Postwar conservatism emerged from three general strands of thought: libertarianism, traditionalism, and anti-communism, which formed the “three-legged stool” of conservatism. Political scientist and FUSION contributor George Hawley wrote in Right Wing Critics of American Conservatism, “Without knowing any context, there is no a priori reason one would infer that these three attributes are correlated with each other, or even that they are necessarily right wing.”
Let's get some finer granularity here. Traditionalism and anti-communism are obviously right wing. That leaves only libertarianism with a questionable status. Likewise, traditionalism and anti-communism will generally correlate with each other, and the only question is whether libertarianism somehow correlates with traditionalism (although it would seem that all libertarians would be anti-communist, right?)
So, the three-legged stool arose because there is a strong relationship binding traditionalism to anti-communism, and both are right wing; and there is a strong bond of libertarianism to anti-communism, although libertarianism is not right wing. The glue holding the three pieces together was anti-communism. When the external communist threat disappeared, the glue disappeared.
What needs to be realized today is that woke leftism is the internal form of the previously external threat of communism. The new three-legged stool is thus traditionalism, anti-wokism/anti-domestic-leftism, and libertarianism. Traditionalists and libertarians should settle their differences after the existential threat of domestic leftism/wokism is vanquished.
You cannot make the leap to a post-conservative movement that jettisons the libertarians and GOP establishment types before you vanquish the existential threat. Today's "post-conservatives" have allowed their animosity towards these groups to drive a premature wedge between them. I have plenty of differences with libertarians, free trade purists, et al. They pale in comparison to my differences with the woke Left.
Clark, while anti-communism per se may be right wing, the American right was historically wary of foreign entanglements - isolationist if you will. The highly expansionist foreign policy vision of the post-Cold War world was definitely novel. Also, many people on the left were anti-communist as well.
Then "anti-communism" is not a good label for the phenomenon that was one of the three legs of the stool. I doubt that the libertarians were expansionist in their anti-communism. So, anti-communism was broad and not uniformly expansionist. Within the three-legged stool, what was the foreign policy common denominator?
I think an additional problem is the continuous leftward shift of seemingly every "conservative" movement. Being against the New Deal was also a shared aspect among the factions of the fusion for a time.
And libertarianism cannot be treated as monolithic. "Mr. Libertarian" Murray Rothbard at one point wanted to ally with the New Left due to their opposition to US foreign wars and later joined up with Pat Buchanan and paleoconservatives due to their opposition to US foreign wars (among other things). Anti-statism was his motivating force. On the other hand, you have the DC libertarian types who seem to be fine with a leviathan central government as long as it's enforcing its vision of liberalism, even at the point of a bayonet and even if it's overseas. As such, I'm not sure "libertarianism" itself is a stable leg for any stool.
When I saw "female neediness," I thought it would be about the female drive to make everyone around her change for her. On the small scale, the need to have all of her quibbles addressed. Writ large,changing the office or culture to accomodate women, enforced by female HR.
The observations in the article, "How Feminism Ends," are common sense. The surprising thing is that social observers should be so slow to acknowledge the toxic effects of feminism.
This inability to see the obvious can be traced to a string of modern events.
One of the ironies of the current situation, it should be noted, is that women only hold positions of authority in society today because men permitted it. Women may feel that they won this authority, but if men a century ago (or today), said "no," that would have been the end of it. However, as they practically and sensibly pursued their everyday tasks, men have never given much thought to the proper roles of men and women. The earlier societal structure worked and was taken for granted.
Then when technological progress began to enable women to undertake the same tasks as men, and women began to agitate for the franchise and access to male occupations, men, again not thinking too much of the consequences, were inclined to acquiesce. After all, they (men) did these jobs, so why not (many thought) let the women do the same. Bad mistake. The orders of creation in the Bible, plus many other scriptural injunctions, make it clear that authority in the household and society is the province of men. The capacity of a person to undertake a task is not the only consideration. The legitimacy and standing of the person doing it is also important. A student in a classroom may have more intellectual prowess than his math teacher but should he then assume control in the class and replace his teacher? Hardly. I would assert that the role reversals we are now witnessing in society are just as bad. As Christian influence in society has waned, evil tendencies, including a Jezebel-like spirit influencing women, took its place, and women began to assume many places in society for which they were ill-suited.
With women holding the franchise and the upper hand in many of our institutions, including the media, only a positive narrative of feminism is permitted. The control is so strong that everyone, even men who should know better, just trudge through their daily affairs, and are unable to see a way out.
Thankfully, there are finally some signs of a growing awareness of this problem. Is it too optimistic that one day the yoke of feminism might be cast off? Feminism has ravaged the lives of countless men, women, and their families.
"Then when technological progress began to enable women to undertake the same tasks as men, and women began to agitate for the franchise and access to male occupations, men, again not thinking too much of the consequences, were inclined to acquiesce. After all, they (men) did these jobs, so why not (many thought) let the women do the same. Bad mistake."
I suppose I see a large part of this narrative as inevitable. When the technological and economic support for patriarchy started to crumble, the consensus in support of patriarchy was always going to be weaker. There were always going to be people with an interest in chipping away at it. And each win they accumulated was always going to be very unlikely to roll back. The struggle might have proceeded differently and more slowly, but its direction was always clear.
As for how it ends, my take continues to be that family formation is broken. You see it in some of these women's discussions of how relationships and dating are broken. These trends are unsustainable; it's a biological certainty that something needs to and is going to change in our culture so that fertility recovers sharply. But there's no reason it needs to happen soon. It might not happen this century. Every time that new technology further disrupts our culture, it pushes the timeline for forming a new, sustainable culture back a little further.
You are so right about technology disrupting our culture. Honestly, it would suit me if we eliminated all technology back to the pre-computer era. There would be wailing and gnashing of teeth, our investments would plunge, but we'd emerge from the ashes stronger than ever.
I understand the sentiment, but I'd say the only way out is through. Better to think about how to use technology to get to where we want to go.
I don't think you can really constrain technological progress without a cure that's much worse than the disease, and that will only be temporary.
But what's going to need to happen is people developing livable norms -- perhaps some laws, but mostly time-tested common-sense around the use of certain technologies. Just as we have norms around the use of alcohol, a technology that society might also be better without, but we've learned how to mitigate its damage.
When it comes to men and women, you can't roll back the fact that productivity-related technologies have modified the balance of economic power between the sexes. Maybe some new technology will one day modify it again. The legal regime can be modified, but I have less faith in that. I don't think there are many natural forces driving laws in a better direction, particularly when it comes to laws with complex long-term consequences.
This point has probably been obvious to everyone else for a long time, but it has fairly recently dawned on me that the key change in all this had to be contraception and the (apparent) severing of sex from reproduction. Being in the position of having two young children (and hopefully more), I realized that reproduction "felt" like a deliberate choice, as did not having sex before marriage - it is not like the social pressures regarding these things easily pushed me towards these choices.
In a world without a welfare state, easy access to abortion and many employment options for women, it's going to fall primarily to families to care for their daughters' children born out of wedlock. Under such conditions, a father will take much more care in overseeing his daughter's decisions in courtship and women themselves will be much more judicious in deciding whom to sleep with. Men will be much more encouraged to get married (and do all the things that make women want to marry them) if that is a prerequisite for sex. I could see how, without thinking about it much, most people would make "trad" choices because that was the equilibrium cultural milieu dictated by incentives (or, in more economistic terms, the result of individuals maximizing subject to their constraints). Contraception changed the constraints, leading to a very different equilibrium.
To borrow another analogy from economics, I am reminded of how Armen Alchian noted how we don't have to assume that firms are "profit-maximizing" to get the result that the firms that survive are the ones that happened to maximize profits - it's like natural selection. And I think that's ultimately how societies developing "livable norms" will be selected. The societies that don't figure this out will eventually die out.
All good points. I’ll only push back on one thing and say that the set of technologies that increase the relative value of female labor are not to be ignored. I.e. the fact that there are fewer jobs that involve working with the physical world and more jobs that involve interacting with people or tediously completing paperwork.
Some of this might be a choice driven by Federal law, but far from all of it. Women in general have higher conscientious and agreeableness, both of which have become more valuable in the workforce.
There’s an anthropological observation that societies where women’s labor has more relative value tend to be matrilocal. With weaker marriage, freer love, and less (if any) responsibility expected of fathers, since women can basically take care of themselves.
If we had our current set of technologies but somehow lacked any method of birth control, I wonder if that might be the result. Indeed for a moment when everyone was worried about “welfare queens”, people were wondering if something like this was our future. I wonder if it could still be our future, or at least one possible unhappy method of restoring fertility in some places.
Imagine single motherhood generally accepted as a norm, with generous social support, lots of use of relatively understaffed daycare from a young age, plus a norm of more children around -- going to work at your retail or administrative job with a baby strapped to you, etc. Marriage wouldn’t disappear completely but would become basically alien to the lower classes -- just as we’re seeing today, but with a lot more babies in the mix.
Your article in Fusion begins:
Postwar conservatism emerged from three general strands of thought: libertarianism, traditionalism, and anti-communism, which formed the “three-legged stool” of conservatism. Political scientist and FUSION contributor George Hawley wrote in Right Wing Critics of American Conservatism, “Without knowing any context, there is no a priori reason one would infer that these three attributes are correlated with each other, or even that they are necessarily right wing.”
Let's get some finer granularity here. Traditionalism and anti-communism are obviously right wing. That leaves only libertarianism with a questionable status. Likewise, traditionalism and anti-communism will generally correlate with each other, and the only question is whether libertarianism somehow correlates with traditionalism (although it would seem that all libertarians would be anti-communist, right?)
So, the three-legged stool arose because there is a strong relationship binding traditionalism to anti-communism, and both are right wing; and there is a strong bond of libertarianism to anti-communism, although libertarianism is not right wing. The glue holding the three pieces together was anti-communism. When the external communist threat disappeared, the glue disappeared.
What needs to be realized today is that woke leftism is the internal form of the previously external threat of communism. The new three-legged stool is thus traditionalism, anti-wokism/anti-domestic-leftism, and libertarianism. Traditionalists and libertarians should settle their differences after the existential threat of domestic leftism/wokism is vanquished.
You cannot make the leap to a post-conservative movement that jettisons the libertarians and GOP establishment types before you vanquish the existential threat. Today's "post-conservatives" have allowed their animosity towards these groups to drive a premature wedge between them. I have plenty of differences with libertarians, free trade purists, et al. They pale in comparison to my differences with the woke Left.
Clark, while anti-communism per se may be right wing, the American right was historically wary of foreign entanglements - isolationist if you will. The highly expansionist foreign policy vision of the post-Cold War world was definitely novel. Also, many people on the left were anti-communist as well.
Then "anti-communism" is not a good label for the phenomenon that was one of the three legs of the stool. I doubt that the libertarians were expansionist in their anti-communism. So, anti-communism was broad and not uniformly expansionist. Within the three-legged stool, what was the foreign policy common denominator?
I think an additional problem is the continuous leftward shift of seemingly every "conservative" movement. Being against the New Deal was also a shared aspect among the factions of the fusion for a time.
And libertarianism cannot be treated as monolithic. "Mr. Libertarian" Murray Rothbard at one point wanted to ally with the New Left due to their opposition to US foreign wars and later joined up with Pat Buchanan and paleoconservatives due to their opposition to US foreign wars (among other things). Anti-statism was his motivating force. On the other hand, you have the DC libertarian types who seem to be fine with a leviathan central government as long as it's enforcing its vision of liberalism, even at the point of a bayonet and even if it's overseas. As such, I'm not sure "libertarianism" itself is a stable leg for any stool.
When I saw "female neediness," I thought it would be about the female drive to make everyone around her change for her. On the small scale, the need to have all of her quibbles addressed. Writ large,changing the office or culture to accomodate women, enforced by female HR.
Apparently that's still a topic for another day.
The observations in the article, "How Feminism Ends," are common sense. The surprising thing is that social observers should be so slow to acknowledge the toxic effects of feminism.
This inability to see the obvious can be traced to a string of modern events.
One of the ironies of the current situation, it should be noted, is that women only hold positions of authority in society today because men permitted it. Women may feel that they won this authority, but if men a century ago (or today), said "no," that would have been the end of it. However, as they practically and sensibly pursued their everyday tasks, men have never given much thought to the proper roles of men and women. The earlier societal structure worked and was taken for granted.
Then when technological progress began to enable women to undertake the same tasks as men, and women began to agitate for the franchise and access to male occupations, men, again not thinking too much of the consequences, were inclined to acquiesce. After all, they (men) did these jobs, so why not (many thought) let the women do the same. Bad mistake. The orders of creation in the Bible, plus many other scriptural injunctions, make it clear that authority in the household and society is the province of men. The capacity of a person to undertake a task is not the only consideration. The legitimacy and standing of the person doing it is also important. A student in a classroom may have more intellectual prowess than his math teacher but should he then assume control in the class and replace his teacher? Hardly. I would assert that the role reversals we are now witnessing in society are just as bad. As Christian influence in society has waned, evil tendencies, including a Jezebel-like spirit influencing women, took its place, and women began to assume many places in society for which they were ill-suited.
With women holding the franchise and the upper hand in many of our institutions, including the media, only a positive narrative of feminism is permitted. The control is so strong that everyone, even men who should know better, just trudge through their daily affairs, and are unable to see a way out.
Thankfully, there are finally some signs of a growing awareness of this problem. Is it too optimistic that one day the yoke of feminism might be cast off? Feminism has ravaged the lives of countless men, women, and their families.
"Then when technological progress began to enable women to undertake the same tasks as men, and women began to agitate for the franchise and access to male occupations, men, again not thinking too much of the consequences, were inclined to acquiesce. After all, they (men) did these jobs, so why not (many thought) let the women do the same. Bad mistake."
I suppose I see a large part of this narrative as inevitable. When the technological and economic support for patriarchy started to crumble, the consensus in support of patriarchy was always going to be weaker. There were always going to be people with an interest in chipping away at it. And each win they accumulated was always going to be very unlikely to roll back. The struggle might have proceeded differently and more slowly, but its direction was always clear.
As for how it ends, my take continues to be that family formation is broken. You see it in some of these women's discussions of how relationships and dating are broken. These trends are unsustainable; it's a biological certainty that something needs to and is going to change in our culture so that fertility recovers sharply. But there's no reason it needs to happen soon. It might not happen this century. Every time that new technology further disrupts our culture, it pushes the timeline for forming a new, sustainable culture back a little further.
You are so right about technology disrupting our culture. Honestly, it would suit me if we eliminated all technology back to the pre-computer era. There would be wailing and gnashing of teeth, our investments would plunge, but we'd emerge from the ashes stronger than ever.
I understand the sentiment, but I'd say the only way out is through. Better to think about how to use technology to get to where we want to go.
I don't think you can really constrain technological progress without a cure that's much worse than the disease, and that will only be temporary.
But what's going to need to happen is people developing livable norms -- perhaps some laws, but mostly time-tested common-sense around the use of certain technologies. Just as we have norms around the use of alcohol, a technology that society might also be better without, but we've learned how to mitigate its damage.
When it comes to men and women, you can't roll back the fact that productivity-related technologies have modified the balance of economic power between the sexes. Maybe some new technology will one day modify it again. The legal regime can be modified, but I have less faith in that. I don't think there are many natural forces driving laws in a better direction, particularly when it comes to laws with complex long-term consequences.
This point has probably been obvious to everyone else for a long time, but it has fairly recently dawned on me that the key change in all this had to be contraception and the (apparent) severing of sex from reproduction. Being in the position of having two young children (and hopefully more), I realized that reproduction "felt" like a deliberate choice, as did not having sex before marriage - it is not like the social pressures regarding these things easily pushed me towards these choices.
In a world without a welfare state, easy access to abortion and many employment options for women, it's going to fall primarily to families to care for their daughters' children born out of wedlock. Under such conditions, a father will take much more care in overseeing his daughter's decisions in courtship and women themselves will be much more judicious in deciding whom to sleep with. Men will be much more encouraged to get married (and do all the things that make women want to marry them) if that is a prerequisite for sex. I could see how, without thinking about it much, most people would make "trad" choices because that was the equilibrium cultural milieu dictated by incentives (or, in more economistic terms, the result of individuals maximizing subject to their constraints). Contraception changed the constraints, leading to a very different equilibrium.
To borrow another analogy from economics, I am reminded of how Armen Alchian noted how we don't have to assume that firms are "profit-maximizing" to get the result that the firms that survive are the ones that happened to maximize profits - it's like natural selection. And I think that's ultimately how societies developing "livable norms" will be selected. The societies that don't figure this out will eventually die out.
All good points. I’ll only push back on one thing and say that the set of technologies that increase the relative value of female labor are not to be ignored. I.e. the fact that there are fewer jobs that involve working with the physical world and more jobs that involve interacting with people or tediously completing paperwork.
Some of this might be a choice driven by Federal law, but far from all of it. Women in general have higher conscientious and agreeableness, both of which have become more valuable in the workforce.
There’s an anthropological observation that societies where women’s labor has more relative value tend to be matrilocal. With weaker marriage, freer love, and less (if any) responsibility expected of fathers, since women can basically take care of themselves.
If we had our current set of technologies but somehow lacked any method of birth control, I wonder if that might be the result. Indeed for a moment when everyone was worried about “welfare queens”, people were wondering if something like this was our future. I wonder if it could still be our future, or at least one possible unhappy method of restoring fertility in some places.
Imagine single motherhood generally accepted as a norm, with generous social support, lots of use of relatively understaffed daycare from a young age, plus a norm of more children around -- going to work at your retail or administrative job with a baby strapped to you, etc. Marriage wouldn’t disappear completely but would become basically alien to the lower classes -- just as we’re seeing today, but with a lot more babies in the mix.