In other words, the rights historically claimed by the left are self-contradicting and self-defeating. The regime of social justice, of which the left dreams, is a regime that by its very nature must crush individual freedom. It is not a question of choosing the right (while avoiding the wrong) political means in order to achieve the desired ends. The means are contained in the ends. The leftist revolution must crush freedom in order to achieve the social justice that it seeks. It is therefore unable to achieve even that justice. This is the totalitarian circle that cannot be squared. Socialism is not bread without freedom, as some maintain; it is neither freedom nor bread. The shades of the victims, in the endless cemetery of 20th-century revolutions, cry out from their still-fresh graves: the liberated future is a destructive illusion. To heed this cry is the beginning of a conservative point of view.
The conservative vision does not exclude compromise; nor should it condemn every attempt, however moderate, to square the circle of political liberty and social welfare. A conservative view does not require that all aspects of the welfare state be rejected in favor of free-market principles. After all, conservatives are (or should be) the first to recognize the intractable nature of the human condition. The perfectly free society is as untenable as the perfectly just society, and for the same reason. We would have to rip out our all-too-human hearts in order to achieve it.
The Hayekian paradox—the point from which contemporary conservatism begins—is an understanding shared by the architects of the American republic. It is no accident, as Marxists would say, that Federalist #10 describes the Constitutional arrangement as a design to thwart the projects of the left—“a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project.” A conservative is thus a conserver of the framework of the American Constitution.
But are we really conservatives? Well, yes and no. The principles of the American founding are, of course, those of classical liberalism. The fathers of modern conservatism—Locke, Burke, Madison—were classical liberals, anti-Tory architects and defenders of the great liberal revolutions of their time. But while modern radicals have failed in their efforts to expropriate the means of material production, they have succeeded in appropriating enough of the means of cultural production to hijack the term “liberal” for their own anti-liberal agenda, and to keep it there.
The radical wolves in sheep’s clothing fall into two categories. First are the Crypto-Marxists, calling themselves radical feminists, post-structuralists, post-modernists, or merely progressives, whose agendas remain totalitarian. Then come the Fellow-Travelling Liberals, who acknowledge the bankruptcy of socialism and make a grudging commitment to free markets, but who still do not want to give up the agenda of “social justice”—the idea that government can arrive at a standard of what is just, and that the state can implement such a standard without destroying economic and political freedom.
The liberal ascendancy that dominates the current horizon is a popular front of these two groups. Their victories are visible all around us. Under the banner of expanding rights, they have transformed the idea of America from a covenant to secure liberties to a claim for entitlements. They have expanded the powers of the state and constricted the realm of freedom. They have eroded the private economy and stifled individual initiative. Through race-based legislation and the concept of group rights, they have subverted the neutrality of the law and the very idea of a national identity.
So ingrained have the premises of the Old Left become in their new “liberal” clothing that in post-Cold War America, conservatives are now the counterculture. That is why we must think in other-than-conservative terms when confronting the challenges that face us. We must think of ourselves as heirs to Locke and Burke and Madison, who faced a similar challenge from the leftists of their time. And with them we must proclaim:
We are the revolutionaries demanding a universalist standard of one right, one law, one nation for all;
We are the champions of tolerance, the opponents of group privilege, and of communal division;
We are the proponents of a common ground that is color-blind, gender-equitable and ethnically inclusive—a government of laws that is neutral between its citizens, and limited in scope;
We are the advocates of society as against the state, the seekers of a dramatic reduction in the burdens of taxation, and of redress from the injustices of government intervention;
We are the defenders of free markets against the destructive claims of the socialist agenda; and
We are the conservers of the Constitutional covenant against the forces of modern tyranny and the totalitarian state.
This was published in Heterodoxy magazine, January 1993.
A book arrived this month that sent a chill into my marrow. The author’s face on the dust jacket was different from the one I remembered. Its hair was cropped in a severe feminist do, its skin pulled tight from an apparent lift, its eyes artificially lit to give off a benign sparkle. But I could still see the menace I knew so well underneath. It was a holograph of the darkest period in my life.
I first met her in June 1974, in a dorm room at Mills College, an elite private school for women in Oakland. The meeting had been arranged by Huey Newton, leader of the Black Panther Party and icon of the New Left. For almost a year before that I had been working with Newton, developing a school complex in the East Oakland ghetto. I had named it the Oakland Community Learning Center and was the head of its Planning Committee.
The unusual venue of my first meeting with Elaine Brown was the result of the Panthers’ odd disciplinary notions. They were actually Huey’s notions because (as I came to understand later) the Party was an absolutist state where the leader’s word was law. Huey had sentenced Elaine to Mills as a kind of exile and house arrest. “I sent her to Mills,” he explained to me, “because she hates it there.”11
I never asked or learned what connection allowed him to simply place her in this exclusive private institution.
Elaine was a strikingly attractive woman, light-skinned like Huey, but with a more fluid verbal style that developed an edge when she was angry. I had been warned by my friends in the Party that she was also crazy and dangerous. A festering inner rage erupted constantly and without warning wherever she went. At such times, the edge in her voice would grow steel-hard and could slice a target like a machete.
I will never forget standing next to Elaine, as I did months later in growing horror, as she threatened KQED-TV host Bill Schechner over the telephone. “I will kill you motherfucker,” she promised him in her machete voice, if he went through with plans to interview the former Panther Chairman, Bobby Seale. Seale had gone into hiding after Huey expelled him from the Party in August. As I learned long afterwards, Seale had been whipped—literally—and then personally sodomized by Huey with such violence that he had to have his anus surgically repaired by a Pacific Heights doctor who was a political supporter of the Panthers. A Party member told me later, “You have to understand, it had nothing to do with sex. It was about power.” But in the Panther world, as I also came to learn, nothing was about anything except power.
That day at Mills, however, Elaine used her verbal facility as an instrument of seduction, softening me with stories of her rough youth in the North Philly ghetto and her double life at the Philadelphia conservatory of music. Her narrative dramatized the wounding personal dilemmas imposed by racial and class injustice, inevitably winning my sympathy and support.
Elaine had the two characteristics