In May of 2019, Ronald Reagan’s former special assistant and primary speechwriter, Peggy Noonan delivered a commencement address at Notre Dame in which she proclaimed to the class of graduating seniors about a needed shift of priorities for conservatives in America:
“Don’t battle right now to make government smaller, don’t talk about that, I mean don’t make believe that’s what you’re doing. Instead, make government more helpful, more pertinent to all of the urgencies around us. Shift focus — direct government toward conservative ends. Focus on conserving.”
Peggy’s speech continued on to stress that the ideal of limited government was a pipe-dream of an age past – the Pandora’s box of the gargantuan state has been opened, so conservatives might as well use it to your own ends. The new marching orders for the American right are to not denigrate or criticize the bloated institutions of our society like the press, the courts, and certainly not the military. Instead, the right must take on “constructive” activities like regulating industries that stand in opposition to their goals (i.e. tech) and in general use government to “protect the American way of life.”
If you are like me, you see autonomy as a zero-sum game – if institutional oversight (whether from government, business, or other) over my life grows then my own autonomy naturally shrinks. In light of this – witnessing a figurehead of American conservatism, which claims to prize and defend personal liberty, state that limiting the reach of government is an issue not worth fighting for is jarring.
But Peggy’s big state fatalism, though announced as if it were paradigm change for conservatism, is really just another episode in a long series of the American right giving lip service to limiting government, and at the same time protecting individual sovereignty. But to understand this we must travel back through history a bit.
A History of Deceit
As Murray Rothbard recants in The Betrayal of the American Right. The right-wing movement in America first started as a reaction to FDR’s New Deal and WW2 mobilization. FDR had spent more than all US presidents before him combined, he cartelized all major industry, he expanded the federal tax base from 10% of the population to 90%, he ran mass censorship campaigns on speech and writing, and proscribed how citizens were to work, consume, and live their lives. Abhorred at the international interventionism, incursion on individual rights, and rapid expansion of government power, taxation, and spending under the four-term administration, a faction of political opposition soon coalesced together.
Because FDR was a Democrat and a (self-titled) left winger- and liberal (a term that prior to this was associated with a belief in limited government), his opposition soon found themselves lumped into the Republican party and under the moniker of right-wing conservatism. Prior to this, the party of Lincoln had actually represented progressive ideals under Roosevelt and Taft.
However, FDR’s New Deal and wartime policies were a boon to many corporate banking and industrial interests (recall that War Is A Racket). And these power elite were not about to relinquish their golden hen of big government spending for people raving about civil liberties. As Chicago Tribune reporter Chesly Manly describes in The Twenty-Year Revolution from Roosevelt to Eisenhower, numerous industrialists and Wall St. power brokers conspired to have Eisenhower win the Republican nomination over libertarian minded Senator Robert Taft because they knew he would keep the FDR/Truman policies in place.
Those policies represented a true regime change in the US. One which was just as revolutionary if not more so than the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. Out of this time was born a muscular heavily centralized government with a Kafkaesque bureaucracy proscribing how Americans were to act and behave in minute detail at home and a military-industrial-complex constantly spending money and lives abroad.
This revolution in the forum was cemented when the Eisenhower administration – the titular “opposition party” – refused to curtail the changes. With both sides of the aisle in tacit agreement this large government, warfare-welfare statism was the status quo of American politics.
In order to quell concerns and disproval about these changes a barrage of distractions was foisted upon American conservatives, the most prominent being the supposed imminent threat posed from foreign enemies. Former FBI snitch and CIA agent, William F. Buckley, appeared out-of-the-blue in the 1950’s as a new figurehead of American conservatism and gave a full-throated endorsement of a large state in order to combat the boogeyman threat posed by the USSR. Buckley wrote that in light of the “far invincible aggressiveness of the Soviet Union… we have to accept Big Government for the duration—for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged… except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores.”
Buckley at the time gave lip service to libertarian ideals, stating that civil liberties, the trampling of privacy, and individual volition were issues that surely needed to be addressed, but only after we had dealt with the larger threats at hand to our American way of life. This is an early presentiment to Noonan’s urges to address social matters above rights issues.
Buckley and the National Review, co-founded by Buckley and later CIA director Bill Casey, took the mantle as leaders of the American right and their proclamations set the tone for that wing of the political establishment in the decades that followed as evidenced by the actions taken by republican presidents up through the present day:
Richard Nixon in addition to implementing wage and price controls, oversaw the creation of OSHA and the EPA (the agency that actively protects polluters), and expanded the USDA (poisoning the American food supply with corn and sugar subsidies) and began America’s tumultuous War on Drugs.
Ronald Reagan ended his 1988 farewell speech with the bromide, “man is not free unless government is limited. While government expands liberty contracts.” This was after he tripled the federal deficit, doubled the amount of entitlement programs, and ramped up the war on drugs while overseeing the CIA spreading crack into inner cities.
George Bush Sr., the former CIA director, who helped oversee and then cover-up the Iran Contra affair, dreamed of a “New World Order” following the fall of the Soviet Union in which governments and multinational corporations around the world would strategize in harmony.
Bush Jr. ushered in our current surveillance state and security dragnet with the Patriot Act, further nationalized education under No Child Left Behind, and actively brokered the largest (at the time) wealth transfer in history with the 2008 Wall Street bailout.
Donald Trump who despite his promises to “drain the swamp” and curtail the deep state took rather flaccid actions to do so, welcomed in hordes of establishment Washington bureaucrats into his cabinet and continued his corporate welfare, presiding over the largest (for now) money printing in history during the COVID Pandemic.
Tech Bros and Philosopher Kings
As Michael Malice sketches in The New Right, there are numerous factions and cliques among the present-day conservative movement in America. But as Vanity Fair notes the most prolific and ascendant of these factions is the one backed by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Theil, the co-founder and chairman of Palantir the company that helps the NSA spy on US citizens. If you read through Palantir’s corporate statements they excuse their assistance in eradicating Americans’ right to privacy because yet again there are barbarians at the gate that pose a larger threat.
Ideologically and philosophically the movement is led by Curtis Yarvin, a former programmer turned philosopher who brags at cocktail parties that he is the “most conservative person you’ll ever meet.” Yarvin is obsessed with the decay and loss of Western society and sees that the only way out of the mess we are in is to relinquish any ideals of limited government and rely on a ultra-strong ultra-centralized regime under a dictator. That’s right, Yarvin is a self-proclaimed monarchist (not joking) and one of the principles of his movement, which he calls the Deep Right, is absolutism – in his own words:
“Does anyone really still believe in “limited government”? Limited by who—exactly? What is up with all this passive voice? The deep right knows that all government is absolute. Because of this, the deep right is only interested in paths to absolute power.”
In The Republic, Plato, disgusted by what he believed were the excesses and social decay of Athenian society, called for the restructuring of the Polis into an authoritarian regime under a philosopher king. Because Yarvin grew up under Silicon Valley start-up culture his philosopher king is to be titled a CEO, and will operate under a board and trustees to ensure he is a benevolent dictator, further, ownership of America will be distributed as amongst the (qualified) public to be traded as equity shares.
Further goofy aspects of his over-architected future include:
The insurance of peace by making all guns remotely controlled smart guns
Believing every nation would be better off if it existed under martial law.
The rapidly spreading appeal of Yarvin’s thoughts and writings propose a rather tragic eulogy for any belief in limited government within the American right.
What is a society worth saving?
I have read through numerous of Yarvin’s books and blog posts and he comes across as a philosophical hypochondriac and control freak. This same tenet is echoed across most if not all of the authoritarian-apologist right as a whole – they claim to be obsessed with safeguarding the American way or more broadly Western tradition and culture – but one must ask: Which parts of western culture are they actually looking to save?
In Common Sense, Thomas Paine reminded a colonial America about the difference between society and the state: “Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins…. Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil.” The distinction between state and society is subtle but crucial – too often when people declare that “society should do X” or “be like Y” they often revert this to thinking that the state should intercede to make this happen. This nuance is currently lost on the American Right and the Left – who both attempt to use strong-arm state tactics to solve problems which are at bottom social issues. “I disapprove of this” quickly becomes “this should be illegal.”
The irony of this for the supposed defenders of Western Culture, is that the distinction between state and society is a unique facet of the Western tradition. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Europe largely existed without a state apparatus for hundreds of years throughout the Dark Ages. This experience, though perhaps harrowing in many ways, engrained in the Western mind that society was distinct from and more fundamental than the state.
The distinction between state and society has been transformative to Western culture, as it placed sovereignty away from a small select elite and into each individual person with the full burden of liberty and responsibility that entails. Of all the positive aspects that Western culture has to offer – rationalism, caritas, self-reliance, pluralism – this aspect is the generating kernel of them all. Self-sovereignty is the best aspect that the West has to offer.
I am sorry to Peggy Noonan and Curtis Yarvin, but defending personal liberty must take primacy to racking up W’s in the culture wars. Defending individual autonomy is defending western culture, and not doing so is sacrificing it.
We have drifted so far from this ideal that it feels trite to state but: liberty was the original American dream not money, not owning your political opponents, not enforcing mass conformity. However, neither side of the political spectrum cares to pay heed to this truth, as both look to further erode away aspect of personal liberty, autonomy, and dignity and lay Americans prostrate before behemoths of state and corporate institutions to dictate more and more of their lives.
I have little sympathy for liberals, leftists, or progressives but I am far from shocked that under such a cold Kafkaesque environment as the one we have created in America protests against our current society take place:
With rampant wealth inequality, poorer groups like blacks & Latinos get poorer and blame it on racism.
With general ennui and alienation spreading, you have people denouncing traditional religious beliefs, ways of life, and sexual practices.
When you see blatant disregard from politicians and corporations for rules and regulations you have widespread disrespect for the rule of law.
These things are all caused by a population made rootless because of constant theft of their autonomy and bludgeoning to their dignity. If the right puts these issues on the backburner, then they are only making the situation worse – if the right wishes to conserve American culture, they should ensure that it is a culture worth conserving.
The Myth of American Conservatism