SOME OF THE SHARPEST minds of conservative punditry have lately been whetting their knives on the candidacy of John McCain. The trend of these arguments is disturbing, because it indicates
conservatism may be drifting far from its roots.
The ire against McCain contains elements of two of
the greatest fallacies of modern political thought:
the notion that ideology can replace virtue as the
mainstay of a decent regime, and the cynical
assumption that virtue is not real but vanity in
disguise.
The main current of opposition to McCain faults him
for departures from strict free-market
ideology. McCain's decisions about tax cuts,
campaign finance, and greenhouse gas caps may be
prudent or imprudent, and it is important to debate
their practical effects on our economy and on our
nation's well-being. Nonetheless, if
conservatives succeed in marginalizing anyone who
does not toe the doctrinaire line of their free
market ideology, they will lose
an important--indeed the most central and
precious--aspect of their creed: the faith in the
virtue of individuals to make
a good society for themselves, rather than the faith in
an ideology to make a good society for us.
The modern form of this debate goes back at least as
far as Immanuel Kant, who articulated the core of
the progressive faith when he argued that "a
people of devils" could form a well-governed
society, as long as those devils
were intelligent--that is, as long as they
believed in the correct
ideology. Alexander Hamilton knew better. Hamilton
warned that when virtue came to be considered
"only a graceful appendage of wealth . . . the
tendency of things will be to depart from the
republican standard." Hamilton was one of the
most ardent believers in the benefits of commerce
among the Founding Fathers. And yet he was not an
ideologue. He knew that rigorous adherence to any
single idea was a recipe for political
decline. Hamilton argued that a decent political
order requires virtuous statesmen because
the activity of politics demands moral
intelligence, or what the ancient philosophers
called prudence. Even the best-designed republic
requires prudent leadership, and Hamilton knew
there is no substitute for this virtue.
Conservatives need to defend free markets not as an
ideology but as an aspect of policy that serves the
purpose of allowing individual excellence to
flourish. A defense of free markets as a means to
a good society, rather than as an end in itself,
has served us well in the past. The struggle
against communism, for example, was not only, or
even primarily, about free markets. It was about
human dignity and the worth of a political order
that allows individuals to live decent and virtuous
lives. Freedom of enterprise is a part--but only
a part--of that decent political order.
The problem with absolute faith in any ideology,
including that of the free market, becomes evident
with a glance at the flagship publication of the
libertarians, Reason magazine. It is no coincidence
that Reason publishes hagiographies of Milton
Freedman as well as pleas for drug legalization and
appreciations of cartoon pornography: economic
libertarianism, elevated to the status
of inviolable first principle, leads to moral
libertarianism.
The moral vacuity of dogmatic libertarianism is
poisonous to public life. By teaching that
'greed is good,' strict free-market ideology
holds out the promise that private vices can be
public virtues. Recent congressional history has
laid bare the fallacy of this
argument. Republicans who
proclaimed from the stump that greed was good turned
out to believe it when they got into office,
amassing earmarks and bridges to nowhere by means
of their newfound powers. Why should we be
surprised? To expect them to do otherwise would be
to expect that men sometimes risk their
self-interest for the sake of the public good, which
our economist friends tell us is
impossible. Conservatives who forget that the free
market is properly a piece of policy rather than
an ideological end-in-itself not only obscure the
importance of individual virtue, they undermine it.
