Turnabout thoughts in and out of season

The respectable right is respectable because it accepts the principles of liberalism and can't offer serious resistance to liberal conclusions.

That's why a less respectable "alternative right" is needed. But what is the alternative that would do better? People have been looking for a good way to resist liberalism for a long time, and judging by results they haven't gotten very far.

Liberalism has a lot of staying power, so there must be something in it that goes rather deep. If that's so, it's not going to go away because fashions change, and dealing with it effectively is going to require thought and correct diagnosis.

Something I wrote, an analysis of liberalism, libertarianism, and conservatism, was enough to provoke a libertarian blogger ("larryniven") to murder fantasies. I decided to address his concerns, but our exchange went nowhere. So I decided to reconstruct it, along with a short side exchange with a mainstream social liberal from Australia, into the following dialogue. Somebody might find the discussion relevant to something, so here it is:

A friend sent me something he was writing on the political prospects for protectionist legislation. I sent him the following response, which I've edited a bit and relates to much more than protectionism:

In general, your discussion follows the interest-group, competing political party, voter sovereignty model of political life in a modern democracy.

I sometimes think another view explains more, a sort of quasi-neomarxist view in which the state is a committee acting on behalf of the governing classes.

There's a longish interview with me at Ignatius Insight, the website of Ignatius Press.

Yet another review, this one by Carl Olson in Catholic World Report. It's longer than average (two three-column pages) and quite favorable:

The Tyranny of Liberalism ... is the work of an imaginative conservative who offers frank criticism and expresses the truth about authentic values and the permanent things with notable clarity, unusual insight, and welcome eloquence.

Evan McLaren notes that I mostly deal with grand issues and tend toward a "big tent" approach, at least among right-wingers, and wonders whether that makes sense.

A friend has forwarded to me his translation of Letter to Cardinal Fornari On the Errors of Our Time by Juan Donoso Cortes and given permission to make it available on the web. At the time the letter was written Cardinal Fornari was in charge of a commission studying modern errors for Pope Pius IX and Donoso was Spain's ambassador to France.

Zenit, the international Catholic news agency, just published an interview with me about the topics I cover in my book.

I just finished reading Allan Carlson's Third Ways: How Bulgarian Greens, Swedish Housewives, and Beer-Swilling Englishmen Created Family-Centered Economies - And Why They Disappeared. It's a really excellent collection of short case studies of 20th century attempts to create, recreate or maintain local, familial, distributist or agrarian economic forms in the face of commies, fascists, and cigar-chomping businessmen.

I've added arguments and responses made in a discussion of the issue elsewhere to my recent entry on faith and reason. For convenience's sake I've added them in the form of comments.

According to George Weigel, the big issue in the fuss over the Society of Saint Pius X (the traditionalist group whose bishops just got de-excommunicated) is religious freedom: whether "coercive state power ought ... be put behind the truth-claims of the Catholic Church or any other religious body."

We live in a liberal age. A conservative, then, is someone who resists liberalism. He wants to reverse it or at least resist its advance.

There are a variety of reasons for resisting liberalism, and they lead to different kinds of conservatism. Some are more liberal or radical than conservative, and each can be at odds with any or all of the others. Short of an extreme situation like an invasion from Mars there's not much they would all agree on.

Anyway, here are some of the possibilities:

1. The Simply Conservative Conservative:

The contributors to the weblog Secular Right: Reality & Reason have put together a sort of credo, What is the Secular Right? Here it is:

I should probably comment on the point of my last post.

A basic problem for a Catholic or any serious person in America is that he lives in a country people treat as a sort of religion. The reason for treating it that way is the need for social cohesion in an ethnically and religiously diverse society in which individual freedom and pluralism are promoted as the highest social goods. If you downplay normal social connections in that way you'll need some sort of superprinciple to make up for them.

I was looking at We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition (1960) by John Courtney Murray. For those who don't know much about him, Murray was a Catholic priest and theologian who

A Swedish correspondent wrote to ask why ideas of historical and cultural community never seem to go anywhere today. My response continues some of the thoughts touched on in the recent discussion of social conservatism:

The basic problem I think is that such ideas depend on notions of what one is, and the modern and liberal understanding of man and the world makes notions of identity seem irrational and therefore threatening.

Takimag has published a piece I wrote on social conservatism. Unfortunately, they no longer allow comments, which was always half the fun of publishing there.

I've been doing some radio interviews to promote my book, maybe a couple dozen in total. Here are some I have links to:

• Niel Young's The Advocates, December 20. Permanent link to the audio.
• Point of View with Kerby Anderson, December 16. Permanent link.
  

Here's the text of a talk I gave at the first annual conference of The H. L. Mencken Club. (Actually, I only had time to present the first 3/5 or so of the talk. The remainder was mostly a rehash of previous talks, though, so maybe it's just as well.)