"The moral vacuity of libertarianism is poisonous to public life."

[elfs]

The Weekly Standard has published a very muddled and confused article entitled No Substitute for Virtue, in which Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey gnash their teeth at the way the press have been mistreating poor John McCain. I don't want to make this an anti-McCain day, and this isn't about McCain, but the premise of their argument is that McCain is the best candidate because he's the most virtuous, and says that he believes in the virtue of human beings to make good government, rather than believing in human beings to adhere to an ideology that would result in good government.

I fail to see a difference here. How is their "virtue" different from "ideology," other than it being more mealy-mouthed, more ill-defined, and therefore more subject to the arbitrary whims of the powerful, rather than subject to the rule of law and applicable to all?

What alarms me most is that this article abandons the conservative principle that we must watch the watcher, and mistrust the powerful: instead, it adheres to the very liberal view that if we put the right man, a virtuous man, into power, then we can trust him to Do The Right Thing, even if that means sometimes failing to adhere to the letter of the law. We've been down this road before: we've been on it for eight screwball years, and as a recommendation it comes poorly and late. This article is last-gasp politics at its worst.

They decry ideology as "the clean and well-lit prison of one idea," while remaining hidebound themselves to one idea: Virtue, without telling us what they mean by it. They adhere to a candidate who is willing to use the force of arms to enforce this "virture" if necessary.

Will Wilkinson characterizes their argument (he says "unfairly," but I disagree) this way:

Libertarianism is dangerous because it discourages juvenile romantic attachment to higher things — meaningful things — like Honor, Virtue, and the indescribable joy of sacrificing one's life to the service of the American Volksreich. All libertarians care about is superficial shit like not starving, living a long time, and being creative and happy. Blah blah blah. But, really, what's the point of living to 200 if all you do is enjoy yourself the whole time? I mean, don't you want to know what it is like to kill a man? DON'T YOU WANT TO TASTE BLOOD!? Besides, virtue.

You have to read his response, you just do, because he's absolutely spot on:

I am more and more coming to the conclusion that National Greatness Conservatism, like all quasi-fascist movements, is based on a weird romantic teenager's fantasies about what it means to be a grown up. The fundamental moral decency of liberal individualism seems, to the unserious mind that thinks itself serious, completely insipid next to very exciting big boy ideas about shared struggle, sacrifice, duty, glory, virtue, and (most of all) power.

That's exactly right. "Great Nation" conservatism is not conservative at all; it's about using power, and is no different than "Great People" liberalism. Both have twisted and ideological ideals to which their adherents would have us all adhere, with our consent or without it, and would use violence to get it. Storey & Storey's article tries hard to mask that, but Willkinson's characterization uncovers it and shows us the slathering, uncompassionate beast underneath.

Comments

Buh?

[(Anonymous)]

"instead, it adheres to the very liberal view that if we put the right man, a virtuous man, into power, then we can trust him to Do The Right Thing, even if that means sometimes failing to adhere to the letter of the law."

Um, excuse me? Since when is that a liberal view? I mean, I may be showing my age here; the first major political event I remember are the Iran Contra hearings and all.

But I don't see that conservativism has a lock on the idea of "who watches the watchmen", and in point of fact, the Democratic Party (you know, the pseudo-liberals) have been doing a better job of that than the Republicans for at least the last 25 years.

(I say pseudo-liberals because the Democrats aren't very much in tune with traditional liberal mentality, just as the Republicans aren't very much in tune with traditional conservative mentality).

-Malthus