Republicans will never become a majority party in
Connecticut – or, indeed, anywhere else – unless they are able to reclaim what
used to be called, in pre-neo-progressive days, the vital center of American
politics.
The vital center has become far less vital than it had been
in the waning days of Camelot, the morally enlightened administration of the John F. Kennedy administration.
Kennedy was a genuine liberal, in the fashion of John Locke,
Adam Smith and the founders of the American Republic.
The founders of the American Constitutional Republic were
intimately familiar with Smith’s writings. His 1759 book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, written long before his seminal
work, The Wealth of Nations in 1776,
provided the underpinnings to his later works, including Essays on Philosophical Subjects in 1795, and Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue, and Arms in 1763.
The works of Smith are less read in academic circles these
days than, say, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a
book written by Paulo Freire, a Brazilian
Marxist, first published in English in 1970. The book is widely considered –
even at Harvard, where Frere was invited to teach that all teaching as such was
a form of oppression – as one of the primary texts of critical pedagogy. The
book proposed a new Marxian connection between teacher, student and society.
The vital center of western politics, preceding and
following Smith, was rooted in a shared, organic sense of moral values
animating all else, including politics. Today, we say that politics “lies downstream
from culture.” That is to say, it is culture that gives rise to politics. To
assume the reverse is to place the cart before the horse.
However, reversing the importance of culture to politics is
the animating idea of all authoritarian regimes. Caesar’s ambition throughout
the ages always has been to use politics to change cultural perceptions. In
totalitarian states, politics has been effectively deployed to change stubborn
cultural presuppositions. Hitherto, Marx said of the Hegelian philosophers of
his day, philosophers and historians have been content to describe accurately history
and the history of philosophy, but the prime object of revolutionary Marxism is
to change both.
The forced collapse of the Stalinist and Post-Stalinist
world-order following the administration of President Ronald Reagan gave the
lie to totalitarian overreach. The Soviet Union had run out of moral suasion
long before it ran out, in Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher’s formulation, “of
other people’s money.”
Smith is singularly unwilling to offer the sometimes
despised rich a primacy of place in a free market economy.
“The rich only select from the heap what is most precious
and agreeable,” he writes. “They consume little more than the poor, and in
spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their
own conveniency (sic), though the sole end which they propose from the labours
(sic) of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own
vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their
improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same
distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the
earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus
without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society,
and afford means to the multiplication of the species.”
So long as the governing hand remains invisible in the
countless free transactions that occur between consumer and seller, though
apparent to those who have carefully read Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, freedom remains indivisible, quite beyond
the reach of autocrats, dictators and tyrants. It is the ambition of tyrants
everywhere to transform the invisible hand into a balled fist, the better to
shape the nation’s moral presuppositions and its future. The iron hand of
government autocracy has throughout the ages been hidden from middle class
producers in velvet gloves.
At some point, the national and state Republican Party – no
longer the party of the idle rich, whose contributions to an assisting
government flow in equal measure towards the enablement of the party that holds
power over them – must begin a reclamation process. And that process will be
deeply rooted in a free market economy that is not captive to the agents of
government.
Smith’s works are the high ground on which to mount rational
howitzers manned by men and women who know that freedom is not to be attained
by Washington D.C. suppliants. That is the undying message of the founders of
the American Republic who constructed their novel experiment in liberty on the
broad shoulders of apostles of liberty such as Smith.
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