George Rebane
Litmus test for liberal mentality. There is a very reliable test to identify a person sporting a well-developed liberal persuasion. It can be administered within the comfortable confines of a casual conversation about almost anything socio-political. A few questions about the person’s viewpoint or perspective, which can then be mildly challenged, will quickly reveal if that person ever considers that there may exist prima facie reasoned and valid viewpoints other than his. If such a rejection turns out to be the case, the likelihood is very high that you are talking to a liberal. If your discussant responds with a reasoned defense of his position, especially one that identifies well-formed weaknesses in the counter-position, then the likelihood is low that you are in the presence of a liberal. In these pages we have years of such evidence. As an example, a most prominent liberal commenter continues repeating the same pejorative assessment of Donald Trump with the surety that his viewpoint is the only one brought down the mountain on stone tablets. The counter-arguments don’t exist, since for him they have been invisible.
The country’s disastrous response to the Covid pandemic continues unabated. Established medicines that would have greatly or even wholly mitigated the health impact of C19 were abolished by the Left from public access during Trump’s administration in order to enable policies that maximized body counts and the destruction of our economy, and established government controls that may have become ensconced destructors of our liberties.
The ‘party of science’ did everything unscientific that was possible to spread unfounded fear across the land, and it continues to this day. As examples, the early banishment of Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin along with mandated draconian lockdowns guaranteed the distress we all have witnessed. Re-evaluating the effectiveness of HCQ and IVM, our FDA, NIH, and CDC have now begrudgingly permitted their qualified use in treating C19. (e.g. here)
But the Dems still talk of keeping masks and lockdowns in place until the end of this year, and some even into 2022. ('masks don't work' here) More reasoned professionals who can read and understand the relevant literature and C19 data have long predicted that lifting lockdowns will quickly bring about herd immunity (the only way ALL infectious diseases abate). Given the mass vaccinations now taking place, the most recent estimate is that effective herd immunity will most likely arrive some time in April (more here).
The disaster of 2020 foisted by the Democrats, lamestream media et al, was all ballyhooed in the name of ‘following the science’. As in the climate change policy debacle (more here), consensus science was again hoisted up the flagpole and celebrated. Any counter scientific arguments and evidence was overwhelmingly quashed as ‘denialism’ along with the endless repetition of the mesmerizing meme that Republicans were unscientific knuckledraggers. The reality has been and continues to be exactly the opposite as pointed out by Prof John Staddon in his 20feb21 WSJ interview ‘Science Needs Criticism, Not Cheerleading’. As was made clear all last year, the Dems schooling in science matriculated from Stalin’s Lysenko Academy.
So during these dark days, the Biden administration is doing everything possible to rapidly remove the nation’s ramparts in our foreign policy, border security, against stifling regulation, insane green goals, and new levels of confiscatory tributes in the futile attempt to pay for it all. To enable these destructive diktats, our advancing autocracy must now instill a sense of permanence for the enhanced population control measures it has put in place. These range from the visible fortification of the nation’s capital down to the regulatory minutiae prescribing every aspect of life at the local level, both in the home and public square.
A good dissertation on all this is ‘The Greatest Fear of Those Who Rule Us’ from the Charlemagne Institute. And an even more forward-looking piece and major essay promoting a beneficial restructuring of open market capitalism is found in the Foreign Affairs piece by Oren Cass, ‘Freeing the Right From Free-Market Orthodoxy’. There he argues for a more centrist-oriented “new conservatism” that would attract the culturally conservatives from both parties. Of these ideas we will have more to say.
I close with some quotes from Cass’s essay =
- The hallmark of conservativism is not, as is often thought, opposition to change or the desire for a return to some earlier time. The misconception that conservatives lack substantive preferences and merely reflect their environments leads to some confusing conclusions—for example, that the conservative of 1750 would oppose American independence but the conservative of 1800 would support it, or that today’s conservative must favor rapid globalization and deregulated financial markets because that has been the recent tradition. What in fact distinguishes conservatives is their attention to the role that institutions and norms play in people’s lives and in the process of governing. “When the foundations of society are threatened,” wrote the political theorist Samuel Huntington, “the conservative ideology reminds men of the necessity of some institutions and the desirability of the existing ones.”
- As Burke himself put it, “a disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman.” This same disposition is easily identifiable in conservatives today.
- … conservatism, more so than other ideologies, sees progress as a process of accumulation rather than disruption, recognizing what is good in society and striving to build on it. Conservatism approaches the project of governing with particular humility, grateful for whatever order a society’s traditions have managed to wrangle from imperfect human nature. The problems it identifies and the solutions it proposes give relatively less weight to guaranteeing individual freedom and choice and more to reinforcing obligations and constraints, relationships and norms, and the mediating institutions that shape and channel people’s energies toward productive ends.
- Critically, however, a conservative skepticism of markets is equally natural. Markets reduce people to their material interests and reduce relationships to transactions. They prioritize efficiency to the exclusion of resilience, sentiment, and tradition. Shorn of constraints, they often reward the most socially corrosive behaviors and can quickly undermine the foundations of a stable community—for instance, pushing families to commit both parents to full-time market labor or strip-mining talent from across the nation and consolidating it in a narrow set of cosmopolitan hubs. For conservatism, then, markets are a valuable mechanism for sustaining and advancing a flourishing society. But they should never be an end unto themselves. And their quality is contingent on the norms and rules by which they function and the vitality of the other institutions operating alongside them.
- Three major trends seem responsible for the fall of the old orthodoxy, and all point toward the promise of a conservative resurgence. The first is a changing world. …; The second trend responsible for the failing consensus is overreach. …; The third factor undermining the old economic orthodoxy is its failure to update its own rules.
- The same thing has happened in the U.S. economy, except that the rule-makers haven’t kept up.
- Surging profitability may signal success for the capitalist, but as Smith recognized in The Wealth of Nations, the opposite holds true for capitalism. “The rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity, and fall with the declension, of the society,” he wrote. “On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich, and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin.”
rebanesruminations.com 
Leave a comment