The divine fallacy + What Trump doesn't get about conservatism

[Yazata]

What Trump Doesn’t Get About Conservatism
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/04/opini...atism.html

I generally dismiss anything written about Trump or his supporters by the New York Times. But this little thing was written by Roger Scruton, who I have great respect for. So it probably merits a thoughtful response.

My response might best be entitled: What Roger Scruton Doesn't Get About Conservatism.

EXCERPT: . . . Conservative thinkers have on the whole praised the free market, but they do not think that market values are the only values there are. Their primary concern is with the aspects of society in which markets have little or no part to play: education, culture, religion, marriage and the family. Such spheres of social endeavor arise not through buying and selling but through cherishing what cannot be bought and sold: things like love, loyalty, art and knowledge, which are not means to an end but ends in themselves.

True. But see below...

About such things it is fair to say that Mr. Trump has at best only a distorted vision. He is a product of the cultural decline that is rapidly consigning our artistic and philosophical inheritance to oblivion.

I'm curious what justification Scruton can produce for that little bit of insultery. What has Trump specifically said or done that threatens to consign "our artistic and philosophical inheritance to oblivion"?

I could just as easily point out that Scruton is a Cambridge graduate (doesn't anyone in the UK attend the 150 or so universities in the UK besides Oxbridge?), possesses a knighthood, is a wine connoisseur and writes classical music, so despite his middle class roots, there may be a bit of a British-style class snobbery at work here.

Trump is just so common and vulgar, isn't he? Nothing remotely like an aristocrat.

And perhaps the principal reason for doubting Mr. Trump’s conservative credentials is that being a creation of social media, he has lost the sense that there is a civilization out there that stands above his deals and his tweets in a posture of disinterested judgment....

Right. And that civilization elected Trump, didn't they?? 'Civilization' extends to all of the voters in a democracy and doesn't just consist of the academic snobs who sit in big leather chairs in faculty clubs with their wine glasses and little nibbles of cheese. And no, those faculty club denizens are anything but "disinterested" in this day and age.

Scruton should know that, since he's been excluded from British academic employment for most of his adult life on account of his incorrect politics. He's been very successful as a French-style 'public intellectual' nevertheless (not unlike Sartre, except conservative). He was eventually knighted for his trouble. But maybe he has a tendency to suck-up to those who never really accepted him.

Perhaps the lesson that's being illustrated here is the distinction between the British-style class-based "conservatism" that Scruton (sadly) seems to want to champion, and today's new style populist conservatism that Trump appeals to. (It isn't just the United States either, it helps explain Brexit, it just won the recent Italian elections, it prevails in Budapest and in Poland, and is even showing its face in the heart of the EU beast itself, Germany.

That movement is all about culture, religion, history and family, precisely the things that Scruton tipped his hat to up above. But in the populist case, it isn't necessarily the elite culture of the landed aristocrats (wine and classical music) but the more familiar culture of the people themselves, in their small towns, their urban neighborhoods or wherever it is. These are the people who see the elites sneering at everything they love, value and believe in, doing their best to discredit and destroy all of those things.

Hungarians want Hungary to be the country of the Hungarians, not a homogenized province of a monolithic European Union, where the elites demand that they accept open borders and being increasingly surrounded with people that share none of their history, traditions and ingrained assumptions, living in neighborhoods where fewer and fewer people follow their ways or even speak their language.

This is probably the time to remind Dr. Scruton of what he wrote up above, about what conservatism is about...

"...the aspects of society in which markets have little or no part to play: education, culture, religion, marriage and the family. Such spheres of social endeavor arise not through buying and selling but through cherishing what cannot be bought and sold: things like love, loyalty, art and knowledge, which are not means to an end but ends in themselves."

If we are really going to accept the reality and desirability of 'diversity' (a contemporary shibboleth) then we have to admit that human cultures, traditions and histories really are different in many important ways and aren't all fungible commodities that can be moved anywhere on the map to suit the short-term economic demands of the international business-owner class. Culture and traditions are destroyed when that happens, the bonds that hold people together in functioning social groups erode. People resist it.

If so much of human life is "socially constructed", as so many professors incessantly tell us, then the cultures and societies out of which the rest of human life grows seem to become more important, not less. One can argue that it's inconsistent to hold to a contructivist social-ontology while simultaneously doing one's best to destroy the cultures and societies where all the construction takes place.

If conservatism is true, in the sense that Scruton wants it to be, people can't be reduced to some kind of individualistic atoms, in which the ideal is to shake everything up as thoroughly as possible, mixing all peoples, cultures and traditions into... what? Nothing, apparently. Something bland, muddy and featureless. If people don't share their most important values, virtues and assumptions in common with the community around them, it probably shouldn't be called a society at all. If people no longer instinctively behave in ways that seem natural and normal in their cultural context, if our new utopia ends up in generating wholesale anomie in which everyone ends up behaving like a herd of cats, then seemingly the only way to keep such a thing from flying apart into anarchy and violence would be by imposing authoritarian rule by force from on top.

So contra-Scruton, opposing those kind of corrosive tendencies, as Trump is doing in the US and the New Populists are doing in Europe, isn't a corruption of conservatism at all. It's the very essence of conservatism, albeit perhaps a less haughty and more popular form of conservatism than some of the Oxbridge elite might feel comfortable with.

[C C]

[...] That movement is all about culture, religion, history and family, precisely the things that Scruton tipped his hat to up above. But in the populist case, it isn't necessarily the elite culture of the landed aristocrats (wine and classical music) but the more familiar culture of the people themselves, in their small towns, their urban neighborhoods or wherever it is. These are the people who see the elites sneering at everything they love, value and believe in, doing their best to discredit and destroy all of those things.

Hungarians want Hungary to be the country of the Hungarians, not a homogenized province of a monolithic European Union, where the elites demand that they accept open borders and being increasingly surrounded with people that share none of their history, traditions and ingrained assumptions, living in neighborhoods where fewer and fewer people follow their ways or even speak their language.

If we are really going to accept the reality and desirability of 'diversity' (a contemporary shibboleth) then we have to admit that human cultures, traditions and histories really are different in many important ways and aren't all fungible commodities that can be moved anywhere on the map to suit the short-term economic demands of the international business-owner class. Culture and traditions are destroyed when that happens, the bonds that hold people together in functioning social groups erode. People resist it.

I'm never quite sure if the "new owners" and the transnational reformulation of "plantation labor and lifestyle" intentionally established partnership with southpaw and para-Marxist thinkers to supply the schools of thought and propaganda for encouraging and managing the mixing of global vassal populations ... Or those academics -- via already dominating educational institutions in number -- simply wriggled their way onto various platforms to posture as the intellectual stewards for the process.

Regardless, by focusing only on the negative elements of "fly-over country" movements, they do try to portray or re-define "populism" in the worst possible light, in contrast to the generic meaning.

populism: the political doctrine that supports the rights and powers of the common people in their struggle with the privileged elite.

If so much of human life is "socially constructed", as so many professors incessantly tell us, then the cultures and societies out of which the rest of human life grows seem to become more important, not less. One can argue that it's inconsistent to hold to a contructivist social-ontology while simultaneously doing one's best to destroy the cultures and societies where all the construction takes place.

If conservatism is true, in the sense that Scruton wants it to be, people can't be reduced to some kind of individualistic atoms, in which the ideal is to shake everything up as thoroughly as possible, mixing all peoples, cultures and traditions into... what? Nothing, apparently. Something bland, muddy and featureless. If people don't share their most important values, virtues and assumptions in common with the community around them, it probably shouldn't be called a society at all. If people no longer instinctively behave in ways that seem natural and normal in their cultural context, if our new utopia ends up in generating wholesale anomie in which everyone ends up behaving like a herd of cats, then seemingly the only way to keep such a thing from flying apart into anarchy and violence would be by imposing authoritarian rule by force from on top.

So contra-Scruton, opposing those kind of corrosive tendencies, as Trump is doing in the US and the New Populists are doing in Europe, isn't a corruption of conservatism at all. It's the very essence of conservatism, albeit perhaps a less haughty and more popular form of conservatism than some of the Oxbridge elite might feel comfortable with.

I guess sometimes a "hit-man" or the "Dirty Dozen" or the "Magnificent Seven" eventually have to be hired if the establishment continually shouts down the less heavy-fisted or less controversial candidates. On one hand "Dirty Harry" may seem to conflict with the principles that a group supposedly holds; but the ".44 Magnum" gets done what proper procedure kept tangling up in red tape.

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