I nearly had a spit-take with my morning cereal today, as I read George Will’s latest fecal throw published in the Palm Beach Post (but found online through the Washington Post — subscription may be required).
Entitled “The Case for Conservatism,” Will makes a series of ridiculous and unfounded statements, conclusions, and accusations to prop up his paper-thin argument that, basically, conservatives are teh kewl and libruls are teh suck. Seriously, a high school debate team member could take apart his argument in ten minutes.
Fortunately (and you knew this was coming), I was on my high school debate team, so I’m eminently qualified to take Will on. Here’s how he begins:
Conservatism’s recovery of its intellectual equilibrium requires a confident explanation of why America has two parties and why the conservative one is preferable. Today’s political argument involves perennial themes that give it more seriousness than many participants understand. The argument, like Western political philosophy generally, is about the meaning of, and the proper adjustment of the tension between, two important political goals — freedom and equality.
Today conservatives tend to favor freedom, and consequently are inclined to be somewhat sanguine about inequalities of outcomes. Liberals are more concerned with equality, understood, they insist, primarily as equality of opportunity, not of outcome.
Liberals tend, however, to infer unequal opportunities from the fact of unequal outcomes. Hence liberalism’s goal of achieving greater equality of condition leads to a larger scope for interventionist government to circumscribe the market’s role in allocating wealth and opportunity. Liberalism increasingly seeks to deliver equality in the form of equal dependence of more and more people for more and more things on government.
I swear to Jeebus, I will never understand how conservatives can argue that they, and not liberals, “tend to favor freedom,” thereby insinuating that liberals do not favor freedom. First of all, George, “equality” is not the opposite of “freedom.” Indeed, freedom ought to beget equality — not necessarily equality of wealth, but certainly equality of opportunity (as in “the pursuit of happiness” — perhaps you’re familiar with that turn of phrase?). Secondly, how can any ideology that, in its current American incarnation through the Republic Party, advocates intrusion into a woman’s right to choose what’s best for her own body and into the rights of consenting adults to engage in personal relations with whomever and however they want, successfully argue that they are on the side of “freedom?” It’s patently absurd on its face.
Later, Will spews onward:
Steadily enlarging dependence on government accords with liberalism’s ethic of common provision, and with the liberal party’s interest in pleasing its most powerful faction — public employees and their unions. Conservatism’s rejoinder should be that the argument about whether there ought to be a welfare state is over. Today’s proper debate is about the modalities by which entitlements are delivered. Modalities matter, because some encourage and others discourage attributes and attitudes — a future orientation, self-reliance, individual responsibility for healthy living — that are essential for dignified living in an economically vibrant society that a welfare state, ravenous for revenue in an aging society, requires.
This reasoning is congruent with conservatism’s argument that excessively benevolent government is not a benefactor, and that capitalism does not merely make people better off, it makes them better. Liberalism once argued that large corporate entities of industrial capitalism degraded individuals by breeding dependence, passivity and servility. Conservatism challenges liberalism’s blindness about the comparable dangers from the biggest social entity, government.
A democratic government, which may be viewed as “excessively benevolent” from Will’s warped perspective, exists to protect its citizens from “the power of concentrated wealth,” as Euphronius puts it. Indeed, the true “dangers,” George, are from that concentrated wealth and from the government that refuses to protect its citizens from it; that is, a government that enables and supports the unbridled collection and exploitation of that wealth. In short, that’s the government we have today, via our Halliburton-soaked executive branch.
Racial preferences are the distilled essence of liberalism, for two reasons. First, preferences involve identifying groups supposedly disabled by society — victims who, because of their diminished competence, must be treated as wards of government. Second, preferences vividly demonstrate liberalism’s core conviction that government’s duty is not to allow social change but to drive change in the direction the government chooses. Conservatism argues that the essence of constitutional government involves constraining the state in order to allow society ample scope to spontaneously take unplanned paths.
At long last, Mr. Will, have you no shame? Is there no argument that you will not present through the looking glass to try to prop up your tripe?
How can anyone reasonably assert that liberalism is a foe of social change? Were it not for liberalism, there would have been no civil rights movement, no women’s suffrage, no defeat of slavery. The very definition of conservatism is to oppose change, be it social, economic, cultural, or political. Your argument here fails ab initio, George.
Will’s conclusion is about as heinous as it gets:
Conservatism embraces President Kennedy’s exhortation to “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country,” and adds: You serve your country by embracing a spacious and expanding sphere of life for which your country is not responsible.
Here is the core of a conservative appeal, without dwelling on “social issues” that should be, as much as possible, left to “moral federalism” — debates within the states. On foreign policy, conservatism begins, and very nearly ends, by eschewing abroad the fatal conceit that has been liberalism’s undoing domestically — hubris about controlling what cannot, and should not, be controlled.Conservatism is realism, about human nature and government’s competence. Is conservatism politically realistic, meaning persuasive? That is the kind of question presidential campaigns answer.
How dare you, Mr. Will, quote President Kennedy as support for conservatism? I know your hero, Drunky McStagger, has moved this country so far to the right that Nixon seems liberal today. But to soil the memory of John F. Kennedy with the filth of conservatism borders on heresy, not to mention complete historical inaccuracy.
And your “addition” is merely a means to allow the rich white guys who wank themselves into a conservative frenzy to justify their actions, which basically means ignoring those who are less fortunate and rejecting any concern about the future. “We’ve got ours,” you, George, and your fellow conservatives say, “so the rest of you can fend for yourselves.”
I don’t really believe conservatism is as you say it is, George; it certainly isn’t “realism,” for conservatives today are about as divorced from reality as one can be (see, e.g., New Orleans and Drunky’s response to Katrina). I don’t believe someone like Barry Goldwater would agree with you, either. Your conservatism is an angry, frustrated, fatuous, uncaring, impotent ideology, and its adherents are similarly situated.
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