The Folly of the Conservative
In the 2014 film ‘The Judge’ Robert Duvall and Robert Downey Jr. represent two poles of the legal system where Duvall plays a hard-bitten conservative judge who kills a man who through his mistake murdered a 16 year old local girl and Downey plays his high-flying defence counsel son. In ‘The Judge’ we see Duvall desperately cling onto the legal system in the belief that the system is always right and just and will exonerate him because of well… justice. Only to find this belief in the absolute justice of the legal system shown to be nothing more than a legal fiction because – as Joseph de Maistre might put it – the system exists as the representation of the power of the state not as a neutral judge handing down blind justice and therefore is neither neutral or blind but rather extremely partisan.
The film ends with Duvall’s character Judge Joseph Palmer being imprisoned for four years by the state because he refuses to let this fictitious belief go and continually incriminates himself by absolute honesty while the system gleefully uses this honesty to crucify him. It is only through the efforts of Downey’s character Henry ‘Hank’ Palmer that his father is saved from the death sentence on the charge of murder in the first degree.
The message is clear in so far as conservativism is a belief – I wouldn’t even go as far as to call it a philosophy – that rests upon the blind adherence to the fiction that things would be better ‘if only’ such and such was kept as it is or returned to. It is not a coherent belief system in and of itself but rather an attempt to hold back the evolution of society and culture by holding it in stasis.
This belief in stasis is usually supported by some kind of vague religiosity – Christian or otherwise – whereby it is claimed that if only ‘we prayed more’ and did less of X, Y and/or Z then things would be ‘different’. The reality is of course that every ideal worthy of the name must revolutionize society and then proceed to evolve based on its own ideological premises or abandoned those ideological premises to become a new ideal.
Yet this ideal must not only be alive but energetic. Conservatism is by its very vagueness not even an ideal, but a kind of fossilized superstition that bases itself not on real change and putting into practice what it preaches. Rather it is an attempt by its adherents to retard socio-cultural as well as economic change not because said changes are bad or will result in evil consequences, but rather because the conservatives themselves don’t want those changes to occur before they die.
Why is this?
Conservatives are the NIMBYs of politics and rather than embracing new ideas or revitalizing older ones. They simply sit down on the ground and scream ‘No! You can’t do that! I forbid it!’ until they are blue in the face.
They don’t say why it would be a bad idea or result in evil consequences but rather squeal about how ‘when they were young’ it was ‘different’/’better’. They want the economic and technological benefits of modernity, but they refuse to comprehend that they must evolve or die. Yet conservatism does evolve but not in the way of a vital ideology such as National Socialism.
The Catholic philosopher Fulton Sheen understood just when this when he declared that:
‘Every Liberal is a reactionary; he is in reaction to the last form of liberalism.’ (1)
What Sheen is telling us is that liberalism and conservatism are two broad ‘big tents’ of those people who want change for the sake of change (Liberalism) and those who don’t want change for the sake of not wanting change (Conservatism).
Neither camp have an actual ideology but rather they are acting in opposition to one another and that the action of ‘conservatism’ on liberalism merely produces a new slightly less liberal synthesis, which in turn means that the ‘new’ ‘conservatives’ of any era are merely the liberals of the prior era not proponents of a new vital philosophy.
The father of neo-conservative thought James Burnham, for example, understood just this when he declared that liberalism not conservatism was the true weltanschauung (= worldview) of the United States (2) and that nationalism is ‘antithetical’ to this liberalism (i.e. ‘conservatism’). (3) Burnham understand that it was not ‘conservatism’ that was the true enemy of liberalism but rather National Socialism. (4)
Burnham was quite right to declare that National Socialism was the true enemy of liberalism and also made it very clear that National Socialism is not a form of conservatism, (5) because – as Sheen points out – National Socialism absorbs the individual into the totality of one’s race and thus places the emphasis on the collective good of the race – the actual meaning of ‘Socialism’ in National Socialism – rather than the purely individual good. (6)
Conservatism and liberalism both adhere to the principle of the individual good and not collective good and oppose vital ideologies (such as National Socialism) as well as fossilized ones (such as Marxism) that place the emphasis on the collective not the individual good.
Sheen states that:
‘Nature is concerned only with the species. Individuals may perish by the millions, but nature is indifferent as long as species keep their pattern. Humanity, however, is concerned with persons, not with species, and each person has sovereign, inalienable rights and is just as important as any other person in the world.’ (7)
What Sheen fails to cogently explain is where these ‘sovereign, inalienable rights’ come from – other than blithely claiming they ‘come from God’ – or why any individual ‘is as important as any other’.
The nineteenth century French philosopher Joseph de Maistre might be forgiven for raucously laughing from the heavens at Sheen’s presumptive claims in defence of ‘Christian individualism’.
Since he rightly pointed out – as I am sure Sheen as a Professor of Philosophy himself was well aware – in his 1814 ‘Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions’ that:
‘No constitution results from deliberation; the rights of the people are never written, or never except as simple declarations of pre-existing rights not written, of which nothing more can be said than that they exist because they exist.’ (8)
When Sheen fails to point out and answer is the challenge laid down by de Maistre in that an individual cannot have rights for the sake of having rights, but rather these must have been ‘generated’ from somewhere and there is no evidence beyond blind assertion and credulous belief that these were ‘generated’ by God.
Instead de Maistre points out that these were ‘generated’ autonomously by the needs of the state and were not ‘given by God’:
‘The rights of the people, properly so called, proceed almost always from the concessions of sovereigns, and then it is possible to trace them historically; but the rights of the sovereign and of the aristocracy, have neither date nor known authors.
These concessions themselves have always been preceded by a state of things which rendered them necessary, and which did not depend on the sovereign.’ (9)
Therefore when we look back to the quintessentially conservative behaviour of Robert Duvall’s character in ‘The Judge’ we can see that his absolute trust in ‘blind justice’ and the legally neutral position of the state is based on the false assumption that the state is only the blind instrument of some undefinable, ineffable ‘right to justice’ rather than the origin of both what ‘justice’ is and how said ‘justice’ is executed.
This is the folly of conservatism in that it is a belief that is not based on the cold, hard reality of the situation, but rather on the nostalgic self-congratulatory belief that things ‘used to be better’ and thus should be a certain way. It ignores the fact that ‘justice’ is not blind or neutral and that it is the state – not anything else – that determines what ‘justice’ is and how it is to be carried out.
Indeed as Sheen points out; just because things are traditional or new does not mean they are actually right or the truth (10) despite liberalism’s generalized hostility to whatever it perceives to be such. (11)
Instead we must look at things based not upon what upon we would like to believe but rather on what is objectively true. Sheen himself gets very close to this in the aforementioned passage when he states that:
‘Nature is concerned only with the species. Individuals may perish by the millions, but nature is indifferent as long as species keep their pattern. Humanity, however, is concerned with persons, not with species, and each person has sovereign, inalienable rights and is just as important as any other person in the world.’ (12)
The first part of Sheen’s paragraph shows that he understands that nature is not concerned with individuals only the species and that the life and wishes of an individual must by their very nature be sublimated to the needs and objectives of the species.
Yet he radically veers away from the logical conclusion that the concept of ‘humanity’ is functionally irrelevant – much as the belief that every ant is really an autonomous individual and cannot be classified or understood as working for the greater good of his or her ant colony – and that what matters is man as part of nature not the nonsensical idea that man is above nature.
If we but view man as a part of nature rather than being above nature per de Maistre’s points about the state autonomously generating ‘rights’ and that these rights are enforced not by some external inalienable ‘right’ from above but rather by the ruler’s use of ‘might’ – as explained in the famous and much reprinted 1896 book ‘Might is Right’ – then it necessary follows that the foundation of all ‘rights’ is the state and that the foundation of the state is its ability to enforce its will.
As the German thinker Friedrich von Bernhardi noted:
‘Might gives the right to occupy and conquer’ (13) because struggle is the only truly universal law of nature (14) and the simple fact that – to quote the sixteenth century Italian theologian Lorenzo Scupoli – ‘our entire life on earth is [one of] continual warfare.’ (15)
Hilaire Belloc – following others such as Bernhardi (16) as well as Burnham himself - (17) understood that struggle and conflict is the only true medium by which human affairs are settled be they between individuals, states and/or nations. (18) This is because – as Sheen notes - ‘the world judges us by results’ not by our intentions or what we claim we would have done. (19)
When there is no conflict and no warfare then there is no struggle and without struggle there cannot be evolution and without evolution then we will not survive any change in our environment.
This inability to evolve to meet a new situation leads to the simple conclusion – stated again by Sheen – that ‘nations are not often murdered; they more often commit suicide.’ (20)
In other words; when we talk about the state and its success and failure we must see things not in terms of simple success or failure of policies but rather as a failure to read the situation and adapt.
This in itself is a peculiar problem of so-called ‘representative democracies’ so beloved of modern ‘conservative’ in that the concept is an ideal which does not - and indeed cannot - exist because human nature and competition for resources – as Edward Wilson observed in his ground-breaking book ‘Sociobiology’ – render it a social impossibility. Due to this ‘representative democracies’ inevitably slide further and further into a combination of open plutocracy (rule by the few) and hidden kleptocracy (rule by thieves).
Since to quote the anti-communist conservative lawyer Donald Johnson: ‘mass approval is the basis of dictatorship: and not, in itself, of democracy.’ (21)
The realities of governance are that only a strong authoritarian non-democratic government can offer what Sheen calls the ‘three Ps’ that the people desire: ‘Power, Police and Politics’. (22)
In other words what people truly want is: to have their say and to have it enforced by the state.
It is by fulfilling the desires of the people (i.e. mass approval aka plebiscitary democracy) that the non-democratic authoritarian state continues to rule while so-called ‘representative democracies’ merely create vague parties who are ‘rigidly organised political machines with a tendency to get large majorities’. (23) That isn’t ‘listening to the people’ or ‘letting them have their say’ any more than herding cattle into a slaughterhouse is natural selection.
People choose their leaders for what they believe they will do for them rather than for any idealistic reason or commitment to anyone ‘party’ per se. (24) Party loyalty such as it is absolutely nothing to do with idealism among the vast majority of the population but rather a conviction that should such a leader – as people vote for the person in charge not for the party’s swathe of faceless political bureaucrats – (25) get ‘into office’ then they will be rewarded with what they want (aka the ‘rent seeking’ of the French proto-libertarian philosopher Frederic Bastiat).
To paraphrase the American classicist Revilo Oliver: ‘representative democracy’ boils down to stampeding the public through polling stations with big, glossy photos of prospective ‘leaders’ every few years. (27)
Therefore only the non-democratic authoritarian state is – contrary to received wisdom which is actually the gas-lighting of the people by the modern kleptocratic plutocracy via the medium of ‘political parties’ – truly democratic in that it is plebiscitary – as ancient Athenian democracy was – and goes direct to the people rather than through the bureaucratic intermediary of the ‘political party’.
National Socialism did just this when it repeatedly went direct to the German people – rather than asking the ‘representatives of the people’ in the Reichstag – such as on 12 November 1933 (for approval of Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations), 19 August 1934 (for approval for Hitler to become the President of Germany), 29 March 1936 (for approval to re-militarize the Rhineland) and 10 April 1938 (for approval to incorporate Austria into the Third Reich).
When was the last time that the federal government directly asked you for an opinion on its foreign policy?
Not recently I’d wager.
That is the beauty of true democracy: it doesn’t require bloated, bureaucratic political parties as so many so-called ‘conservatives’ are keen on despite claiming to be the champions of ‘limited government’.
The fact that so many so-called ‘conservatives’ who champion ‘limited government’ ardently support a system – ‘representative democracy’ - that intrinsically lends itself to the creation of multiple unwieldy bloated highly bureaucratic organizations – political parties, the courts, government departments, non-governmental organizations, quangos to name but a few - is ironic and demonstrates yet again – as we saw with the failure of ‘conservative’ thinkers like Burnham and Sheen to apply their own thought – that ‘conservatives’ do not (and will not) practice what they preach and are in fact just old school liberals who really don’t care about transgender bathrooms so long as they are installed after they die.
You can see this again in the fact that the ‘conservatives’ have consistently failed to implement their own ‘anti-immigration’ policies that are necessarily predicated on maintaining on a racially homogenous country – otherwise anti-immigration policies don’t make much sense other than as a limiter to state expenditure on social security/benefits/poor relief – but yet also harp on about ‘humanity’ while simultaneously preaching the ‘supremacy of the individual’.
For example Sheen talks about how: ‘an attack from the outside solidifies a nation and strengths its moral fibre.’ (27)
But then makes an appeal to individuality when faced with other political ideas which ‘solidify the nation and strengthen its moral fibre’:
‘The totalitarian views of Nazism, Fascism and Communism are wrong for they assume that the individual man is intrinsically corrupt and can be made tame, docile and obedient only by the force of the collectivity enshrined in a dictator.’ (28)
And then suddenly when Sheen wants people to be a collective – i.e. in obedient service to the Roman Catholic Church – they are ‘not mere individuals in religion’ (29) and must obey ‘Christ’s law’ before the laws of the states in which they reside. (30)
In other words: Sheen wants to have his cake (i.e. individualism when it suits him) and eat it too (i.e. collectivism when it suits him) rather than the more rational view trumpeted by National Socialism that we are individuals who submit ourselves to the state as part of a social contract without any intrinsic ‘human rights’ beyond the only one that can be said to exist in nature: the right to revolt.
Nor is Sheen alone in thinking this as von Bernardi railed against this kind of solipsistic thinking using the veneer of ‘superior morals’ in the early twentieth century. (31) After all – as Johnson points out – for the honest ‘conservative’ as well as the honest liberal ‘national race pride’ (i.e. National Socialism) is far more dangerous than communism or capitalism. (32)
The reason for this is simple in that National Socialism – in whatever form it takes and has often been used with a superficially Marxist veneer by sub-humans in Asia, Africa and Latin America – (33) ‘solidifies the nation and strengthens its moral fibre’ by not only recognizing the national struggle – rather than mere bartering – that characterizes every aspect of foreign policy but also that internal enemies of the nation must be neutralized in order to ensure that they cannot work against national interests.
Indeed as Sheen himself states (and as usual doesn’t apply the thought): ‘The balance and the equilibrium of the whole system is disturbed when an organ is divorced from its function in the whole organism, or divorced from its higher purpose.’ (34)
In order for the system to work effectively it has to remove the impediments to its function from the inside as well as the outside. This includes those who are not part of the nation – i.e. not of the same race – as the only way the state can connect with and represent the people it governs (i.e. true democracy) is when like governs like. Hence why you cannot put a lion in charge on a herd of gazelle or a gazelle in charge of a pride of lions and expect social harmony.
‘Conservatives’ and liberals alike usually begin screeching about ‘political repression’ and ‘dictatorship’ at this point – another indication if one were needed that they are essentially the same group – and fail to recognize that every state that has ever existed has done this.
Hence why we have entities like the FBI and the Secret Service in the United States, MI5 and Special Branch in the UK and so on. Yet all these so-called ‘conservatives’ and liberals with their ‘inviolable principles’ are not upset about them: why?
Because they do not target them and make them responsible for their words and deeds.
For example when a ‘free market conservative’ stands up and advocates a ‘free trade agreement’ with China that will result in American men and women losing their jobs, American businesses being subject to dumping from China’s slave labour economy, a decrease in American tax revenues and so on.
Is said ‘free market conservative’ not the definition of a traitor to America?
The difference between them and say an Islamist is that the Islamist wants to destroy America to subject it to the rule of Islam where-as the ‘free market conservatives’ wants to destroy America so they can get rich quickly (and screw America).
There is little difference in reality as one uses force and the other ‘policy recommendations’.
Why would you arrest one and not the other?
You wouldn’t right?
I mean who wouldn’t want to see Elizabeth Warren in a court room, wearing a jump suit and on trial for her life?
Yet so-called ‘conservatives’ don’t want this.
Why?
Because they are liberals at heart who serve merely to provide the illusion of choice to the people.
After all when was the last time that so-called ‘conservatives’ actually did anything other than talk a big game?
The only political philosophy that understands this implicitly and took action accordingly is National Socialism as Burnham himself recognized. (35)
This is why Robert Duvall’s character in ‘The Judge’ is such an adroit characterization of what ‘conservatism’ is, because he – like every so-called ‘conservative’ from William Buckley Jr. to Charlie Kirk - fails to understand is that in order to make an omelette you have to break some eggs.
They don’t want to break eggs because to do so would mean that they’d have to recognize that their much loved romantic delusions of ‘individuality’ and ‘humanity’ are their version of the Emperor’s new clothes.
National Socialists on the other hand are not afraid to break as many eggs as is necessary to make a good omelette and that is why National Socialists are not of the right or of the left but rather work on different axes all together.
That is also why National Socialism - and only National Socialism - gets shit done.
Unlike Donald Trump.
(1) Fulton Sheen, 1954, ‘Life Is Worth Living’, 2nd Edition, Ignatius Press: San Francisco, p. 182
(2) James Burnham, 1986, ‘Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism’, 2nd Edition, Regnery: Chicago, p. 44
(3) Ibid, p. 85
(4) Ibid, p. 206
(5) Ibid, p. 33
(6) Sheen, Op. Cit., p. pp. 277-278
(7) Ibid, p. 179
(8) Joseph de Maistre, 1847, [1814], ‘Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions’, 1st Edition, Little and Brown: Boston, Preface
(9) Ibid.
(10) Sheen, Op. Cit., p. 181
(11) Burnham, ‘Suicide’, Op. Cit., pp. 59; 62-63
(12) Sheen, Op. Cit., p. 179
(13) Friedrich von Bernhardi, 1914, ‘Germany and the Next War’, 1st Edition, Edward Arnold: London, p. 23
(14) Ibid, p. 21
(15) Dom Lorenzo Scupoli, 2010, ‘The Spiritual Combat and A Treatise on Peace of Soul’, 1st Edition, Tan: Charlotte, p. 193
(16) Bernhardi, Op. Cit., pp. 18-19
(17) James Burnham, 1950, ‘The Coming Defeat of Communism’, 1st Edition, Jonathan Cape: London, pp. 42; 67; 71
(18) Hilaire Belloc, 1937, ‘The Crusade: The World’s Debate’, 1st Edition, Cassell: London, p. 3
(19) Fulton Sheen, 2004, [1939], ‘Victory Over Vice’, 1st Edition, Sophia Institute Press: Manchester, p. 90
(20) Fulton Sheen, 1949, ‘Peace of Soul’, 1st Edition, Ligouri: Missouri, p. 180
(21) Donald Johnson, 1948, ‘The Ends of Socialism: The Reflections of a Radical’, 2nd Edition, Christopher Johnson: London, p. 133; restated in different form by Burnham, ‘Coming Defeat’, Op. Cit., p. 78
(22) Sheen, ‘Peace of Soul’, Op. Cit., p. 10
(23) Johnson, Op. Cit., p. 164
(24) Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, 1973, ‘Letters from inside the Italian Communist Party to Louis Althusser’, 1st Edition, NLB: London, pp. 41; 46; 64
(25) Ibid, p. 10
(26) Revilo Oliver, 2006, ‘America’s Decline: The Education of a Conservative’, 2nd Edition, Historical Review Press: Uckfield, p. 74
(27) Fulton Sheen, 2008, [1953], ‘Way to Happiness’, 1st Edition, Alba House: New York, p. 93
(28) Fulton Sheen, 2014, [1946], ‘Remade for Happiness: Achieving Life’s Purpose Through Spiritual Transformation’, 1st Edition, Ignatius Press: San Francisco, p. 33
(29) Ibid, p. 100
(30) Ibid, p. 107
(31) von Bernardi, Op. Cit., p. 25
(32) Johnson, Op. Cit., p. 148
(33) Roy Laird, Betty Laird, 1970, ‘Soviet Communism and Agrarian Revolution’, 1st Edition, Penguin: London, pp. 115-116
(34) Sheen, ‘Victory over Vice’, Op. Cit., p. 39
(35) Burnham, ‘Coming Defeat’, Op. Cit., p. 80
