Horizon

Well, That Didn't Take Long

Less than a week after the publication of Crunchy Cons, Johah Goldberg reads Rod Dreher out of the conservative movement:

Rod's problem is that he has essentially bought into a Christian Marxist worldview. Now, I don't like using the word Marxist much because too many conservatives throw it around promiscuously (Social Security isn't Marxist, for example). But all of his talk about alienation and worker exploitation, his contempt for bourgeois careerism, and his relentless abuse of the word "materialistic" all point in that direction. The fact that he also favorably invokes Marxist activists, scholars, arguments, and movements, while ignoring, say, Robert Nisbet's work on community, is also a bad sign. And then there's this whopper of a statement: "Adam Smith and Karl Marx are two sides of the same coin: they define man as primarily economic man."

Putting aside the grotesque slander to Smith, who was one of the great moral philosophers of the last three centuries, it's simply untrue that the free-market is rooted in materialism or that Smith's intellectual descendants define man in economic terms. Classical liberals root their case for laissez-faire in the autonomy of the individual, the primacy of freedom, the faith that virtue not freely chosen isn't virtuous, and in a deeply religious conception of the individual conscience (another sorely missing voice in Rod's book is Michael Novak, the world's leading authority on the intersection of market economics and Catholicism). Save for a few Randians (heh), the only people who really think the free market is based on a materialist vision in an intellectually serious way are themselves Marxist materialists, in much the same way that the only people who see white racism behind every black problem are people convinced of the primacy of race.

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Rod frets over mass man like a Fabian socialist, tut-tutting their wants and poo-pooing their desires. He buys into the Malthusian fetish of scarcity. He embraces the environmentalism of the left and — at least by implication — the condescending aesthetics of the anti-globalization movement. . . . He sounds like Al Gore in Earth in the Balance when he talks about modernity, and he lavishes praise on Hillary Clinton's view that it takes a village to raise a child (a somewhat odd view for someone so passionate about the glories of homeschooling). He claims Russell Kirk as his hero, but he often sounds like Jean-Jacques Rousseau in a Russell Kirk mask. Again and again and again, Rod buys into leftist categories of thinking and thinks that by merely calling them "crunchy" they will suddenly become conservative.