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July 22, 2009
In this review of Mark R. Levin's Liberty and Tyranny A Conservative Manifesto Peter Berkowitz makes some good points. He says that Levin's conservatism puts liberty first while respecting the claims of faith and traditional morality.
Like Goldwater's, Levin argues that liberty and tradition are mutually supportive: Faith and traditional morality educate citizens for liberty, and liberty provides the best protection for faith and traditional morality against the major threat to them, encroaching government power. And like Goldwater, Levin greatly understates the conflict between liberty and tradition: Freedom encourages impatience with (and skepticism of) inherited authority and custom; tradition generates impatience with (and skepticism of) innovation, novelty, and diversity.
This conservatism is premised on classical liberalism in that it sees in the government's assumption since the 1930s of expanded responsibility for regulating the economy and providing a social welfare net not merely excess and waste but hateful tyranny. The solution to big-government statism is small government.
Berkowitz says that Levin observes that the market generates what Joseph Schumpeter called "creative destruction," the process by which capitalism's endless innovation and entrepreneurship constantly give birth to new products and companies and render others obsolete and ruin them. However, Levin only brings up the market's destabilizing power to criticize efforts by the statist left to eliminate through law the uncertainty and hardship inherent in capitalism.Berkowitz says:
As Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, and George Will (among others) have pointed out, capitalism also creates significant problems for conservatism. Its churning change erodes the traditional beliefs, practices, and institutions that the conservative rightly sees as essential to moral education in a free society. Because both liberty and tradition are good, because each provides the other crucial support, and because at the same time they often reflect opposing impulses and issue contradictory demands, the conservative, who cherishes both, is constantly called upon to strike a prudent balance between them, or exercise moderation.
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How can anyone take this garbage seriously---seriously.
Especially as people like Russ Limbaugh and the other hooligans at Fox "news" are now the "respectable" face of what is now called "conservative".
My favourite "philosopher" uses the phrase "your objections to anything dont mean shit". Which is a perfectly apt phrase to apply to benighted second rate hacks as Levin.
And why? Because the damage done to the USA body politic by their bastard child "capitalism" (or the politics & "culture" of death dramatized all over the planet) is beyond repair, and the old "answers" just aint going to work. They never really did.
Look at how much of a toxic joke the "religion" that these guys subscribe to has become. Dark, double-minded sex paranoid puritanism dramatised all over the planet too. And yet they presume that it is going to make a positive difference.
The situation is only going to get worse unless something dramatically different and genuinely life- positive arises to replace it.