Market Dynamism and Cultural Conservatism: Keep Trying

One of the standard in-house feuds under this big tent of ours is between the partisans of cultural conservatism and those of libertarian dynamism. Reihan, with his Fitzgeraldesque first-rate intelligence and his affinity for both sides, has tried his level best to resolve the contradiction that, despite his stalwart efforts, has probably killed the Republican coalition for good. A post by James led me to this curious essay by R.R. Reno, in which Prof. Reno tries to square the same circle.

Reno describes free-market capitalism and international intervention as conservative projects that have each, in their own way, induced vertigo and anxiety in the American populace, leading voters to elect Obama as a candidate of stability and assurance:

So, conservatives need to face this singular political fact squarely: The people who have benefited the most from free-market policies were the ones who led the charge against the Republican party. And if my analysis is correct, they did so because of a deeply felt insecurity—an insecurity that we can trace back to our collective experience with something conservatives fought to achieve: a raucously creative, productive, and invariably unpredictable economic system.

and

I hope that a new spirit of democracy prevails in the Middle East. But whatever the outcome, conservatives need to be honest. Decisive use of American military power will always throw the world out of kilter. Thus, once again, policies we associate with conservatism seem to ramp up risk. And not surprisingly, in foreign policy Obama’s call for change is heard as a call for stability: negotiation, slow-moving multilateralism, and a shift toward managing rather than altering the dynamics of global conflict.

So far, so true. But Reno’s defense of dynamism and constructive chaos in economics and geopolitics (complete with a jab at stability-monger Neville Chamberlain) takes a turn for the weird:

But there is a deeper point that conservatives need to make. Our sense of instability, our feeling that everything is up for grabs, and our anxious insecurity has its most destructive source in the triumph of desire over restraint in contemporary culture. Divorce and serial cohabitation bring fluidity and change into the most ancient touchstone of permanence: home and hearth.

Now, I’m on the record as a big fan of the total package: home, hearth, and free exchange. But recall the warnings of ace commenter rortybomb, who worries that “‘free-market traditionalists’ are going to fall on the wrong side of the issues, and end up defending all kinds of odd, broken things” as Reno wraps up:

We can endure the inevitable risks of marketplace and battlefield—but only if we have some confidence about the stability of the deeper, more fundamental things of life.

I read this as “we can continue to fling ourselves into Eurasian wars as long as we convince people not to cohabitate and divorce.” Am I being ungenerous?

why does r. r. reno hate peace?

seriously, this is the craziest fucking article i’ve read in weeks. when did CONSERVATISM become about “innovation and risk-taking,” “economic and geo-political insecurities”?

i mean, look, maybe you can contort yourself into just enough pretzel knots to sorta-kinda reconcile middle eastern wars with deregulated capital markets with the perils of “serial cohabitation” as all part of some consistent political philosophy. But come’on. at least honest people on the right (like our host Mr. Frost) acknowledge the tensions inherent in the modern conservative movement and try to find a way to smooth them over, to more or less success. Not r. r. reno. he strikes me not so much as a conservative, but an anti-conservative—a radical, a revolutionary, who not only wants to remake our economy, remake the rest of the world, but to to remake even our very culture and values. In this, of course, he takes after his teacher: the Republican Party of George W. Bush, one of the most radical and anti-conservative leaders in American history. To Reno, it doesn’t seem to much matter that his various revolutionary projects are in direct conflict. why would it, when you’re a republican propagandist? However, it IS rare for someone to come out and brazenly state outright that conservatism stands for “economic and geo-political insecurit[y],” and to sneer at people’s “desire for security and stability”.”

One of the saddest things, to my mind, is how the republicans stole the word conservatism and then proceeded to turn it into a bad joke. with propagandists like reno still scribbling nonsense, it may be decades yet before conservatism can reclaim its true and important meaning.

— raft · Dec 4, 02:53 AM · #

Am I being ungenerous?

Nope. Reno wrote, in effect, that we can continue to trade bogus derivatives and hurl ourselves into pointless Eurasian wars so long as we observe the proprieties of Christian sexual morality. While I might like to think of myself, in moments of prideful abandon, as a devout man, though I am not in reality, it must be said that Reno is tiptoeing towards consummating a grotesque profanation, in which religion and morality become the handmaidens of all manner of things broken, odd, and just plain wrong. In fact, religion becomes the vehicle for dissembling these defective and profoundly wrong things as partaking of the things we consider good.

— Maximos · Dec 4, 03:24 AM · #

Woah! When I started reading Reno write about how the financial changes since 1980 has made us more volatile but better off, I was expecting to hear the standards about Walmart making things cheaper for poor people, or the Internet destabilizing business models but giving us more information. I did not expect the main workhorse, and only named person, to be:

“Michael Milliken’s pioneering use of junk bonds roiled the sleepy, complaisant boardrooms of corporate America.”

! ! ! That’s exactly what I meant too. When you luv Milliken (pioneering!) but don’t mention Google or Bill Gates at all, you can tell you’ve come down on the wrong side of something. I understand things 25 years old qualifies for tradition these days, but is the junk bond market part of our new traditional values?

If the way to thread this needle is his suggestion that we all believe that “each individual [is] his or her own mini-corporation” – that’s going to be a hard sell. Even though I’m too big to fail!

— rortybomb · Dec 4, 06:29 AM · #

I’ve been pondering delusional thought the past few day and Prof. Reno seems to fit the bill.

I’m not going to condemn all delusional thinking, the DT that has no effect on me, well, what do I know or care.

If my neighbor only goes shopping between the hours of one and four PM because she believes she is only safe then, who cares? She is functioning and it frees up more hours for me to shop with one less car in the parking lot. Win-win.

But Reno may be, and probably is, in that category of DT that has some wider effect.

I guess it goes back to the religious meme that Richard Dawkins likes to hammer away at. Reno can wrap his DT in some religious crap and by that single virtue gain an audience.

Back to my neighbor. Suppose that in church one day she mentions her DT and further relates how Jesus reveled it to her. She might receive a sympathetic hearing, even gain a few fellow shoppers. OK, I’m still unaffected. The point being, the religious meme lends her DT a bit of credibility with her co-religionists. It sounds possible given their belief in god.

Reno, on the other hand, seems to fit into a category inhabited by Popes to George W. Bush. That meme, god’s will. Follow christian,family, values and we will not only survive, but triumph. An ugly blend of patriotism and religion known as American Exceptionalism.

Just saying.

— Bob · Dec 4, 04:51 PM · #

Reno didn’t move me one way or the other, but I found this bit by Poulos fascinating:

There are good manners involved in not making lots of movies that prove how sexy and charismatic devilish souls can be. There are good manners involved in refraining from dragging knowledge not worth knowing out into the street and parading it up and down proudly in celebration of the fact that the well-mannered think too highly of themselves to sully things further by trying to pull you off stage.

Further down, Poulos talks about the “excesses of . . . self-awareness,” and the virtues of manners practiced “not-too-reflectively.” Doesn’t this mean, implicitly at least, that we are to outsource our self-awareness to those with a nobler constitution — i.e., those who are steady and smart enough to smoke the truth but not inhale?

— JA · Dec 4, 05:35 PM · #

Oh man, reading that over, it’s clear I should have written “to light the truth but not inhale.”

Don’t know how I missed it.

— JA · Dec 4, 05:47 PM · #

JA…maybe, only outsourcing itself is a pretty self-conscious thing to do. Expropriation, on the other hand…. But please don’t mistake me for a “high” Straussian. One problem with the outsourcing of nobility is its all-too-self-consciously therapeutic character. These comments are totally inadequate and your question, and its own implications, deserve much pondering!

— James · Dec 4, 08:09 PM · #

I think that it is everyones sacred job to sort out the truth for themselves: personal responsibility, baby. That is my motto. If you outsource the truth you leave yourself way too vulnerable to the unscrupulous or the insane. That is why I don’t agree with James Poulos on the parade point. Some people want to put on an ugly parade and some poeple want to watch. Other’s dont. But it all comes under the heading of sorting out the truth for oneself. People need to follow their own path.

— cw · Dec 5, 02:06 AM · #

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