Conservatism is a set of principles about how government ought to function and the policies which political leaders should implement. And those principles can be known not by how they exist in some Platonic form, abstractly enshrined by think tank groups or in textbooks. One knows it by how its proponents -- "conservatives" -- actually govern and by who and what they support.
And what "conservatives" have supported for the past six years -- vigorously, loyally, unambiguously -- is George W. Bush and the Republicans who have controlled the Congress. "Conservatism," in its only meaningful sense, is that which they have done.
Greenwald was protesting the idea that emerged after the Republican electoral defeat of 2006 that Republicans had lost because they had betrayed true conservatism in some way. He made the not unimportant point that, rather than some hoary set of theoretical notions, conservativism was whatever conservatives actually did in power. Since what conservatives did in power was trash the constitution, wage illegal wars, and refuse to have any coherent response to a natural disaster that nearly destroyed a great American city (not to mention attempt to involve Congress in a personal tragedy in Florida), one has to wonder what, exactly, conservative boosters were claiming might be real conservatism.
In George Scialabba's essay on Isaiah Berlin's The Crooked Timber of Humanity, Scialabba takes issue with Berlin placing responsibility for the crimes of the communist regimes partly on the head of Karl Marx. In the wake of the collapse of the Warsaw Pact 20 years ago, and the end of communist rule in Russia two years later, many leftists and Marxists attempted to make the point that now the time was ripe for real Marxism to be employed as a governing tool.
Sure.
Whether or not it is true that the Soviet Union, or China, or Albania, or wherever, truly embodied Marxist principles in action, it need hardly be said that there has not been a regime that claimed the name of communist that did not descend, rapidly and almost inevitably, to despotism and, usually, terror against its own people. Scialabba's attempt to rescue Marx from what can only be called the fair judgment of history is half-hearted at best.
I can certainly endorse, as the title of Cornel West's monograph puts it, The Ethical Dimension of Marxist Thought. I have always said that Marx was an excellent diagnostician of the malaise of capitalism. I have also always argued that, as a political clinician, he was horrible, promoting a cure that, in the end, was far worse than the disease.
The left, particularly in America, has yet to come to terms with the reality that, as a political program, Marxism is not just a dismal failure (as is conservatism), but a recipe for authoritarianism and the destruction of liberty. While there are many things in Marx, and his theoretical interpreters (Lenin, Bloch), I find not just insightful but important, I could no more endorse a program of Marxist political change than I could a return to the conservative rule of the Republicans of most of the first decade just past. While conservative principles, even in shorthand, sound great - as do Marxist principles - the actual results are far too awful to even contemplate.
While there are many things wrong with the United States, one need not take solace in the thought that there exists a program that, once enacted, would rid us of our many political and social ailments. Sad to say, what little hope we have lies in the kind of piecemeal economic and social regulation that has largely been dismantled by a generation of conservative governance. Indeed, even returning the tax code to the structure that existed from the end of WWII through the mid-1970's seems an almost impossible task; doing so, however, might just be a way to restart the economic engine without relying either on pumping cash in to the investment bloodstream, bloating it yet again, or attempting to reduce the American people to simple consumers of other producer's wares.
While there is much in Scialabba's review essays I find myself nodding in agreement with, on this point he, like much of the older (and some of the newer) Left is, quite simply, wrong.
