by Ralph Nader
The Wealth of Nations argued that high wages were both economically and morally beneficial, compared to the “bad effects of high profits.” Smith wrote: “No society can be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe and lodge the whole body of the people should have such a share of the produce of their own labor as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed and lodged.”2 He tore into any business collusion, telling his readers to watch out whenever a group of businessmen get together. An early forecaster of the corporate state, Smith asserted: “Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.”3
Smith’s “invisible hand” metaphor flowed from his approval of markets so decentralized or de-monopolized between sellers and buyers that the cumulative choices, however self-interested, would redound to the larger common good. His approved role of government, other than defense against external enemies, was to administer justice in disputes, invest in “certain public works and certain public institutions” (including “basic education at the parish level”), and regulate prices for essentials, such as foodstuffs, where they were in the grip of a monopoly. He would have been shocked to learn of his conversion into the patron saint of giant corporate capitalism and its professional apologists.
Ludwig von Mises, Second Only to Smith in the Conservative Pantheon
While at times very distorted, the ideas of major scholars and thinkers deemed conservative ring through the ages, from Edmund Burke (defend the cumulative wisdom), to David Ricardo (free trade), and on to Friedrich Hayek (road to state serfdom), and their later twentieth-century successors, notably Frank Meyer, Peter Viereck, Russell Kirk, and Murray Rothbard, among others. Though it is not quite as argument-clinching as is the scripture cited by devout Christians, in fervent conservative circles there is a similar citing of words from a hierarchy of revered thinkers, each with their schools of thought and adherents, and each reaffirmed by more contemporary writers, columnists, and lecturers who presume to beat their drums.
Towering over all the other icons of the Right is the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973), who started out as a “leftist interventionist but was quickly converted by his study of Carl Menger’s Principles of Economics (1871) to a self-described libertarian, not a conservative but a liberal in the nineteenth-century sense,” according to his biographer, the well-known author and polemicist Murray N. Rothbard.4 Von Mises’s books, published immediately after World War I, were remarkably persuasive; Rothbard noted that they converted “prominent economists and social philosophers out of socialism, including Hayek, the German Wilhelm Röpke, and the Englishman Lionel Robbins.”5 Von Mises is widely considered the most integrative, most scholarly, and most intransigent of conservative economists. Writing in the Encyclopedia of American Conservatism, Rothbard summarizes crisply what von Mises concluded:
The only viable economic policy for the human race was a policy of unrestricted laissez-faire, of free markets and the unhampered exercise of the right of private property, with government strictly limited to the defense of person and property within its territorial area. For Mises was able to demonstrate (a) that the expansion of free markets, the division of labor, and private capital investment is the only possible path to the prosperity and flourishing of the human race; (b) that socialism would be disastrous for a modern economy because the absence of private ownership of land and capital goods prevents any sort of rational pricing, or estimate of costs, and (c) that government intervention, in addition to hampering and crippling the market, would prove counter-productive and cumulative, leading inevitably to socialism unless the entire tissue of interventions was repealed.6
Misesian economics required a noninflationary gold standard and opposition to inflationary bank credit encouraged by central banks. Moving to the United States after World War II, he published what many considered his greatest work, Human Action (1949). After his death, the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, opened in 1982. Through its doors have passed thousands of students taught by hundreds of faculty members, who have published over 150 books and monographs, ranging widely in subject, as the titles of two of its more important books reveal: The Costs of War (1997) and Reassessing the Presidency (2001). Institutes and centers of Misesian economics and social philosophy operate in a dozen major cities on three continents, including Beijing and Moscow.
Arguably the most significant disciple of von Mises, given his influential writings and high-level participation in German free market policies and political structures after World War II, was Wilhelm Röpke. According to the von Mises Institute, he “was able to maintain in one coherent project the best of the logical rigor of Ludwig von Mises, the social understanding of Friedrich Hayek, the anticommunism of Frank Meyer, and the conservative temper of Russell Kirk.” Having “devoted his career to combating collectivism in economic, social and political theory,” he was operationally grounded in the empirical reality of the political economy.7 The Misesian Röpke expressed these often forgotten but memorable thoughts: “The highest interests of the community and the indispensable things of life have no exchange value and are negligent if supply and demand are allowed to dominate the field. The supporters of the market do it the worst service by not observing its limits and conditions.”8
Comparing Contemporary Reality-Starved Conservatives to the Robust Ones of Yore
My reading through a mass of materials of conservative thought, debate, disciplines, and apostates leads me to dispute the contentions of some liberal leaders that dogmatic thinking is what trademarks overall conservative thinking. Or that conservatism is really the only way to justify or rationalize the rule of the rich over the masses.
It is true that contemporary conservatives often ask for this caricature, so maddening is their clinging to rigid abstractions and distancing themselves from facts and realities. For example, their arguments against basic health and safety regulation and its benefits have been delivered with general bombast about the value of free markets and the dangers of socialism. Recently, that approach was taken to the limit by think tanks, which in their discussions fortified an empirically starved plausibility with baseless declarations, rigged costs, and ignored benefits—sometimes to such a heightened degree that it embarrassed their corporate chieftains, who, after all, have accepted and profited from safety devices, such as seat belts, air bags, workplace detection of hazards, and emergency equipment. To paraphrase George Carlin, these think tankers have turned Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” into a middle finger.9
Consider, by contrast, some of the views of the conservative icons often cited as unbeatable authorities for laissez-faire economies. Friedrich Hayek, a leader of the Austrian School of Economics, argued that the government may need to provide “a comprehensive system of social insurance” to protect the people from “the common hazards of life,” including illness.10 He also conceded that, in a situation of chronic unemployment, the government could have a planning role. In short, he was not an absolutist. Though most known for his deep distaste for state economic planning—whether socialist or communist—and for his belief in its inevitable failure, he was rigorously critical of cartels, monopolies, and anything that smelled of impositional planning or coercion by concentrated corporate power over free markets. One would never sense the existence of these nuanced views listening to modern, clenched-teethed libertarians, who shower Hayek with their accolades as the categorical authority for their strict positions.
“Coercion” of any kind animated libertarian Frank Meyer’s writings as well. He wrote that “the only equality premised from the freedom of the person is the equal right of all men to be free from coercion exercised against their life, liberty and prosperity.”11 Russell Kirk was more sensitive to private coercion when he wrote that the true fre
edom of the person “subsists in community.” Kirk, who was a major figure in reviving postwar conservative thought with his seminal book The Conservative Mind, pointed to the destructive effect of the imperious auto/highway lobby on communities and mores. He believed that free, self-reliant communities shielded and advanced individual freedom from both statist and private authoritarians. Meyer and Kirk fought over and never reconciled their differences concerning the dangers of coercion, but their followers blithely ignore these qualified thoughts in their polemics against liberals.12
When Peter Viereck published his Conservatism Revisited in 1950, the liberal Left was preeminent, and “conservatism” signaled militant anticommunism, a strong military, less government, free market economics, and according the benefit of most doubts to the business classes. Viereck did not harp on these themes but felt the key tenet of conservatism was to “root the masses in the universals of civilization.”13 In his view, values precede politics, here recalling Edmund Burke, who was anything but a “rootless doctrinaire.” Burke wrote in 1790 that “a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.”14 Viereck made himself unpopular among old-guard Republicans by supporting the rights of workers to form trade unions (and thereby, he added, form nurturing communities) and by backing some New Deal reforms. He excoriated liberals on many scores, however, for their governmental overreach and for other sins that undermine individual initiatives. That did not matter to his harsh conservative critics, who derided this avowed Edmund Burke/John Adams conservative as really a liberal at heart. After all, anticommunist Viereck opposed Joe McCarthy’s tactics.
And so it goes with conservatives fighting among themselves. There are plenty of philosophical disagreements, and sometimes turf wars and petty conflicts, between self-described conservatives or libertarians, who classify, slice, and dice their differences in raging polemics in their books, magazines, and pamphlets and now on their websites and blogs.
The Many Messages of Contemporary Conservatives
Here are some samples of their contesting nomenclatures: conservative, paleoconservative, traditional conservative, market conservative, libertarian conservative, libertarian populist, populist conservative, Burkean conservative, Buckley conservative, Kirk conservative, Eisenhower conservative, Goldwater and Reagan conservative, neoconservative, even classical liberal as being today’s conservative. Had enough? Try these contemporary micro-distinctions made by today’s conservative columnists: David Brooks of the New York Times talks about communitarian conservatives as compared with market conservatives; Michael Gerson of the Washington Post slices conservatism between “reform conservatism” and “rejectionist conservatism.”15 To further blur public impressions of conservatives, right-wing pollster and wordsmith Frank Luntz unloaded in the April 2012 Washington Post on what he called “Myths About Conservative Voters.” The myths, he writes, are that they care most about the size of government, want to deport “illegal” immigrants, worship Wall Street, want to slash Social Security and Medicare, and don’t care about inequality.16
Even top conservative opinion makers sometimes shake the standard mythology. Arch-corporatist right-winger and Mellon heir, billionaire Richard Scaife has been a major factor in building right-wing think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation, and bankrolling right-wing corporatist candidates. That did not stop him from placing a costly, full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal in 2011 defending Planned Parenthood and praising founder Margaret Sanger with these words: “I respected her dedication to making health care and birth-control services available to all Americans, especially those with low incomes, no insurance and no other recourse to medical services.”17
In a vigorous rebuttal of a column by the right-wing George Will, former leading Republican senator Alan Simpson stated he favors campaign finance reform. He even assailed the Republican justices’ 5–4 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United that said corporations were “persons” for the purpose of letting them make unlimited independent donations for or against any candidates for public office. He took the justices to task for “asserting a remarkable right of corporate personhood that I have yet to find in the Constitution.” This is the same Alan Simpson who has ridiculed elderly people, the AARP, and the “entitlements” senior citizens receive.18
Flying in the face of conservatives’ belief in fiscal responsibility, Republican leaders John Boehner in the House and Mitch McConnell in the Senate routinely oppose any cuts in the giant military budget, no matter how wasteful, redundant, or even unauditable is the spending, and they will sometimes try to give the Pentagon more than it requests. All this for a “U.S. Defense establishment” that author Fareed Zakaria calls “the world’s largest socialist economy.”19
Here are two other examples. Conservative Stanford professor Ronald McKinnon wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal called “The Conservative Case for a Wealth Tax.”20 Federal judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, seen as a paragon of judicial conservatism, wrote a book, Cosmic Constitutional Theory: Why Americans Are Losing Their Inalienable Right to Self-Governance (2012), in which he took on both Left and Right constitutional theories. Jeffrey Rosen’s review of Wilkinson’s book notes “For law students and citizens who are frustrated with the way that all the constitutional methodologies fail, in practice, to deliver on their promise of helping judges separate their political views and judicial decisions, Wilkinson’s primer offers a diagnosis of the problem and a self-effacing solution.”21 Take that, Justice Scalia.
In other countries, what self-described conservatives stand for is even more ambiguous and often grounded in pragmatism. In Western Europe, conservative parties generally continued broad-gauged social welfare policies when they defeated and replaced the governing social democratic parties, at least until the recent turbulent recession. The Times’ David Brooks visited the conservative government in the United Kingdom in May 2011 and pronounced that Prime Minister David Cameron’s “Big Society” program “seeks to nurture community bonds, civic activism and social capital, reacting to the concentrated corporate power that weakens the network of entrepreneurs and tradesmen.”22 Maybe these were just words, but lip service is the first step toward acceptance.
David Brooks categorizes the different Washington Republicans as the “beltway bandits,” “the show horses,” “the big government blowhards,” and the “permanent campaigners.” “All these groups,” he writes, “share the same mentality. They do not see politics as the art of the possible.” He called for a fifth category of “practical conservatives.”23
(He failed to pinpoint another category in the conservative camp, those—regularly politicians—who mouth the slogans of conservatism but violate them in practice. This is where legislators say no to government handouts and yet take the dough. This is where we might place Representative Michele Bachmann, who was presenting herself as a no-holds-barred opponent of government spending and taxation at the same time as her family’s farm received $260,000 in subsidies from the Department of Agriculture between 1995 and 2009.24)
President Reagan’s budget chief, conservative David Stockman, recently wrote a book about the “corruption of capitalism in America,” denouncing rampant Wall Street speculation, greed, and what one reviewer described as “sweetheart deals between government and industry”—often with the energy sector—driven by corporate lobbyists.25
Another George Will column found fault with conservative politicians. Will tore into Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham in relation to the US attack, with other NATO countries, on Libya. For good measure, he added another column on “Obama’s Lawless War,” noting that many Republican senators supported it without demanding the congressional votes required by the Constitution to declare war and specifically to authorize and appropriate the monies spent on those attacks.26
Indeed, because liberal thinkers tend to be more empirical in their worldly assertions and so don’t have the abstract quality of much older conservative thought—or at least so
it has been over the past century—they are not comparably revered and recalled authority figures, and are not cited as much in serious public dialogue or conversations. This contrast may be changing, as conservatives shift the grounds of their arguments.
When the foggy militaristic writings of the neoconservatives before and after their Bush-Cheney criminal invasion of Iraq are compared with more recent articles in the American Conservative magazine, one can see the changeover to descriptions and empirical arguments that attempt to ground themselves in facts and data. The American Conservative and one of its founders, Patrick J. Buchanan, have issued the most devastating critiques of the neocons’ lust for unlawful wars. It is a compliment to this magazine that its definition of conservatism, without the need for a qualifying adjective, demonstrates the possibility of Left-Right fusion. Until the recent change in publishers at the American Conservative, the Nation magazine could easily carry many of its articles without skipping a paragraph.
