Edmund Burke and the Statesman's Roots

           During this campaign season, no description is more coveted among Republican candidates than “conservative.”  In order to vest themselves with the mantle of conservatism, they habitually articulate a litany of the ways they are like Ronald Reagan.

While I am far from belittling Reagan, conservatism’s roots are much older and go much deeper than his presidency.  Modern conservatism finds its source in the thought and writings of Edmund Burke, especially in his venerable and profound Reflections on the Revolution in France.  In it, Burke assesses the best possible background for producing an authentic statesman, from among which he lists the physician, the businessman, the financier, the lawyer, and the historian.

Reminiscent of Jesus explaining the soils upon which the Word of God fell as a seed, soils that did not permit good rooting or good growth, Burke rejects the first four as typically unsuitable:  (1) Doctors do not make good statesmen because “the sides of sick beds are not academies for forming statesmen and legislators.”  (2) Businessmen, whom he calls traders, know a bit about the order and function of contemporary society, yet they have little in-depth understanding of “anything beyond their counting house.”  (3) Financiers are expert only at dealing in “stocks and funds,” and in moving from one type of commodity to another, as they do when they “change their ideal paper wealth for the more solid substance of land,” none of which is the same as grasping the reins of government and steering it rightly onward.  (4) Lawyers “are habitually meddling, daring, subtle, active, and litigious,” which is poison to political prudence.

 These backgrounds frequently fail to produce great statesmen because skill at these particular functions is not a qualification for leading the affairs of a great nation.  The doctor is not trained to heal what truly ails the polity; the businessman can make profitable deals, but the President or the Prime minister of a great nation is not its CEO, and to think so is grossly myopic; the financier makes profitable investments, but making profitable investments is not interchangeable with steering the ship of state adeptly along the course of greatest prudence; the lawyer might be technically proficient at the subtleties of law and litigation, but the statesman is far more than a legal technician.

Those best suited by background to the demands of statesmanship, Burke says, are the historians because by study and by profession they are more likely have “knowledge of mankind,” and “experience in mixed affairs,” by which Burke means “a comprehensive connected view of the various complicated external and internal interests which go to the formation of that multifarious thing called a state.”

That, in brief compass, is Burke’s assessment of the background of the current crop of Republican candidates, whether they are doctors (Paul), businessmen (Cain), financiers (Romney), lawyers (Santorum and Bachmann), or historians (Gingrich).

As usual, I think Burke is spot on.

Gingrich and Perry vs. Cannibalism or, Opposing Romney is not Opposing Capitalism

Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry both criticized Mitt Romney for buying companies in order to break them up, to close them down, and to sell off portions of them piecemeal for a profit.  Their opposition to this practice has been characterized as opposition to capitalism and as “bashing business success.”

It is not.

By opposing Romney’s marketplace actions, Gingrich and Perry are not “bashing business success.”  They are saying that not all ways of making a profit are morally equal.  In a free market, Romney is free and able to make money in many ways.  That is not the problem.  That he chose to do what he did in the face of countless other options and opportunities for success is a problem. 

One is free to make money working as a doctor for Planned Parenthood, or as a brothel owner in Nevada, or as a medical marijuana dealer in CA.  The activities and the profits made from those activities are legal and are part of the free market, at least here and now.  But neither contemporary legality nor contemporary freedom puts those activities and those profits above criticism or beyond reproach.  Choosing to make money in any of those ways, or as a business vulture the way Romney did, is worthy of principled opposition.  That opposition is not anti-capitalism.  It is criticism against some of the choices we capitalists ocassionally make.

Capitalism itself is not on trial here with Gingrich and Perry; Romney's choices within that system are.

Being a friend of the market is not an absolutist position.  One is not required to endorse either every activity and every profit the market yields or else none of them.  Sometimes market advocacy requires subtlety and distinctions (of which Ron Paul seems too often incapable).  One can be a strong advocate of the market and yet forcefully criticize some activities within it that still yield a handsome legal profit.  Sometimes one might need to drive the money changers out of the Temple -- not because the marketplace itself is evil, but because while some things are profitable, not all things are right and deserve protection, support, or applause.  Producing economic road kill, and then selling off bits of it as steak and sausage the way Romney did might be just such an activity.

You cannot tell what is right by seeing what is legal or profitable because “legal,” “profitable,” and “moral” are not the same.

Opposing pornography, for example, is not opposition to the free market.  It's opposition to the destruction of souls and of families.  Opposing pornography is right and good, even though the market permits and rewards it.  In other words, the free market is good in many ways and for many things -- many, not all.

The marketplace is very good at giving people what they want; it is not so good at teaching them what they ought to want or what they ought to do.

By the same token, while cannibalizing businesses and putting folks out of work is legal and profitable, it is not without objection.

So Gingrich and Perry objected.

Good on them.
They haven't yielded their obligation for acute moral discernment to the marketplace, which, like all human institutions, from best to worst, is fallen.

Gingrich Takes Gore to Task for Faulty Science and False Facts (Global Warming 4)

Newt Rips Gore's 'Facts' To Pieces

Ammunition for Andy Wiley

In Support of Gingrich on Pro-Family Amnesty

Newt Gingrich rightly proposes that we permit illegal aliens who have been here for, say, 25 years, who have a job, two or three generations of family history, and demonstrable ties to the community, to remain in the country, along with their families.  To break up that rooted, responsible, and productive family, Gingrich argues, is an anti-family action, and ought not be the policy of Republicans who wish to be truly pro-family.

In response to Gingrich’s proposal, I’ve heard a man ask, “But what if the illegal alien murders someone in your family, how pro-family is that?  The question is ill-conceived on several counts.

First, it is sub-rational.  It forgets that suppositions are not telling arguments.  We all can suppose things that support our views.  Such suppositions are easily conjured.  Conjuring them does not prove that we are right or that the other side is mistaken.  After all, one might just as easily suppose an illegal alien whose heroic actions saved the life of one of your family members.  And if you had deported that person, and as a result your son or daughter now were dead because the hero had been banished, how pro-family is that?

Second, to suppose that the person in question will become a murderer flies in the face of the evidence.  It ignores a quarter-century of peaceable character and conduct, such as getting and holding a significant job, paying taxes, getting married and raising a family, consistently paying rent or a mortgage, and community ties and contributions, like church membership -- none of which suggests in any meaningful way that we are dealing with a murderer.  If such persons are potential murderers, then we all are, including the person who made this insulting supposition.

In short, neither side in the debate, whether for or against Gingrich, will deem the other side’s suppositions convincing.  That’s because suppositions are not conclusive.

Third, and this is not a supposition:  There's typically a statute of limitations (or of repose) on crimes, especially non-violent crimes like this.   We rightly understand that the time to prosecute eventually runs out.  The statute of limitations is not a reward for crimes; it's a recognition that the intervening years normally yield new conditions and consequences that ought to be taken into account, conditions and consequences like the deterioration of evidence and of memory, on the one hand, and the unintentional punishment of innocent persons, such as the children who committed no crime, children who were born in America and are legal US citizens, on the other.  Those children committed no crime and must not be deported along with their parents in order to keep the family together.  Nor ought they to be deprived of their parents, if their parents are sent away without them.  That's not how we treat law-keeping, natural born citizens.
To the ideological purist, this approach might seem too conciliatory, too compromising.  But politics is the art of the possible, not the pure.  To deport more than 10 million persons seems neither possible nor good.  In most cases, the ideologically pure is not possible, though sometimes it is.  Given the enormity of the undertaking, I doubt that this is one of those times. 

We might want to write a law and a statute of limitations to enshrine Gingrich's chosen effect, which he calls “creating legality.”  When we do, we start the clock on the day of entry, or as close to it as we can reasonably determine.  To be clear, we are talking here about granting legal residency, not citizenship.