This post is written by Thomas Falcone
I was surprised, if a little taken aback, by Leonid Sirota’s recent declaration on Double Aspect that he is opposed to co-operation with conservatives whom he deems insufficiently committed to a rigid Hayekian philosophy. The reason for my surprise lay not in Sirota’s ideology laid bare – he is commendably transparent about his public philosophy – but more to the creeping suspicion I had that I may have played a small part in inspiring his writing.
Sirota mentions “conversations” he engaged in at the recent Runnymede Society Law and Freedom Conference in Toronto as prompting his exposition of the reason why collaboration with conservatives is indefensible. Now, Sirota is a bit of a rock star at any Runnymede Society event – and rightfully so. His contributions to Canadian jurisprudential thought surely vault him into that vogue category of “thought leader.” I myself have plastered Double Aspect articles penned by him onto slides I’ve used in graduate seminars. Sirota’s leading ideas on originalism in a Canada are extremely impressive, and (as I have told him myself!) I am mostly in firm agreement with his opinions on the administrative state.
But I am compelled to respond to his call for libertarians to reject “refusionism”, which is to say his belief that we cannot be friends, let alone political allies. Perhaps he is right.
It is unfortunate that in Sirota’s attempt to describe what he calls “right-wing collectivism” he doesn’t bother to engage with any of the thinkers he finds so frightening. To be fair, however, the very nature of conservatism makes it difficult to attribute unifying policies or ideas that form a singular coherence. Oakeshott’s old adage that conservatism “is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried” is helpful only insofar as it helps to explain that what a conservatism will stand for, or against, or agree to over time and after collective consideration, will vary in different places and amongst different peoples. Roger Scuton’s refrain that the task of a conservative is to assure people that their prejudices (properly understood as a person’s gut feeling) are justified is thus perhaps more helpful than Oakeshott’s old formulation.
In a Canadian context, Ben Woodfinden’s recent long essay in C2C Journal on Red Toryism is surely the closest thing we have to a contemporary “manifesto” of the sort of reform conservatism loosely associated with the broader movement Sirota wants to pre-emptively divorce himself from. But Sirota is right that conservatives ought properly to understand the goal of politics as being attached to the promotion of the highest good. This isn’t nearly as scary as he makes it out to be.
Take the institution of private property, for instance. Conservatives rightly commit themselves to the steadfast protection of this institution. But why is private property so important? Surely it cannot be a sacrosanct institution in-and-of-itself, despite idolatrous libertarian suggestions that the primacy of private property will result in an almost supernatural “spontaneous” right ordering of society. We can find a hint of why conservatism is associated with this institution in Scruton’s invaluable The Meaning of Conservatism:
“Home is the place where private property accumulates, and so overreaches itself, becoming transformed into something shared. There is no contract of distribution: sharing is simply the essence of family life. Here everything important is ‘ours’. Private property is added to, and reinforces, the primary social relation. It is for some such reason that conservatives have seen the family and private property as institutions which stand or fall together.”
Sirota’s biblical pronouncements of Hayekian “warnings” to the contrary, I would submit rather confidently that the vast majority of Canadians – and surely universally conservatives! – would agree on a general scale that the family is an immutable social good, and ought to be defended as the primary organizing unit of our society. The rather modest suggestion that I would posit to conservatives is that when we evaluate public policy proposals we adjudicate their desirability against whether or not they help or harm our shared social goods, like the family. Devin Drover has proposed publicly-funded therapy for families to combat the mental health crisis plaguing our society. US Senator Josh Hawley has proposed cash subsidies to families as emergency relief in response to the Chinese coronavirus pandemic.
Surely another commonly held value amongst Canadians is that it is better to work than to be idle. Having a job ties us to our community, provides us with income, and fills us with a sense of purpose. The notion that the state ought to be “neutral” as to whether people choose have jobs or sit around smoking cannabis would be nonsensical to the average person on the street. But that is precisely the Hayekian proposition Sirota suggests is “the philosophically and morally right position”, whereby individuals are the sole arbiters of their own ends. It is also a position completely alien to a conservative to whom work is fundamental good.
Recognition of the importance of work – and, indeed, the primacy of production over consumption (another value Sirota rallies against in his piece) – is central to Oren Cass’ The Once and Future Worker. And yet Cass’ proposed policy response to our society’s moral devaluation of work is, characteristic for a conservative, quite modest. He proposes a direct wage subsidy to not only make work more monetarily valuable but also signal the state’s – and thus our society’s – value of work. From an excerpt of Cass’ book in The American Interest:
“The subsidy would be calculated relative to a target wage of, say, $15 per hour and make up half the difference—so someone earning a market wage of $9 per hour would receive an additional $3 per hour. Such a subsidy would have two major effects: first, a substantial raise for low-wage workers, making each hour worked more valuable and yielding more take-home pay; second, encouragement for less-skilled workers to take that initial step into the workforce and for employers to offer such jobs.”
My point here is not to provide a laundry list of bold policy ideas that combat the scourges of family decline, widespread opioid misuse, loneliness and social isolation, and widespread disengagement of young men from the workforce. My point, rather, is to suggest that these are good and fundamentally conservative ideas. They are also not the stuff of totalitarian nightmares as Sirota will have us believe.
Finally, I feel compelled to address Sirota’s concluding appeal to the Book of Hayek. Here he suggests that power itself is an evil and thus there should be no power. This is untenable and flies in the face of our contemporary political reality. Harvard law professor Adrian Vermuele has best expounded on the internal contradictions at the core of Sirota’s philosophy by coining the phrase “the liturgy of liberalism.” How is it that liberalism, supposedly so profoundly committed to principles of freedom and liberty, can so quickly turn to repress any intellectual heterodoxy? Vermuele’s work is profound and complex, but the basic problem is that a political philosophy underpinned by nothing more than the idea of “freedom” will forever look for new oppressions to dismantle.
And herein lies the crux of my departure with Sirota: while he suggests conservatism is the flip-side to the woke-ism phenomenon, it is in fact libertarianism that is a not-so-distant cousin of SJWism. Both are committed to a religious devotion of individual preference maximization and will ruthlessly supress any suggestion that time, tradition, community, or common sense may occasionally contain more wisdom than the proclivities of any one person. Power is real and always will be – and as US Attorney General Bill Barr has noted, it is currently being deployed by left-leaning liberals against conservatives. I doubt libertarians will be spared.
This all bodes poorly, perhaps, for the future of a long-term political partnership with Sirota. But it need not foreshadow the demise of any would-be friendship. To the contrary, I am confident that right-leaning politics would benefit mightily from a continued dialogue around these difficult issues – especially in these difficult times. He is also, as I mentioned, a brilliant legal thinker. The reality is also that I know libertarians in 2020 are unlikely to try to “cancel” or “deplatform” me and I would never utilize such tactics against a libertarian. The same cannot be said for progressives. This may be a thin basis for continued political co-operation but the stakes are too high to let our disagreements overwhelm us.
| Thomas Falcone is an LLM candidate at the University of British Columbia Peter A. Allard School of Law. He holds a BA in philosophy and political science, an MA in political science, and an LLB from the University of London. He is co-president of the UBC Runnymede Society chapter. You can follow him on Twitter @thomas_falcone. |
Double Aspect 