George F. Will, spokesman for the hence-thus-indeed
coffee-table school of conservatism, whose utterances
seem meant to sound like old translations from some
august language, has once more done what he does best:
set my teeth on edge with yet another pronouncement on
what the contemporary conservative position ought to be.
In recent weeks Will has all but endorsed Rudy
Giuliani (whom else?) for president and ridiculed Ron
Paul, who takes the U.S. Constitution seriously, as an
anachronism. I imagine he slapped his flippers together
in glee when Giuliani attacked Paul for saying the
obvious, that the 9/11 attacks were motivated by American
foreign policy, rather than by virginal American
innocence. Paul might have been speaking for Jefferson,
Madison, and Hamilton, men to whom Giuliani would have
little to say, unless he could say it with his middle
finger.
Hence, according to Will, conservatives thus should
insist indeed that "the argument about whether there
ought to be a welfare state is over." I don't know what
he reads, but within the last hour (several hours after I
read that sentence!) I saw a review of a new book arguing
that the welfare state should be done away with. Hence,
thus, and indeed my foot.
Where does the Constitution authorize any such
thing? How does Will square the mammoth Federal welfare
state with anything in THE FEDERALIST PAPERS, where the
Federal powers are said to be "few and defined"? Well,
Will has also declared the Tenth Amendment to be "dead as
a doornail," so maybe anything written two centuries ago
is now defunct under the Living Document doctrine. Or is
the whole darned Constitution subject to some statute of
limitations?
As long as there are men like Will asserting that
all is well with the present system, there will be need
of other men to contradict them. The word "conservative"
is vain unless you can define what most needs to be
conserved, because most things are bound to perish.
Case in point: I have to move from my old house to a
small apartment this week. I own well over 10,000 books.
I can fit about a fifth of them into my new place. That
means I face thousands of choices, many of them painful.
Conservatism is like that. You have to keep making
hard choices. That's why I'm a little startled when
anyone calling himself a conservative starts by deciding
that the Constitution, or any of its key provisions, can
be thrown out with the rubbish.
You expect it of a party hack like Giuliani, of whom
it would be flattery to say that crassness is second
nature to him, when he manifestly knows no other. He
calls killing children in the womb a constitutional
right. But George Will should know better. Has he
forgotten his own arguments?
The truncated, perverted version of conservatism now
called neoconservatism in the media is "conservative"
only in the sense that sodomy is "sex." The real thing
can be found in the American Founders and, in England, in
the writings of such men as Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke,
John Henry Newman, and C.S. Lewis.
What American conservatism needs now can be summed
up in a single word: purification -- an inward
regeneration, without the slogans and gimmicks of the
last few decades -- supply-side economics, term limits,
and all the other familiar but desperate substitutes for
simple principle. We are all bored and jaded with these
by now.
The change will have to come from young people who,
without being zealots, refuse to compromise as their
elders have. We need a pacific patriotism that doesn't
confuse war with "defense," welfare with "compassion," or
the sheer multiplicity of arbitrary (and even criminal)
powers with the rule of law. These are all lies that may
be brushed aside, and the sooner the better.
The old conservatism has had its day, and it has
failed as dismally as the old liberalism. Even some of
the old conservatives are finally starting to realize
that. As the Federal Government spends trillions of
dollars per year, mostly borrowed or virtually
counterfeit, the compromises of the last few generations
are bound to buckle and collapse.
Start with a simple question: How would honest
Americans be worse off if the Federal Government, in its
present form, just ceased to exist?
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Read this column on-line at
"
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2007/060531.shtml".
