Well, David, Hitler was also democratically elected, mind you. And although Chavez is not killing people as sistematically as the Nazis, still, he is using his now unlimited authority to arm South American guerillas, arrest political enemies and enrich political allies. As far as Veryretired’s Tocquevillean critique of democracy and its discontents goes, the comparison is relevant and sensible.

I had much the same reaction when I heard something similar a few years ago. The hard part is that a lot of political Conservatives have a very different idea in mind: either a return to an “earlier America” or simply a desire to use political levers to ensure the continued success of their business model. Of course, this plays into the worst stereotypes promulgated by the liberal intelligentsia so it is hard to affiliate with the label amongst liberal friends.

Lexington’s point is still a very good one though: I think *most* of the intellectual conservatives I’ve met (and many of the rank and file) appreciate the need for a flexible and dynamic economy.

Agreed. It is the paradox that lies at the heart of American culture especially, and Anglospheric culture more generally. Moreover, we have evolved resilient and malleable institutions and cultural practices to make the paradox work — common law adjudication, efficient bankruptcy laws, general purpose incorporations statutes, a culture based (ideally, and often in practice) on merit and competence, and free choice of the participants, rather than kinship relations (perhaps the most important one of all), the practice of marriage decisions made by individual rather than families or clans (or maybe this is the most fundamental) and a whole bunch of other stuff that makes our culture work. It did not come out of the blue, it all has deep historical roots.

…God created a universe that is ever changing. Why? Because static is boring.

I don’t think so. After all, he knows how it all turns out in the end anyway. ;-)

Shannon, you want to “conserve” America’s dynamism and future-oriented culture…

Hah! I think you are right. It’s something of a paradox, being a conservative to conserve the modality of change. It’s like the old observation that the only thing a tolerant culture cannot tolerate is intolerance.

Abundent resources become scarce; scarce resources get used up and conservation, no matter how draconian, can never stop things from changing because God created a universe that is ever changing. Why? Because static is boring.

Social organizations must evolve and adapt to our ever changing world or become extinct. God created free markets as the means for societies to evolve.

Change or become extinct. That’s my ideology. Ideologies that fail to deal with change lose adherents until only the loony tunes are left.

Congratulations, you are now a real conservative.

Not sure if I am. To quote Glenn Reynolds, “I’m don’t think I am a conservative because there is little I want to conserve.” I am a future directed person who believes in the inevitability and desirability of change. Neither am I religious or attached to a specific culture. Most definitions of conservative don’t include that basic outlook.

For most of the 20th century the Left represented change most of the time and got labeled progressive as a result. By circa 1975, however, they stopped changing and became the conservative element (i.e. attempting to maintain and extend the institutions of the status quo). Now most of the new original ideas come from thinkers on the right. Modern politics has become a struggle between Leftist resisting the innovations of Rightist.

I suppose I think of myself as something like a progressive-Rightist.

The first, and most important, step on the path to wisdom. Congratulations, you are now a real conservative.

I am not sure why you lump in Chavez with Nazis…

I would say that Chavez is in the mold of the totalitarian leaders of the 20th century. He shares their delusions of understanding and control. Like them, when his theories fail, he will turn on the people blaming them for his own errors.

Chevez will cruise along until the inevitable oil bust and then he will fall. The only question is how hard that fall will be and how many innocents will be caught up along with him.

A question that might be considered: to what extent is the attempt to understand any and all ideologies as “specific adaptations to specific environments” itself an ideological project?

I don’t think of ideologies as adaptations. Something of the opposite. I think people try to make ideologies into platonic ideals divorced from any physical reality and holding true for all places and times. That’s a bit of an exaggeration but I think there is something in our psychology that pulls us toward that kind of purity.

Ideologies are those things we scoff at if they are not ours: Freudianism, socialism, Marxism…and yes: libertarianism. Thus stay with pragmatism and like a true political figure you can be all things at any given time.

In ancient times, up to the modern day, many of these systems were based on some religious definitions that justified the (usually autocratic) “order of things”. As the religious foundations began to break down, new theories were proposed.

The results produced by any particular ideological system provide a very valid basis for evaluating the correlation between the claims of the system and the actuality of human beings’ nature, and the theory’s relationship to reality.

This is the reason that true believers must so adamantly insist that the failures of their belief system were the result of “incorrect interpretations” and “evil or incompetent practitioners”. To admit otherwise would require a complete re-evaluation of the ideology, and questions at that level are simply not permitted.

Thus, for example, marxism defines humans as products of their economic conditions. Rearrange the economic system, and you can rearrange the nature of human beings into the “new socialist man”. Individuals don’t matter, only economic classes.

Nazism is based on the blood and folk theories of the 19th century. Humans are their breeding. Pure blood = good, mixed blood = bad. Throw in some rabid anti-semitism and some “spirit of the folk” mythology, and the master race is only some racial cleansing programs away. Individuals don’t matter. Rights are an inconvenient obstacle on the way to the promised land.

As the millions upon millions of corpses piled up all over the world, so did the level of desparation of the true believers escalate. There could be no question that the theory was correct, the goals immaculate, the sacrifices necessary. Only people could be in error. Only people were not worthy. Find the right people to run the system, and it would work this time.

Enter Hugo Chavez and his acolytes. Or the islamic loonies waiting for the 12th imam. Or any number of authoritarians operating under any number of variations of the age-old belief that the leader and his state know best, so sit down and shut up, or we’ll kill you.

There is an direct relationship involved—the further from reality about the human beings they are attempting to control, the more blood must be spilled to enable the true believers theories.

Chickens are relentless little animals. They always come home to roost.

Ignoring the eschatological dimension of ideological thought can be dangerous. Reading Michael Burleigh’s in The Third Reich: A New History, I’m struck by how often critics and victims of the Nazi’s represented Nazi anti-semitism as a regression to medieval patterns. The Nazis themselves were rather clear that what they were aiming at was not a return to a medieval community, but the creation of a new (and eternal) human community. The creation of this end-state, they claimed, fully justified any means necessary, which the Nazis demonstrated was not simply a bit of rhetorical excess on their part when they set up the death-camp system. Nazi thought was fundamentally oriented towards this attempt to re-create the world. Attempting to understand it either as a reversion to older patterns or as a somehow distorted piece of pragmatic, problem-solving thinking, entirely misses what proved to be the center of Nazi thought.

A question that might be considered: to what extent is the attempt to understand any and all ideologies as “specific adaptations to specific environments” itself an ideological project?

If so, then any political ideology is always going to adopted with lots of caveats, because politics and the promotion of any ideology is merely a means.

Some libertarians have a dogmatism about them, as if all the problems in their own personal world and the world at large would be solved in only … whatever the “if only” happens to be. This is a species of political dogmatism that can exist anywhere on the political spectrum. Such people may happen to be correct on a lot of their policy proposals — as I usually think they are — but they are coming at it all from a different place than you, me, or a lot of people will ever inhabit.

That is why I always say I am “a conservative” — in the USA this is a name for a particular conglomeration of ideas and policies which has evolved over time (since the mid-50s), which incorporates small-l libertarianism (mostly) and the idea of strong national defense (2 biggies for me), within a framework of political practicality (i.e. not dogmatic to the point of not caring about winning elections), with an institutional home (the conservative wing of the GOP) from which it can sometimes actually have a real-world impact. Nor, unlike many uncomfortable members of this coalition, am I particularly troubled by the cultural conservatism of the GOP. My only difference with the religious right on most things is the dogmatism business — get what you realistically can from the political process and don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the pretty good. But, even for those small-l libertarians who are troubled by this part of the coalition, or even despise it, the trade-offs are superior to any theoretical benefit from aligning with the Democrats on issues like abortion, where that Party’s raison d’etre is the expansion of government power the total incorporation of all citizens into a government regulated world. One party causes libertarians to hold their noses, one threatens their core values with extinction. I have never seen how there is any contest.