The A Yeoman Farmer Series Part IV:

support to workers buffeted by globalization

tax rates and immigration levels’ to foster social cohesion.

On the surface, these appear anodyne or boiler plates. What President does not

seek the national interest abroad and national solidarity at home? Is this an issue for

the campaign? This would also suggest that Obama was not pursuing the national

interest and national solidarity. The desire for foreign policy retrenchment seems to

seem a strange desire since Obama worked to retrench American foreign policy with

Muslim countries and to wind down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. If these were

not retrenchments, then what does retrenchment look like? We are told America First

would be a form of retrenchment but would it be if it too seeks the national interest

abroad? How can we retrench foreign policy and simultaneously seek the national

interest abroad? As for the desire to support workers buffeted by globalization, this

appears laudable yet contradictory. Does this mean that we are to be insulated from

globalisation’s negative effectives and open to its positive effects? How exactly does

that work? It seems to be a nostrum that sounds good, it tastes great and it is less

filling or is simply sound and fury signifying nothing. It is a way to flatter the audience

that wants to hear that the government will take care of them so that we return to big

government to protect the worker by intervening in the economy to pick the winners

and losers. This might be Trumpism, but it is certainly not conservatism. As for tax

rates that foster social cohesion that seems rather strange approach unless the idea

is that misery loves company since tax rates have no connection to social cohesion.

Perhaps this is the silver bullet to solve social cohesion, better tax rates. Who knew?

Then again, the author might be right about conservativism’s decline if the best it can

do about social cohesion is to argue that tax rates are the answer.

10. Yet we may also reasonably ask: What explains the Pollyanna-ish declinism

of so many others? That is, the stance that Things-Are-Really-Bad—But-Not-So-

Bad-that-We-Have-to-Consider-Anything-Really-Different! The obvious

answer is that they don’t really believe the first half of that formulation. If so,

like Chicken Little, they should stick a sock in it. Pecuniary reasons also

suggest themselves, but let us foreswear recourse to this explanation until we

have disproved all the others.

Once again, the author suggests that things are so bad that we need a change and

not just any change, but a radical change, but without explaining what it is that ails

America except that the policy alternatives are so bad that people have voted for

them for the past eight years. What we are to understand is that we have a choice

between Candide or Gibbon without a choice between them. We are presented with

a Manichean choice when the reality is that statesmanship is rarely presented with

such choice except in the most extreme positions, usually moments of existential

crisis (think Churchill rallying Britain and the West against Hitler’s onslaught). The

author does not want to accept that the general direction of America can be

improved in some areas but that the Republic in its core is stable or is at least in a

position where the normal challenges that any republic faces are not approaching an

existential nature. If the Republic is in an existential crisis, the ails that he mentions

are at best the symptoms and not the cause, but we cannot discuss that because the

author believes that the symptoms are the cause.

As for the author’s lament of the conservatives who display a Pollyanna-ism which

he claims is unwarranted, we must ask what he thinks of Christians who believe that

final success is to be found with Christ so that any of the today’s travails can be

endured for that reason. In other words, the author seems strangely quiet about

religion’s role in conservatism or more generally the role that optimism plays within

America and American politics. If we follow the author, then we must refuse to be

optimistic in the face of challenges and that the challenges are so great that

optimism cannot be justified. More to the point, if they are to claim things are bad

they must be so bad that radical change is required, not just change but radical

change, which raises the question of whether conservatives can argue things are

bad, or things are very bad, but if they do they must embrace radical change for

anything less is surrender to unwarranted optimism.

However, what bothers the author is that his fellow conservatives either do not

believe that things are that bad, in particular as he does not grant that they can be

that bad in specific areas without being that bad overall, or they have a pecuniary

Page 2 of 5 | Previous page | Next page