{"id":63220,"date":"2022-11-03T06:00:47","date_gmt":"2022-11-03T10:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/?p=63220"},"modified":"2022-11-03T07:48:05","modified_gmt":"2022-11-03T11:48:05","slug":"big-government-conservatism-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/2022\/11\/big-government-conservatism-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Big Government Conservatism?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Yesterday we blogged about John David Davidson\u2019s article We Need to Stop Calling Ourselves Conservatives<\/a>, which maintains that the conservative movement in America, with its advocacy of small government and free markets, has failed to \u201cconserve\u201d our civilization and its institutions, such as the family and the church.\u00a0 He calls for a new movement\u2013with a government big enough \u201cto rebuild and in a sense re-found\u201d the nation, rein in big corporations, and put the brakes on the sexual revolution.\u00a0 Those who take up this task should call themselves not conservatives but \u201cradicals, restorationists, and counterrevolutionaries.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

His article has sparked controversy and criticism, to say the least, in \u201cconservative\u201d circles.\u00a0 He answers his critics in another article entitled The Performative Outrage Of \u2018Conservatives\u2019 Is Further Evidence Of Their Failure<\/a>\u00a0with the deck, \u201cUnable to cope with the failure of the conservative movement, its erstwhile champions resort to calling their critics fascist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s think through \u201cbig government conservatism.\u201d\u00a0 It sounds contradictory to American ears, but it is highly descriptive of European conservatism.\u00a0 If conservatives are those who want to conserve their historical institutions, in Europe that would mean conserving the monarchy, the state church, and the laws and customs that go with them.<\/p>\n

Before the Enlightenment, such traits were just the way things were.\u00a0 But when \u201cliberalism\u201demerged in the 1700s, so did conservatism, as a movement to counter and oppose the \u201cliberal\u201d alternatives.\u00a0 Back then, though, in Europe, liberalism was not about supporting New Deal or Great Society social programs, as the term came to mean in the U.S.\u00a0 In fact, such programs would probably have been associated with the paternalism of a generous king or aristocrat and be considered \u201cconservative.\u201d\u00a0 The word \u201cliberal\u201d came from the Latin word for freedom, and it denoted a program of individual freedom, personal rights, democracy, limited government, and free market capitalism.\u00a0 Sort of like what American conservatives believe.<\/p>\n

When the United States of America was born at the height of the Enlightenment, our founders set up a \u201cliberal\u201d state.\u00a0 This is what our \u201cconservatives\u201d want to conserve.\u00a0 In the meantime, here in the states, \u201cliberal\u201d became associated with those opposed to those traditions, as new \u201cprogressive\u201d ideologies, such as the various kinds of socialism, came to the fore.\u00a0 Socialism, of course, whether the relatively mild version of FDR, the Marxist version, or the Fascist version, all required a \u201cbig government,\u201d with some ideologies advocating a \u201ctotalitarian\u201d government, which would use \u201cscientific\u201d principles to control the economy and every facet of citizens\u2019 lives.<\/p>\n

So the terminology is confusing.\u00a0 A good way to assess a conservative is to ask, \u201cwhat do you want to conserve?\u201d\u00a0 If the goal is to \u201cmake American great again,\u201d I would think that would involve conserving of our Constitutional order.\u00a0 \u00a0Many conservative intellectuals, such as Davidson, have discovered the European conservative tradition.\u00a0 They have gotten some good ideas from it, but European conservatives tend to blame all our woe on \u201cliberalism\u201d in old sense, whose emphasis on freedom has led to disasters such as the sexual revolution and thus the breakdown in the family, whose individualism has destroyed the sense of community, whose emphasis on democracy has led to mob rule, whose emphasis on capitalism has led to greed, materialism, and the exploitation of workers, whose emphasis on religious freedom has led to secularism, etc., etc.<\/p>\n

The Leftist \u201cprogressives,\u201d do not like old-fashioned \u201cliberalism\u201d either.\u00a0 In fact, when the \u201cNew Right\u201d advocates big government, criticizes capitalism, champions the working class, and seeks to \u201crefound\u201d the country, they can sound much like the \u201cNew Left.\u201d\u00a0 And when Davidson calls for revolution and \u201cradicalism,\u201d the resemblance is even greater.\u00a0 As is the memory of how many European conservatives did support the revolutionary, national socialist, collectivist program known as Fascism.<\/p>\n

So let\u2019s look at the record of big governments.\u00a0 Have they ever restored or refounded a nation?\u00a0 I suppose one could cite the Roman Empire, but surely that was a falling away from the virtues of the Roman Republic, with its representative and elected government.\u00a0 The Empire was the result of war, conquest, and the divinization of emperors.<\/p>\n

If we had a big enough government to rebuild or refound our nation, what would give the government its direction and values, in the absence of \u201cliberal\u201d democracy?\u00a0 And are our problems really due to too much freedom?<\/p>\n

I would argue that a government that can, overnight, change the definition of marriage followed by all cultures for all of human history, is too<\/em> big and too<\/em> powerful.\u00a0\u00a0The same holds true of governments that presume to legalize the killing of unborn children.\u00a0 Or that will punish citizens who do not go along with the ideology of transgenderism.\u00a0 Or that presumes to raise and indoctrinate its citizens\u2019 children through the public schools.<\/p>\n

The good kings of yore were those who respected the authority of other institutions:\u00a0 the nobility, yes, but also the self-governing free cities, the churches, and the family.\u00a0 It was the bad kings\u2013the tyrants\u2013that undermined these competing authorities and centralized state power in himself.<\/p>\n

Some on the New Right, such as the Catholic integralists whom we have blogged about<\/a> and whom Davidson mentions favorably, are calling for the return of a state church, which could ensure the government ruled in a morally wholesome way.\u00a0 But, historically, having a state church did not mean that the church ruled the state.\u00a0 Rather, the state ruled the church.<\/p>\n

We conservative Lutherans know all about that, since Frederick Wilhelm III, the King of Prussia, got it into his mind to merge Lutherans and Calvinists into one state church, with each tradition having to surrender its theologies in the name of church union.\u00a0 This usurpation of the King over the church provoked the Lutheran migrations to America, Australia, and other parts of the world, and to the eventual formation of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod and other confessional church bodies.<\/p>\n

And if today the state were to impose a religion of some kind over its citizens, that religion would almost certainly be leftwing, secularized, and unorthodox.\u00a0 As today\u2019s state churches are.\u00a0 Yes, Catholicism may have been an exception, since it did claim authority over the state, something Catholic integralists would love to see come back.\u00a0 But that temporal authority still led to the secularism of the church, with the army of the Pope battling the army of the Emperor, and a vast amount of materialistic corruption.\u00a0 The financial, moral, and political corruption of the Roman church provoked the Reformation, which, in turn, influenced\u00a0 the emergence of a \u201cliberal\u201d society.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think American institutions are as \u201cdead\u201d as Davidson fears.\u00a0 The overreaching of Progressives has sparked a backlash.\u00a0 There is an election next Tuesday.\u00a0 Roe vs. Wade is overturned.\u00a0 The rest of the world is turning against transgenderism, and surely America will soon follow.\u00a0 #MeToo challenges the sexual revolution.\u00a0 All sides are turning against the tech moguls.\u00a0 False ideologies are coming apart of their own internal contradictions.\u00a0 Despite all of the assaults from without and the even worse assaults from within, the church of Christ remains.<\/p>\n

Davidson says he is neither a fascist nor a Catholic theocrat, and I believe him.\u00a0 He says that he will be proposing policies in the days ahead, and I look forward to reading about them.\u00a0 I may well support them.\u00a0 He can call himself what he wants, but I think I\u2019ll still call myself a conservative.\u00a0 A small-government conservative.<\/p>\n

UPDATE:\u00a0 See also the reply<\/a> to Davidson\u2019s article by another Federalist writer,\u00a0 Nathanael Blake.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Illustration:\u00a0 Friederich Wilhelm III, King of Prussia, by unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Most American conservatives believe in limited government, individual freedom, and free market economics. Some on the New Right, though, say that approach has failed and are calling for a big government conservatism in which the state is powerful enough to rebuild our broken civilization. This is the approach of European conservatism, while the American variety has aligned with what Europeans call “liberalism,” a system built around freedom. 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