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Tag Archives: Conservativism

How the Great War Created the Modern State

26 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Politics, War

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

A. J. P. Taylor, Britain, British History, Conservativism, England, English History, European History, Government, history, Liberalism, Paul Cambon, politics, The New Cambridge Modern History: 1898-1945, War, Winston Churchill, World War One, World War Two

A.J.P. Taylor

“Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman.

He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the state who wished to do so. The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913-14, or rather less than 8 percent of the national income… [B]roadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.

All this was changed by the impact of the Great War. The mass of the people became, for the first time, active citizens. Their lives were shaped by orders from above; they were required to serve the state instead of pursuing exclusively their own affairs. Five million men entered the armed forces, many of them (though a minority) under compulsion. The Englishman’s food was limited, and its quality changed, by government order. His freedom of movement was restricted; his conditions of work prescribed. Some industries were reduced or closed, others artificially fostered. The publication of news was fettered. Street lights were dimmed. The sacred freedom of drinking was tampered with: licensed hours were cut down, and the beer watered by order. The very time on the clocks was changed. From 1916 onwards, every Englishman got up an hour earlier in summer than he would otherwise have done, thanks to an act of parliament. The state established a hold over it citizens which, though relaxed in peacetime, was never to be removed and which the second World war was again to increase.”

__________

Pulled from the opening chapter “The Effects and Origins of the Great War” in A. J. P. Taylor’s English History, 1914-1945.

In The New Cambridge Modern History: 1898-1945, there’s a substantial discussion of this link between the First and Second World Wars and the rise of the modern administrative state. A summary paragraph:

Until after 1847 direct income tax had been a device almost peculiar to Great Britain… During the 1890s, pari passu with the great expansion of governmental expenditures on armaments as well as on social services, Germany and her component states, as well as Italy, Austria, Norway, and Spain, all introduced or steepened systems of income tax. French governments repeatedly shied away from it, though they resorted to progressive death duties in 1901, and it was 1917 before a not very satisfactory system of income tax was introduced. The great fiscal burdens of war accustomed people to heavier taxation.

In 1920, Paul Cambon, France’s ambassador to Britain, told Winston Churchill, “In the twenty years I have been here I have witnessed an English Revolution more profound and searching than the French Revolution itself.” He continued, “The governing class have been almost entirely deprived of political power and to a very large extent of their property and estates; and this has been accomplished almost imperceptibly and without the loss of a single life.” Cambridge summarizes this: “If M. Cambon was exaggerating in 1920, he was perceptively prophetic, for his description became substantially true after the second world war.”

Read on:

  • What’s the point of reading history if you’ll just forget it later?
  • How Wittgenstein found god (and wrote a masterpiece) in the trenches of World War One
  • David McCullough provides an unbeatable answer to the question why history matters

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How the Greek Conception of Human Nature Can Shape Your Politics

14 Tuesday Jul 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Political Philosophy

≈ Comments Off on How the Greek Conception of Human Nature Can Shape Your Politics

Tags

classics, Conservativism, Denis Diderot, French Enlightenment, Greek History, Greek philosophy, Greek tragedy, Greeks, human nature, interview, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Philosophy, Thucydides, Victor Davis Hanson

Roman Bust

“I don’t think I would think the way I do if I hadn’t had an affinity for the writings of the Greeks. I think the idea the Greeks had, the tragic view of the world — that there are limitations in the human experience: we all age, we all die, we don’t demand utopian perfection given the brief time we’re on earth — has made me more realistic about things.

So when you see a war, for example, you don’t ask who’s one hundred percent good and who’s one hundred percent evil. There is good and evil in the world, yes, but it can sometimes be very difficult to understand that you have to go to war even though you won’t always be in the right.

The Greeks were much more realistic about the fallibilities of human nature. That’s had a very profound influence on me…

The idea that people are predictable across time and space, as the historian Thucydides said. That they have appetites and urges which are often identifiable. That people seem to respond to status and honor and fear, and that civilization — whether it’s religion, or custom and tradition, or politics — tends to save us from our selves.

It’s a very different view from the Rousseauian, Diderot, French enlightenment idea that we’re born into the world perfect human beings, but that religion or the family or the government repress us and ultimately ruin us.”

__________

Victor Davis Hanson, checking off the important boxes in the first minute of his three-hour-long C-SPAN In-Depth interview in 2004. If you want to read Hanson, pick up his acclaimed study of nine pivotal battles in history, Carnage and Culture. I just ordered my copy.

Watch Hanson’s answer (along with the other two hours and fifty-nine minutes) below.

Then move on:

  • An illuminating passage from Arthur Schlesinger’s biography of RFK — how the Kennedys read the Greeks differently (and how Robert took solace in them after Jack’s death)
  • A summary: the Christian worldview vs. the Greek worldview
  • How ancient Greeks partied

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Our Students Are Taught to Feel but Not Think

13 Monday Jul 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Politics, Psychology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

American Schools, Conservativism, Diane Ravitch, education, Firing Line, Inside American Education: The Decline, Learning, Schools, Teaching, The Deception, The Dogmas, Thomas Sowell, thought, William F. Buckley

Thomas Sowell

“Science is not the only field in which American students are lacking in knowledge and — more importantly — in the ability to tie what they know together to form a coherent chain of reasoning. Many American students seem unaware of even the need for such a process. Test scores are only the tip of the iceberg. Professor Diane Ravitch, a scholar specializing in the study of American education, reports that ‘professors complain about students who arrive at college with strong convictions but not enough knowledge to argue persuasively for their beliefs.’ As Professor Ravitch concludes: ‘Having opinions without knowledge is not of much value; not knowing the difference between them is a positive indicator of ignorance.’ In short, it is not that Johnny can’t read, or even that Johnny can’t think. Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is, because thinking is so often confused with feeling in many public schools.

The phrase ‘I feel’ is so often used by American students to introduce a conclusion, rather than say ‘I think,’ or ‘I know,’ much less ‘I conclude.’ Unfortunately, ‘I feel’ is often the most accurate term — and is regarded as sufficient by many teachers, as well as students. The net result, as in mathematics, is that many students are confident incompetents, whether discussing social issues, world events, or other subjects. The emphasis is on having students express opinions on issues, and on having those opinions taken seriously (enhancing self-esteem), regardless of whether there is anything behind them…”

__________

Excerpted from Thomas Sowell’s 1993 book Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogmas.

Below, watch Sowell debating American schools in a 1981 episode from Buckley’s Firing Line.

More:

  • More people now have smart phones than clean water
  • Chomsky riffs on education and the value of work
  • Another hot take from Sowell — on the problem with a ‘living wage’

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The Problem with Our ‘Immigration Policy’ Is We Don’t Have an Immigration Policy

02 Tuesday Jun 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Politics

≈ Comments Off on The Problem with Our ‘Immigration Policy’ Is We Don’t Have an Immigration Policy

Tags

Conservativism, debate, Government, Hoover Institution, Immigrants, Immigration, Immigration Policy, interview, Japan, Laos, Path to Citizenship, Peter Robinson, politics, Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell

“When only two percent of immigrants from Japan to the United States go on welfare, while 46 percent of the immigrants from Laos do, there is no single pattern that applies to all immigrants. Everything depends on which immigrants you are taking about and which period of history.

One of the things about the immigration debate is they talk about immigrants in the abstract — and there are no immigrants in the abstract.

An additional problem is that we don’t know who those people are that are already here. They may all be PhD’s from the University of Chicago, in which case they should all stay. Or they may in fact be people who majored in sociology at Berkeley, in which case we should get them all out of here as soon as possible.

But we don’t know. And that’s one of the problems of our so-called ‘immigration policy’: we don’t have an immigration policy, unless we control the border. It doesn’t matter what our policy is; if anyone who wants to cross the border can cross, our policy is just a bunch of words on paper.

And especially when they talk about people in agriculture. This is a country that has had a chronic surplus of agricultural output for decades on end, costing the tax payer billions upon billions of dollars. […]

Any discussion of people in the abstract drives me crazy. Because there are no abstract people. One hundred years ago, people understood that. So when there was a debate about immigration, there was a multi-volume set of tomes about the characteristics of immigrants from various countries — how do their kids do in school, what is there crime rate, what is their disease rate. All those things. That matters.”

__________

From Thomas Sowell’s interview with the Hoover Institute’s Peter Robinson last December.

In case I need to say it again, I don’t agree with some of the things I post on here. This is one of those things. Still, I love Sowell’s panache in this interview as well as the clarity of his seminal work Basic Economics, a primer on market economies that’s quoted in the opening paragraph above.

There’s more:

  • Krauthammer answers Can we be optimistic about America’s future?
  • Sowell just says it: The ‘living wage’ is a flawed concept
  • Mark Leibovich argues that ours is a political culture that rewards cowardice

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Thomas Sowell: The Obvious Problem with a “Living Wage”

28 Tuesday Apr 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Political Philosophy

≈ Comments Off on Thomas Sowell: The Obvious Problem with a “Living Wage”

Tags

Basic Economics, Capitalism, Conservativism, economics, Fair Wage, Finance, Free Market, Hoover Institution, Living Wage, Macroeconomics, Microeconomics, Peter Robinson, Salaries, Thomas Sowell, Wages

Thomas Sowell

“Wages and salaries serve the same economic purposes as other prices — that is, they guide the utilization of scarce resources which have alternative uses, so that each resource gets used where it’s most valued. Yet because these scarce resources are human beings, we tend to look on wages and salaries differently. Often we ask questions that are quite emotionally powerful, even if they are logically meaningless. For example: Are the wages ‘fair’? Are the workers ‘exploited’? Is this ‘a living wage’?

Such questions seldom get asked about the prices of inanimate things, such as a can of peas or a share of stock in General Motors. But people are believed to be entitled to pay that is ‘fair,’ even if no one can define what that means. ‘Exploitation’ and ‘a living wage’ are likewise emotionally powerful expressions without concrete meanings. If a worker is living, how can he be receiving less than ‘a living wage’ unless he is, as some have said thoughtlessly, ‘living below subsistence’?

No one likes to see fellow human beings living in poverty and squalor, and many are prepared to do something about it, as shown by the vast billions of dollars that are donated to a wide range of charities every year, on top of the additional billions spent by governments in an attempt to better the condition of less fortunate people. These socially important activities occur alongside an economy coordinated by prices, but the two things serve different purposes. Attempts to make prices, including the prices of people’s labor and talents, be something other than signals to guide resources to their most valued uses, make those prices less effective for their basic purpose, on which the prosperity of the whole society depends. Ultimately, it is economic prosperity that makes it possible for billions of dollars to be devoted to helping the less fortunate.

Nothing is more straightforward and easy to understand than the fact that some people earn more than others, for a variety of reasons. Some people are simply older than others, for example, and their additional years have given them opportunities to acquire more experience, skills, formal education and on-the-job training — all of which allows them to do a given job more efficiently or to take on more complicated jobs that would be overwhelming for a beginner or for someone with only limited experience or training. It is hardly surprising that this leads to higher incomes. With the passing years, older individuals may also become more knowledgable about job opportunities, while increasing numbers of other people become more aware of them and their individual abilities, leading to offers of new jobs or promotions. It is not uncommon for most of the people in the top 5 percent of income-earners to be 45 years old and up. […]

These and other common sense reasons for income differences among individuals are often lost sight of in abstract discussions of the ambiguous term ‘income distribution.’ Although people in the top income brackets and the bottom income brackets — ‘the rich’ and ‘the poor,’ as they are often called — may be discussed as if they were different classes of people, often they are the very same people at different stages of their lives. An absolute majority of those Americans who were in the bottom 20 percent in income in 1975 were also in the top 20 percent at some point over the next 16 years. This is not surprising.”

__________

Excerpted from Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics, a modern conservative’s primer on money and the market economy.

Below, watch the affable 84-year-old discussing the release of the fifth edition of Basic Economics with the Hoover Institution’s Peter Robinson last December.

And there’s more:

  • How Jefferson fostered compromise on the national debt
  • David Ricardo outlines the principle of comparative advantage
  • Arthur Brooks on earning money versus creating value

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Friendship as a Conservative Act

06 Friday Feb 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Essay, Philosophy

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Andrew Sullivan, Conservativism, Essay, Friends, friendship, Matthew Sitman, Michael Oakeshott, On Being Conservative, Philosophy

Michael Oakeshott

“Friends are not concerned with what might be made of one another, but only with the enjoyment of one another; and the condition of this enjoyment is a ready acceptance of what is and the absence of any desire to change or to improve. A friend is not somebody one trusts to behave in a certain manner, who supplies certain wants, who has certain useful abilities, who possesses certain merely agreeable qualities, or who holds certain acceptable opinions; he is somebody who engages the imagination, who excites contemplation, who provokes interest, sympathy, delight and loyalty simply on account of the relationship entered into… The relationship of friend to friend is dramatic, not utilitarian; the tie is one of familiarity, not usefulness; the disposition engaged is conservative, not “progressive.” And what is true of friendship is not less true of other experiences – of patriotism, for example, and of conversation – each of which demands a conservative disposition as a condition of its enjoyment.”

__________

From Michael Oakeshott’s essay “On Being Conservative”.

I found this excerpt in my friend Matthew Sitman’s wonderful short tribute to his friend and colleague Andrew Sullivan, on the day that their blog TheDish, the internet’s best news and commentary hub, wraps up for good. I like all of Matthew’s writing, which I encourage you to follow as he sets off toward greener pastures, though this final paragraph about his business-friendship with Andrew really did it for me today:

I can’t help but feel joy that my friend is leaving blogging behind. His deepest interests are not political, as my own story of meeting and getting to know Andrew should indicate. The daily jousting on the web, however brilliantly he executed it, does not reveal the core of the Andrew I know. Instead, if asked to describe the man, what comes to mind is the time we talked about God hour after hour one sunny Spring day, or the eagerness with which he showed me Provincetown my first visit there. I look forward to the day, soon arriving, when reciting our favorite Philip Larkin poems supplants discussion of web traffic, and when, after going to Mass together, we can converse about Jesus without worrying over Monday morning’s blogging.

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Can We Be Optimistic about America’s Future? (Yes, Says Charles Krauthammer)

02 Monday Jun 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, Politics, Speeches

≈ Comments Off on Can We Be Optimistic about America’s Future? (Yes, Says Charles Krauthammer)

Tags

American, American Government, Bradley Symposium, Charles Krauthammer, Conservativism, FDR, founding fathers, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Freedom, Government, liberty, Otto von Bismarck, political philosophy, politics, Robert P. George, Ronald Reagan, The United States

Charles Krauthammer

“Looking down the road, to the future of the United States, I… I really am, despite the burden of our current problems, optimistic.

If you believe, as I do, in the political ideology of liberty; in the importance of an open civil society, and that the relationship between the citizen and the state should be a limited one, then I think you must believe that, if we can advocate those ideas clearly enough, we will win out in the end. And when you take away the other contaminants — the personalities, the contingencies, the financial crises, the Congressional gridlocks, the things that are confined to ‘the times’ — those ideals will survive for another generation. And that’s why I think, in the end, reality does win out. That’s why I’m confident.

Let me just end by saying that I’ve always had a sense that there is something providential about American history — and this is from somebody who isn’t strictly religious. But here is a nation founded on the edge of civilization by a tiny colony, living on the outskirts of the civilized world — one that, at a time when it needs it, miraculously finds within its borders the most brilliant generation of political thinkers in the history of the world. Then, a century later, when it needs a Lincoln, it finds a Lincoln. Then, in the 20th century, when it needed an FDR to fight and destroy fascism, it found it. When it needed Reagan to revive the country, it found one. And I don’t think there is a Reagan or an FDR on our horizon.

But there’s something about American history that redeems itself in a way that should inspire even the most pessimistic cynic. The way I would summarize the root of this feeling is by quoting my favorite pundit, Otto von Bismarck. He’s not known for his punditry, but he did famously say that, “God looks after four things: children, drunks, idiots… and the United States of America.”

I think he still does. I hope he still does. Thank you.”

__________

Charles Krauthammer, speaking off-the-cuff at the closing of his address to last summer’s Bradley Symposium.

More from Bradley:

  • Princeton professor and reader of this site Robert P. George debates C.K. on the essential question: What was the American Founders’ View of Human Nature?
  • Krauthammer relates an anecdote about Winston Churchill in the restroom

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William F. Buckley on Legalizing Drugs

29 Thursday May 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Politics

≈ Comments Off on William F. Buckley on Legalizing Drugs

Tags

Addiction, Alcohol, Alcoholism, Bordeaux, Cocaine, Conservative, Conservativism, Drug Legalization, Drugs, Freedom, Government, Heroin, interview, justice, Law, Law Enforcement, Legal System, Legalization, Legalizing Drugs, libertarianism, Marijuana, Narcotics, police, politics, Public Health, Public Policy, Richard Heffner, The Open Mind, William F. Buckley, wine

William F. Buckley

“First of all, please don’t confuse my position with that of people who are indifferent to drugs. I’m not indifferent to drugs. I think I’ve been quoted as saying if I could turn a single latch which would make all the drugs disappear from the face of the earth, with the exception of here and there, a vineyard in Bordeaux, I would turn that latch.

Now, you say is it inconsistent for a conservative to take my position. I don’t think it is, because a conservative seeks to be grounded in reality. That which works is quantifiable; that which simply does not work, isn’t. If you were to pass a law requiring people to go to church on Sunday, it wouldn’t work. Under the circumstances, you would eventually simply withdraw such a law. My position on drugs is that our drug laws aren’t working, and that more net damage is being done by their continuation than would be done by withdrawing them from the books. This, as I say, should not be confused as a sanction for drugs. Drugs are a form of escapism, and the damage in taking them is not by any means self-limited. It damages other people also. For that reason, the question is: How do you diminish the net harm done by drugs?[…]

Anybody who becomes an alcoholic, which is probably the primary curse of this country, in my judgment, is morally stigmatized by permitting himself to get into that condition. That is not an argument for prohibition. Adultery is widely practiced. So is fornication. You can simultaneously say it’s morally wrong, but we’re not going to tell the police to open the doors of every motel to find out whether the people inside have marriage licenses.”

__________

William F. Buckley, speaking in an interview on Richard Heffner’s The Open Mind on August 6th, 1996.

More on various vices:

  • Richard Burton discusses how alcohol pushed him to the brink of death
  • Noam Chomsky explains what the lottery can teach us about the drug war
  • Former addict Will Self reflects on the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman

William F Buckley

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Gore Vidal: What ‘Pursuit of Happiness’ Means Today

19 Monday May 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, Politics, Speeches

≈ Comments Off on Gore Vidal: What ‘Pursuit of Happiness’ Means Today

Tags

American Founding, American History, Bill of Rights, Conservativism, Constitution, Declaration of Independence, Federalist Papers, Freedom, Gore Vidal, Government, Law, liberty, Life, Patriarchy, political philosophy, politics, Pursuit of Happiness, Speeches, State of the Union, The Nation, Thomas Jefferson, tyranny

Gore Vidal Portrait Session

“We would together constitute a new nation, founded upon ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ The first two foundation stones were familiar, if vague… ‘The pursuit of happiness’ is the real Joker in the deck. To this day, no one is sure just what Jefferson meant. But I suppose what he had in mind was that government will leave each citizen alone, to develop as best he can in a tranquil climate, to achieve whatever it is that his heart desires, with a minimum of distress to the other pursuers of happiness. This was a revolutionary concept in 1776, and it still is…

Although the Founding Fathers were, to a man, natural conservatives, there were enough Jeffersonian-minded pursuers of happiness among them to realize that so lawyerly a Republic would probably act as a straight jacket to those of an energetic nature. So to ensure the rights of each to pursue happiness, the Bill of Rights was attached to the Constitution. In theory, henceforward, no one need fear the tyranny of either the state or of the majority. Certain of our rights, like the freedom of speech, were said to be inalienable.

But some like to remind us that the right to privacy cannot be found anywhere in the pages of the Constitution, or even in the Federalist Papers… We are told that since the Constitution nowhere says that a citizen has the right to have sex with another citizen, or to take drugs, or to OD on cigarettes — or, as the nation is now doing, on sugar — that the Founders therefore did not license them to do any of these things that may be proscribed by the prejudices of a local majority. But this is an invitation to tyranny…

Was the United States meant to be a patriarchal society? I think the answer is no. Was the United States meant to be a monotheistic society, Christian or otherwise? The answer is no. Religion may be freely practiced here, but religion was deliberately excluded from the political arrangements of our republic…

Each year it is discovered with some alarm that American high school students, when confronted anonymously by the Bill of Rights, neither like it nor approve of it. Our society has made them into true patriots — but not of the idea of a free society, but of a stern patriarchy, where the police have every right to arrest you for just about anything that the state disapproves of. To me the tragedy of the United States in this century is not the crack up of an empire we never knew what to do with in the first place; but the collapse of the idea of the citizen as someone autonomous, whose private life is not subject to orders from above.”

__________

From Gore Vidal’s speech at The Nation’s 125th Anniversary in 1990.

As typically is the case with Vidal, the combination of his intelligence and charm — conveyed as they are in his patrician, cisatlantic tones — masks a scattering of sins of hyperbole and historical judgement. I nevertheless recommend the speech below, and have listened to it twice now — not because of it’s heavy scholarship, but because it’s as heady and sardonic a piece of political theater as you’ll find.

Read on:

  • Vidal’s hilarious, prophetic rebuttal to Bush’s second inaugural
  • Reader of this site Dr. Robert P. George debates Krauthammer on the founders’ views of human nature
  • The greatest debate of all time: Hitchens grapples with Galloway on Iraq

Gore Vidal

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