Bear Stearns (who are the real conservatives?)

Last updated on: March 17, 2008 at 10:38 am by Matthew

Bear Stearns (who are the real conservatives?) 2008-03-17T10:38:37-05:00 Matthew

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The bailout and subsequent buyout of Bear Stearns is revealing just how tenuously “free” our market remains. There has been much brouhaha of late about whether this is a “liberal” blog or not. Among some of the bloggers on this site, I would argue they are truer conservatives than many of the hecklers in the comment boxes; and more than a few Catholics who deride our supposed liberalism would be surprised to find that their opinions owe more to Hobbes, Locke, and Kant, than Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas. (Or perhaps they would be more surprised to find that those two traditions are incommensurable.)

True “conservatism” is a forgotten thing here in America; both Democrats and Republicans embrace fundamentally “liberal” principles about the person, the state, and the common good.

The Bear Stearns near-fiasco illustrates these deeper principles held in common: neither party is able to offer a critique of our economic woes that goes any deeper than a fundamental enthusiasm for the American compulsion to spend and consume, as well as a continual addiction toward what is “big,” “productive,” and “efficient.” Both see the needed solution as “restoring consumer spending and confidence”, whether by tax rebates or helping disenfranchised minorities with more aid. And both argue strongly that the only solution will come from a new administration, i.e. that the federal government is the only one who can save us.

If you are not reading Patrick Deneen’s blog “What I Saw In America,” put it on the top of your blog roll. His two latest posts are masterful analyses of our economic maelstrom, and our failures to open our eyes and see a solution that can work. Here’s a selection:

That [Bear Stearns] was “so big it could not be allowed to fail” starkly reveals the fundamental bias in the current economic and political system toward massiveness and centralization. Note well: such largeness is constantly invoked against those who would commend smaller and more local forms of economy and banking as BETTER because, unlike economies of smaller scale, such large scale (national, international, global) enterprises ensure that no ONE local failure will result in deprivation. That is, in small economies, when a crop fails or a bank folds, the whole community is potentially shattered. A large scale economy theoretically spreads risk so that the consequences of small failures are minimized, much like a punch to a Sumo wrestler is absorbed by his gigantic girth. The fact that the failure of Bear Stearns was not permitted to occur because it would have potentially caused the collapse of the entire American and even international financial system suggests that this argument on behalf of bigness has always been false and beside the point. Further, the entire sordid subprime (and increasingly prime) fiasco has shown how this system has been designed to ensure that everyone is able to avoid responsibility – unlike a more local economy, in which responsibility toward one’s community, friends, and neighbors is felt with some force. One could easily argue that a Government could just as easily intervene and ensure against the worst effects of a local failure just as it has done in the current instance of defending against the failure of the global system. We should now put aside the riposte by defenders of economies of massive scale that such an economy defends against failure by spreading risk; if anything, the consequences of our current systemic failure are likely to be far more costly and pervasive, even as we have undermined our moral resources that would otherwise need to accompany this challenging moment.

So what is at issue then? Far from representing a “neutral” position toward human ends or the “good” (a laughable article of faith in contemporary liberalism), our current economic and political system is riven with deep preferences that are otherwise most often barely discernible, even if hidden in plain sight. Most fundamentally, no matter the party or the “ideology,” there is a deep hostility toward the local. There is a pervasive adversity toward commitment, loyalty, memory, the willingness to be content with what one has and where one is. There is, instead, a systemic pressure to adopt the Hobbesian view of man – “a restless desire of power after power that ceaseth only in death” (a.k.a., “the pursuit of happiness”). Big means more than even just growth, wealth, and power: it is a systemic orientation that encourages avarice, greed, restlessness and a willed (and eventually habitual) ignorance of the costs of our actions. Everyday I see the evidence of this systemic assumption in the students I teach: they have internalized the imperatives of their parents, ones they have learned from everyone around them, from the media, the elites, the leaders of our society, that the only true measure of success in our society is gain, ascent to the centers of power, wealth and power. They accord no special regard to other virtues that one might instead embrace, including the aspiration to make good families in good communities in which we are able stewards of what we are and possess, in which we take pride and are accorded honor for our contributions to those communities (whether monetarily rewarded or not), and in which we tend to the memory of the dead and care for the future of the unborn. We celebrate the “free market” as a neutral means of attaining the various goods we might individually seek, while ignoring an enormous finger on the scale that tends to funnel all conceptions of good to a point of singularity – insatiability. We tend to think of our current way of life as wholly natural, a way of life inherently arising from that “natural” condition described by Hobbes which was itself a masterful redefinition of our nature to fit his particular goal of a certain kind of society – one dominated by Leviathan, the great, massive, central powers that would ensure our safety even as that system wrought in us infinite and unfulfillable appetites.

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