Now Here's a True "Must Read"!

I am just beginning a very unusual book, When Corporations Rule the World, By David C. Korten. Both the author and his writing style are very unusual. The author is a 70 year old with an MBA and Ph.D. from Stanford's Graduate School of Business, who taught and did research at Harvard's Graduate School of Business and has thirty years of field experience working in Asia, Africa and Latin America for the Ford Foundation, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and a number of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). With a background like this one does not expect to read a book like When Corporations Rule the World!!! Moreover, his writing is remarkably honest and extremely clear--one cannot mistake what his values are and what he is saying; this in itself is an unusual blessing. Here's an excerpt that gives the flavor of the book (pp. 9 & 12):

[T]he systemic forces nurturing the growth and dominance of global corporations are at the heart of the current human dilemma.... These forces have transformed once beneficial corporations and financial institutions into instruments of a market tyranny that is extending its reach across the planet like a cancer, colonizing ever more of the planet's living spaces, destroying livelihoods, displacing people, rendering democratic institutions impotent, and feeding on life in an insatiable quest for money.

But let me point out how the author is an authentic conservative as opposed to pseudo-conservatives such as William F. Buckley. Here is Korten's description of his "values" (a much-abused word in contemporary America):

With regard to political values, I remain a traditional conservative in the sense that I retain a deep distrust of large institutions and their concentrations of unaccountable power. I also continue to believe in the importance of the market and private ownership. However, unlike many contemporary conservatives, I have no more love for big business than I have for big government. Nor do I believe that posession of wealth should convey special political privilege. I share the liberal's compassion for the disenfranchised, commitment to equity, and concern for the environment and believe that there are essential roles for government and limits to the rights of private property. I believe, however, that big government can be as unaccountable and destructive of societal values as can big business. Indeed, I have a distrust of any organization that accumulates and concentrates massive power beyond the bounds of accountability.

OK, here's the essential kernel that separates the sheep from the goats: However, unlike many contemporary conservatives, I have no more love for big business than I have for big government. This is what separates many authentic conservatives from pseudo-conservatives. The latter chatter incessantly about the horrors of 'collectivism' inherent in 'big government'; but they are stone silent about the 'collectivism' that is only too obviously involved in the growth of the modern corporation since 1865 in the United States. Korten is a very unusual fellow in that he is consistent on this point.

Actually, I've just been thinking about the meanings of "conservative" and there is a strain within conservatism which says that rule by the rich and well-born is best and that the 'mob' cannot be trusted. (John Adams believed this.) If one takes that seriously then people like William F. Buckley could be labelled 'conservative' in the latter sense because they certainly do support the powers that be. However, in this case Buckley is simply a liar because he does not honestly state that he distrusts the people and thinks the rich and well-born (like himself) should rule; rather he uses a variation of classical liberalism like that of Milton Friedman to rationalize his views and identify himself as a defender of 'liberty'. He attacks the state but is an ardent defender of business and the corporation.

Why Posts on Individual Freedom?

I have been posting on individual freedom, individualism, etc., because this is a basic value upon which virtually all Americans from left to right agree, at least as an abstract principle. It is only when one looks into the details of political opinions that one finds that 'individual freedom' in the abstract does not translate into the same concrete set of political and social recommendations. For example, it seems to me that if one truly values individual freedom then one must endorse a pretty strong policy of civil liberties as defined in the bill of rights. In the abstract pseudo-conservatives like William F. Buckley endorse civil liberties; however, in God and Man at Yale he advocated an end to academic freedom as we know it and endorsed a policy of indoctrination for undergraduates in the 'truths' of morality and political economy as he viewed them as a Catholic and an Adam Smith lover (see documentation of this in John Judis' biography of Buckley). Moreover, Buckley's support for McCarthy and McCarthyism also demonstrated his lack of a robust view of civil liberties. Indeed, Buckley's views regarding both academic freedom and McCarthyism demonstrated that he does not at all support the free exchange of ideas in freedom of speech when it comes to matters where he believes his views are 'right', and thus indoctrination is the policy he supports in many cases. I'm not sure how this differentiates him from Stalinists who also endorsed indoctrination of the 'party line.'

The Path Not Taken: Viereck’s Humane Conservatism

Reading Peter Viereck’s writings on conservatism from 1949 to 1962 I am painfully aware of what a marvelous possibility was entirely lost and instead replaced by a vicious, hate-filled, righteous, right-wing radicalism that is for the most part simply a disguised advocacy for the reigning business class. Viereck is so unusual he is hard to believe, particularly in the politically divisive atmosphere largely created by right-wing radicalism since the late 1970s (yes, I know it’s virtually obligatory to blame the current poisonous political atmosphere equally upon Democrats and Republicans but this is nonsense; just compare the prominence and effectiveness of the viciousness of the right in dealing with a relatively good president, Clinton, with the relative passivity and respectfulness accorded a singularly bad president, George W. Bush).

Viereck is someone you have to read to believe because he is such an unusual American political animal. He defines conservatism, as do most dictionaries, as a reverence and respect for the traditions, customs and practices of one’s own country or locality. This recognizes that in some part conservatism is relativistic; it is not simply a specific set of socio-political beliefs, like liberalism or socialism, but a tendency to support whatever has been best in the slow organic development of one’s own society. (Viereck as a Western Christian conservative does emphasize the ‘freedom’ of the individual, so his conservatism is not completely relativistic.) But to give a flavor for what is relativistic in his American conservatism here are a few quotes (from Conservatism Revisited, Revised and Enlarged Edition, 1962, Collier Books, pp. 125-143:

…romanticizing conservatives refuse to face up to the old and solid historical roots of most or much American liberalism…. In contrast, a genuinely rooted, history-minded conservative conserves the roots that are really there, exactly as Burke did…. American history is based on the resemblance between moderate liberalism and moderate conservatism…. The Burkean builds on the concrete existing historical base, not on a vacuum of abstract wishful thinking. When, as in America, that concrete base includes British liberalism of the 1680’s and New Deal reforms of the 1930’s, then the real American conserver assimilates into conservatism whatever he finds lasting and good in liberalism and in the New Deal…. [I]n America it is often the free trade unions who unconsciously are our ablest representatives of the word they hate and misunderstand: conservatism. The organic unity they restore to the atomized ‘proletariat’ is… providential…. So we come full circle in America’s political paradox; our conservatism, in the absence of medieval feudal relics, must grudgingly admit it has little real tradition to conserve except that of liberalism—which then turns out to be a relatively conservative liberalism.(last emphasis added)

So a real American conservative accepts our liberal tradition including some New Deal reforms and sees the conservative benefits of trade unions. Of course right-wing apologists for the business class like William F. Buckley would repackage 'conservatism' with their own contradictory set of beliefs and successfully sell this to the American public as 'conservative'. In a later post I'll quote some of Viereck's choicest descriptions of the Buckleyites' pseudo-conservatism; but here's one to whet your appetite: "right-wing nationalist thought control."

Peter Viereck, A True Conservative

I'm discovering more about Peter Viereck, who died May 13 of this year at 89 and was an authentic American voice of conservatism. Viereck, to our great misfortune, was shouted down in the 1950s by the hateful, extremist rhetoric of William F. Buckley and his band of right-wing radicals. Viereck published the first book of the New Conservatism in 1949, Conservatism Revisited.

In a 1962 preface to a reissue of Conservatism Revisited Viereck wrote of himself and Clinton Rossiter (author of Conservatism in America):

we broke with the majority of current self-styled American conservatives (pseudo-conservative radicals of the right, in our view) over... issues of nationalist thought-control. The same pseudo-conservative rightists who discriminate against Negroes, despise the groping new governments of Asia and Africa, and stir up authoritarian nationalism against U.N. internationalism, these same thought-control rightists are also avowed disciples of Burke.... But Burke held a freedom-loving central position... [he] fought against the Negro slave trade and against imperialist oppression of India.

Viereck's mention of "pseudo-conservative rightists who discriminate against Negroes" is a reference to the probably no longer remembered fact that William F. Buckley wrote consistently in favor of a states' rights defense against racial integration. In the August 24, 1957 National Review Buckley wrote (John Judis, William F. Buckley, Jr., 1988, pp. 138-9):

The central question that emerges...is whether the white community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically. The sobering answer is Yes--the white community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race....

Viereck's charges of 'thought-control nationalism' (McCarthyism) and 'authoritarian nationalism against U.N. internationalism' hit the bullseye; it is these baneful influences, aggressively fostored by the radical right, which have too much dominated U.S. political discourse since World War II and have unerringly led us to the 'thought-control nationalism' of the George W. Bush administration. Oh how much better off we would have been had the saner beliefs of Peter Viereck prevailed.

John Judis' Buckley Biography

In 1988 John Judis published a biography of William F. Buckley. In reading it I am reminded of why I dislike this man. He was brought up in the lap of privilege, by a father who was a European-style Catholic defender of any Catholic-dominated status-quo and who saw almost any more democratic challenge as the march of Communism. His father defended the Mexican dictator Diaz against even bourgeois revolutionaries and was more opposed to Communism and Russia than he was to Hitler and Nazi Germany. Both father and son opposed U.S. entry into World War II until we were attacked by the Japanese. The father saw himself as a counter-revolutionary and Jr. has really been a counter-revolutionary all of his life, though the 'revolution' against which Jr. has fought was the New Deal. Jr. is from childhood described as a haughty, aristocratic, product of privilege, who was very much in his father's image. Buckley Sr. and Jr. would have been far more happy to live under a Catholic monarchy where they were members of the nobility and kept the 'rabble' in their place. Any support for democratic civil liberties on Buckley's part would be secondary to his predilection for a preferred authority's rule over all; thus, his defense of fellow Catholic anti-Communist Joseph McCarthy and his seeming less concerned about Nazisim. I don't see any reason to see William F. Buckley, Jr. as a defender of individual freedom.

Pseudo-Conservatism Unmasked as Early as 1951

In a marvelous review of William F. Buckley’s 1950 book, God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of 'Academic Freedom' (New York Times, November 4, 1951), Peter Viereck, a true conservative, early espied Buckley’s central contradictions. Complimenting Buckley’s insistence that “man has a moral nature”, “that freedom depends on the traditional value-code of the West and that unmoral materialism results in a suicidal intolerance debunking all values as equally ‘relative’", nonetheless Viereck found much to criticize:

Yet what is his alternative? Nothing more inspiring than the most sterile Old Guard brand of Republicanism, far to the right of Taft. Is there no ‘selfish materialism’ at all among the National Association of Manufacturers as well as among the ‘New Deal collectivists’ here denounced?

Only a true conservative with the integrity of self-criticism and the desire to advocate a consistent set of principles could ask that question—and William F. Buckley, “this product of narrow economic privilege” as appropriately described by Viereck—certainly did not, and to this day does not, satisfy those criteria. (See my William F. Buckley's Courageous Fight for Principle--NOT.)

Buckley raised concerns about excessive ‘materialism’ but only the alleged materialism of “New Deal collectivists” while conveniently ignoring the primary source of American materialism, the consumerism of those like the National Association of Manufacturers. In other words, Buckley takes arguments often dear to American conservatives (e.g., importance of traditional morality, anti-materialism, individual freedom) but transforms them to suit his own ideological prejudices and utterly ignores the blatant contradictions underlying his own tortured usage of ‘conservative’ positions. Buckley, from the beginning really had no principles, he merely cunningly used what he alleged were positions of principle to advocate for a group of interests to which he personally subscribed. Viereck: “[T]he author irresponsibly treats not only mild social democracy but even most social reform as almost crypto-communism. He damns communism, our main enemy, not half so violently as lesser enemies like the income tax and inheritance tax.” Buckley, like his oil baron father, was avidly pro-capitalist and out to protect in every possible manner the prerogatives and privileges of businesspeople who had benefited from American capitalism—thus the attacks upon the income and inheritance taxes (and today's pseudo-conservative attacks on the 'death tax'). He was ferociously anti-New Deal and wished to tear down its edifices and engaged in typical right-wing Cold War hyperbole identifying not only “mild social democracy but even most social reform as almost crypto-communism.”

Buckley posed as a great champion of individual freedom but when it suited his ideological agenda he quietly switched to authoritarian thought control to ‘banish from the classroom’ those ideas he deemed heretical. Viereck: “Words will really fail you when you reach the book’s final ‘message’: [Yale]trustees and alumni should violate the legally established academic freedom to ‘banish from the classroom’ not merely Communists but all professors deviating far from Adam Smith!”

Viereck: “And why is this veritable Eagle Scout of moral sternness silent on the moral implications of McCarthyism in his own camp?” Buckley was a rabid anti-communist willing to blink at the attacks upon civil liberties of those such as Senator Joseph McCarthy. On the one hand he’s against communism for its attacks upon Western freedoms, on the other he undermines these freedoms in the very battle to save them. As the writers of The Authoritarian Personality wrote: “The pseudo-conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions.., consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.”

Viereck went on to identify more fatal contradictions: “Is it not humorless, or else blasphemous, for this eloquent advocate of Christianity, an unworldly and anti-economic religion, to enshrine jointly as equally sacrosanct: ‘Adam Smith and Ricardo, Jesus and St. Paul?’” This is a contradiction too infrequently noted: Christianity as preached by Christ is not compatible with the secular worship of the pursuit of wealth, though the 'protestant ethic' may have been twisted to fit 'the spirit of capitalism'.

Viereck, an excellent writer, concluded: “Not for economic privilege but for ethical and anti-materialist reasons, some of us have preached a conservative ‘revolt against revolt.’ If the laboring mountain of the new campus conservatism can turn out no humane and imaginative Churchill but merely this product of narrow economic privilege, then we might need a revolt against the revolt against revolt.”

Many of Peter Viereck's books are still available. For an evaluation of Viereck's conservative credentials see George H. Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, (1996, p. 60): "[Conservatism Revisited, Viereck's 1949 book] was the book which, more than any other of the postwar era, created the new conservatism as a self-conscious intellectual force." If that was so, Viereck certainly disagreed with Buckley's 'conservatism', as published only a year later.