Filed under: Uncategorized
This is my piece from the past issue of The GW Patriot. It was written as a counter-point to a piece by the president of GW’s YAF (Young America’s Foundation) chapter. That issue can be found here. I’ll post my piece here as well. Enjoy:
Conservative political theorist and literary critic Russell Kirk, writing the introduction to his 1953 classic “The Conservative Mind,” described the state of conservatism then as follows: “By and large, radical thinkers have won the day. For a century and a half, conservatives have yielded ground in a manner which, except for occasionally successful rear-guard actions, must be described as a rout.” Kirk’s work, described by conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. as the primary source of modern conservatism, without which “a dominant conservative movement in America” was inconceivable, tied conservatism to the work of Edmund Burke in Europe and John Adams in the United States. Kirk valued “voluntary community” over “involuntary collectivism,” and cited “the need for prudent restraints upon power and upon human passions” as central to a conservative government. Kirk, who privately suggested that George Bush Sr. be hanged on the front lawn of the White House for America’s first oil war would feel quite out of place in the new (read: neo) conservative movement.
Conservatism has become so distorted that its intellectual fathers would no longer recognize it. Conservatives that claim to adhere to the US Constitution have little to say about the numerous undeclared wars undertaken since World War II. Conservatives that claim to respect our ancestral statesmen bow to globalism and ignore George Washington’s advice to stay out of “the insidious wiles of foreign influence.” Conservatives that believe American world hegemony is essential for world stability–or those that even believe that world stability should be an aim of the American Republic–ignore the words of John Quincy Adams warning America against going “abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” Abraham Lincoln described conservatism as “adherence to the old and tried against the new and untried,” but those words ring hollow against neoconservatism’s gross expansion of government and its complacency in corporate America’s destruction of small-town America.
Since “The Conservative Mind” was published, the decline of conservatism has accelerated, with the relatively short-lived and overrated Reagan years as the primary exception. Liberalism’s ascent continued through the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s, and eventually infiltrated intellectual conservatism itself with the rise of neoconservatism. Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz were two neoconservative thinkers that abandoned the Left due to its moral relativism and insufficiently interventionist foreign policy and found a new home on the Right.
Despite hundreds of years of American foreign policy tradition, from Eisenhower internationalism to Revolution-era isolationism, men such as Kristol and Podhoretz effectively hijacked the Bush White House in the aftermath of 9/11 and replaced those traditions with go-it-alone militarism. Under this new doctrine, the only way America can ensure its safety is by preemptively destroying or isolating any perceived enemy. It requires the maintenance and continued expansion of a vast imperium of military bases stretching the globe, occupying hundreds of countries and expending billions of dollars. Fiscal conservatism be-damned, the New Right looks to continually hike the military budget and build new bases while attacking bills written by politicians such as Jim Webb of Virginia that propose increases in veterans benefits. How is this conservative?
Still left unaddressed is the three trillion dollar War in Iraq, an effective case study in the faults of modern conservatism. Blood shed for material self-interest, billions of dollars unaccounted for, corruption, and plans to build more bases in Iraq for, as the presumptive “conservative” candidate has stated, “fifty to a hundred years,” are all symptoms of the neoconservative rot on the conservative movement. All this, waged by a “compassionate conservative” president that in 2000 promised a “humble foreign policy.”
What about those conservatives that support a rolling back of the American Empire, the shrinking of the American State, adherence to the American tradition of self-accountability—for both individuals and corporations? They are labeled as selfish, small-minded, ignorant, appeasers of Islamofascism. Indeed the term “islamofascism” itself is indicative of the anti-intellectual nature of the movement. Are Americans really supposed to believe that Palestinian nationalists, Sunni Islamist terrorists, Shi’ite radicals, Ba’athist insurgents, and the government of Iran are all homogenous in the threat they pose to the United States? Yet my friends at the Young Americans Foundation hold their “Islamofascism Awareness Week” every year, meant only to stir the hornets nest of progressive activists on campus.
The GW Patriot is different. At the Patriot one finds an intellectually diverse group of students, from anarcho-libertarians to backwards-traditionalists to Republican party hacks to Forever War supporters. We argue and debate amongst ourselves, but are (almost) always congenial and intellectual. And we hope to offer a forum for non-leftists of any stripe to voice their opinions, no matter how uncouth or taboo they may be. We also hope to offer a unique perspective on campus events. From the SA presidential race to inner-CR politics to race-baiting on campus, the Patriot serves to open minds and stir controversy. The Patriot has done this for almost seven years, and will continue to do so for as long as we are allowed to.
