Our conservatives are either market liberals -- Nozick, Rothbard, Epstein, Posner, etc., or statists, who don't care about any tradition except keeping the rich and powerful rich and powerful by concentrating power in the hands of the state. Cheney and his crew were of this gang. Their slogan is I Got Mine.
It is true, of course, that constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.
-- gee that's pretty good, I should write that up!
But the conservative objection to all that is now ossified among the communitarians, some of whom, like Michael Walzer, area actually socialists. The communitarians had minor presences in both the Clinton (William Galston, Amati Etzioni) and Bush II (Melvin Olasky, John DiLulio) administrations, but they're not exactly a material force that grips the masses. (Like we should talk.)
Andie
--- On Mon, 9/14/09, farmelantj at juno.com <farmelantj at juno.com> wrote:
> From: farmelantj at juno.com <farmelantj at juno.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Conservatism
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Monday, September 14, 2009, 2:06 PM
>
> Well many of the more serious
> thinkers on the right will concede
> that the free market is destructive
> of tradition and traditional values.
> Yes, many of them look to religion
> to religion to provide a check
> on the destructive effects of the market.
> The problem is that capitalism does
> seem to promote tendencies towards
> secularism: religion being one of
> the traditions that capitalism undermines.
> That's one example of what Daniel
> Bell, many years ago, called the
> "cultural contradictions of capitalism."
> Capitalism, in his view, depended on
> the cultural inheritance of religion
> and other cultural traditions in
> order to maintain the values and
> attitudes (like the work ethic)
> that are necessary to capitalism to
> thrive. But in his view, capitalism
> over time promoted a hedonistic ethic
> that undermined those very traditions
> that had sustained capitalism.
>
> Bell's argument was not too different
> from the ones that Joseph Schumpeter
> gave in his writings like *Capitalism,
> Socialism, and Democracy*. Both men,
> were of course, not unfamiliar with
> Marx's analysis of this situation too.
>
> Of course there are many conservatives
> who will deny that there is a problem
> here, but as I said before, contemporary
> conservatism is pretty much brain dead,
> so no surprises there.
>
>
> Jim Farmelant
>
> ---------- Original Message ----------
> From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Conservatism
> Date: Mon, 14 Sep 2009 14:44:19 -0400
>
>
>
> On Sep 14, 2009, at 2:30 PM, farmelantj at juno.com
> wrote:
>
> > There was among other things the
> > obvious thing that a full throated defense
> > of free market capitalism is incompatible
> > with the defense of traditionalism, since
> > capitalism itself is the greatest force
> > for undermining and destroying time hallowed
> > traditions as Marx noted long ago.
>
> Of course you could deny that the market destroyed
> tradition and say
> instead that you need the moral inheritance of religion to
> act as a
> check on market passions. Or you could argue, as do many of
> our
> fundies, that the market is a wonderful mechanism of reward
> and
> punishment to keep us fallen humans in line, with worldly
> success as a
> kind of visible measure of virtue.
>
>
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