The A Yeoman Farmer Series Part III
[Mark Safranski/ zen]
I am stirring from blogging retirement to bring you a series culled from a historical-political essay by a scholar who is a very long time reader of ZP who wrote this post over a long period of time following the last presidential election. He writes under the pseudonym “A Yeoman Farmer” and his foil is the famous “Flight 93 Election” essay of “Publius Decius Mus” in The Claremont Review of Books. I will be breaking the essay into parts and turning the footnotes into section endnotes with each post and linking to the previous sections that have been posted. This post comprises Part III of the series.
The Reichstag is always burning: a commentary on The Flight 93 Election
By: A Yeoman Farmer
….
What the author does not consider is whether those wars suggest a deeper problem, an unspoken or implicit problem, with America and republicanism, that he does not want to address.
6. Conservatives spend at least several hundred million dollars a year on think-tanks, magazines, conferences, fellowships, and such, complaining about this, that, the other, and everything. And yet these same conservatives are, at root, keepers of the status quo. Oh, sure, they want some things to change. They want their pet ideas adopted—tax deductions for having more babies and the like. Many of them are even good ideas. But are any of them truly fundamental? Do they get to the heart of our problems?
Here we start to see that the issue is more than a lament over the electoral challenges or policy proposals for the conservative movement. They are too conservative since they spend their time defending the status quo or tinkering with change. The author wants more, he wants serious and fundamental change. At this point, the question is whether the author is being ironic since he is asking conservatives to seek a fundamental change which would suggest he wants them to start a revolution. He does not explain how one decries the ills of society means that one defends the status quo. The author provides no evidence so we are to take his word that the conservatives defend the status quo. Except that they don’t but that is not a concern to the author since he has a point to make. Instead of trying to conserve institutions, rule of law, or the norms that sustain decent politics, the author lets us know that we must embrace a candidate who will challenge, change, or even undermine these institutions and norms so that conservative ideals can be encouraged if not enforced through electoral victory because no one else is serious about doing something “truly fundamental”. In a strange way, conservatives are to be as much social engineers as the “progressive” they appear to denounce. In this approach, we start to get a sense that the problem isn’t a specific political policy or norm, the problem for the author appears to be what is fundamental about America. Will the author explore this question? Will he get to the heart of the matter?
7. If conservatives are right about the importance of virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, character and so on in the individual; if they are right about sexual morality or what came to be termed “family values”; if they are right about the importance of education to inculcate good character and to teach the fundamentals that have defined knowledge in the West for millennia; if they are right about societal norms and public order; if they are right about the centrality of initiative, enterprise, industry, and thrift to a sound economy and a healthy society; if they are right about the soul-sapping effects of paternalistic Big Government and its cannibalization of civil society and religious institutions; if they are right about the necessity of a strong defense and prudent statesmanship in the international sphere—if they are right about the importance of all this to national health and even survival, then they must believe—mustn’t they?—that we are headed off a cliff.
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