Standing outside the fire

Where are you on the political spectrum?

The late journalist Joe Sobran (1946–2010) analyzed the political spectrum, thusly:

If you want government to intervene domestically, you're a liberal. If you want government to intervene overseas, you're a conservative. If you want government to intervene everywhere, you're a moderate. If you don't want government to intervene anywhere, you're an extremist.

When it gets down to it, most folks don't want this regime intervening in any domestic affairs. Cross “liberal” off the list, for we are aware of the Law of Unintended Consequences.

Sobran once identified as a conservative, and perhaps due to being unceremoniously thrown out of the conservative movement in the Buckleyite purge of the early 1990s, his idea of “conservative” here properly describes the neoconservatives.

In the neoconservative worldview, there exists a constant itch for the government to intervene in foreign wars. Rarely do they effectively scratch that itch well enough for their own good.

In this young century alone, the incessant pruritus of the neocon establishment has cost us nearly a generation’s worth of blood and treasure.

Wherefore moderates? These serpents are as wet-fingered as they come. As such, the moderate is very popular in electoral politics. They have no problem changing with the political winds.

Invade the world? Sure. Tax and spend domestically? Of course. Keep your head on a swivel, though—the “moderates” are coming for you next.

Russell Kirk had a name for people who believe in “an enduring moral order” and the need for “prudent restraints upon power and upon human passions.”

That word was conservative, a word that had more gravitas on the right before William F. Buckley—at various times from the 1970s through the early 1990s—resoundingly dismissed the traditional conservatives like Sobran from his movement.

Liberals never cared for the conservatives in the first place, but are a bit more amenable to the milquetoast version of today’s conservatism offered by the likes of Bill Kristol, David Brooks, Jonah Goldberg, Nikki Haley, David French, et cetera.

Today it is not only liberals, but the—so-called—conservative movement who are apt to describe people clinging to the beliefs illustrated by Kirk as “extremists.”

While the appellation “conservative,” tends to be more preferable to the human ear, in its current form, particularly with the hijacking of the movement by Trotsky’s intellectual descendants, the stand-alone descriptor of conservative does not properly describe the large portion of right-of-center folks.

We are extremists.

We don’t want government to interfere anywhere.

Former Arizona senator and 1964 GOP presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, said, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”

But should “liberty” even be a value to be championed in today's culture war?

Invoking liberty can be troubling, because the modern mind does not understand the word, let alone the concept.

When most Americans envision liberty, the concept today largely pertains to the amorphous idea of “freedom” and the unconstrained ability to do whatever one feels—libertinism.

“Liberté, égalité, fraternité.”  (Liberty, egality, fraternity) This is the national motto of both France and Haiti.

Fraternity is the only unobjectionable one of these concepts. Egalitarianism has totally failed wherever it has been tried. Look no further than the French First Republic and Haiti’s entire history.

Contra Meat Loaf, two out of three is bad.

Might as well embrace extremism.

As “extremists” we believe other such things as upholding voluntary community and opposing involuntary collectivism. We understand that both “permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society.”

We also adhere to “custom, convention, and continuity,” for the great extremist, Edmund Burke, soberly noted that “the individual is foolish, but the species is wise.”

And it is not the government, per se, that is bad—that’s another argument for another day. The problem, particularly in regard to “interference,” is the people within the current regime. They only make things worse.

While we are always able look toward the future about “what can be,” in no way is today’s extremist, as today’s most prominent philosophizer enjoins us, “unburdened by what has been.”

If it were not for our forebears, we could not see so far into the future and see the possibilities ahead of us. We are, in fact, proud inheritors of the past, not “unburdened” by it.

Inherited wisdom. Something today’s liberals, moderates, and conservatives lack. Extremists hold it in spades.