Thomas Fleming, Pigs is Pigs

"Pigs is Pigs," from the February 2007 issue of Chronicles.

In response to the not-so-far leftists who run the GOP, self-described conservatives call for a restoration of conservative principles. This is one of the besetting follies of American conservatives, the delusion that “ideas have consequences,” a pretentious phrase foisted on Richard Weaver by his publisher and inevitably picked up by the same Trotskyists who think that arguments between the kids at two City College cafeterias constituted a world-historical event. In Washington, think tankers who may behave as complete cynics still profess to believe in conservative principles, and even a Republican Party waterboy like Rush Limbaugh, improbable as it may seem, thinks he is engaged in a battle of ideas. If they are to accomplish anything, conservatives have to face the unpleasant truth that ideas mean very little to politicians in the postmodern political arena and even less to voters, who think of government the way children think of Santa Claus.

In a trivial way, we all know this: Money and media access win elections, while lofty principles, if a politician is unwise enough to articulate them, are so many weapons in the hands of the enemy. Defenders of “family values” are homophobes; believers in a moral order are fascists; critics of imperialism are traitors and cowards; and supporters of states’ rights and the Old Republic are racists and bigots.

Conservatives concede the point and advise cowardice or, what is the same thing in such cases, caution, perhaps because they know intuitively that the real struggle is not over principles but over the interests of constituencies. In a simple way, we know that the oilmen who back the Republican Party have certain interests, as do Jewish and Christian Zionists who want to exterminate the enemies of Israel, agribusinessmen who want price supports and a guest-worker program for Mexicans, to say nothing of the ethnic, religious, sexual, and erotic minorities who all demand special privileges for their identity, sect, or perversity.

Even conflicts over principle are played out by parties that act as interest groups. Abortion, as a legal and political issue, is not the center of a moral contest over principle so much as it is a conflict among voting blocks and funding sources: Committed Christians and religious Jews oppose a woman’s right to kill her babies, while organized feminism, Hollywood, and secularized Jews are in favor. If the former group has numerical superiority, the latter is richer in the stuff that dreams are made of, which is why abortion is unlikely to be recriminalized in the lifetime of anyone alive today.

There is no one who takes the most passing interest in politics who does not understand this fact. The men who have got rich and famous as political advisors have not been studying moral philosophy: They have been counting votes and laundering money.

A cynic would be tempted to say: “Thus it has ever been.” Perhaps, but, while there is always a grain of truth in blanket condemnations of the human character, such condemnations tend to obscure the details in which the Devil is said to lurk. Modern states have elevated the political to a plane that supersedes all other loyalties. In premodern societies, economic interests naturally play a part in political disputes, faction fights, and civil wars, but family connections, religious differences, and territorial divisions may often be more important. Ancient Athens or Rome would provide good examples, but one might as easily take the Venetian republic, 17th-century England and France, or the United States of 200 years ago. In America, the states used to play a major role in politics, giving identity to the citizens and sending politicians to Congress who represented the states’ interests. To a limited extent, this goes on today. As states lost sovereign power and mass politicking became the norm, however, other identities—socioeconomic class, union membership, minority status, ideology—began to take precedence.

So-called democracies, while they may continue the pattern of clan wars or religious struggles, tend to diminish the authority of Church and clan and focus ever more narrowly on the interests of individuals or abstract groups, such as classes and minorities. Since everyone thinks he has a stake in getting something from the treasury, his political identity (if he has one) tends to be defined by the noisy groups he is identified with. Machiavelli pointed out (in his Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio) that ordinary people have no interest in the state beyond personal security and a decent system of justice. In consequence, they spend very little time on political activities, because the rewards are comparatively slim in proportion to the time they would have to spend. However, interested minorities, such as aristocrats, know that a modest amount of effort can be rewarded with contracts, monopolies, lucrative positions, and the irresponsible power they are itching to abuse.

The political economist Mancur Olson reached a parallel conclusion about citizens in a modern democracy. They pay scant attention to the state, whose policies and politics are controlled by small cliques with large appetites, and they are content if the laws are enforced, taxes kept moderate, and benefit checks sent out on time. Ultimately, the increase of the number and influence of interest groups leads to national impotence. What kind of practical strategy on the environment, for example, can be adopted, when the debate is entirely controlled by radical environmentalists and industrial polluters?

In the realm of “ideas,” the politics of special interests are supported by an ideology of acquisitive individualism. Each individual, according to this theory, has the “right” to get as much of what he wants out of life as he can by any legal or nonaggressive means. Although this view is traditionally associated with classical liberals, and, thus, with Americans who have misappropriated the term conservative, it has also been adopted by the soft-Marxist European left that wants to give every male, female, and shemale the right to be as swinish as any old-school capitalist pig.