On politics, political theory, and rights

From the pens of others-

Liberalism permits Western civilization to be reconciled to dissolution; and this function its formulas will enable it to serve right through to the very end...

James Burnham

Tolerance, in this culture, is not the virtue we generally evoke; it is an ideological command of a similarly ideological equality or egalitarianism.

And this defeat of the West will have been accomplished, not by the superior strength or civilization of the newcomers. Not by the "forces of history," but simply by the feckless generosity and moral cowardice of the West itself.

Liberalism is dauntingly powerful. But the one force it does not have on its side is truth. And that finally, is its one invincible enemy, and our one unshakable friend.

A culture of poverty is one in which the future is discounted - both implicitly and explicitly - at a very high rate.

Having come to know something of the gigantic ideology of Bolshevism, I knew that I was not going to be able to settle for the pigmy ideologies of Liberalism, social democracy, refurbished laissez-faire or the inverted, cut-rate Bolshevism called "fascism." Through the Machiavellians I began to understand more thoroughly what I had long felt; that only by renouncing all ideology can we begin to see the world and man.

James Burnham The Machiavellians, p. viii.

In any case, whatever may be the desires of most men, it is most certainly against the interest of the powerful that the truth should be known about political behavior. If the political truths stated or approximated by Machiavelli were widely known by men, the success of tyranny and all the other forms of oppressive political rule would become much less likely. A deeper freedom would be possible in society than Machiavelli himself believed attainable. If men generally understood as much of the mechanism of rule and privilege as Machiavelli understood, they would no longer be deceived into accepting that rule and privilege, and the would know what steps to take to overcome them.

James Burnham The Machiavellians, p. 87.

Rather than retreating from the Enlightenment, therefore, conservatives should confront liberal ideas on their own ground. The real question is not "How do you justify authority? But "How do you justify rights?" Maybe there are no rights; and maybe the whole idea of equality is an illusion. If that is so, then the liberal assumption of the moral and intellectual high ground is spurious. We are faced with a confrontation not between and enlightenment and prejudice but between two kinds of prejudice.

The conservative policy in this encounter should be to support the prejudice of ordinary people. Liberals will be contemptuous of such a policy, since the prejudices of enlightened people never seem like prejudice to those who entertain them. But the contempt of liberals is something that conservatives must learn to endure.

What happens in other forms of government -- namely, that an organized minority imposes its will on the disorganized majority -- happens also and to perfection, whatever the appearances to the contrary, under the representative system. When we say that the voters ’choose’ their representative, we are using a language that is very inexact. The truth is that the representative has himself elected by the voters, and, if that phrase should seem too inflexible and too harsh to fit some cases, we might qualify it by saying that his friends have him elected. In elections, as in all other manifestations of social life, those who have the will and, especially, the moral, intellectual and material means to force their will upon others take the lead over the others and command them.

G. Mosca, The Theory of the Ruling Class, p. 154.

If his vote is to have any efficacy at all, therefore, each voter is forced to limit his choice to a very narrow field, in other words to a choice among the two or three persons who have some chance of succeeding; and the only ones who have any chance of succeeding are those whose candidacies are championed by groups, by committees, by organized minorities.

Mosca, The Theory of the Ruling Class, p. 154.

Sociology is now an ideology (or at least a set of ideologies) instead of what it had been in an earlier time, a study of ideology.

[N]atural law and natural rights are inventions intended to advance the interests of the inventors... The true believer in the myth of natural rights speaks metaphorically but claims to assert a literal truth.

Natural Law metaphysics can accurately be described as a verbal construct that, like a hypnotist's commands, creates a trance state in which experience is edited out and the verbally-induced hypnotic revery becomes more "real" than sensory-sensual stimuli. Natural Law appears to be a map that does not correspond to any real territory, but like other Idols it becomes almost "real" when the worshipper stares at it long enough with passionate adoration.

In an era of democracy, ethics constitutes a weapon which everyone can employ. In the old regime, the members of the ruling class and those who desired to become rulers continually spoke of their own personal rights. Democracy adopts a more diplomatic, a more prudent course. It has rejected such claims as unethical. Today, all the factors of public life speak and struggle in the name of the people, of the community at large. The government and rebels against the government, kings and party-leaders, tyrants by the grace of God and usurpers, rabid idealists and calculating self-seekers, all are ‘the people,’ and all declare that in their actions they merely fulfill the will of the nation.

Robert Michels