House of Eratosthenes

Dennis Prager starts out writing a column about global warming, and ends up writing a column about other stuff. The central topic is how, and why, liberals and conservatives go about confronting problems in different ways, and how it comes to pass that they end up confronting entirely different problems. His theory is that conservatives confront big meaningful problems like communism and totalitarianism, and liberals confront petty, meaningless bullshit.

People who don’t confront the greatest evils will confront far lesser ones. Most humans know the world is morally disordered — and socially conscious humans therefore try to fight what they deem to be most responsible for that disorder. The Right tends to fight human evil such as communism and Islamic totalitarianism. The Left avoids confronting such evils and concentrates its attention instead on socioeconomic inequality, environmental problems and capitalism. Global warming meets all three of these criteria of evil. By burning fossil fuels, rich countries pollute more, the environment is being despoiled and big business increases its profits.

It’s a good, logical, meaty article. If I could offer one critique, and it’s probably a critique that is meaningless once you factor in that Prager has to come in under a strict word-count for his material, whereas I labor under no such restriction — it would be good to analyze, further, how & why this came about. Our country, after all, is over two centuries old. It has always had a left and a right. And yet it didn’t always have Republicans and it didn’t always have Democrats. The left and the right, at one time or another, were each more concerned about equality between the races than their opposites. They have, at one time or another, each been more concerned about spreading democracy throughout the world than their opposites. Even today you can come up with some issues on which conservatives seem to be apathetic to issues related to privacy and freedom, and you can come up with some other issues on which liberals show equivalent apathy to equivalent concerns.

What’s the consistent theme, going all the way back to the days after Washington’s Farewell Address, when our First President’s words were promptly forgotten and the hobgoblin of partisan politics was born, when the Federalists were on the left and Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans were on the right?

I think it is this:

Throughout the 210-or-so years of partisan politics, people on the “right” labor under a theory that “evil” has a pinpoint-precise definition. It doesn’t represent malicious intentions, quite so much as a set of principles whose exercise results in policies deleterious to the harmony of mankind, and destined to be everlastingly so. And the core among these principles resulting in injury to the harmony of mankind, is that some people are masters, and other people are drones. The people we call “conservatives” are people who point out the simple dictum that when we proceed forward from this premise, that some people are masters and other people are drones, all the world over the ultimate result is always death, or at the very least, wasted human opportunity on a massive scale. The conservative axiom is that this must always be the case; it cannot turn out any other way.

Federalists wanted the federal government to have strong authority, via legislation such as the Alien and Sedition Act, while the opinions of people and the sovereign states were ignored. Southern Democrats wanted slavery to be kept in place, while the fundamental human rights of the slaves were ignored. Franklin Roosevelt wanted tailors to be thrown in jail if they charged more than 35 cents for hemming a shirt, while the principles of the free market were ignored. Lyndon Johnson wanted a Great Society in which the sovereign rights of the states were ignored. Throughout the eighties and nineties, liberals were all about raising taxes, which would mean the drones labor onward year after year, giving up huge pieces of their lives for the benefit of The Queen, who is kept in power making arbitrary decisions about how the lucre will be spent. Under Clinton we had “hate crime legislation,” so that now The Queen could make decisions about how these little drones should be thinking, punishing them if they didn’t think the right way.

It all has to do with whether we are Lord and Master of our destinies. All of us, right down to the lowliest among us. Are we cells of a larger organism, unable to make weighty decisions unless we’ve been vested into an office fit for such things, or are we sovereign beings as individuals, all of us, right down to the ugliest pariahs. People on the “right,” since the John Adams administration, say of course we are sovereign beings. If we are not, what was the point of America in the first place?

That is the “conservative” message — the “liberal” message is simply a lot of stuff that distracts from it. Hey look, 2500 dead soldiers in Iraq. Hey look, Al Gore has a movie out about global warming. Hey look, Bush has been spying on “ordinary Americans.” Hey look, Cheney worked for Halliburton. Hey look, our “allies” don’t look favorably upon us. Hey look, President Bush just choked on a pretzel because he’s so stupid. Hey look, Jesse Jackson says vicious attack dogs kept poor blacks from voting in Florida.

This, I think, is why Prager is seeing what he is seeing. His article is made all the more durable, because this is a situation that has remained unchanged for two centuries, while so much other substance has changed drastically. Conservatives believe we have God-given rights — because an important part of the conservative movement, is people who believe in God — including the personal right to make boneheaded decisions. Ronald Reagan famously said, and I believe this captures the spirit of the conservative movement, back to 1797: “I don’t believe in a government that protects us from ourselves.” Life is a car, and each person who owns that life, is the driver — let his hand, and his alone, be upon the steering wheel. Let the government get involved when he smacks into, or threatens the safety of, other cars — or when others vandalize his tires, gas tank or battery cables. Not one minute before.

One day, our grandchildren may ask us what we did when Islamic fascism threatened the free world. Some of us will say we were preoccupied with fighting that threat wherever possible; others will be able to say they fought carbon dioxide emissions. One of us will look bad.

There ya go.

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This Is Good IXTuesday, June 20th, 2006

This Is Good IX
Tuesday, June 20th, 2006