All of a sudden, I am reading articles about what conservatism should be. "Common good" conservatism? Just regular old conservatism without the modifiers? National conservatism? Or what?
I think it's important to know who is doing the asking. In my view the Hobbeses, Lockes, Burkes, that were celebrated in Buckleyite conservatism were a class of the high bourgeois trying to imagine a ruling class of people like them rather than the royalty of old. In other words, if you weren't anointed by God, how do you justify your regime?
I would say that it was a basically honest attempt to form a new politics, for it clearly was interested in the class interest of people like them, but it also thought that the lower orders would benefit too.
This view of ruling has been challenged by an openly educated, intellectual class that has justified its rule on the notion that it rules not in the interest of the upper echelons but in the interest of the lower class. That's what communism, socialism, the welfare state, the managerial state are all about.
I think that the view of the educated, intellectual class has basically been a lie. I would say that the liberals / socialists / progressives have basically ruled in their own self interest, based on a cruel hatred for the middling sorts of people and an agenda that seems to care for the lower class but in fact confirms it in its serf-like, dependent status, and actually Makes Things Worse for everyone except the educated ruling class.
The present mania for "systemic racism," in my view, is a confirmation that today's educated ruling class does not rule for the benefit of the lower class or "minorities." There would be no need to make a big fuss about racism if the progressives were really benefiting minorities and the oppressed; everyone would understand how the traditionally oppressed were making great strides under the benevolent rule of the educated and the evolved.
Thus, in my view, the big publicized racist incidents of the last few even-numbered years, from 2014's Trayvon Martin to 2020's George Floyd, are not an indication that eevil white oppressors are oppressing innocent oppressed people, but that there is a whole generation of minority underclass people who have been utterly trashed by the progressive administrative state and the educated class culture on which it stands.
I would say that the simple fact is that government programs supervised by the educated class cannot be the basis of human society. Human society is not an administrative hierarchy; it is an emergent phenomenon with interconnections and relations that we barely understand. Call it the "lifeworld" -- a term invented by the German Husserl and further developed by the German Habermas -- as, according to La Wik,
the "background" environment of competences, practices, and attitudes representable in terms of one's cognitive horizon.
This idea obviously has a connection with Burke's "little platoons" and the idea of a whole network of social organizations separate from and independent of government.
I say that the only warrant for government power is "existential peril," in other words an emergency that requires the mobilization of society and its resources to fight something that will destroy "us." Obviously, you would expect, the biggest problem in human society is dealing with would-be leaders that are selling an "existential peril" that is not, in fact, an existential peril. But how do we tell?
I think that the way to understand politics at the present moment is that the ordinary middle class, the Commoners, are starting to organize in an organic fashion, and are trying to coalesce around a politics that will represent their interest, to live responsible lives with marriages, families and children, and to live such lives by following the rules, going to work, and obeying the law.
You can see that the old conservatism, based on the culture of the upper middle class, does not serve. And the progressive educated class has clearly shown itself, over the last century, as the enemy of the ordinary middle-class Commoner.
Who should lead the ordinary middle-class Commoners? Politically it is simple.
First it was Richard Nixon, with his vice president that championed the "silent majority." And you will remember that the Deep State dispatched him in his second term with a threatened impeachment in the House.
Then it was Ronald Reagan. I remember attending a Republican presidential caucus in 1980 and being amazed by the clearly Commoner Reagan supporters from down the hill that showed up to win the caucus. The educated class tried to get rid of Reagan with "Iran Contra" but failed.
Then it was Donald Trump. He connected with the Commoner middle class and won the 2016 election. They tried to get rid of him with investigations and Deep State shenanigans and two impeachments in the House, and eventually succeeded in the curious case of the election of 2020.
Looked at that way, you can see that the question of the political rise of the Commoner middle class is not a shocking new thing that started with Donald Trump.
I would say that the resistance to the rise of the Commoner middle class has been getting more and more determined. It seems that though the question will soon come to a head.
We may all hope that it does not include violence and a butcher's bill. But you never know. Sometimes ruling classes go quietly. Sometimes they have to be shown the door. Sometimes they have to be ejected.
Time will tell.
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