Yglesias on Posner and the Conservative Movement

Richard Posner blogs on what he calls "the intellectual decline of conservatism," which prompts some gleeful ruminations from Yglesias. The trouble with this (and it's a trope that's bound to be repeated elsewhere on the left) is Yglesias' claim that Posner is "definitely a political conservative."

Posner may have been a Reagan appointee, but you can't go by that (Eisenhower, after all, appointed Warren and Brennan). Posner may have been affiliated with the market-friendly wing of the law and economics movement, but you can't go by that either.

The bottom line is that Posner is not now and never has been a conservative in any meaningful sense of the term. I addressed this issue a long time ago, concluding that Posner's documented record puts him in opposition to virtually every major conservative principle.

In sum, the left is going to try to spin this as an internal critique (see, e.g., Jonathan Singer), but what Posner has to say about the state of conservatism is no more an internal critique of the movement than what, say, Yglesias has to say.

To say that Yglesias is wrong about Posner, of course, is a rather different thing than saying Posner is wrong about the GOP. His critique may be external, but some of it strikes home. As Steven Taylor notes, for example, Posner writes:

By the fall of 2008, the face of the Republican Party had become Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Conservative intellectuals had no party.

Steven then opines:

That, in two sentences, sums up the basic situation with the Republican Party at the moment.

Rick Moran focuses on the same point:

Posner’s real gripe - and the gripe of many less ideological conservatives - is that “the new conservatism [is] powered largely by emotion and religion and [has]for the most part weak intellectual groundings.”

Amen and Hallelujah. What Posner refers to as “new” conservatism (a term I will be shamelessly stealing from now on), calls on such intellectual luminaries as Hannity, Limbaugh, Coulter, and Beck, for sustenance. In this, the leading lights of the new conservatism dole out philosophy and rationale the way a Baskin Robbins ice cream server spoons whipped creme on to his concoctions. The result are that ideas and concepts with the heft of cotton candy, but extremely palatable to the narrow minded, are passed off as conservative dogma.

Indeed. My own disgust with the rampant anti-intellectualism and faux populism of the current GOP was documented in these pages long ago. (See also here.)

Having said that, however, let me immediately disassociate myself from the implicit assumption in Posner's post (as in so much else of his work) that religious discourse is inherently anti-intellectual (or, at least, non-intellectual).

It's been aptly observed of Posner's writings that:

Religion (Posner generally lumps all religions together) is generally relegated to the opposite end of the intellectual paradigm and is viewed by Posner as subjective, “local,” “provincial” and anti-intellectual. Throughout his article, Posner gives Christian theism the most severe criticism, which explains why it ranks at the bottom of his intellectual paradigm. This is because the good judge believes that Christian theism lacks the intellectual cogency to change the mind of any thinking person.

Personally, for example, I think a renewed conservative intellectualism would be deeply engaged with Catholic Social Thought.

Given the things Posner has had to say about religion over the years, I doubt he would agree. After all, as Martha Nussbaum noted of Posner's work on sex, Posner launched an "assault on religious moralism about sex' with the "strategic aim of shocking the pious." 59 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1689, 105-06. Of the same body of work, Jane Larson observed that "Posner's moral neutrality and hostility to religiously based morality links him to the broader economics tradition, as well as to a morally skeptical version of classical liberalism." 10 Const. Comment. 443, 451-52.

So excuse me if I take Posner's critique with a grain of salt.

Comments

[Beldar]

Ping (in lieu of trackback): Beldar on Posner on conservatism.

[Beldar]

Link for the above: http://www.beldar.org/beldarblog/2009/05/beldar-on-posner-on-conservatism.html

[Don B]

Dear Prof:

I think you do yourself a disservice to take this with a grain of salt. Let's turn this over to Posner:

The major blows to conservatism, culminating in the election and programs of Obama, have been fourfold: the failure of military force to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives; the inanity of trying to substitute will for intellect, as in the denial of global warming, the use of religious criteria in the selection of public officials, the neglect of management and expertise in government; a continued preoccupation with abortion; and fiscal incontinence in the form of massive budget deficits, the Medicare drug plan, excessive foreign borrowing, and asset-price inflation.

Every one of these ideas has a deeply conservative DNA to it. Yes, even the Drug plan. Reagan created the SS trust fund and thus gave his credibility to entitlements in general. Reagan was the original snake oil salesman of low taxes solving everything and left us with a mammoth deficit that took several successive tax INCREASES, coupled with Clinton's cutting the military (a conservative pet) to fix. And the conservative STILL have nothing to offer on global warming except denialism, still have nothing offer about government expertise except the usual "Government is the problem" nonsense, and still have nothing interesting to say about health care. When I look for something idea oriented in terms of a platform, I read the Oklahoma Repblican platform and scream. There is just nothing there right now. I am not sure how you, a very bright person, even feels comfortable in the party.

[Brett McDonnell]

It seems to me this is sliding between several meanings of "conservative". On a narrower meaning, it refers to a strand of thought, associated with thinkers like Burke and Kirk, that values the wisdom of traditional institutions and morals and is distrustful of change. This was Hayek's target in "Why I Am Not a Conservative," and in this sense, Posner has clearly never been conservative.

But, at least to this outsider, I have seen the American conservative movement, both academic and intellectual, as for many decades being an uneasy alliance of that notion of conservatism with several other strands, most importantly libertarianism/classical liberalism. In that broader sense of conservative, Posner counts, or at least he did until now. Are you saying good riddance to that broader conservative alliance, Steve?

[Pithlord]

Nietzsche says somewhere that no concept with a history can also have a definition. It's easy enough to stipulate a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for "conservatism" such that Posner is outside it. It's harder to deny that he played a big role in the history of the intellectual right in the US, especially in law.

Even if we want to take Kirk as the quintessential conservative, it's hard to imagine he'd be much kinder about the current intellectual health of the movement.

[y81]

The major blows to conservative political ascendancy have been:

1. First and foremost, the complete collapse of deregulated financial institutions. Both Judge Posner and Prof. Bainbridge were strong advocates of this disastrous program of financial market deregulation, so for them to say that conservative intellectuals have no home, when they themselves burned down their own home, is farcical.

2. The failure of a policy of aggressive unilateral militarism overseas. This policy was advocated by a group, the neoconservatives, who most definitely qualify as intellectuals.

So really, it was misguided intellectuals who brought down the conservative movement.

I should note, most of the neoconservatives are still Republicans. Judge Posner would be more accurate if he said that secular libertarian intellectuals have no home. Not that I would want that group, if I were trying to build a political movement.

[Anthony]

I think you're making the opposite mistake from what the rest of the commenters are accusing you of. You shouldn't take Yglesias' analysis seriously. Just because a leftist says that a conservative's critique of the contemporary conservative movement is a renunciation of conservatism doesn't mean that it is.

Posner is criticising 4 specific things. The first - the failure of military force to acheive our objectives - is not necessarily a failure of conservatism, though it is a failure of foreign-policy neoconservatism. The second - the substitution of will for intellect - is a very real criticism of conservatism as it is popularly understood, and Posner is hardly the first to make the point. The third - "a continued preoccupation with abortion" - is a more difficult issue. I think that the emphasis on completely overturning something which most Americans want a moderate position on has been electorally damaging, but I'm not sure that it's been intellectually damaging. (Though the pro-life movement has singularly failed to make a case that legal abortion has had bad consequences beyond an increase in abortions, which is surprising given the amount of energy spent on the issue.) The fourth - fiscal incontinence - is a failure of supposed conservatives, not of conservative ideas, with the exception of the stupid big-government conservatism. In the last case, the idea that government should be smaller so that people could be more free was immediately abandoned by conservatives once they obtained power in both Congress and the White House.

The fourth failure has helped cause the election of Obama, and the Republican leadership (both formal and informal) is to blame for that. It's inane to expect voters to believe in a message of fiscal restraint from people who immediately started spending like drunken liberals once they got into power. Unfortunately, the voters' memories are probably going to be long enough for that to keep the Republicans out of the White House in 2012, and that will be the direct result of conservatives abandoning conservatism.

[Eric Rasmusen]

You are quite right that while Posner is a conservative in the broad sense of being realistic in his view of the world and scornful of the conventional wisdom he is not conservative literally or temperamentally. I think he'd agree with that.

On the other hand, while his critique of conservatism isn't a critique from within, we should of course take it seriously-- perhaps more seriously, as coming from a balanced outsider. If he finds nothing of interest in Catholic Social Thought, either (a) he hasn't read it seriously (quite possible), or (b) CST people ought to worry about that.

I tend to think that he's right and that Traditionalism needs some revitalization. Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley are gone now, and most of the energy-- if not the political potential, actual belief, or scholarly potential-- is with the libertarians.

Come to think of it, although the libertarians have energy and optimism, I don't get a sense there's much in the way of vigor in exposition of ideas either. Perhaps it'sa problem of lack of public intellectuals generally.