Michael Oakeshott

Posted by Phil Peterson on May 18, 2005, 09:06 AM | #

governing is a specific and limited activity

So let’s look at the facts. Bush has expanded the size and scale of the US Government at a rate unimaginable even in the liberal Clinton era.

And what about all the other aspects of Bush’s progressive agenda such as Open Borders, Multiculturalism, Political Correctness, his messianic preaching about spreading revolution? Those are “conservative” too?

If they are, then we are in the realm where anyone who likes a miniscule tax cut or who objects to such absurdities as “Gay marriage” automatically gets labelled a “conservative” by the media. We live in an age where the settled notions of justice have moved so far to the left that simply relying upon the mainstream media’s definition of “conservative” makes absolutely no sense.

I cannot in God’s name understand how anyone could seriously argue that Bush is a “conservative” in any shape or form. May be conservatism is dead and its time for us to face the facts rather than keep deluding ourselves (to make ourselves feel better) by saying Tony Blair is a “conservative” and George Bush is a “conservative”. If thats, “conservatism” I want no part of it. Thank you.

Posted by Phil Peterson on May 18, 2005, 09:14 AM | #

Additional facts:

President Bush has presided over the largest overall increase in inflation-adjusted federal spending since Lyndon B. Johnson. Even after excluding spending on defense and homeland security, Bush is still the biggest-spending president in 30 years.

His 2006 budget doesn’t cut enough spending to change his place in history, either.

Total government spending grew by 33 percent during Bush’s first term. The federal budget as a share of the economy grew from 18.5 percent of GDP on Clinton’s last day in office to 20.3 percent by the end of Bush’s first term.

The Republican Congress has enthusiastically assisted the budget bloat. Inflation-adjusted spending on the combined budgets of the 101 largest programs they vowed to eliminate in 1995 has grown by 27 percent.

The GOP was once effective at controlling nondefense spending. The final nondefense budgets under Clinton were a combined $57 billion smaller than what he proposed from 1996 to 2001. Under Bush, Congress passed budgets that spent a total of $91 billion more than the president requested for domestic programs. Bush signed every one of those bills during his first term. Even if Congress passes Bush’s new budget exactly as proposed, not a single cabinet-level agency will be smaller than when Bush assumed office.

Republicans could reform the budget rules that stack the deck in favor of more spending. Unfortunately, senior House Republicans are fighting the changes. The GOP establishment in Washington today has become a defender of big government.

Posted by Guessedworker on May 18, 2005, 09:16 AM | #

I am puzzled, John, that you seek to defend a Conservatism that has acquiesced before the advance of liberalism since 1832, and latterly given us the perpetually failing modern Party in Britain and the non-Conservative Neocons in the States.  How low must Conservatism sink before you wonder whether it might, in fact, be terminally ill?

I came to this conclusion when Maggie was removed (ie, when acquiescence in the form of One-Nationism and Europhilia walked back in the front door).  I am surprised that you, an avowed Reaganite, do not share this view but, apparently, cling to the incomprehensible belief, for example, that GWB is somehow a Conservative politician.

Posted by Phil Peterson on May 18, 2005, 09:16 AM | #

Further it is said that a disposition to be conservative in politics reflects what is called an ‘organic’ theory of human society

How are open borders consistent with an “organic” theory of human society?

Posted by Mark Richardson on May 18, 2005, 09:31 AM | #

John, I won’t disappoint you. Oakeshott’s quote is terrible. He is basically saying that “conservatism” doesn’t mean conserving anything of substance, such as nation, family, moral code, religion, culture and so on.

Instead, he claims it means restricting government activity to rules of conduct which maximise individual choice.

But this is a basic starting point of the liberal philosophy, the advanced stage of which we are now struggling against.

John, what sense does it make to attach the word “conservative” to a philosophy which both in theory and practice is dedicated to the breaking down of traditions and institutions in order to clear a path for individual choice? Surely, “conservatism” must denote at some level actually conserving things.

And what sense does it make to label this one philosophy with two different names: liberal and conservative?

It’s in the interests of liberals to maintain this confusion of definition, as it means the “conservative” opposition stays within the basic philosophy of liberalism rather than decisively breaking free from it.

Posted by Phil Peterson on May 18, 2005, 09:44 AM | #

Instead, he claims it means restricting government activity to rules of conduct which maximise individual choice.

That’s Libertarianism*, not conservatism. But even if this was “conservatism” as John Ray argues, Bush fails that test mightily.

*Clearly, there is overlap between libertarianism and conservatism but they are not the same thing.

Posted by Steve Edwards on May 18, 2005, 01:50 PM | #

All of this is well and good, but you are not a conservative until you have become a Trotsky-con:

http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=5226

Supporting Islam Karimov and lionising Leon Trotsky is what true conservatism is all about!

Posted by Phil Peterson on May 18, 2005, 02:05 PM | #

Indeed.

Posted by Phil Peterson on May 18, 2005, 02:21 PM | #

Actually the most revolting aspect of the Neocons (ie, people who would be cowering under a sofa at the sight of a knife and those who never bothered to turn up in a field of battle; people remember an utterly shaken Paul Wolfowitz, shaking like a leaf in a gale after a mortar attack on his Baghdad hotel) is the way they smear real heroes. The most recent example of that was the smearing of General Zinni.

And these people are tolerated in America’s Republican Party. Bush a man of dubious credentials, a habitual liar surrounded by a group of conniving crooks that keep mooching off the system. And John Ray would like American conservatives to worship them.

Posted by John S Bolton on May 18, 2005, 04:49 PM | #

Conservative politics has to be about aggression, if all politics be the ethics of aggression. Hopefully the right wants to conserve freedom from aggression, and not any traditions which allow freedom to the aggressor as such. Conserving the nation has to mean a consciousness that we owe loyalty to our conationals when they are attacked by foreigners. Neocons reject this loyalty in favor of the borderless republic of humanity; they fail to defend the citizen against the aggression by which foreigners take net public subsidy here, thus falling into vile treason.

Posted by jonjayray on May 18, 2005, 06:20 PM | #

As a libertarian, I don’t agree with ANY of the welfare policies from Churchill to GWB but that’s the point.  Conservatism as we know it is NOT libertarianism and it is not just mindlessly conserving everything. It is somewhere in between those poles

Posted by Phil Peterson on May 18, 2005, 06:26 PM | #

John,

Is opposing race replacement, multiculturalism and forced diversity a case of “mindlessly conserving everything”?

And, is supporting those things a “conservative” position?

Posted by Andrew L on May 19, 2005, 01:50 AM | #

I would rather think NOT any Politition of any denomonation has the Right of any to re-order society , in the name of Philosophical Idieology, Where once public office was held as a privilage and a honour,to serve the Public, now it is a organised mafia movement, The order of Devine right to introduce all and any Insane Ideology they see fit,and without consiquence, to change, re-order , and totally distroy Civilizations on a whim. What is even worse, WE LET THEM.

Untill the Farmer and the Builder, and the Truckdriver, etc, start to reprisent the people again, The Real people, whilst these artificial egotistical morons that graduate from post modernist Universities and pretend to be intelligent and stash the cash in their back pockets, A revolution is needed indeed.It is they that need to become compost, much like their contribution.Steaming piles of it.

Posted by Effra on May 19, 2005, 08:39 AM | #

I never thought the sneery-weary Oakeshott was a reliable ally of conservatives, any more than the prissy Russell Kirk was in the States. Their influence on self-described post-war conservatives seems to me on balance for the worse, guiding them into a passive acceptance of the rules of the socio-political game as defined by leftist chatterati, bureaucrats and ideologues.

In the Oakeshott quotation offered above, the obvious (and for an academic, commonplace) fallacy is to make ‘government’ and your attitude to its size and scope float free of the biology and natural history of Man. ‘Instruments enabling people to pursue the activities of their own choice’ are the ideal, which sounds more like Gladstone than Salisbury. But they do not arise or endure in vacuo. 

Oakeshott, no more than Trotsky in ‘The Revolution Betrayed’, can think with the blood. For a true conservative, blood, faith and soil are what matter; questions about the minutiae of organisation of social and economic life, including their expression in political institutions and arrangements, are contingent considerations, and ‘your own choice’ is a touchstone to be examined with scepticism if we do not subscribe to the atomic theory of the ‘individual’. 

For instance: Alan Clark, a real conservative, used to say that he would rather live under a socialist but patriotic regime than under a bunch of capitalist-globalist ‘conservatives’. I daresay Enoch would have agreed. But all that concerns Oakeshott is aligning government with ‘our current manner of living’. The word ‘current’ is the giveaway, like the throwaway gibes about royalism and Anglicanism. Oakeshott is just another rootless cosmopolitan trend chaser (‘right wing’ branch), and anyone who sailed by his star would soon become a practitioner of ratchet-effect reformism. Pace Mr Ray, I don’t call such creatures conservatives and will not allow anyone else to do so in my hearing without correction.

Posted by Guessedworker on May 19, 2005, 10:59 AM | #

Blood and soil do precede government, and usually faith does, too.  But they are of the Conservative’s being - not, directly at least, of his politics.

Liberalism, though, has a way of forcing things.  In our modern world, in which the freedom to select identity is the arbiter of human worth, our genetic, historical and cultural heritage has been made a war zone.  The Conservative’s duty and privilege is to defend it against assorted deconstructors of both left and right (and against one uniquely well-organised, race-warring minority).

That said, good government remains a priority, contingent or otherwise.  I don’t know if the period from 1783 to 1832 was a Golden Age generally.  But it was an age of Conservative character, and that’s good enough for me.