Industrial Workers of the World

Will is not the first conservative to believe himself an exile in hisown country. A sense of exclusion has haunted conservatism from thebeginning, when emigr's fled the French Revolution and Edmund Burkeand Joseph de Maistre took up their cause. Born in the shadow ofloss--of property, standing, memory, inheritance, a place in the sun--conservatism remains a gathering of fugitives. From Burke's lamentthat "the gallery is in the place of the house" to William F. BuckleyJr.'s claim that he and his brethren were "out of place," thecomfortable and connected have fashioned a philosophy of self-styledtruancy. One might say this fusion of pariah and power has been thekey to their success. As Buckley went on to write, the conservative'sbadge of exclusion has made him "just about the hottest thing in town."While John Locke, Alexis de Tocqueville and David Hume are sometimescited by the more genteel defenders of conservatism as the movement'sleading lights, their writings cannot account for what is trulybizarre about conservatism: a ruling class resting its claim to powerupon its sense of victimhood, arguably for the first time in history.Plato's guardians were wise; Aquinas's king was good; Hobbes'ssovereign was, well, sovereign. But the best defense of monarchy thatMaistre could muster in Considerations on France (1797) was that hisaspiring king had attended the "terrible school of misfortune" andsuffered in the "hard school of adversity."

Conservatives have asked us not to obey them but to feel sorry forthem--or to obey them because we feel sorry for them. Rousseau wasthe first to articulate a political theory of pity, and for that hehas been called the philosopher of the losers. But doesn't Burke,with his overwrought account of Marie Antoinette in Reflections onthe Revolution in France (1790)--"this persecuted woman," dragged"almost naked" by "the furies of hell" from her bedroom in Versaillesand marched to "a Bastile for kings" in Paris--have some claim to thetitle, too?

Marie Antoinette was a particular kind of loser, a person witheverything who finds herself utterly and at once dispossessed. Burkesaw in her fall an archetype of classical tragedy, the great personlaid low by fortune. But in tragedy, the most any hero can achieve isan understanding of his fate: the wheel of time cannot be reversed;suffering cannot be undone. Conservatives, however, are not contentwith illumination or wisdom. They want restoration, an opportunitypresented by the new forces of revolution and counterrevolution.Identifying as victims, they become the ultimate moderns, adeptcompetitors in a political marketplace where rights and theirdivestiture are prized commodities.

Reformers and radicals must convince the subordinated anddisenfranchised that they have rights and power. Conservatives aredifferent. They are aggrieved and entitled--aggrieved becauseentitled--and already convinced of the righteousness of their causeand the inevitability of its triumph. They can play victim and victorwith a conviction and dexterity the subaltern can only imagine,making them formidable claimants on our allegiance and affection.Whether we are rich or poor or somewhere in between, the conservative is, as Hugo Young said of Maggie Thatcher, one of us.

But how do they convince us that we are one of them? By makingprivilege democratic and democracy aristocratic. Every man, JohnAdams claimed, longs "to be observed, considered, esteemed, praised,beloved, and admired." To be praised, one must be seen, and the bestway to be seen is to elevate oneself above one's circle. Even theAmerican democrat, Adams reasoned, would rather rule over an inferiorthan dispossess a superior. His passion is for supremacy, notequality, and so long as he is assured an audience of lessers, hewill be content with his lowly status:

Not only the poorest mechanic, but the man who lives upon commoncharity, nay the common beggars in the streets...court a set ofadmirers, and plume themselves on that superiority which they have,or fancy they have, over some others.... When a wretch could nolonger attract the notice of a man, woman or child, he must berespectable in the eyes of his dog. "Who will love me then?" was thepathetic reply of one, who starved himself to feed his mastiff, to acharitable passenger who advised him to kill or sell the animal.

It took the American slaveholder to grasp the power of this insight.The best way to protect their class, the masters realized, was todemocratize it. Make every man, or at least every white man, amaster, and so invested would he be in his mastery that he'd work tokeep all others in their place. The genius of the slaveholding classwas that it was "not an exclusive aristocracy," wrote Daniel Hundleyin Social Relations in Our Southern States (1860). "Every free whiteman in the whole Union has just as much right to become an Oligarch."To that end, Southern politicians attempted to pass legislation andprovide tax breaks to ensure that every white man owned at least one slave.

full: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/philosophicalcreativity/message/1668