The Internal Threats to Liberty
Reaching the conclusion of David Limbaugh’s 380-page book left this reader feeling shell-shocked and exhausted. Example upon example of distortion, incivility, and rage directed against people who think differently than the hard Left makes one want to disengage from the public square, and hope someone else will make the nightmare come to an end. Because when it seems that the currency of public discourse is no longer reason but rhetoric, and good arguments have been replaced by the spewing of emotions, why bother? Well, I have to believe that we cannot and must not give up on reason, because that is all that sets us apart from the animals and from having our society ruled by raw power.
I think David Limbaugh would agree with me that if you’re a conservative, Democrats are not the enemy: the ideas of the Left that they have swallowed – they are the enemy. And we have to become clear on just what ideas are held by the Left, and which ones do conservatives hold to. And if we can crystallize them down to their basic principles and internalize them, I think those of us regular folks who care about our country can make a difference, not only at the ballot box, but at the supper table with our children, and at the water-cooler at work with our colleagues.
I have found it helpful to describe conservatism as the belief that social reality is characterized by an order of things, that social institutions exist objectively and are not human creations. There are Permanent Things that have been instituted by the Creator, things like marriage, family, a proper teleology for sex and sexuality, an ordered balance to different spheres of government, from the family all the way up to the federal government.
And so, for example, when the same-sex marriage issue comes up, we can say, look, it’s not that we are being mean and wanting to deny happiness to two people who love each other and happen to be of the same sex. If they want to co-habit without persecution, that’s one thing, but a conservative is not going to just go out and change a time-tested and time-honored institution such as traditional marriage, which has served as the stable bedrock of Western culture for two thousand years, just because cultural mores shift in that direction. We believe in preserving and conserving time-tested values and ideals that have sustained us, and same-sex marriage is manifestly not a time-tested value and ideal.
No, conservatives are not reactionary. We are not living in the past. But we do consult the past, regularly, and separate good ideas from bad ones in order to help guide us as we move forward. Progressives, on the other hand, don’t know where they’re going. We can recall that the entirety of the Democratic Party, including the Clintons, supported the “Defense of Marriage Act” in 1993. Then just 20 years later, they switched to supporting same-sex marriage. Where are they going to be in another 20 years? I think we conservatives ought to ask that question because it’s a fair one. We haven’t changed. Why are they attacking us as bigots when just two decades ago they agreed with us?
If conservatives are characterized by an adherence to the Permanent Things, then progressives adhere to the twin dogmas of absolute personal autonomy and personal subjective relativism, the belief that there are no objective moral values. But surely this is a recipe for personal and societal anarchy. And isn’t that what we are witnessing today?
Russell Kirk in “The Roots of American Order” (1974) said that you need to have internal order of yourself before you can have external order in a country. Are David Limbaugh’s countless examples of Leftist anger, threats, and intimidation portraying a movement whose leaders are characterized by internal peace, or by internal turmoil?
Limbaugh has also shown how vocal representatives of the Left have become not only increasingly secular, but also increasingly hostile to Christianity. This is troubling, not only to individual Christians who find themselves targeted, but to the future of liberty itself, liberty for everybody. Alexis de Tocqueville, in his 1838 book “Democracy in America,” wrote, “Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot. Religion… is more needed in democratic societies than in any other.” Why? Because you have the freedom to do anything that you want. That’s why you need the moral rudder, the guiding force, of faith. Otherwise we are reduced to rule by mere power.
Ronald Reagan said that the most sublime image in American history is the image of George Washington on his knees in the snow of Valley Forge. Why? “Because it personified a people who knew it was not enough to depend on their own courage and goodness. They must also seek help from God, their Father and their Preserver.” The Left scoffs at such wisdom, as it does any transcendent truths.
There are other important conservative principles that we ought to own and defend, such as the sanctity and dignity of human life, a belief in the individual as more important than the state, and enough knowledge of economics to realize that capitalism enriches entire societies, including the poor, while socialism impoverishes everyone. Limbaugh helps us here, for example in his discussion of the “trickle-down straw man” (p. 166) in which the Left constantly accuses conservatives of the ineffectiveness of an economic policy that they don’t even hold. But I think we’ve said enough to show that even abstracting from the specific examples of Leftist outrage that Limbaugh gives us, and looking at general principles, “the Democrats must not win,” as the subtitle says.
Well, fine, but what’s the alternative? Donald Trump? Really? Really. Consider this quote from page 356: “Increasingly, political argument is taking the same form, with liberals asserting that Trump Policy X is not just bad for reasons a, b, and c, but that it transgresses some unwritten standard of moral rightness that renders it prima facie unacceptable and illegitimate. Most often the rationale offered for this judgment amounts to the assertion that the policy, or the motive behind it, is racist (or nativist, xenophobic, sexist, homophobic, or transphobic).”
What this means is that we ought to be wise to the reality that both the media and the administrative state, which are supposed to be neutral, are in fact anything but. We have to look more carefully at Trump’s actual record and not allow our opinions to be poisoned by the sometimes subtle, other times blatant distortions we get from the media. Trump may not know the theoretical ins and outs of conservatism, but like it or not, he is the conservative representative for the moment and the only thing standing between us and a Democratic president who would lurch the country even further to the Left and over the waterfalls of moral anarchy and economic impoverishment.