Your article goes head-on against a long conservative tradition of tinkering with government policy in the (correct) belief that it affects such “metaphysically” grounded institutions as the family.  Look at the Catholic (and also some non-Catholic) French conservatives, le Play for instance, who devoted so much attention to the law of primogeniture and its effect on the 19th-century family. Metaphysically-oriented conservatives need to take the tax code seriously.

Your description of Machiavellianism has little to do with Machiavelli, of course.  Machiavelli was not a technocrat.  He was vitally concerned with the goods of politics--what you call the “why” as opposed to the “how"--in the Discourses and even in The Prince.  And modern-day Machiavellians such as (boo, hiss) Michael Ledeen are just as concerned with the “why” as was their master.

Your description of “individual rights or tribal groupthink” as “value-neutral” was sarcastic, right?  I hope?  If it was, then I was too bad a reader to pick up on the sarcasm.

(Can anyone explain to me why late-term abortionists in New York State are respected medical professionals, while losers caught with the wrong-sized bag of pot will be sentenced to decades of prison rape? Help me out here, people.)

Well, people dont go to jail for decades anymore for pot. Less than 2 ounces is a slap on the wrist. Why I knew a guy that got busted with 5 lbs of weed and never went to prison or got his salad tossed. =)

Well, Ploni, I’m afraid you aren’t the most careful reader. Yes, I understand like everyone else who has read the even introductions appended to editions of “The Prince” that Machiavelli was an Italian patriot, who had actual MOTIVES for his actions. Sigh.... So does Douthat, and so did Talleyrand, presumably. Some of those motives included ideals. What I point to is how the adoption of means that corrupt one’s ends degrades and obscures those ends… and if you can’t see how trying to connect America’s middle and working class to the pneumatic machinery of wealth redistribution obliterates roughly HALF of what constitutes conservatism (at least of the Anglophone variety), then you ought to go right out and get a job working for the McCain campaign. The Christian Democrats of Europe followed this strategy, and the enervated, post-Christian, peoples of today’s EU are the result. It was all so predictable… which I know because Wilhelm Ropke predicted it, in “The Social Crisis of Our Time.”

Yes, the tax code should discriminate in favor of heterosexual married people with large families. But every such attempt at policies that explicitly and exclusively favor traditional social forms will founder and fail in our secular political culture. So we’ll end up subsidizing gay couples who adopt… and a few Supreme Court decisions later, polygamous families who clone.

A fine article, Dr Zmirak.

If memory serves( a big if), wasn’t Dr. Fleming’s opposition to a anti-gay-marriage amendment based on the idea that policies that would increase the power of the federal government would always favor the left in our morally degenerate culture?

“Unless conservatives are ready and willing to advocate full-on, Francoist patriarchy (Not that there’s anything wrong with that…), they really should give up on the notion that tinkering with tax policies will save the family, or the working class, or anything else caring about. Apart from closing the borders so we aren’t colonized by foreigners, there’s not much the State can do for us except cut our taxes and stay out
of our way.”

Amen Dr. Zmirak! One can simply sum up the intellectual bankrupty of so-called “modern”
conservatism with all these proposals to reinvigorate conservatism by jiggering the
tax code. Is this all one can come up with? I thought we were supposed to get rid of
this awful tax code, not play with in order to benefit certaining voting blocs? Isn’t
that what liberals do?

Count me out.

In paragraph 7, you use the term “case OFFICER” where context implies that the correct term is “case-WORKER.” The term, “case OFFICER” is a term-of-art of the spook trade. The business of a case officer is seducing foreign nationals to disclose their countries’ state secrets, i.e.: Commit treason.

Shame, Sir. The spook trade may be necessary to a State’s survival, but despite that, on the personal level of its individual actors, it is too often likely to be morally foul.

“The grim and self-defeating selfishness that makes modern family life seem so pointless to so many is less the fruit of policy than the fact that so many of us read Betty Friedan and Hugh Hefner back in college.”

If you are like most people, you probably went to college due, in part, to government policy.  And you certainly were able to “read” Hugh Hefner due to changes in government policy. 

“In a West that is doggedly secular, the public sector will infallibly stumble toward value-neutral policies based either on individual rights or tribal groupthink (depending on which party and which race holds the whip).”

But in fact they aren’t value-neutral, and are remarkably uniform throughout the West.  Policies that are best for the dominant race are not in effect in any Western motion, nor do “conservative” parties in the West make the interests of the majority of their constituents into policy, even at the smallest level, when they win elections.  The question is not why do things fall, but why do they fall the way they do? 

Certainly twiddling the tax code won’t put Humpty back together Repubs scream “tax cut! tax cut! tax cut!” to avoid confronting the dominant left on cultural (read racial) issues, the same reason they look for adventures overseas.  The white working class is the Republican party’s most loyal constituent group, though they get virtually nothing from the Repubs, and talk about winning back the working class only makes sense if you dishonestly leave the “white” out of it, thus inaccurately making it a class problem instead of a race problem - the fraudulence of organized conservatism in a nut-shell. 

The Republicans apparently have some real
class issues to deal with, though.

“[S]quinting his eyes shut tight against the `why’”?  OK, forget about the Machiavelli thing.  We both agree that I didn’t get what you meant to say.

Your particular ghost story, that subsidizing heterosexual parents means subsidizing homosexual parents too, doesn’t frighten me.  Given homosexual “marriage” (which is bad) and a complex tax code (which is bad), it’s not obvious to me that subsidizing gay couples who raise children is bad too.  At least the little tykes will have beautifully decorated nurseries, right?  I guess there’s little doubt from a Catholic point of view, but is there an argument that might be convincing to an atheist like me?  The answer for your example may be relevant to your general argument, which is reasonable but still unconvincing.

Your suggestion that I support McCain doesn’t insult me that much either.  I don’t like him, but I do like the idea of issue-oriented coalitions with mainstream conservatives and, yes, neoconservatives.  I know--now everybody go read “Answering Blasphemy”.

In paragraph 7, you use the term “case OFFICER” where context implies that the correct term is “case-WORKER.” The term, “case OFFICER” is a term-of-art of the spook trade.

Right.

http://www.occupationalinfo.org/19/195267022.html

http://www.sjgov.org/hr/Jobs/C/RL1002%20Child%20Support%20Officer%20II.pdf

Ploni Almoni wrote: Machiavelli was not a technocrat.  He was vitally concerned with the goods of politics--what you call the “why” as opposed to the “how"--in the Discourses and even in The Prince.

Very true and I am not sure what is with all the Machiavelli bashing lately.  We should not bring this great thinker’s name into a discussion of the kind of bureaucratic materialism that passes for “realism” these days, he has been slandered enough.

I agree with John Zmirak that questionable means increase the risk of corrupting noble ends, but it is odd to make the assertion that they inevitably corrupt them (a notion I think belongs more to utopian liberalism than to the right) and then praise Franco.  I am no Franco-basher, believe me, but to attack Machiavelli and praise a man who assumed the role of a classic Machiavellian ruler to protect what was noble and sacred seems contradictory. 

I mean, I understood the point Zmirak was trying to make with this article, but Machiavellian to me pertains more to a man he rightly defends here than those he deplores.  And you have to look at the rational as well as the irrational motives behind a leader or movement’s power, the material interests and the ideals.  You look at just one or the other.  Sam Francis, a real neo-Machiavellian thinker, understood that well, as did Machiavelli himself.

I meant to write “You CAN’T just look at one or the other.”

Great article, Mr. Zmirak

This is why I went from “conservative” to libertarian.  Government can’t make you a better person, and if anything many of today’s rotten vices can be attributed to big government.  Lower government as much as possible, butt out of people’s lives, and society will then correct itself.  True, that won’t make utopia or make things perfect by any stretch, but at least we will have a much more happy and sane and productive society that way.

What’s the greatest objection to Franco (and hence, to Machiavellianism)? Not so much the atrocities he committed (rightly deplored by no less than the Royalist Georges Bernanos) but the atrocity he left behind: A Spain desperate to escape the bonds of a coercive Catholic politics which had largely replaced the supernatural Faith. I agree with the Carlist critics of Franco; his problem was that he was entirely TOO modern, too much of a compromiser. He wanted modern Western dressed up with scapulars, watched over by the Guardia Civil. Didn’t work any better than the Christian Democracy tried in France, or the clericalist nationalism in Ireland. We need something entirely new-- based in freedom AND faith. The movement which comes closest to finding it is Communion and Liberation, which I highly recommend to any Catholic readers. But skip their liturgies....

But skip their liturgies....

Mr. Zmirak: Not traditional enough? Surely they can’t be as bad as the liturgies of a typical American parish?

“The movement which comes closest to finding it is Communion and Liberation, which I highly recommend to any Catholic readers”

Was briefly reading their US website, looks interesting, I will definitely check it out in more detail later

Dear PB: They’re kind of happy-clappy. But then, I really don’t favor the Novus Ordo if one can avoid it. Most towns now have either Church-approved Tridentine or Eastern Rite alternatives. Perhaps by the end of this pontificate the ordinary parish Mass will regain a suitable level of reverence. Certainly that’s what we’re praying for!

We should definitely pray for good things to come out of World Youth Day, even though the liturgies might not be better than what was experienced in DC during the Holy Father’s visit.

While I understand Machivelli and what he was about, it comes to me that we should move ahead in time, not that it exists, but that this time suits them, shouldnt we really be discussing Strauss?

Really, our media, financed by whatever means for whatever cause, has found it can coerce peoples opinions thru less than honest script. Strauss realised this relaity thru a small screen in ones living room can induce a reality thats not real. Reality based is what Rove called the TV viewers.

Screw Machivelli, Marx, Rand and all the rest. They are being thrown down the memory hole, and rightly so.

The question is how can we take advantage of the failure of the Orwellian attempt?

Dear PB: They’re kind of happy-clappy. But then, I really don’t favor the Novus Ordo if one can avoid it. -JZ

I dont favor the Novus Ordo under those who wish to bring it to frution, yet I understand that a Novus Ordo is pertinent to the survival of life, the original and pure immaterialist one, for this is, really our cause.

If Franco had been less ruthless or less modern, his country would likely have fallen to communism (the strongest party of the evil Republican coalition, but the others were no prizes either) instead of being a buffer against it.  His Catholicism was no more coercive than that of his country’s forefathers and foremothers, who also had good reason to do what they did.  In that sense he was a traditionalist, but I think the coercive nature of conservative Spanish Catholicism has been fairly exaggerated.  It is true that he was a pioneer in strategic bombing and the destructive horrors that come with it, but I can understand his explanation that he would rather see Madrid destroyed than see it fall to Marxism.  I am not saying this absolves him, but his admittedly cruel methods should be seen in light of the sort of savages he was up against. 

Even if you do not agree with my admiring view of Machiavelli and Franco, I hope you can agree that they do not deserve to be mentioned in the same light as Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, or Jim Baker and Henry Kissinger.

A. MacGarr, well said.  That’s what I was trying to say, but unsuccessfully.

Possibly relevant to Machiavelli: There seems to be an implied strategy at Takimag which is, in effect, “Engage in political action if and only if there is no chance of success in the short run.” I’m recommending exactly the opposite strategy. 

(There’s also the Chronicles strategy, which I agree with Takimag in rejecting, and which is, “Refrain from all political activity.  Instead, raise your great-great-grandchildren to be paleocon politicians.")

There’s also the Chronicles strategy, which I agree with Takimag in rejecting, and which is, “Refrain from all political activity.  Instead, raise your great-great-grandchildren to be paleocon politicians.”

Ploni. Baloney.

If you think that is what Chronicles is about then you haven;t the first clue.

The article is one long dirge of defeatism. The biggest problem faced by young men and women is the high land prices and rents in big cities which create most of the jobs. Most young people are not armed with Ivy league degrees and command good wages in the job market.

It’s not defeatist to suggest we re-direct our efforts from a futile and counter-productive effort (such as turning the Republican party into the advocate of middle-class welfare) towards more essential struggles. If religious folks would spend more time and energy fostering renewal among their own communities, instead of letting party hacks use them as foot soldiers, we’d make more progress. In other words, think globally, act locally!

Re the “Chronicles strategy”: OK, then call it the Scott Richert strategy, as described by him in a Comment section here at Takimag.  I didn’t want to bring his name into it at first because he’s not here to respond.  Obviously my characterization was tongue-in-cheek, and you can Google to find his exact words. I have a lot of respect for Mr. Richert, but I think he was wrong in this case.

As I said to Mr. Richert at the time, I think Chronicles (especially Sam Francis) made a mistake in abandoning its (his) Gramscian approach. That does not contradict my belief that politicking for short-term goals is a good idea.  As a Gramscian, I agree with Richert that you’re not gonna do much in government (even if you get there) until you’ve changed the culture first.  But you can do good at the margins.