Letter to the Editor

Liberty, March 2001 issue

(Published in May 2001 issue, omitting second and last paragraphs)

Timothy Sandefur's review of Dinesh D'Souza's book The Virtue of Prosperity (Conservatives vs. Progress, March) was interesting, but misleading at several points. His main claim, as reflected in the title, is that "conservatism has always been hostile to free markets." A more accurate statement would be that there has always been an anti-market component to conservatism.

George H. Nash, in his excellent book The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, distills three primary strains in the modern conservative movement; libertarianism or classical liberalism (the first to emerge after WWII to challenge the welfare/warfare state), the New Conservatives or Traditionalists (represented by Richard Weaver, Peter Viereck, Russell Kirk and Robert Nisbet) and anti-communists, many of whom were ex-radicals, such as Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham and Frank Meyer.

If Republicans have sometimes failed to defend and promote free markets, it is because the antimarket strain has been ascendant. However, to write off the entire movement is a fatal mistake, since it contains many of the most crucial allies of liberty, namely those who base the case for liberty on the Judeo-Christian tradition. The liberty we enjoy today derives from this tradition, and will (continue to) disappear as we ignore it.

Sandefur admits the sad history of slippage on the part of liberalism in defending individual liberty in the last 2 centuries, illustrating the fact that liberty (or any other Western value) cannot be defended without a religious basis (although many have tried and continue to try). Its a lost cause. Tocqueville said "If a man has no faith he must obey, and if he is free he must believe." Another way to say it is that men will either be restrained by religious conviction or by force.

Sandefur cites the hostility of many conservatives to evolution education, fetal tissue research and cloning as evidence of their hopelessly backward, anti-progress attitudes. This obscures and dismisses the true source of their objections; Judeo-Christian rejection of atheistic materialism and its associated devaluation of individual human beings created in God's image. This true source is, of course, also the source of our liberty and many other Western values.

Sandefur makes many interesting observations about Virginia Postrel's "dynamists vs. stasists," C. P. Snow's "scientific vs. literary culture" and D'Souza's "Parties of Yeah vs. Nah," and I appreciate his concern for the material well-being of those less fortunate than we are. However, if the conservative respect for God is rejected (relegated to "a ragbag of morals that come from past beliefs," as Jacob Bronowski is quoted), the long Western tradition (with its notions of progress, reform, liberty, individualism and science) will dissolve and reveal the ugly Hobbsian world of faithless human existence; a world of oppression, collectivism, primitivism and unrestrained violence and depravity.

Steve Sawyer