Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Putting Mobbishness on the Shelf
In episode 342 of the Ricochet podcast, James Delingpole said, “I don’t even know why anyone even cares what conservatism is anymore.” And I’m so glad he did. This is exactly what I was getting at when I wrote There’s No Philosophy In It two weeks ago.
You see, James Delingpole is at war. He says so explicitly. David Limbaugh says the same in episode 340. And they are right. There is a war. They are at war. But I’m not.
This war they speak of is not my war. This is not a war between the philosophical left and right. It is not a war between liberals and conservatives. It is not a war between Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz. It is a war between the Democrat mob and the Republican mob.
And as Chesterton said of mobs:
This popular spirit may take a good or a bad form; and a mob may cry out many things, right and wrong. But a mob cries out “No Popery”; it does not cry out “Not so much Popery,” still less “Only a moderate admixture of Popery.” It shouts “Three cheers for Gladstone,” it does not shout “A gradual and evolutionary social tendency towards some ideal similar to that of Gladstone.” It would find it quite a difficult thing to shout; and it would find exactly the same difficulty with all the advanced formulae about nationalisation and internationalisation and class-conscious solidarity.
That one mob is preferable to another in a strict binary sense might be true. But it’s the mobbishness I deplore.
What good are conservative policies if effected by a mob? What good is a wall if built by a king? What good is winning a race to the bottom?
I genuinely don’t see any good in it and the topsy-turvy arguments to convince me otherwise only make me dizzy.
Chesterton again:
We have grown used to a habit of calling things by the wrong names and supporting them by the wrong arguments; and even doing the right thing for the wrong cause. We have party governments which consist of people who pretend to agree when they really disagree. We have party debates which consist of people who pretend to disagree when they really agree. We have whole parties named after things they no longer support, or things they would never dream of proposing.
Tomorrow I’ll begin my Lenten Ricofast. I intend to sink deep into higher things and leave this exhausting war talk behind. I hope to return to calmer waters (both on and off Richochet) and to bring something fresh and new to the table. (And I hope to return to a Pirates 12 game winning streak.)
May your Lent be blessed and joyful. And may Ricochet be well.
Published in General
One problem I have with the “politics as war” analogy is that wars end. Politics doesn’t. Even while the western allies were joined to Stalinist Russia in the fight against Hitler they were planning for postwar opposition to the Soviet Union. I’d have more time for the Delingpole view of things if there was some indication that he actually viewed the alliance with the alt-right as a one of convenience. Instead, he seems to have an attitude similar to that fellow travelers in the US had toward the Soviet Union.
I think the post mischaracterizes Delingpole’s point, which like Andrew Breitbart’s is that the Left is “at war.” And that if you don’t want to join with those who are like-minded (though not exact-minded) to fight, you should resign yourself to world government and hate-speech laws. Mob rule is a strawman.
On the Ricochet Podcast with Delingpole, Redsteeze argued (after Delingpole hung up) that the Right was winning. He cited the present majority in the state governor’s offices and legislatures and in the U.S. Congress. But this focuses on the recent electoral victories and both ignores the enormous lefty majority in the bureaucracies and overlooks the public culture, which the Left has been winning for decades—how’s civil society doing? the family? who runs the media? the academy? the arts? Is government shrinking? Isn’t the fact of a debate about “people with penises” using the girls’ bathroom proof enough that we’re losing?
I don’t like the term “war” for this, but politics isn’t clean either. The mindset “this isn’t my war” is a reason why we keep losing. It’s the reason why 58 Senators vote against Robert Bork, and 3 vote against Ruth Ginsburg. The Left is “at war”; conservatives disagree.
(I worry you’ll reject as “mobbish” my use of the term “we” to describe the members of Ricochet, which dubs itself “center right.” But I hope not.)
April 12, 2014: We Need These Butchers.
Still holds up pretty well, I think.
There’s no such thing as a “revolutionary conservative” agenda, it’s an oxymoron, a self-contradiction. The struggle is between the forces of revolution vs. the forces of conservation. If the conservatives become revolutionaries, then there’s no one left to conserve the old Constitutional order, and the Republic is doomed no matter which mob wins.
I’ve wondered how a place like Detroit could happen. And how a place like Chicago could continue operating their corrupt one party state for generations.
Now I see the final piece fall into place.
I don’t want to be part of a mob. I’d rather lie low, or better yet move on to better pastures. It isn’t my fight, I have principles.
So where are you going to go? Detroit is surrounded by functional cities where people moved to. Much easier than to do the really dirty and nasty work of making Detroit functional.
And by the way, Delingpole has lived through the inexorable decline of a nation driven by leftists and go along to get along Conservatives. He knows the stakes.
Corrupt systems can continue for as long as enough people continue to get paid.
Detroit’s economy was dominated by only three large corporations, so when corrupt politicians tried to put the screws to ’em it was fairly easy for them to move their business elsewhere.
In Chicago, the economy is more diversified, so corrupt politicians can more easily play businesses and unions against each other without killing the economy entirely.
Washington D.C. will continue to operate until the heat death of the Universe, because so many beds remain feathered thanks to its corruption.
Yes, that’s right.
What we call Left and Right, or Liberal and Conservative, are in opposition. One set of ideas vs another. But those ideas are no longer part of our political reality.
The tension… the WAR…. is between two sides who are not pulling directionally right or left.
Thanks, Casey. Welcome back.
Points A and B are very good points about something else. But to clarify what I was saying, to build a wall to protect the American way by changing the American way to build a wall means we’ve no reason to build a wall.
If the result is all you want then it doesn’t matter how you get there. The heart of conservatism is in how we get there. Once we’ve given up on conservatism to get policies then we’ve stopped doing conservatism.