Jay P. Greene's Blog

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

After publishing last week’s much-discussed post on schools, state power, culture and citizenship, I had two further experiences that I think are worth recording as a sort of appendix.

One clarification I want to add first, though – I should have bent over a little further backward to stress the distinction between “conservative ideas” and “ideas championed by conservatives.” I never denied – in fact I explicitly said – that the use of the government school monopoly to impose a moral order and civic culture on the nation is something some conservatives have advocated. What I deny is that the idea itself ought to be called “conservative.” If that’s a distinction we’re never allowed to make – which seems to be the position from which my post is being assailed – I can’t see any ground for even using labels like “conservative” at all, since they would have no meaning.

A few days after I put the post up, I was discussing Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom with a friend who is, not exactly a liberal, but certainly not a conservative. Hayek’s thesis was that the “soft” collectivist trends of the Anglo-American world mid-century were parallel in some very important ways to the “soft” collectivism of Germany after WWI – and that murderous totalitarianism was the logical endpoint of both trends. Not because the intentions of the soft collectivists were not noble and uplifting, and everything one might wish them to be; but because the unintended effect of their policies is to destroy the institutions and thought-patterns that obstruct totalitarianism, and strengthen those that give rise to it.

“Well,” remarked my friend,”it sure does make your job easier if you can tie your opponents’ position to Nazism.”

“Yes, it does,” I replied, “but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

The epigram to the introduction of Road to Serfdom, from Lord Acton, says it all: “Few discoveries are more irritating than those which expose the pedigree of ideas.”

I’m more than willing to have a civilized debate about the facts, provided I can find an interlocutor who’s interested in a civilized debate about the facts. Until I do, I think that’s pretty much all I have to say about this aspect of the controversy.

Then, over the weekend, I ran across Calvin Coolidge’s speech on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The speech is very, very good and I encourage you to read it all. His critique of Progressivism, which was then in the slow and painful process of receding from the height of its power and influence, is simply devastating:

If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

The more I learn about Coolidge, the more I think he’s known as “Silent Cal” primarily because he only spoke when he had something worth saying.

But in light of the topic I posted on last week – the contrast between the progressivism that sees the diligent exercise of state power as the grounding of a strong moral culture and civic identity, and the conservatism that trusts in our strong moral culture and civic identity as the grounding of state power – I couldn’t help but notice Silent Cal made the same point very well (and far more succinctly). Much of the speech is devoted to the idea that free political institutions ultimately derive from a culture that loves liberty, and cannot survive in its absence. After discussing the historical origin of that culture and some of the social institutions that maintain it, he remarks:

Governments do not make ideals, but ideals make governments. This is both historically and logically true. Of course the government can help to sustain ideals and can create institutions through which they can be the better observed, but their source by their very nature is in the people. The people have to bear their own responsibilities. There is no method by which that burden can be shifted to the government. It is not the enactment, but the observance of laws, that creates the character of a nation.

Wish I’d said it that neatly.

But then, how many hits did Cal’s blog have?

And how did I run across this speech? It was linked in The Corner by…Jonah Goldberg. Small world!