Conservatives against Conservatism

[elfs]

Over the weekend, I briefly dipped my toe back into the Honor Harrington universe to read the second and third books, The Honor of the Queen and The Short, Victorious War, both of which are among the better books in Weber's oeuvre. As I read them, I was as usual pummeled by the way Weber portrayed the liberal vs. conservative divide on Manticore, but you have to admire the fact that his conservatives were absolutely not racist in the least, and even their religious conservatism was extremely well-tempered and moderated by a classic liberalism expectation that where the human condition had weaknesses, the human mind could be turned to deal with those weaknesses without futher deprecating the human mind.

Weber's "conservatisem" is a paean to the finest of human qualities, and the expectation that every human being wants to be a perfect expression of those qualities.

So, of course, I wake up this morning to find that Whitney Houston has died, and FOX News "conservatives" respond with anything but decency and dignity.

I'm still thinking that Corey Robin's book, The Reactionary Mind, may have gotten it essentially correct: conservatism is always about the maintenance of power in those who currently have it, and who therefore conclude that they are fit to rule, and ought to always be the ones to rule. The currrent ugliness about Whitney Houston and Barack Obama is what happens when the convinced power base sees that, even though it has maintained its half of the bargain, its privileges are not being maintained.

George W. Bush's won the 2004 election with his promise that he would protect the US from gay marriage, welfare cheats, and Muslim terrorists. He dismantled the regulatory system, turned a blind eye to mortgage market pillaging by private interests, and allowed cronyism to rampage through US-owned natural resources-- all the while, more states allowed gay marriage, and a black man ended up in the White House. The bargain has not been upheld.

You go to war against the conservatism you have, rather than find common cause with the conservatism you wish you had.

Comments

[autopope.livejournal.com]

I find it instructive to look at the real world system Weber modelled his novels on.

Weber's Manticorian politics in those books is lifted wholesale from English politics in the late 18th century. (Conservatives = the party of the rich landowners; Liberals = the party of the merchants and traders, bearing in mind that the merchants included the embryonic British East India Company who, in a fit of absent-minded acquisitiveness, went on to conquer India.)

As the franchise in that period (pre Great Reform Bill, circa 1832) was limited to well under 5% of the population -- you had to be an adult male protestant land-owner; the GRB extended the suffrage to the all-time high of 15% of the male population (i.e. 7.5% of the total) -- it was basically the political framework for the 1%.

Anyone in favour of stuff like, oh, votes for non-landowners (much less women) or state pensions and unemployment insurance was a Radical, and a radical Radical at that, until the late 19th century.

(I've met David. He's a born-again Christian, and a small-c conservative. He seems like a nice enough guy. However, his value system is utterly alien ... somewhere between Burkean conservative (which the Republican party today seem to have abandoned) and authoritarian (his writing tends to glorify military hierarchical systems as the acme of social order.)