Political theory

What is tyranny? There are obvious examples, but like other obvious things it can be hard to say what’s there when you press the point. Is PC tyranny? The patriarchy? Determinate being as such? All those things can seem horribly oppressive depending on which way you’re pointed. Like every other judgment, a judgment that something is a tyranny depends on your overall scheme of what makes sense, what’s worth while and what life should be like.

A correspondent passed on the following comment by another reader of my essay “The Tyranny of Liberalism”:

Guys like Julius Caesar and Hegel got places by dividing things into three parts, so I thought I’d do my own three-part division of liberal tyranny:

Here are some further unsystematic thoughts noted down while reading Political Liberalism:

1. Rawls presents himself as a theorist of democratic society. That is a misnomer. It is not the people who rule in a society in which basic issues are all resolved in advance by Rawls and other experts and the solutions enforced by coercive bureaucratic machinery in all significant social relations. There are of course democratic elements that differentiate advanced liberal society from Soviet society. Many important specifics (e.g.,the exact features of the welfare system) are determined politically, and the people could if sufficiently outraged exert a veto that would remain effective as long as the outrage lasts. Such elements are important and provide something of a reality check that helps keep the system comparatively rational. They hardly make the system a democracy though.

As punishment for my sins (which must be scarlet indeed) I’ve been obliged once again to read John Rawls’s Political Liberalism. Some comments (further comments as always are welcome):

1. Rawls was evidently an extremely careful and hardworking man. He is said to have been quite shy. I met him once in a group, and would add “very awkward with people he didn’t know.” So far as I can tell, he was a classic nerd, an Asperger type who compensated for social cluelessness by conscientiousness, altruism and continual attempts at outreach.

The tyranny of liberalism is mostly a tyranny of ideas. It’s not completely disembodied, of course. Like every tyranny it’s run in a way consistent with the tyrants’ power and profit. The professional and managerial classes and bureaucratic and financial interests that maintain it benefit from the conversion of informal traditional arrangements into bureaucratic and market institutions. It’s the ideological justification for their rule.

Still, the means are mostly gentle. Diversity coordinators and federal judges may act badly but on the whole they’re not physically terrifying or brutal. They believe in what they’re doing, and people believe them or anyway don’t know how to resist what they say. The basic problem is that the advanced liberal state always wins because even people who object to it have trouble rejecting its claims coherently. After all, it bases itself on freedom and equality, so those who oppose it presumptively favor slavery and oppression.

What is liberalism?

The view that equal freedom is the highest public standard, and that society should be a rational arrangement to put that standard into effect.

How can liberalism be tyrannical?

“Tyranny” is usurped and abused power. The goals of liberalism are comprehensive, and it views them as a simple matter of justice and rationality. It rejects social and religious traditions, and understandings of society and human nature, that set final limits to those goals. Liberalism is therefore progressive, it always wants more, and it recognizes no ultimate limiting principle. Its demands become ever more far-reaching and the means it uses more and more comprehensive and intrusive.

I was discussing America, the Constitution, the liturgy and the Roman Catholicism with an Anglican and Americanist friend. It occurred to me that the issues were all related, so I decided I’d put them somewhat together. On the liturgy I said (in an edited way):

My vote for the Novus Ordo for now would be to improve the way it’s done—improve the translations, have the priest once again face the same direction everyone else faces, and put more and more of it back in Latin. That would be very much in line with what Vatican II said should be done, and it could be carried out without any formal changes in liturgical rules if bishops and priests liked the idea and decided to take it piece by piece. If you don’t have support in the clergy for this kind of stuff you’re not likely to get anywhere anyway.

A minor upset (my guess is that it rippled from this situation to this comment) suggests once again the question of whether a purely conservative conservatism, one based simply on attachment to habits and attitudes that seem to work out to the general satisfaction of those involved, is possible as a practical matter. My answer is “no.” Some observations:

• By saying “no” I don’t mean it’s impossible for pure conservatives to exist or have an effect, or that they deserve insult. What I mean is that such views don’t make for a conservatism that’s going to go anywhere, that offers hope for bringing about a re-orientation of society away from libertine statism and toward personal responsibility, limited government, local social cohesion, and a stable and predominantly self-organizing way of life that most people find satisfying. To my mind the kind of conservatism we need today is one that presents a basis for social order, and purely conservative conservatism doesn’t do that.

Here’s another way to state the problem with liberalism: Judith Sklar speaks of the “liberalism of fear,” Leo Strauss says modern politics tries to build solidly by aiming low, and I say moderns try to come up with machines based on principles that can be fully grasped and give reliable results. Put those points together, and it seems that the basic liberal impulse is to base government on a few simple principles designed to prevent evils like slavery and religious persecution, and also to promote basic material goods like prosperity. Government, the thought is, should be rendered controllable and harmless by strictly limiting it. Goals other than the political goals of liberalism can then be treated as matters of luck or private choice and effort.

Old friends continue to complain that I’m not making sense. Here’s a comment on my most recent post from a second friend (who cc’d the first friend):

A friend complains about the following passage in my last entry:

During the Middle Ages Europe was loosely organized politically—there was no conception of state sovereignty—and it recognized a universal Church that in principle was superior to political authorities and in practice could sometimes influence and so limit them. In early modern times Europe moved from that state of affairs to one in which the state was supreme.

The ever-active Steve Sailer has an explanation I hadn’t seen before of why Larry Summers crumpled immediately in the face of unprincipled abuse from academic female PC profiteers.