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The American Left, the American Right, and the Enlightenment
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13615 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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4 / 1988 |
2,273 Words |
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Stanley Rosen
Stanley Rosen is professor of political science at the
University of Southern California, Los Angeles. |
The peculiar rancor of the campaign against Judge Bork, the collapse of the stock market, and the failure of Congress to support the president's contra aid package combine with the singular incomprehension of the Great Communicator to persuade us that we are already in the post-Reagan epoch. In one sense, we have been there for some time now, let us say, since the bombing of the U.S. Marine headquarters at the Beirut Airport revealed the virtual absence of a strong Reagan foreign policy.
A good many of us voted twice for Reagan because we were unable to support the Democratic alternative. We did not vote for Reagan under the illusion that we were contributing to a renaissance of conservatism in the United States. I was, however, certainly under the illusion that Reagan's advisers would be men of political prudence. On this point I was mistaken. In addition to the high degree of outright corruption among Reagan appointees and associates, I point to the intellectual mediocrity of the majority of top members of the Reagan administration.
These remarks have not been written by a partisan of the political Left. I cannot easily categorize my political views in terms of contemporary ideologies, but it may suffice as an introduction to say that I would be happy to support an intelligent, sober, and honorable administration that did not define conservatism in terms of populism or laissez-faire economics, but was dedicated to a strong national defense, anticommunism in Latin America, and the pursuit of civil liberty and domestic justice by a mixture of prudence and decency.
Is the program just sketched platitudinous? It ought to be a conservative platitude. But the tragedy of conservatism in the United States is that there isn't any conservatism. Instead, we have a peculiar native blend of radical romanticism, populism, and the unspeakably vulgar selfishness of the "strike it rich" frontiersman. If this were not bad enough, a tribe of American political philosophers have arisen who justify this blend with quotations from John Locke, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and the Founding Fathers, to say nothing of Aristotle and the Bible.
I want to make only the absolutely necessary remarks about this deplorable situation. First: There is no basis whatsoever in the writings of the ancients, whether in the pagan or Judeo-Christian tradition, to support a "conservatism" that derives from the ostensibly useful consequences of the dialectic of the passions. Second: Conservatism refers to the preservation of traditional ways of life by a strong
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