Welcome to the new conservatism

Wish I'd said that!

[Reprinted from Issues & Views August 23, 2004]

A decade ago, or a mere five years ago, would you ever have equated "conservatism" with militarism? Would the statement, "If you don't want war, you must be a liberal," have made any sense to you? Here are some thoughts from long-time conservative Jeffrey Tucker, who, along with multitudes of other conservatives, hardly knows what to label himself any more:

Ads like this one make me shudder, mainly because I once thought of myself as a conservative (for both good and bad reasons). The ad runs: "3 Conservative Books for $1 each" and examples of such conservative books flash by, all of them screaming for blood, exalting the imperial state, decrying the very basis of civilization (peace), and demanding the jailing of dissidents, and one more: something denouncing Democrats.

Sean Hannity's Deliver Us From Evil combines chauvinism and sacrilege, P.J. O'Rourke's Peace Kills finds humor in slaughter, Ann Coulter's Treason imagines internment as a permanent solution to the problem of political dissent, and there are a hundred other books striking similar things available from the same service.

All of this can be yours for next-to-nothing down, and only a promise to buy more later should your will to kill fail you as the months pass by.

So there we have it. The magic of the marketplace, delivering via your computer screen straight to your doorstep, for only a buck, hundreds of pages of the most violent rhetoric put between covers since Progress Publishers collected Stalin's speeches.

This is conservatism. There's no use in denying it. The war party and American conservatism are interchangeable and inseparable. They are synonyms. The same thing. They co-exist. How many ways can we put it? Militarism and violence is at the core of conservatism.

Read the Rest of "The Violence of Conservatism" on the Lew Rockwell site.

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