January 2004
Defining Left and Right—January 2004
PERSPECTIVE
The Conservative Search for Order
by Thomas Fleming
The triumph of the ancien régime.
VIEWS
The Education of George Bush
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.
Not by George Bush.
Consumption Taxes, Property Rights
by Scott P. Richert
Notes toward the restoration of property.
The Conservative Search for Order
The terms liberal and conservative (nearly always paired in that descending order) are now so confused as to be almost entirely useless. Originally, liberal was used to denote the ideology that aimed at the liberation of human individuals from the restraints of Church establishments, aristocratic and monarchical privileges, and legal restrictions on business and international trade. Radical leftists, Marx and his followers in particular, took the additional step of advocating revolutionary means to achieve their utopian ends: a communist society, created and enforced by terror, in which individuals would enjoy a fullness of life that transcended the individual himself. Some of Marx’s followers eventually rejected the revolutionary path and advocated a gradualist and ameliorist approach that allowed them to participate in the political process. They became known as socialists or social democrats.
The Cabal Strikes Back
Ever since the exposure in the mainstream media last year of the neoconservatives as a fifth column that engineered the present boondoggle in Iraq, dragged the United States into a foreign war for the transparent benefit of Israel, and concocted what are now known to have been lies about Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” and Saddam Hussein’s “links” to the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, the neoconservative cabal in both the Bush administration and the press has been on the defensive. The cabal (or, at least, its major leaders in government) ought to be standing in the same dock that Alger Hiss and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg once occupied, but that outcome cannot—yet—be realized. What has been realized is the complete discrediting of “neoconservatism” as a more “humane,” more “responsible,” or more “credible” variety of the conservative persuasion.
The Education of George Bush
I used to wonder at the deep melancholia to which Evelyn Waugh was subject in the last years of his life. “Papa,” his eldest daughter Meg would plead with him, “why are you so unhappy?” Waugh’s misery, verging on despair, struck me as unwarranted. He had, after all, great literary success, a large and creditable family, a magnificent country home; above all, he had his Faith, which regards despair as a sin. Why was he so unhappy?
Though considerably more ebullient in my own 50’s, I wonder no longer at Waugh’s state of mind. It was life in what he called “the Century of the Common Man” that ground him down, mentally and emotionally, as living on in a world half created by, half designed for, a universalized and universalizing proletariat increasingly oppresses my own spirit, and the spirits of close friends. (Today’s proletariat, armed with cheap contraceptives and a constitutional right to abortion, is no longer fit even for its traditional eponymous activity.)
