"You can't beat something with nothing." That is an old slogan out of American politics. It applies to all of life.
In every philosophical system, there is a pro and a con. There is a benefit and a liability. There is something to be attained and something to be avoided. There are positive sanctions and negative sanctions. There are carrots and sticks. Christianity teaches about heaven and hell.
All of this seems obvious, but when we get to American politics today, we find that it is virtually all anti-.
The 2016 presidential election is the classic example of this in American political history. People lined up against Trump or against Clinton. But it was difficult to find anybody who was philosophically in favor of either one of them. Certainly, the voters did not see it this way. It truly was an election settled by an appeal to this familiar principle: the lesser of two evils. In this case, millions of people really did believe that the candidate they opposed was evil.
THE CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT
I was recruited into the conservative movement in 1956 because of a lecture given by an Australian physician named Fred Schwarz. He was a specialist in communist philosophy and tactics. He ran an organization called the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade. He was a good speaker, and he was able to boil down communist tactics and philosophy in ways that the average person could understand them.
The problem he faced, which he admitted at the time, was that he had no practical solutions to offer. He said that people would come to him after a lecture, and they would ask the obvious question: "What should I do?" He always said the same thing. He said that he was like a physician who specialized in diagnosis. He did not offer cures. There are such physicians, but we do not find them practicing medicine for a living. They are researchers who work in labs. A physician who cannot offer a suggested treatment to deal with a fatal diagnosis is not going to keep patients. Schwarz should have understood this obvious fact from the day that he started his anti-Communist crusade.
In the late 1950's and early 1960's, I often heard this complaint: "Why don't the conservative organizations all get together? Why do they keep arguing with each other?" This betrayed an astounding lack of understanding of how organizations work, especially ideological organizations. The Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks battled one another in the early 1900's a lot more than they battled the Czar. This is especially true in the early phases of any movement.
In 1956, there were only two magazines that people in the American Right wing could subscribe to for more information. One was National Review, which had been started in late 1955. The other was The Freeman, published by the Foundation for Economic Education. William F. Buckley, who launched National Review, originally had wanted to get control over the name The Freeman. It was controlled by Leonard E. Read. There had been a previous magazine called The Freeman, but it had gone out of business in 1954. Read started his version of The Freeman in 1956. Some of the authors wrote for both magazines. Henry Hazlitt was one, and John Chamberlain was another. But the two magazines had different goals and organizing principles. The most important difference was this: The Freeman was not an "anti-"magazine. It was "anti-" only in so far as a particular author would contrast what Read called the freedom philosophy with some other philosophy that did not promote freedom, and therefore produced bad results.
Buckley was a conservative who had no operational philosophy of what to do. He was famous for the initial promotion of National Review, which he described in its Mission Statement: "It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it." The rest of the mission statement is an attack on the bad guys. It accurately identified some very bad guys. But he never did articulate what his political philosophy was. He spent the last decades of his life writing spy novels. This was appropriate, since he had been in the CIA after graduating from Yale, where he had been a member of Skull and Bones, which was a supplier of bright young men to the CIA.
In contrast, Read was clear: there is a freedom philosophy. His editor, Paul Poirot, was able to generate a sufficient number of articles every month promoting his philosophy to enable him to fill approximately 60 pages. He did this for over 30 years. I wrote for the magazine from 1966 until 1996. My final article was "The Moral Dimension of FEE."
Read did not see the freedom philosophy as simply anti-government. He saw it as a defense of a society in which individual liberty would unleash the creative forces that are necessary to build a better society. He always emphasized the positive message. He always fought big civil government on this basis: individual creativity is the basis of progress, not the negative sanctions of civil government, and surely not the imitation positive sanctions of civil government. He and the many authors who contributed to the magazine constantly returned to this theme: the civil government is able to bestow benefits on some people only because it has extracted wealth from other people. The state is not a source of net positive sanctions. It is at best a source of restraints on violence and fraud.
This was not good enough for Buckley and his authors, but they never made it clear exactly what it was that they were trying to substitute for the political system run by the bad guys. In contrast, Read did not want attacks in his magazine against bad guys. He wanted analyses of flaws in the ideas of the bad guys. A writer could mention bad guys, but only with respect to their flawed arguments.
It is not that difficult to demolish the arguments presented by the defenders of the messianic state. I started doing it in 1958 in a term paper against Karl Marx. A decade later, I did it again with a book against Karl Marx. The difference was this: in between, I figured out what to substitute for the utopian revolutionary ideas of Karl Marx.
If we date the conservative movement with Edmund Burke's classic book, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), we get to the heart of the problem. Burke had no philosophical defense of the free society. In fact, his book was a philosophical attack on the idea of a philosophical statement of faith with respect to the social order. Burke's position was entirely defensive. He wanted tradition, but he never defined which tradition he wanted. He was a friend of Adam Smith. He liked Smith's book, The Wealth of Nations (1776). But he correctly identified Smith as an economist, and he believed that the fatal flaw of all economists is that they try to set forth an overarching system that can then be used to construct legislation. He completely opposed this strategy. He did not trust any logical system that was presented in the name of changing society. He built his philosophy on this premise. So did the conservative movement that built on Burke's initial challenge to the French Revolution. The conservative movement in Western Europe was overwhelmingly anti-French Revolution throughout the 19th century. It was opposed to the French Revolution and all of the mini-revolutions that had come into existence in imitation of the French Revolution.
I remember the first essay I ever read on Burke that exposed this problem. It was written by Murray Rothbard. He made the obvious point: there are a lot of different traditions. How can anyone decide which tradition to adopt and then seek to implement? To do this, he argued, we have to have a logically coherent philosophy by which to evaluate the competing traditions. I read that in 1960. It saved me a lot of grief. It also kept me from being a hard-core conservative. That was because the American conservative movement after World War II was overwhelmingly an "anti-"movement. It was anti-Communist. I was an anti-Communist, but I realized by 1960 the truth of the adage that you can't beat something with nothing.
The problem that Rothbard raised in 1960 remains the problem today. It is not good enough to be anti-. You have to have some idea of what should replace the system created by the forefathers of today's bad guys.
It is possible to recruit people to join an "anti-" movement. They will commit time, money, and emotional energy for a time. But then they will drift away. I have watched this development for over 50 years. The woman who took me to hear this lecture by Fred Schwarz eventually grew tired of the battle and drifted away. She was part of a group of women in Southern California who clipped newspapers and the Congressional Record for years. They were all anti-Communists. But they drifted away. They also failed to recruit replacements. Finally, in December 1991, the Soviet Union committed suicide. That was the end of the anti-Communist movement in America.
In his 1996 autobiography, Fred Schwarz admitted that he never thought he would see this. He was amazed at how quietly the whole movement had disintegrated. The book was appropriately titled: Beating the Unbeatable Foe: One Man's Victory Over Communism, Leviathan, and the Last Enemy. He lived another 13 years. He died at age 96 in 2009.
He never wrote a book on what he thought should be substituted for this Leviathan. While history continues, there will not be a last enemy. It will be the same old enemy. Schwarz was a Christian, and he knew who the last enemy is. It is not a political movement. Right up to the end, he was always hampered by the fact that he had been an anti-Communist, but he had no philosophy of Christian civilization. He never talked about it. He talked only about the diagnosis of Communism. He did not talk about the cure.
CONCLUSION
Different people are committed to different positive philosophies. It is their task to defend them intelligently. It is also their task to do whatever they can to formulate programs for implementing their philosophies locally. This is a lot of work, and almost nobody ever wants to do this. This is why revolutions are always begun by a tiny minority within some a fringe movement. Lenin was a Bolshevik. His enemies in 1903 were Mensheviks. I learned that from Schwarz. But Schwarz never attempted to build his equivalent of the Bolsheviks.
It is not good enough to diagnose a problem. You have to suggest a cure. Otherwise, people are not going to pay attention to your diagnosis. It is easier to eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.
You can't beat something with nothing.
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