Will to Power
John Holbo has three posts that I think are linked: one about Josh Trevino, one about David Frum, and one about Karl Schmitt. Call it a project to analyze a particular current of thought--Dark Satanic Millian Conservatism.
Here Holbo watches Josh Trevino say that we must not be squeamish about dealing death and destruction on people for no reason other than it would be convenient for our Imperial Mission; he watches David Frum say that we must make the lower orders fearful and stressed--the circumstances of the Donner Party are mentioned--in order to make them morally righteous; he watches Karl Schmitt say that it would be insane to go to war to make a profit but that it is our bright shining mission to go to war for no comprehensible advantage at all.
It is a trifecta: ruling elites must be willing to slay villages and put entire populations in concentration camps abroad; ensure that those of the lower orders who breach the principles of thrift and good morals find themselves in poverty and misery at home; and accept the probability of their own violent death for no reason other than that they have labeled somebody else an "enemy." I think that these three currents of opinion are definitely of the same origin. But I don't quite see how they all fit together.
John Holbo on Josh Trevino:
: [T]his, by Trevino (a.k.a. Tactitus):
Americans simply do not wish to suffer, and do not have the senses of patriotism, pride, and honor that buffered such suffering for earlier generations.... The ability of a society to see through grinding conflicts like the Philippines Insurrection or the Boer War augers well for its future, lest it lose the mere capacity to conquer, and be susceptible to humiliation by any small power with no advantage save mental fortitude. It is indeed difficult to imagine now the methods that transformed the Philippines for us, and South Africa for the British, from bitter foe to steadfast friend being applied in Iraq. Would that they were....
Republicans, the suffering for suffering's sake party? It all reminds me of this post by Henry: "There's an important strain within US conservatism that is interested not only in revolution, but in permanent revolution. The struggle itself is what is important, not a successful resolution, which is dull, and somehow slightly distasteful. The everyday politics of policy and markets just aren't very interesting. Some conservatives never seem more comfortable and happier than when they are engaged in an epic struggle between good and evil." Only now I guess feelers are being put out into "beyond good and evil" territory. Conservatives will indignantly respond that Trevino is not an immoralist, [that] "we can accomplish absolutely anything in the world through the application of sufficient military force. The only thing limiting us is a lack of willpower." Do you think the problem with people who think this way is that they don't read enough comic books, or do they read too many?...
John Holbo on David Frum:
John & Belle Have A Blog: Dead Right: I can see why Marshall finds Frum’s book... interesting....
Social conservatism is potentially more popular than economic conservatism. But severed from economic conservatism, social conservatism too easily degenerates into mere posturing. The force driving the social trends that offend conservatives, from family breakup to unassimilated immigration, is the welfare function of modern government. Attempting to solve these social problems while government continues to exacerbate them is like coping with a sewer main explosition by bolting all the manhole covers to the pavement. Overweening government may not be the sole cause of America’s maladies.... The nearly 1$ trillion the federal government spends each year on social services and income maintenance -- and the additional hundreds of billions spent by the states -- is a colossal lure tempting citizens to reckless. Remove those alluring heaps of money, and the risks of personal misconduct would again deter almost everyone, as they did before 1933 and even 1965.
It’s a bit-- um, ripe -- to analogize immigrants and single-parent families directly to sewage. Nevertheless, this can still be read as more or less pure economic libertarianism (with just a layer of slime on top.)... It turns out economic inefficiency isn’t what ‘offends’... Frum.
The great, overwhelming fact of a capitalist economy is risk. Everyone is at constant risk of the loss of his job, or of the destruction of his business by a competitor, or of the crash of his investment portfolio. Risk makes people circumspect. It disciplines them and teaches them self-control. Without a safety net, people won’t try to vault across the big top. Social security, student loans, and other government programs make it far less catastrophic than it used to be for middle-class people to dissolve their families. Without welfare and food stamps, poor people would cling harder to working-class respectability than they do not.
The thing that makes capitalism good, apparently, is not that it generates wealth more efficiently than other known economic engines. No, the thing that makes capitalism good is that, by forcing people to live precarious lives, it causes them to live in fear of losing everything and therefore to adopt – as fearful people will -- a cowed and subservient posture: in a word, they behave ‘conservatively’. Of course, crouching to protect themselves and their loved ones from the eternal lash of risk precisely won’t preserve these workers from risk. But the point isn’t to induce a society-wide conformist crouch by way of making the workers safe and happy. The point is to induce a society-wide conformist crouch. Period. A solid foundation is hereby laid for a desirable social order....
[L]aissez faire capitalism is good if and only if under capitalism the masses are forced to work in environments that break their will to want to ‘jump across the big top’, i.e. behave in a self-assertive, celebratorily individualist manner. Ergo, a dark satanic millian liberal will tend to oppose capitalism to the degree that, say, Virginia Postrel turns out to be right about capitalism ushering in a bright new age of individual liberty, in which people try new things for the sheer joy of realizing themselves, etc., etc....
Contemporary conservatives still value that old American character.... [T]here have been hundreds of such changes -- never mind since the Donner party’s day, just since 1945.... All of these changes have had the same effect: the emancipation of the individual appetite from restrictions imposed on it by limited resources, or religious dread, or community disapproval, or the risk of disease or personal catastophe. (p. 202-3)
Words fail me; links not much better. The Donner party? Where did all these people go? Into each other, to a dismaying extent.... The stoical endurance of the Donner party in the face of almost unimaginable suffering is indeed moving.... But it is by no means obvious... that lawmakers and formulators of public policy should therefore make concerted efforts to emulate the Donner’s dire circumstances.... “It’s the economy, stupid! We need to bury it under ten to twelve feet of snow so that we will be forced to cannibalize the dead... [to] be objects of moral edification to future generations.”...
I’ve had enough of this. I’m stopping. The funny thing about this book is: it isn’t nearly as bad I just made it sound.... The middle chapters -- full of history and policy detail, so forth -- are quite cogent. Just the main chapters have problems...
John Holbo on Karl Schmitt:
Carl Schmitt: War! What is it good for?: John Quiggin writes:
So, let me start with the observation that war is inherently a negative-sum activity and the empirical fact that, in practice, aggressive war is almost invariably a negative-return activity for the inhabitants of countries that undertake it, Germany in the first half of C20 being a striking example. Schmitt and similar thinkers manage to construct logical frameworks that insulate them from crucial facts like this....
And yet here is what Schmitt actually says on the subject in The Concept of the Political....
War as the most extreme political means discloses the possibility which underlies every political idea, namely, the distinction of friend and enemy. This makes sense only as long as this distinction in mankind is actually present or at least potentially possible.... [I]t would be senseless to wage war for purely religious, purely moral, purely juristic, or purely economic motives.... [R]eligious, moral and other antitheses can intensify to political ones and can bring about the decisive friend-or-enemy constellation. If, in fact, this occurs, then the relevant antithesis is no longer purley religious, moral, or economic, but political. The sole remaining question then is always whether such a friend-and-enemy grouping is really at hand, regardless of which human motives are sufficiently strong to have brought it about. (p. 36)
More succinctly:
To demand seriously of human beings that they kill others and be prepared to die themselves so that trade and industry may flourish for the survivors or that the purchasing power of grandchildren may grow is sinister and crazy (p. 48)
Schmitt is running John Quiggin's point more or less in reverse[:]... since the economic reality does not support war, but it is clear that the possibility of war remains real, therefore the friend-enemy distinction must be fundamental. I have to admit it: that makes a dismal sort of sense to me. And reading the newspaper doesn't make it make less sense, I'm sad to say.
I also agree with Quiggin that Schmitt seems weirdly insulated from these facts, even though he more or less lays them out himself. He complains about one sinister, crazy thing -- going to war for profit -- but seems placidly untroubled by the [even greater] sinister craziness of going to war even though its not profitable, just because you are locked in a friend/enemy thing...
