Mr. Lundy’s site, Front Porch Republic, was created to help restore “concepts such as human scale, the distribution of power, and our responsibility to the future” to “the public conversation.” It stands athwart “the political and economic centralization and atomization that have accompanied the century-long unholy marriage between consumer capitalism and the modern bureaucratic state” and against a “flattened culture and increasingly meaningless freedoms.” Its contributors are “convinced that scale, place, self-government, sustainability, limits, and variety are key terms with which any fruitful debate about our corporate future must contend.”

That seems pretty Taoist to me, and not very “conservative” in the Bushevik sense of the word, but it doesn’t fit into the “two ideological veal crates” (to use paleoconservative Bill Kauffman’s term) that the contemporary American political lexicon offers, and is thus not easily understood.

I think a little “rectification of names” is required here. The words “conservative” and “liberal” have lost any meaning they ever had. Stewart Lundy et. al. are what are called “paleoconservatives,” as opposed to Bush and his “neoconservatives” (a battle goes all the back to the 1930s*). The paleos were among Bush’s fiercest critics long before the War in Iraq even started. As Kirkians, they have no “paleoconservative ideology” to adhere to, but they tend to be non-interventionists (both in economy and foreign policy, unlike both neoliberals and neoconservatives) and radical decentralists.

*The story is documented by Justin Raimondo, the openly gay editor of Antiwar.com who gave Pat Buchanan’s nomination speech in ’92 (when the candidate was running against Gulf War), in a 1993 book entitled “Reclaiming the American Right.”

Good luck on creating a Taoist conservatism distinct from all the modern versions of conservatism. I wish you well. Have you read Allen’s Way of Water and Sprouts of Virtue? It may help you some with the water metaphor, if you have not read it already

It’s probably helpful to know that I am an anarchist and a Taoist. My redefining conservatism is in essence drawing others to Taoism gently by appealing to its conservative ideas such as longevity, inaction, ignorance, and so forth. Taoism is NOT modern conservatism. I think it SHOULD be.

I thought it non-controversial that Republicans tend to favor capitalist economics and have for most of my life, been fairly aggressive in their ideas about the use of the military.

Alan,

i don’t disagree at all. much to the contrary, in fact.

i do, however, disagree with the sleight of hand that rejects a comparison between “Conservatism” and the principles of the Dao by denouncing Republicans.

Republicans today are to Conservatism (a largely political philosophy founded as a reaction to the French Revolution and, later, Liberalism) as Chinese alchemists are to the Dao: each of former was inspired by, but deviates in practice from the the principles of the latter.

i understand that you “find the comparison between conservatives and Laozi’s ideas about water not just wrong but useless.”

but i had also read your initial post as dismissing a comparison between Conservatism (*not* “Republicans” or “conservatives”) and the Dao rather than between Republicans (*not* Conservatism) and the Dao.

whatever. this is your post. i don;t want to harangue you any further about the matter.

but as useless as the original comparison may be (which is not immediately apparent to me), how much more so is a criticism thereof which conflates a 200+ year-old philosophy with a discreet group of its present-day semi-adherents, namely Republicans?