Capitalism vs. Conservatism (Book Notes: America Right Or Wrong)

Many liberals in America have expressed bewilderment at the fact that so many voters act against their economic interests: they vote for conservatives whose cultural rhetoric they like, but who can also be counted on to defend economic policies which will be harmful.

In America Right Or Wrong: An Anatomy Of American Nationalism, Anatol Lieven writes:

The clash between cultural and social loyalties and the imperatives of capitalist change is an old dilemma for those social and cultural conservatives who at the same time are dedicated to the preservation of free market economics. As the distinguished U.S. political and ethical thinker Garry Wills has noted, “There is nothing less conservative than capitalism, so itchy for the new.”

Lieven also quotes Karl Marx, who wrote about the negative effects that capitalism could have on traditional ways of life — something which people continue to confront even today in the debates over globalization:

“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. ... All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.”

“The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed.”

Conservatism is necessarily traditionalist — after all, traditions are what we are supposed to be conserving. Free-market capitalism is, however, often anti-tradition. Capitalism isn’t inherently opposed to tradition because tradition is lauded when it serves to make a profit. Capitalism is, however, no friend of tradition either — tradition is useful as a means to some other end and quickly dispensed with if it stands in the way (which it can often do). Can anyone really claim that the penetration of Wal Mart into small towns around America is actually “conserving” any local traditions?

The business interests of the modern Republican Party conflict directly and immediately with the conservative interests of authentic conservatives — both in the religious and non-religious sense. It is the market-driven entertainment that bumps up against religious values. Notice how often religious leader try to blame Hollywood Liberals who, in reality, are following the market — but if the free market were blamed, the contradictions in the Republican Alliance would be exposed, so a different scape goat is targeted. It is the market-driven push for discount stores that drive locally owned stores out of business, disrupting traditional patterns of life in small towns.

Maybe all of that is ultimately for the better and maybe not, but the point is that these are examples of market forces undermining and even destroying traditions, something that authentic conservatives should be opposed to. Authentic conservatives should be opposed to the market and economic forces that have encouraged the drive toward prepackaged foods and away from traditional domestic life, but you won’t find any current Republicans say anything about it because they are too beholden to those same economic forces.

So, they find other scape goats: feminism, liberalism, gays, atheists, etc. They want to return to a better age, but to accomplish that they would first have to turn against the monied capitalists who have helped fund their agenda thus far — bite the hand that has been feeding them, so to speak. I don’t think that they’ll do that or that a true counter-cultural conservatism is likely to develop here. This in turn leads to a corruption of conservatism in America and I wonder where it will take us.

Elsewhere, Lieven explains:

[T]hese voters belong to coherent and immensely strong religious and cultural worlds, which are genuinely under attack as a result of social, cultural and economic changes. The political importance of the religious factor is of course not peculiar to the United States. As long as religious belief and adherence remained of great importance in certain Western European societies, it also had a critical effect on political allegiances in those countries — sometimes, unfortunately, in extremist directions.

The tragicomic aspect of the situation of politically conservative American religious believers is that the laissez-faire capitalism which they support is not only undermining their economic world, but through the mass media and entertainment industries is also playing a central role in biting away at their moral universe.

Lieven is quite right to bring up the way in which the media and entertainment industries produce material which contradicts the values of religious conservatives. Regardless of the political, social, or religious prejudices of those in the media, though, they wouldn’t continually create “putrid hedonistic stuff” if it continually lost money. Sometimes they would, sure, but it wouldn’t work on a continuing basis.

Despite what some religious conservatives might think, this material isn’t produced specifically in order to attack Christianity. Over the long term media companies copy and make whatever has proven to be profitable. A common criticism of the “major” media (like major Hollywood studies) is, in fact, the lack of innovation and the constant copying of past creations.

If the government were run 100% by conservatives, and specifically conservatives who adhered consistently to Free Market principles, there is no reason to think that the products of Hollywood and television would be any different than they are now. Indeed, it’s possible that they would be worse than what we currently see (from the perspective of religious conservatives) because such Free Market conservatives might remove many of the government restrictions on what people can say and do on radio and TV.

 

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