http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2216
Paul Gottfried
In my latest book, Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right, I use the term “baseless conservatism” to refer to the deficiencies of an American Right without a firm and distinctively rightist character. Part of the reason for this oddity is that the American Right operates without the social base of such classical European political movements as socialism, bourgeois liberalism, and classical conservatism; indeed our self-described and sui generis conservatism prides itself on its adherence to universals—that is, to values that have nothing to do with traditional nations or communities or particular classes.
In one notably impassioned attack on Patrick J. Buchanan several years ago, Ramesh Ponnuru extolled the conservatism of our country for rejecting Buchanan’s appeal to national and social loyalties. Ponnuru’s companions-in-arms are the true universalists, he maintained, because the essence of their conservatism is a moral commitment to “http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2627, Richard Weaver, and M. E. Bradford—to the more recent glorifications of equality as a “conservative value.”But do those whom the movement conservatives target really suffer from a lack of values? Hillary Clinton promotes much the same social positions as does Rudolph Giuliani, whom a number of conservatives in the very recent past were happy to support as a presidential candidate. On the policy think tank right, “values” have been allowed to function as a kind of adornment for candidates and policies that serve neoconservative geopolitical ends. The preferred values of anti abortion activists or the opponents of gay marriage, who are mostly traditional Christians, are highlighted, marginalized or discarded depending on the shifting political and electoral interests of the movement’s leadership and financial backers. It is likewise misleading to portray feminists, multiculturalists, or advocates of abortion on demand as people bereft of values. Such partisans simply appeal to their own interpretations of fairness, equality, and individual freedom.
The specter of “value relativism” often seems to be nothing more than a label that movement conservatives pull out to rally the faithful. But my problem with the electoral campaigns waged against “relativism” goes beyond this superficiality to a deeper intellectual objection. It is not at all clear that relativists exist, outside of a rather limited academic coterie; and even here one is dealing with a self-contradictory position, since garden-variety relativists give weight to certain values even while pretending to treat all values as equally valid or invalid. They are, in a nutshell, instrumental relativists who are working to subvert or shatter someone else’s beliefs for the sake of their own. If one scratches such would-be relativists, one usually finds dissembling advocates of equality who rage against our inherited civilization for not going far enough to implement their favored value. Because of their implicit egalitarianism, such relativists have something in common, conceptually, with those who propose equality as a “conservative value.”
Ponnuru’s The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life makes the case that abortion rights conflict with the ideal of equality. This is intended as a serious charge; for as someone who embraces the convictions of Harry Jaffa, Ponnuru asserts that equality for all persons, even embryonic ones, is the underlying principle of the American founding and political experience. Whether or not one endorses his objections to abortion rights advocates, it is revealing that it is as a genuine egalitarian that Ponnuru opposes a key feminist right. He is launching a critique of the feminists from inside their value universe, chastising others of his ilk for not being consistent in their application of the principle of equality.
http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/articles.aspx?article=273&theme=home&loc=b