Conservatism qua Conservatism

A trio of sentences by National Review editor Richard Lowry shows that establishment conservatism has hope:

“Skepticism about the drug war is often associated with libertarianism. But it also reflects a conservative distrust of utopian schemes, with impossible goals (eliminating certain forms of intoxication in the United States) to be pursued by nearly limitless means. Government can’t straighten the crooked timber of humanity, the impulse for euphoria and/or oblivion constituting one form of that crookedness.” (“This Is a Bust,” National Review, July 9, 2001)

Exceptional is Lowry's opposition to the drug war's premise, not its practicality.

A lust to remake mankind is the leitmotif of all totalitarian regimes: the Soviet Union's Homo Sovieticus, Communist Cuba's El Hombre Nuevo, the Khmer Rouge's "Year Zero." It is an essentially heretical project; these tyrants seek to supplant God. David Horowitz observes in this vein:

Fascism and Communism were both rooted in the messianic ambitions and Gnostic illusions that the Enlightenment had unleashed; both invoked the salvationist claims of the socialist promise; both looked to a historical transcendence, proposing final solutions to what had been timeless problems of the human condition. Both set out to create their socialist futures by first destroying the bourgeois present, then erecting their utopias on its smoldering ruins. Both intended to restore the lost unity of mankind by first dividing humanity into opposing camps: the politically saved and the morally damned, the children of light and the carriers of darkness, Us and Them…The means of purification, for both messianisms, was political terror. (The Politics of Bad Faith: The Radical Assault on America's Future)

Mindful of radicalism's sanguinary fruits, Russell Kirk's sixth canon of conservative thought notes that "innovation is a devouring conflagration more often than it is a torch of progress."

In their endorsement of the drug war, professed conservatives such as Commentary managing editor Gary Rosen and Attorney General John Ashcroft betray their creed. (Rosen writes in the July-August issue of Commentary that "our drug-control policies have performed pretty well" and "The basic premise of existing policy…is that drug use should be illegal…I share this premise." Ashcroft's Department of Justice homepage affirms his post-confirmation pledge "to renew the war on drugs." Counter to federalism and freedom – intertwined principles, as Felix Morley demonstrates in Freedom and Federalism – the War on Drugs has scarred if not incinerated American traditions with its puritanical flames.

There is nothing conservative about wrecking families by incarcerating a parent who smokes marijuana occasionally; there is nothing conservative about nationalizing a quintessential concern of the several states in contravention of reserved powers; and there is nothing conservative about enlisting the most centralized state power in displacement of domestic and community roles. There is everything authoritarian and subversive about these policies.

For an American conservative to support federal anti-drug coercion is the equivalent of a Jeffersonian in favor of kritarchy. It has been and continues to be a ruinous incoherence.

Lowry's drug war-apologist peers can call themselves conservatives, just as supporters of price controls can call themselves capitalists. If they seek to embody and not further betray their creed, however, the establishment Right must not only repudiate the War on Drugs but spearhead its abolition.

Lowry's sentiments should be contagious.

July 11, 2001

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