Spoiling For A Fight: The Miers Nomination
by Steven Rybicki
“In the course of my life I have taken part in many wars, and I see among you people of the age as I am. They and I have had experience, and so are not likely to share in what may be a general enthusiasm for war, nor to think that war is a good or a safe thing”
- King Archidamus recounted by Thucydides in
“The Debate at Sparta and Declaration of War 432” in
The History of the Peloponnesian War
With the announcement of Harriet Miers as President Bush’s nomination for Associate Justice on the Supreme Court, there has been a vocally disappointed reaction from some wings of the social conservative movement. It is too early to tell if this reaction will be widespread. Additionally, how will this reaction be reconciled and/or assuaged. Already Vice President Cheney appeared on Rush Limbaugh’s show to gently remind angered social conservatives that Bush has fought hard for them with his nominations to the federal appellate courts and won’t let them down now.
The voiced objection is: “we (the social conservatives) can’t wait to fight them (a liberal opposition?) and please, please, please give us a shot.” And there’s also the implicit suggestion: “If you don’t provide us a fight, there will be consequences…”
I have recently had some drive time with some school related commuting and have been curious to listen to what’s new in talk radio, and I’ve found myself listening to Laura Ingram. Ingram is crusading to find “the” next conservative leader who will lead social conservatives into battle against a vague socio-politico-ideological behemoth on the left. She points to the failures of the Republican political leadership to think outside of the paradigm of a majority party trying to keep power. She’s upset that the leaders of the party tie their ideological positions to those shared by Dick Cheney (a domestic libertarian and foreign policy hawk) and Bill Kristol (a “big as the government ‘needs to be’ conservative” as he expressed last month at Harvard). She likens the current leadership vs. rank-and-file disjunction to the late 70s when the moderate Fords, Bushes, and Rockerfellers dominated the mechanisms of party. She thinks social conservatives are in a position to induce outrage from the silent supermajority of Americans and can harness that outrage into progress for their agenda.
This piece is meant to be an opening salvo to elicit discourse and debate on this topic. At no point do I wish to appear as “knowing” what specific solution is best, but I genuinely believe this vein of questions needs to be opened up. Also, before I go forward I wish to recognize some of my built in assumptions:
Of course, with my Stace(y)ist background of Mansfield’s Machiavelli (and now Althusser’s), and with the emphasis of Thucydides in my International Relations class, I’ve been thinking of this issue through the prism of some specific terms. Therefore, I want to bring up two issues about these social conservatives who wish to engage in some public battle for the hearts and minds of the American people and at the same time establish a claim of a rightly orthodox, popularly adhered to, American ideology.
I want to suggest one fundamental political axiom that should be addressed: do you fight only when you believe in your model of how and why you will win? Or do you fight for the sake of a fight, without paying special attention to indicators that other people use to determine the constitution and execution of that war? My reading of Machiavelli encourages me to believe the former statement. I wish to argue that you only fight when you know you are going to win on the terms you have chosen before you go all Wu-Tang and bring the ruckus. And at this point, social conservatives are not in a position to fight for their cause because they do not know what victory looks like.
The social conservatives lack a vision of victory and this relates directly to their lack of a rigorously conceived ideological position (remember this isn’t the same thing as a rigorously pursued ideological position… the social conservatives have got that down, for the most part). The problem is the ability for the social conservatives to evaluate the formation and execution of their ideology and it can be parsed into two connected dilemmas: one is a general ideological problem; the other, created by the first, is a specific political problem.
Social conservatives adopted the mode of political progressivism many years ago. It had been coming since TR and Wilson governmentally reified their social goals in the early twentieth century. But progressivism became central to how many social conservatives viewed politics as a result of the brush with massive national government of the Reagan Administration. Now they are caught in the practice of addressing economic, social, political problems with the vocabulary, and proposed remedy, of centralization of power to the national government. Ideologically, traditional, conservative, decentralization of all forms is no longer consistently and coherently advocated. Thus, this forms the basis for the theoretical problem.
The general ideological problem stems from the social conservative movement’s inability to privately justify and explain their beliefs. Social conservatives stubbornly resist understanding where their ideological program stands in relation to an intellectual tradition and in relation to larger social structures. Writers like Eric Voegelin, Michael Oakeshott, and Russell Kirk rooted twentieth century conservatism in an exploration of different philosophical and political traditions. It is not apparent whether these writers are still vital for today’s social conservatives. Currently, excepting those wonderful ISIers, the works of those aforementioned men have been eschewed for a new harvest of sophisticated theses best summarized as: how to argue like a petulant child against those with whom you disagree. Ask the current crop of Young Republicans and CPACers what they read and you get Anne Coulter, not Hannah Arendt. And God forbid you mention Sandel, Berry, and the communitarian movement around those groups…
What does this mean? Well, it means that social conservatives cannot locate and give an account of their ideological commitments within the greater social structures that influence our lives. Regarding capitalism: what type of considerations and/or precautions do we take with the West transitioning into a post-industrial society; how does one, and how ought one, politically reconcile the market system’s drive for consumption and materialism? Regarding nationalism: what is the status of the nation-state; what is the status of the right of national self-determination; what are goals for how national self-interest be defined and interpreted? Regarding democracy: does democracy indicate civil progress; what are the challenges to democracy and do they have any merit?
Contemporary social conservatives are stuck, because they have not considered these questions. This is the stuff of pomo-ist, Marxist, critical theorist (and types of those degenerate “intellectuals”) masturbatory academic games. Concurrently, those who have and do are regarded as engaging in a peripheral, superfluous, and, in some extreme cases, a regressive endeavor. And if you disagree, I patiently ask you demonstrate where these questions are seriously contemplated? I can think of writers like Peter Augustine Lawler, Robert P. George, Daryl Hart, and many others at ISI or the work of First Things…but where else… and do these voices even matter to the political leaders of the social conservative movement?
The political problem with the ideology of the social conservatives is they are unable to distinguish the degree to which their political leaders demonstrate ideological verisimilitude. An example of this is social conservatives do not seem to have a good reference point to evaluate the ideological commitments of the Bush Administration. The American Left is deeply confused about conservatism. They are unwilling or unable to distinguish between the different vintages of the movement, and as such, have chronically suffered from misinformed diagnoses of the ideological diversity in the Bush Administration. Astoundingly, social conservatives have accepted the left’s deficient terms. As an offering of mild corrective to these social conservatives: just because Moveon.org, the ACLU, or ANSWER believe and attack Bush, and his cabinet, as being extreme American rightists, doesn’t mean it’s true. This is valuable to remember because most social conservatives seem to forget that Dick Cheney is a social libertarian (hello, the 2000 and 2004 debates!), Rumsfeld has vacillated between a vaguely leftist positions and social libertarianism, Condoleeza and Colin Powell are moderates on many social issues (for these claims check out Rise of the Vulcans by James Mann).
Ignoring the crucial process of how Karl Rove brilliantly executed neighborhood-by-neighborhood campaigning in swing states, President Bush won his re-election on the fact that he was able to energize under-voting demographics (like the evangelicals) to vote for him. But what did he win on? How about a perceived competency to prosecute his vision for a war on terrorism and better positioning than Kerry on some general social issues like “gay marriage”? But, keep in mind, Bush’s opposition to the gay relationships being officially sanctioned by the national government as “marriages” is better defined as a popular, moderate view in the US, than a principled, “by any means necessary” ideological commitment. So as wrongheaded as the attacks on President Bush are by the American Left (Al Gore through Al Franken) the social conservatives have been gullible to accept those terms and assumptions. And this gullibility stems directly from the social conservatives lacking a coherent, sturdy ideological position.
So how does this ideological discontinuity manifest itself in the Supreme Court considerations? Well, lets act like social conservatives and talk about abortion. For instance, we’re hearing a lot about Roe vs. Wade. So, let’s call the question for social conservatives: is it more of a priority for Roe vs. Wade be overturned so that each state may vote whether to allow abortion in its borders, or is abortion a moral injustice so great that it must be nationally prohibited and criminalized? Is there a plan of action for this issue? Figures like Bill Kristol and Justice Scalia advocate a state-by-state consideration of this issue. However, when push comes to shove on the abortion issue, are the social conservatives instead hoping for a progressive, centralized “solution” to issue of abortion in the US? Or would they, indeed, opt for decentralization? If social conservatives in general support the progressive position, how will they advocate their goals of criminalization of abortion when fighting this ‘war to end all wars’ with the left? How, and for how long, can they consistently articulate an advocacy for one position or another?
This is not a zero sum argument in this article: being skeptical of the endorsed tactics of some on the right does not result with praise of the current tactical choices of the left. In fact, I think the Democratic Party is facing a similar problem with problems with the base reconciling its ideology with itself and the party-at-large. Rush Limbaugh’s October 17th op-ed expresses this view quite nicely, and Christopher Hitchens’s dispatches from the past two months have exposed the extreme left’s own ideological desolation.
But I do have this quibble with Rush: for Judge Bork, Anne Coulter, Sean Hannity, etc. to just criticize the President for not igniting a social right vs. (the ambiguously defined) left, and, in fact, do their best to manifest an upheaval within the Republican Party, is a miscalculation. The social conservatives have some policy initiatives with a popular voting bloc that can, and possibly will, devastate leftist politicians. But I must stress: this does not alleviate the problem of social conservatives not possessing a rigorously considered ideology. Maybe some will argue that my concern is misdirected, because as long as one keeps winning in the near and intermediate future, the long-term future will take care of itself. Well, this is a valid rebuttal, but I do not find it convincing or satisfying: just a rationalization for why social conservatives don’t know what victory looks like.
Instead of lamenting the loss of an opportunity for a brawl, why don’t social conservatives instead, internally and publicly, make a case for how they would fight, who they would fight with and for, what fronts are expendable, which are imperative to maintain or acquire, and where they would fight these battles. Social conservatives, while they may be able to dominate a battle in the Republican presidential primary, don’t have the tools or perspective to consciously fight a major confrontation for a drastic social paradigm shift.
Sun Tzu made it clear in The Art of War that he believed that it is the mark of a better general to make the other side surrender without having to engage in physical combat. It is very strange that some quarters of the social conservatives are so anxious to fight that they are willfully disrupting their internal political coalition. But without a thoughtfully enumerated plan or vision of what victory looks like, how could they do anything else?
“In the course of my life I have taken part in many wars, and I see among you people of the age as I am. They and I have had experience, and so are not likely to share in what may be a general enthusiasm for war, nor to think that war is a good or a safe thing”
- King Archidamus recounted by Thucydides in
“The Debate at Sparta and Declaration of War 432” in
The History of the Peloponnesian War
With the announcement of Harriet Miers as President Bush’s nomination for Associate Justice on the Supreme Court, there has been a vocally disappointed reaction from some wings of the social conservative movement. It is too early to tell if this reaction will be widespread. Additionally, how will this reaction be reconciled and/or assuaged. Already Vice President Cheney appeared on Rush Limbaugh’s show to gently remind angered social conservatives that Bush has fought hard for them with his nominations to the federal appellate courts and won’t let them down now.
The voiced objection is: “we (the social conservatives) can’t wait to fight them (a liberal opposition?) and please, please, please give us a shot.” And there’s also the implicit suggestion: “If you don’t provide us a fight, there will be consequences…”
I have recently had some drive time with some school related commuting and have been curious to listen to what’s new in talk radio, and I’ve found myself listening to Laura Ingram. Ingram is crusading to find “the” next conservative leader who will lead social conservatives into battle against a vague socio-politico-ideological behemoth on the left. She points to the failures of the Republican political leadership to think outside of the paradigm of a majority party trying to keep power. She’s upset that the leaders of the party tie their ideological positions to those shared by Dick Cheney (a domestic libertarian and foreign policy hawk) and Bill Kristol (a “big as the government ‘needs to be’ conservative” as he expressed last month at Harvard). She likens the current leadership vs. rank-and-file disjunction to the late 70s when the moderate Fords, Bushes, and Rockerfellers dominated the mechanisms of party. She thinks social conservatives are in a position to induce outrage from the silent supermajority of Americans and can harness that outrage into progress for their agenda.
This piece is meant to be an opening salvo to elicit discourse and debate on this topic. At no point do I wish to appear as “knowing” what specific solution is best, but I genuinely believe this vein of questions needs to be opened up. Also, before I go forward I wish to recognize some of my built in assumptions:
1.) This reaction from some quarters of the social conservative movement is indicative of some deeper resentment and longing for a fight.
2.) Laura Ingram’s show is an apt representative of the sentiments of many American, social conservatives.
Of course, with my Stace(y)ist background of Mansfield’s Machiavelli (and now Althusser’s), and with the emphasis of Thucydides in my International Relations class, I’ve been thinking of this issue through the prism of some specific terms. Therefore, I want to bring up two issues about these social conservatives who wish to engage in some public battle for the hearts and minds of the American people and at the same time establish a claim of a rightly orthodox, popularly adhered to, American ideology.
I want to suggest one fundamental political axiom that should be addressed: do you fight only when you believe in your model of how and why you will win? Or do you fight for the sake of a fight, without paying special attention to indicators that other people use to determine the constitution and execution of that war? My reading of Machiavelli encourages me to believe the former statement. I wish to argue that you only fight when you know you are going to win on the terms you have chosen before you go all Wu-Tang and bring the ruckus. And at this point, social conservatives are not in a position to fight for their cause because they do not know what victory looks like.
The social conservatives lack a vision of victory and this relates directly to their lack of a rigorously conceived ideological position (remember this isn’t the same thing as a rigorously pursued ideological position… the social conservatives have got that down, for the most part). The problem is the ability for the social conservatives to evaluate the formation and execution of their ideology and it can be parsed into two connected dilemmas: one is a general ideological problem; the other, created by the first, is a specific political problem.
Social conservatives adopted the mode of political progressivism many years ago. It had been coming since TR and Wilson governmentally reified their social goals in the early twentieth century. But progressivism became central to how many social conservatives viewed politics as a result of the brush with massive national government of the Reagan Administration. Now they are caught in the practice of addressing economic, social, political problems with the vocabulary, and proposed remedy, of centralization of power to the national government. Ideologically, traditional, conservative, decentralization of all forms is no longer consistently and coherently advocated. Thus, this forms the basis for the theoretical problem.
The general ideological problem stems from the social conservative movement’s inability to privately justify and explain their beliefs. Social conservatives stubbornly resist understanding where their ideological program stands in relation to an intellectual tradition and in relation to larger social structures. Writers like Eric Voegelin, Michael Oakeshott, and Russell Kirk rooted twentieth century conservatism in an exploration of different philosophical and political traditions. It is not apparent whether these writers are still vital for today’s social conservatives. Currently, excepting those wonderful ISIers, the works of those aforementioned men have been eschewed for a new harvest of sophisticated theses best summarized as: how to argue like a petulant child against those with whom you disagree. Ask the current crop of Young Republicans and CPACers what they read and you get Anne Coulter, not Hannah Arendt. And God forbid you mention Sandel, Berry, and the communitarian movement around those groups…
What does this mean? Well, it means that social conservatives cannot locate and give an account of their ideological commitments within the greater social structures that influence our lives. Regarding capitalism: what type of considerations and/or precautions do we take with the West transitioning into a post-industrial society; how does one, and how ought one, politically reconcile the market system’s drive for consumption and materialism? Regarding nationalism: what is the status of the nation-state; what is the status of the right of national self-determination; what are goals for how national self-interest be defined and interpreted? Regarding democracy: does democracy indicate civil progress; what are the challenges to democracy and do they have any merit?
Contemporary social conservatives are stuck, because they have not considered these questions. This is the stuff of pomo-ist, Marxist, critical theorist (and types of those degenerate “intellectuals”) masturbatory academic games. Concurrently, those who have and do are regarded as engaging in a peripheral, superfluous, and, in some extreme cases, a regressive endeavor. And if you disagree, I patiently ask you demonstrate where these questions are seriously contemplated? I can think of writers like Peter Augustine Lawler, Robert P. George, Daryl Hart, and many others at ISI or the work of First Things…but where else… and do these voices even matter to the political leaders of the social conservative movement?
The political problem with the ideology of the social conservatives is they are unable to distinguish the degree to which their political leaders demonstrate ideological verisimilitude. An example of this is social conservatives do not seem to have a good reference point to evaluate the ideological commitments of the Bush Administration. The American Left is deeply confused about conservatism. They are unwilling or unable to distinguish between the different vintages of the movement, and as such, have chronically suffered from misinformed diagnoses of the ideological diversity in the Bush Administration. Astoundingly, social conservatives have accepted the left’s deficient terms. As an offering of mild corrective to these social conservatives: just because Moveon.org, the ACLU, or ANSWER believe and attack Bush, and his cabinet, as being extreme American rightists, doesn’t mean it’s true. This is valuable to remember because most social conservatives seem to forget that Dick Cheney is a social libertarian (hello, the 2000 and 2004 debates!), Rumsfeld has vacillated between a vaguely leftist positions and social libertarianism, Condoleeza and Colin Powell are moderates on many social issues (for these claims check out Rise of the Vulcans by James Mann).
Ignoring the crucial process of how Karl Rove brilliantly executed neighborhood-by-neighborhood campaigning in swing states, President Bush won his re-election on the fact that he was able to energize under-voting demographics (like the evangelicals) to vote for him. But what did he win on? How about a perceived competency to prosecute his vision for a war on terrorism and better positioning than Kerry on some general social issues like “gay marriage”? But, keep in mind, Bush’s opposition to the gay relationships being officially sanctioned by the national government as “marriages” is better defined as a popular, moderate view in the US, than a principled, “by any means necessary” ideological commitment. So as wrongheaded as the attacks on President Bush are by the American Left (Al Gore through Al Franken) the social conservatives have been gullible to accept those terms and assumptions. And this gullibility stems directly from the social conservatives lacking a coherent, sturdy ideological position.
So how does this ideological discontinuity manifest itself in the Supreme Court considerations? Well, lets act like social conservatives and talk about abortion. For instance, we’re hearing a lot about Roe vs. Wade. So, let’s call the question for social conservatives: is it more of a priority for Roe vs. Wade be overturned so that each state may vote whether to allow abortion in its borders, or is abortion a moral injustice so great that it must be nationally prohibited and criminalized? Is there a plan of action for this issue? Figures like Bill Kristol and Justice Scalia advocate a state-by-state consideration of this issue. However, when push comes to shove on the abortion issue, are the social conservatives instead hoping for a progressive, centralized “solution” to issue of abortion in the US? Or would they, indeed, opt for decentralization? If social conservatives in general support the progressive position, how will they advocate their goals of criminalization of abortion when fighting this ‘war to end all wars’ with the left? How, and for how long, can they consistently articulate an advocacy for one position or another?
This is not a zero sum argument in this article: being skeptical of the endorsed tactics of some on the right does not result with praise of the current tactical choices of the left. In fact, I think the Democratic Party is facing a similar problem with problems with the base reconciling its ideology with itself and the party-at-large. Rush Limbaugh’s October 17th op-ed expresses this view quite nicely, and Christopher Hitchens’s dispatches from the past two months have exposed the extreme left’s own ideological desolation.
But I do have this quibble with Rush: for Judge Bork, Anne Coulter, Sean Hannity, etc. to just criticize the President for not igniting a social right vs. (the ambiguously defined) left, and, in fact, do their best to manifest an upheaval within the Republican Party, is a miscalculation. The social conservatives have some policy initiatives with a popular voting bloc that can, and possibly will, devastate leftist politicians. But I must stress: this does not alleviate the problem of social conservatives not possessing a rigorously considered ideology. Maybe some will argue that my concern is misdirected, because as long as one keeps winning in the near and intermediate future, the long-term future will take care of itself. Well, this is a valid rebuttal, but I do not find it convincing or satisfying: just a rationalization for why social conservatives don’t know what victory looks like.
Instead of lamenting the loss of an opportunity for a brawl, why don’t social conservatives instead, internally and publicly, make a case for how they would fight, who they would fight with and for, what fronts are expendable, which are imperative to maintain or acquire, and where they would fight these battles. Social conservatives, while they may be able to dominate a battle in the Republican presidential primary, don’t have the tools or perspective to consciously fight a major confrontation for a drastic social paradigm shift.
Sun Tzu made it clear in The Art of War that he believed that it is the mark of a better general to make the other side surrender without having to engage in physical combat. It is very strange that some quarters of the social conservatives are so anxious to fight that they are willfully disrupting their internal political coalition. But without a thoughtfully enumerated plan or vision of what victory looks like, how could they do anything else?
posted by steven rybicki at 5:28 PM
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