2011-02-20

Conservative movements defend established privilege by government power

The push to take away the common people’s ability to bargain collectively by some temporary conservative majorities in state governments – by any means possible, the use of power for the sake of power – is reminiscent of other excesses.
Friedrich Hayek wrote in his 1956 foreword to the US edition of The road to serfdom:
Conservatism, though a necessary element in any stable society, is not a social program; in its paternalistic, nationalistic, and power-adoring tendencies it is often closer to socialism than true liberalism; — Friedrich A Hayek, “Foreword to the 1956 US edition”, The road to serfdom – The definitive edition (2007, first published 1944)
Often referring to himself as a Old/English Whig, Hayek did not mean liberalism/liberals in the contemporary US sense.
It was the ideals of the English Whigs that inspired what later came to be known as the liberal movement in the whole of Europe and that provided the conceptions that the American colonists carried with them and which guided them in their struggle for independence and in the establishment of their constitution. — Friedrich A Hayek, “Why I am not a conservative”, The Constitution of Liberty (1960)
In the USA we have lost the classical sense of “liberal”, and US conservatives use the term as an insult: pointy-headed assertions such as there is “anti-Republican liberal media bias”. Now it is true that all media have a bias (and many different forms) but Walter Cronkite thought the bias should be of a particular form, that of a liberal bias of examining each case on its merits:
I think that being liberal, in the true sense, is being nondoctrinaire, nondogmatic, noncomitted to a cause – but examining each case on its merits. Being left of center is another thing; it’s a political position. I think most newspapermen by definition have to be liberal; if they’re not liberal, by my definition of it, then they can hardly be good newspapermen. — Ron Powers, “Interview with Walter Cronkite” (Playboy, 1973). [My emphasis]
Hayek also said “A conservative movement, by its very nature, is bound to be a defender of established privilege and to lean on the power of government for the protection of privilege”. Of course Hayek does not define “established privilege”, but that could include established in the mind of those in government as being desirable (conservatives, by their nature, often reach back to an earlier time) – established privilege could also include the interests of financial backers of those who had government power.
Possible Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty said “The Constitution wasn’t written to limit freedom, it was written to limit government” and “The message of the tea party, as I see it, is pretty simple, it’s pretty straight forward, and it’s this: God made us to be free and the founding fathers made the constitution to keep us free.” Pawlenty should have told us that the US constitution’s social engineers (founding fathers?!) wanted white men to be free, but not  slaves, not indigenous peoples, and not recent recent immigrants (don’t forget that only the native-born could be the US President – the establishment didn’t trust immigrants). Tea Party supporters seem perfectly willing to restrict other people’s freedoms, often in order to maintain their established privileges.

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