I'm more pissed at the ers who made it so interesting, but I know what you mean.
@MB:
(Mr. Smarty Pants level of veracity, right?)
Tacitus worshipped the primal simplicity and robustiousness of Germania. He lusted for their tribal unity and martial frenzy, and preached it as morality among the Romans.Mr. Smarty Pants gets his information from books, magazines, newspapers, the internet, radio, and television. He also includes facts he has overheard at parties.
Afterthought: inasmuch as living a bored, boring life betokens a stable public order and personal plenty it is to be prized for itself. It too is perishable from the earth.
(gastric disturbance)
Last edited by Winehole23; 02-27-2011 at 04:37 AM.
(Phoenixx)
What Bork sees as logical flimsiness on Nisbet's part is, to some of us, the difficulties encountered by an over-Jesuitical thinker (Bork) with a genuinely conceptual thinker (Nisbet).
Nisbet's views on the militarization of American society would most likely get him branded as a RINO by contemporary 'conservatives.'. That is, if they even knew who he was.
http://www.amconmag.com/mccarthy/201...ouglass-adair/
A diversity of small-scale ins utions is the means of maintaining pluralism on the large scale, and the intermediary ins utions beloved by traditional conservatives fit this bill. But again, one cannot take the health and survival of these ins utions for granted. If they disintegrate, the foundations of cons utional pluralism are undermined. From above, these ins utions are menaced by national power. From below, they are threatened by atomization, an entropic individualism that breaks down small-scale ins utions into a genized mass of elementary particles. Not only are individuals cut loose from ins utions unlikely to be able to mount the kind of power necessary to resist encroachments from above, but the decay of civil society may leave a hunger for “community” that national power (or nationalism) swoops in to fill. Robert Nisbet has described this risk in The Quest for Community and elsewhere.
The Madisonian system, then, is jeopardized from three directions: from consolidated national power, from binary oppositions that take on national proportions, and from social entropy. All of these are potent forces, and even if they chip away at cons utional pluralism only gradually, over time they will still destroy the edifice.
Does pluralism have any defense? Patrick Deneen has been willing to contemplate “subsidizing localism.” But this calls to mind a warning from Nisbet in his 1978 essay “The Dilemma of Conservatives in a Populist Society”:
The same rush to Washington, D.C. for handouts or participation in the power structure is to be seen elsewhere: in the universities and schools; in the churches – eager for some new tax exemption or to promote some new welfare reform; in the labor unions; in just about every sector indeed of American society. The family is important: there must, therefore, be a plethora of Federal laws and agencies protecting women and children. The local community is important: there must, therefore, be a vast community redevelopment act passed by Congress and an appropriate bureau established. So it goes. Given present currents, one has the sense that if the move toward decentralization and localism did become major, it would culminate in some new Federal Bureau or Department, doubtless led “Department of Decentralization and Localism.” But I am being cynical. The dilemma of the conservative is, however, a very real one. The great question that must be faced and answered by conservatives is that of the relevance in our time of such values as the family, neighborhood, locality, religion, social rank, voluntary association, and, alone making these possible, limited political government.
I no longer believe that conservatism as described by Nesbit has a voice in organized politics.
The Democratic Party wants to conserve certain things like water and forests and the existing flora and fauna status quo. And they are prepared to legislate requirements to make people conserve those things.
The Republican Party wants to conserve the social status quo of the 1950's and is prepared to legislate requirements to make people conserve those things.
What Nisbet is describing is the conservation of a cultural normative set and societal, political contract (including non-intrusive government) that stopped being characteristic of the direction of the Republican Party during the Presidency of Richard Nixon.
Aside from political rhetoric, Republicans have had no interest in non-intrusive government for at least three decades.
Modern Republicans accuse someone of being a RINO if they are in favor of increasing taxes on anyone for any reason. Nothing else counts. Nothing.
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