Oops, It Didn't Work!
On Friday, William F. Buckley threw in the towel. He speaks of
the Iraq war when he announces It
Didn't Work, but he's really talking about the conservative
movement. In his constrained acknowledgment of the failure of
neoconservatism's most extreme expression, he's really acknowledging
the failure of the conservative movement. It's falling back to earth
now, like a spent rocket. It never deserved so much of our attentive
energy, but it sounded so promising, to the more credulous among us.
I discovered William F.
Buckley in 1965 at USAF Training
at Williams AFB, AZ. Most of my classmates loved this guy, so erudite
and impressive and reasonable sounding. But he didn't sound reasonable
to me. I remember asking my mates, "Can't you hear the words he's
saying?
It's crazy."
Even then, the idea of boosting the most capable by taking
from the least among us made no sense to me, whether in a family or a
society. But that didn't matter to most of my fellow elitists - we had
prevailed over most pilot training candidates, qualifying for The Fighter School
- the most exclusive of the Air Force's eight training bases. Like most
elites, we
didn't spend a lot of time examining the accidents of birth or nurture
that equipped us to qualify for those few slots at "Willy".
Once you
strap on that G-suit and start drilling holes in the sky, there's no
limit to your arrogance. You're omnipotent and you know
it, clap your hands.
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Conservatism
Didn't Work.
That's Bill Buckley's impending conclusion, but he
can't form his mouth around the words. It hardly matters which metric
or cultural barometer you use, the Big-C conservatives (like the Big-L
liberals before them) have had their turn at
the wheel, and they've fucked up beyond all recognition. This
shouldn't be surprising, when you consider this insight
from Buckley's arch nemesis, Kenneth Galbraith:
The modern conservative is
engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy;
that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
Galbraith's exposé is literally true, not just
clever satire. When the
most powerful people in a society set themselves up to bleed the rest
of the
body politic, the culture's in as much trouble as any body is when its
most
aggressive cells metastasize. Yep, that's what unbridled conservatism
is: a network of ambitious, well-connected cells sucking as much energy
as possible
from their host. Once you
strap on that three piece suit and start drilling holes in the
economy, there's no
limit to your arrogance. You're omnipotent and you know
it, clap your hands.
Self-interest is not the problem: it's the primary source of
energy in any society. Galbraith is exposing a deeper, cultural
problem. Like alcoholics enabled by their
admirers, our mutual dysfunction is that so many of us have placed our
bets
on the metastatic principle of self interest. Most of We the People
Mortgage Holders have decided that we and our families will surely
prevail if
we work the pecking order just a little better than our less fortunate
neighbors: we've decided that we will
somehow buck the odds and will succeed if we advance ourselves to the
detriment of those whom we're in a position to slight. When
selfishness is enshrined above the commons' sense, the Tragedy of the
Commons
is as certain as if Shakespeare had penned it. And ultimately, just as
deadly.
The flaw in this tragic logic is easy to see. Conservatism,
like the stock market, systematically moves resources from the less
informed to the more informed. Pick your sides. Only suicidal hubris
allows people to assume they're on the inside track of that power law.
Ed vs. the Coneheads
Ed
Cone and his readers are conducting a spirited debate about
Buckley's capitulation over at Ed's blog.
Ed threw the gauntlet down by asking, "Why
does Bill Buckley hate America?"
Why does Bill
Buckley hate America?
"One can't doubt that the
American objective in Iraq has failed,"
writes the father of the modern conservative movement in The National
Review.
Well, of course, one can
doubt it, if one ignores the facts.
And as the facts get harder
to ignore, one can blame the media.
No fair blaming the
richly-documented incompetence of the administration and widespread predictions
that we would end up exactly where we are.
Ed is one of my heroes. He descends from a family of authentic
American visionaries and capitalists who built a great textile business
in North Carolina and struggled to keep the plants and workers
together. Ed and I hung out together when he came up to document
the Dean campaign and at a few subsequent conferences. It's obvious he
gets it. Maybe it's because he now writes about IT and systems for Ziff
Davis: People who think in terms of systems seem to have a larger view
than those who think in terms of sound bites.
Checked by Mates
Conservatism has entered its end game
and can no longer disguise its motives with platitudes and
swell-sounding theories. Buckley hints at the sorry truth
that this four-decade crescendo has been an intellectual exercise, sort
of a
stimulating debate not quite ready for prime time, unencumbered by
concerns about consequences in the
real world:
What do
we do when we see that the postulates do not prevail — in
the absence of interventionist measures (we used these against Hirohito
and Hitler) which we simply are not prepared to take? It is healthier
for the disillusioned American to concede that in one theater in the
Mideast, the postulates didn't work. The alternative would be to
abandon the postulates. To do that would be to register a kind of
philosophical despair. The killer insurgents are not entitled to blow
up the shrine of American idealism.
The
shrine of American idealism. The horror! Can we ever
abandon our precious conservative postulates!
Even his headline speaks to the conservatives' distance from
real-world consequences: Saying "It didn't work" is as reflective as
saying "Oops". It's how you characterize a patio door broken by a
softball, not how you describe a conscious assault on
American values, culminating in a colossal, unilateral foreign
adventure that guts America's sense of fair play while killing and
maiming hundreds of thousands of people, including our own. No wonder
these people who've never seen combat don't want us to see
flag-draped coffins. They have no sense of participation in the real
fight, for theirs is an ivory tower engagement.
I've often said that real combat is no place for dreamers and
idealists. Nor is the hard landscape of geopolitical practicalities. Those
who understand the realities of insurgent warfare knew all
along that
this Iraqi colonialism wouldn't work.
What will work, inevitably, is patience. A
skillful idealist should realize that time is on our side, that our
pervasive media and peer-to-peer Internet-based communications is the
overwhelming power in the world right now, not these obsolete imperial
adventures.
Claims Made for Selling, not for Using
Conservative promises are like the complex features we never
use,
on all the gadgets we probably don't need. this "philosophy" (if that's
what you call a justification
for selfishness) is a set of theories and visions that are worthless
once you take the appliance out of the show room (Conservatism's think
tanks and
heavily subsidized media outlets) and install it at home (government).
Once put into service, there's no way we'll use that fancy control
panel for
anything but a timer, and that's where conservatism's questionable
social compact breaks down.
The entire shaky premise of conservatism has been the "trust
us" assurance that Bush trots out whenever the curtain is pulled aside
to expose this most questionable wizard. Conservatism has predicated
its promise on a complex set of features we might use some day, but
which, so far, have provided no discernible benefits to We the
Users.
Impatience Alert - Flamers take a break
Comments are on, but for those of you who adore
the passion around the tiresome Liberal/Conservative "debate",
please save yourselves the trouble. I'm a practicing capitalist, shot
down in Vietnam, voted for Reagan and formed more businesses than most
people have worked for. Conservatives can now empathize how it felt for
the liberals as the air leaked out of their movement. Get used to years
of this sinking feeling. Now it's obvious to anyone:
This conservative movement has been an unbelievably expensive
detour from the American Dream, which was forged in the late 18th
century out of the Age of Enlightenment and Common Sense, reinforced by
the realities we grasped thanks to Theodore Dreiser, two world wars and
the Great Depression. Don't embarrass yourself by siding with Warren
Harding. Go do your homework and calculate the components of your
grandchildren's tax burden. Then ask yourself if those expensive,
broadcast-era slogans have been worth it.
On the other hand, I-told-you-so liberals might ask why no
one has a clue what you're talking about.
1:20:20 AM 
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