay is also, like my fellow student, "The Reason." He is also my Facebook friend, but may not be after he reads this.
Let me explain. Recently there has been a lot of chatter among paleoconservative, libertarian and other elements of the alternative right that the American Conservative has lost its way. There is even the suggestion, perish the thought, that the magazine and website are drifting left.
Why all this concern? David Lindsay is "The Reason." Lindsay may not be "The Only Reason," but he is certainly "A Major Reason." But "A Major Reason" doesn't lend itself to nickname status quite as well so I will stick with "The Reason."
Personally I have defended the American Conservative from this accusation although not always without my own doubts. But that is a discussion for another essay.
David Lindsay writes under the blog heading "Post Right." This blog is, as the name suggests, written by people who fall outside the traditional Left/Right dichotomy. As such, it is probably not reasonable to expect pure paleoism from Lindsay, but Jack Hunter and Nathan P. Oringer also write under the same blog, and I rarely disagree with either of them while I only occasionally agree with Lindsay.
Lindsay is a British conservative. Therefore he does not share the American Right's love affair with the free market. This frustrates the more libertarian leaning AmCon readers to no end. While I am much more favorable of the free market than Lindsay, he is philosophically correct that laissez-faire capitalism is not inherently conservative and historically speaking was leftist in origin (classical liberalism.) While I do not question the efficiency of the marketplace, conservatives should be very careful to avoid economic reductionism and economic man thinking which can quickly degenerate into nothing more than the flip side of Marxism.
But Lindsay also does not share the American Right's commitment to limited government, especially regarding health care. So Mr. Lindsay has proceeded to lecture us over and over and over and over . . . on the benefits of Universal Single Payer Health Care. It is this incessant drumbeat for big government health care that occasions this little rant.
Lindsay envisions a social conservative, anti-capitalist, big government synthesis, because . . . well basically . . . that's how they do it in England. But I have a news flash for Mr. Lindsay, America is not England and American conservatism is not English conservatism. I recall what the late great Lewis Grizzard used to say about Yankees in the South. Heavily paraphrased he suggested that Yankees were more than welcome to come down here and eat our grits, drink our sweat tea, and even marry our women, just as long as they didn't tell us how they used to do it back in Cleveland. Southerners don't care how Yankees do it in Cleveland, and Mr. Lindsay, American conservatives don't care how you do it in England. We have our own tradition that we are trying to conserve (imagine that), and government-run health care would trample on, not conserve, that tradition. Not to mention the difficulty of cobbling together the coalition he envisions.
Mr. Lindsay and I have been round and round in his blog posts, but for the benefit of most of the readers who have not followed our little spat, I will go over this again. It is all very simple. Conservatives seek to conserve. (Crazy thought I know.) One thing that conservatives in America should seek to conserve is the constitutional Republic left to us by our Founding Fathers. One aspect of conserving that constitutional Republic is the quaint little idea that the Constitution should actually be followed. (Another crazy thought.) Strict Constitutionalism is not the sum total of conservatism, but it is difficult to defend as authentic American style conservatism anything that doesn't include strict constitutionalism. I realize there could be rightist objections to "constitutionalism," but that too is for another essay. In this case Lindsay is not a rightist objecting to constitutionalism on some principled grounds. He simply doesn't consider the Constitution an impediment to government run health care.
The Constitution does not authorize Federal involvement in health care delivery. Period! If you think it does then please provide me with the Article and section that does so. Therefore, a conservative, who is seeking to conserve our constitutional Republic, cannot support a government program that tramples upon the concept of enumerated powers enshrined in the Constitution. If he does then what, pray tell, is he conserving?
If we had honest political discourse in this country then liberals who support government-run health care would provide the Article and section of the Constitution that authorizes it. Lacking such (I've read it, and it ain't in there), they would either drop the subject or seek to amend the Constitution so as to authorize it. But alas we do not have honest political discourse in this country and instead we have liberals babbling about the "general welfare" and "interstate commerce" clauses and a "living and breathing" Constitution when they are not just ignoring it altogether. Invoking the Preamble, broadly interpreting the commerce clause, or fancying the Constitution a living document is clearly a thought pattern of the Left in this country. How anyone can think casual disregard of the Constitution as written and intended is conservative, or could serve conservatives well, is beyond me. I've said it many times on his blog, and I will say it again, David Lindsay does not get American conservatism, and until he does he will remain "The Reason."
I don't follow the 'blog in question and don't really get why this piece would have any relevance outside of the 'blog in question. Without knowing the social/political intricacies of the community at American Conservative, the only thing that struck me about this article is the author's contention that laissez faire free markets and classical liberalism are "leftist". I suppose when your definition of "conservatism" is relative to mercantilist 17th century Europe those probably would be radical leftist ideas. Of course, those were the ideas that most influenced our founders and were central to the construction of the constitution that the Paleoconservative ostensibly desires to "conserve".
Patrick, I wasn't necessarily making a criticism of free markets. Not everything to arise from the left has been bad. I was making a historical and philosophical point. Ask yourself "Was Adam Smith a liberal (original sense) or a conservative?” The answer is simple. Most free marketers such as Hayek and von Mises considered themselves classical liberals. Hayek even wrote a famous essay entitled “Why I Am Not a Conservative.” That advocacy of the free market has come to be associated with the right in America makes a certain amount of historical sense, but is also a bit of a historical accident. As modern conservatism was starting to come together around the time of the Great Depression and the New Deal, classical liberals were objecting to increased intrusion of the government into the marketplace and hence were against the new and defending the older way. So the association with conservatism was natural, but keep in mind that that coalition also included the Southern Agrarians who were essentially bemoaning the Industrial Revolution. Support of free enterprise rose in prominence on the right during the Cold War because it was in contradistinction to the planned economies of Communism.
The paragraph you are referring to was a bit of a throw away, but my point was that the libertarian objection to Lindsay’s anti-capitalism wasn’t a sufficient indictment of Lindsay’s lack of conservatism. Lindsay’s objections to free-markets are generally from the right (and I believe from a Catholic social teaching perspective), but his solutions often sound run-of-the-mill liberal. As I suggested, what conservatives must avoid is economic reductionism. For example, if efficiency is the highest good then the free flow of labor is ideal and conservatives shouldn’t object to immigration.
American Conservative Magazine was founded by Pat Buchanan and Taki Theodoracopulos, both long gone at this point, and so AmCon has been considered, along with Chronicles, the flagship publication of the paleo right, much as National Review is the flagship of movement conservatism. So if it is moving left or otherwise off message, that is noteworthy.
[...] David Lindsay article below is now up at Intellectual Conservative. | | | | | [...]
Dan,
For once, I find myself in agreement with several of your conclusions as follows:
a. Lindsay “… does not [appear to] share the American Right's love … with the free market”
b. Lindsay … does not share the American Right's commitment to limited government [as regards] health care; he favors passage of the House bill based on the sole but insufficient criteria it now contains the Stupak amendment excluding funding for abortion
c. Lindsay defends European style government healthcare (though not especially British care) because most European GHCs defund abortion
d. American conservatism is not English conservatism (though from what I know of modern British conservatives, there are many who do oppose NHS on grounds similar to our own)
e. American conservatives should seek to conserve the constitutional Republic
f. The Constitution ought to be adhered to in all cases, and its interpretation should be no less strict than extremity warrants
g. The Constitution does not authorize Federal involvement in healthcare delivery (nor be a provider in competition with us)
Note the slight amendments I made to your characterizations of Lindsay (because I only have the one article to judge how ‘un-conservative’ he is). In fairness to Lindsay, you do have an exclusionary tendency (you also don’t think we – here at IC – meet the criteria for conservatism; see http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2009/09/25/a-memo-to-the-conservative-action-project/ ).
Regardless, I agree with you that Lindsay’s position, in this instance, is decidedly ‘un-conservative’ in the American context of conservatism. Moreover, I agree with you it is demonstrably foolish of Lindsay to believe government-healthcare a better deal than market-healthcare. His own experience of the state of British care ought to be sufficient to convince any thinking person (who is not also a determined Marxist – real goal: unrestricted power) that even the best socialized care is a relative disaster. This does not require any great or undue faith in markets to appreciate, only the direct evidence of 60 years of far less effective care at substantially the same or greater cost (unless, of course, you ignore the high taxes of SHC).
About the only thing conservative about Lindsay’s article is his stance on abortion, and even that with substantial reservations (takes the typically conservative position defending the right of the unborn to live, but thinks it conservative to support nanny-state healthcare that excludes abortion). The bigger point than whether Lindsay is or is not sufficiently conservative, is whether or not government-healthcare has any leg to stand on (with or without abortion, funded or otherwise), be it Constitutional, economic, or quality-of-care; and, so far, it fails all three tests.
Lindsay is counting chickens too soon. Not only hasn’t Obama-care become law just yet, but what is to say it won’t be altered soon after passage to strike out the liberal offending ‘abortion defunding’ provision. A lot can still happen, and this may only be a ploy with which to gin up enough votes to secure that all important passage. If it fails to gin up the necessary votes, I have little doubt the defunding proviso will be the first thing stricken. Regardless, once it becomes law and government provided care established as the standard none of us dare live without, it is a simple matter to enact a funding change either by enactment, SCOTUS decree, or executive fiat. Rush Limbaugh had something to say on this today also, pointing out it doesn’t much matter what the House bill says until reconciled with the Senate bill, and that very clearly funds abortion at policy-payer expense (i.e., not at taxpayer expense, so what’s the conservative beef – kind of like saying utility-payer surcharges for things like ethanol and solar mandates aren’t really hidden taxes). This guarantees a major battle reconciling the two, with abortion proponents demanding the Senate provision stays intact.
Here’s one final comment you can take back to Mr. Lindsay if you like. He remarked “…everywhere in Western Europe has universal public healthcare, and has had [it] for so long that no one can imagine life without it, a status which, admittedly, it has attained very rapidly indeed everywhere where it has ever been introduced.” The fact so many Europeans are satisfied with substandard care (by our standards) only proves they’ve been subject to it so long they’ve either forgotten what really good care is or are too young to have experienced it. They are also in a position of complete dependence on government for their care, a boat few are apt to upset. Consider our own regulatory confiscations in which we created private-public monopolies of things like railroads, telephone transmission, and power utilities. Both innovation and profit were moribund under those regulated monopolies, and some of it remains so today (e.g., Amtrak, power production). To take but one example, the standard telephone went unchanged for nearly thirty years until deregulated; after which the number, variety of phones, and features exploded. Few, then, had more than a single home phone because the government/utility partnership decided for us that was all any of us needed (i.e., rationed). The means and range of transmission has been similarly revolutionized (fiber-optic, satellite, cell, data-compression, &c). Consider, too, the difference in service-quality and responsiveness since partial deregulation of these systems. Yet, when Reagan first proposed deregulation, a great many Americans could not even envision them unregulated, and parroted the fear-mongering of the left it would all end in disaster. It didn’t, but people resist change even when it is back to something known to have been better than the thing with which they are most accustomed. People quickly acclimated to regulation in this country, but even more quickly acclimated to deregulation due to the obvious benefits. Therefore, his argument positing European satisfaction with SHC is weak (not to mention unproven, did he cite a poll?).
Follow up links:
http://www.rules.house.gov/111/SpecialRules/hr3962/111_part3_hr3962.pdf
http://usliberals.about.com/od/healthcare/a/StupakAmendment.htm
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/abortion-amendment-health-care-bills-ignites-debate-womens/story?id=9034995
http://www.ohioverticals.com/blogs/akron_law_cafe/2009/11/health-care-financing-reform-62-the-stupak-amendment/
Dan,
I must object to your response to Patrick wherein you mischaracterize “…what conservatives must avoid is economic reductionism. For example, if efficiency is the highest good then the free flow of labor is ideal and conservatives shouldn’t object to immigration.”
The main conservative objection to illegal-immigration is not economic. Rather, it is the simple matter of security. Forced-entry is a violation of our sovereignty no different from a house break-in. They broke-in; they should be arrested, punished and sent packing. There is a right way to enter this country and a wrong way; and any entry that circumvents or disregards our laws is the wrong way. Don’t think for a minute the Mexican authorities treat their border violators more lenient than we do; yet insist we are wrong to punish and return theirs to Mexican soil.
If anyone engaged in ‘reductionism’, it was you by reducing our several arguments (including economics) to the one that least signifies. We argue the economic costs of the alien burden only to debunk the arguments of the alien-lobby pretending there is no economic cost of ignoring the invasion (just like they pretend there are no labor, law-enforcement, identity-theft, public-safety, security or voter-fraud consequences).
Dan,
For once, I find myself in agreement with several of your conclusions as follows:
a. Lindsay “…does not [appear to] share the American Right's love … with the free market”
b. Lindsay does not share the American Right's commitment to limited government [as regards] health care because he favors passage of the House bill based on the pretext it contains an amendment excluding funding for abortion (Stupak)
c. Lindsay defends European style government healthcare (though not British care) because most European GHCs defund abortion
d. American conservatism is not English conservatism (though from what I know of modern British conservatives, there are many who do oppose NHS on grounds similar to our own)
e. American conservatives should seek to conserve the constitutional Republic
f. The Constitution ought to be adhered to in all cases, and its interpretation should be no less strict than hazards warrant
g. The Constitution does not authorize Federal involvement in healthcare delivery (nor be a provider in competition with us)
Note the slight amendments I made to your characterizations of Lindsay (because I only have the one article to judge how ‘un-conservative’ he is). In fairness to Lindsay, you do have an exclusionary tendency (you also don’t think we – here at IC – meet the criteria of conservatism; see http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2009/09/25/a-memo-to-the-conservative-action-project/ and your most recent immigration issue scolding above).
Regardless, I agree with you that Lindsay’s position, in this instance, is decidedly ‘un-conservative’ in the American context of conservatism. Moreover, I agree with you it is demonstrably foolish of Lindsay to believe government-healthcare is a better deal than market-healthcare. His own experience of the state of British care ought to be sufficient to convince any thinking person (who is not a determined Marxist) that even the best socialized care is a relative disaster. This does not require any great or undue faith in markets to appreciate, only the direct evidence of 60 years of less than effective care at the same or greater costs (unless, of course, you ignore the high taxes of SHC).
About the only thing conservative about Lindsay’s article is his stance on abortion, and even that with substantial reservations (takes the typically conservative position defending the right of the unborn to live, but thinks it conservative to support nanny-state healthcare other than abortion). The bigger point than whether Lindsay is or is not sufficiently conservative, is whether or not government-healthcare has any leg to stand on (with or without abortion, funded or otherwise), be it Constitutional, economic, or quality-of-care; and, so far, it fails all three tests.
Moreover, Lindsay is counting chickens too soon. Not only hasn’t Obama-care become law just yet, but what is to say it won’t be altered soon after passage to strike out the liberal offending ‘abortion-defunding’ provision. A lot can still happen, and this may only be a ploy with which to gin up enough votes to secure that all important passage. If it fails to gin up the necessary votes, I have little doubt the defunding proviso will be the first thing stricken. Regardless, once it becomes law and government provided care established as the standard none of us dare live without, it is a simple matter to enact a funding change either by enactment, SCOTUS decree, or executive fiat. Rush Limbaugh had something to say on this today also, pointing out it doesn’t much matter what the House bill says until reconciled with the Senate bill, and that very clearly funds abortion at subscriber-payer expense (i.e., not at taxpayer expense, so what’s the conservative beef – kind of like saying utility-payer surcharges for things like ethanol and solar mandates aren’t really hidden taxes). This guarantees a major battle reconciling the two, with abortion proponents insisting the Senate provision trumps.
Here’s one final comment you can take back to Mr. Lindsay if you like. He remarked “…everywhere in Western Europe has universal public healthcare, and has had [it] for so long that no one can imagine life without it, a status which, admittedly, it has attained very rapidly indeed everywhere where it has ever been introduced.” The fact so many Europeans are ‘satisfied’ with substandard care (by our standards) only proves they’ve been subject to it so long they’ve either forgotten what really good care is, are too afraid to challenge it to get something better, or are too young to have experienced it. They are in a position of complete dependence on government for their care, a boat few are apt to upset. Consider our own regulatory confiscations in which we created private-public monopolies of things like railroad, telephone, and power utilities. Both innovation and profit were stifled under those regulated monopolies, and some of it remains so today (e.g., Amtrak, power generation). To take but one example, the standard telephone went unchanged for nearly thirty years until deregulated; after which the number, variety of phones, and features exploded. Few, then, had more than a single home phone because the government/utility partnership decided for us that was all any of us needed (i.e., rationed). The means and range of transmission has been similarly revolutionized (fiber-optic, satellite, cell, data-compression, &c). Consider, too, the difference in service-quality and responsiveness since partial deregulation of these systems. Yet, when Reagan first proposed [partial] deregulation, a great many Americans could not envision them unregulated (even those who predated regulation), and parroted the fear-mongering of the left it would all end in disaster. It didn’t, but people resist change even when it is back to something known to have been better than the thing with which they are most accustomed. People quickly acclimated to regulation in this country, but even more quickly acclimated to deregulation due to the resulting improvement. Therefore, his argument positing European satisfaction with SHC is weak (not to mention unproven, did he cite a poll?).
Now, if you could only learn to deliver such pithy observations without feeling obliged to take potshots at your audience as turns them off to your message.
Follow up links:
http://www.rules.house.gov/111/SpecialRules/hr3962/111_part3_hr3962.pdf
http://usliberals.about.com/od/healthcare/a/StupakAmendment.htm
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/abortion-amendment-health-care-bills-ignites-debate-womens/story?id=9034995
http://www.ohioverticals.com/blogs/akron_law_cafe/2009/11/health-care-financing-reform-62-the-stupak-amendment/
Not sure how this posted twice (#3 & #5). Must be something in the host software.