10 April, 2019

The late Lawrence Auster 1949 – 2013

By John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.)


Auster

Author of the blog "VIEW FROM THE RIGHT", Auster was a deeply conservative writer who often wrote on immigration and multiculturalism. Sadly he died all too soon. Conservatives tend to remember their honoured predecessors so I thought I should put up a small personal memoir about him. I therefore put up below largely unaltered versions of my posts about him in 2004


Defining conservatism

I rarely comment on arguments put forward by my fellow conservatives, but I am going to make a small exception today to say a few words about the ideas of Lawrence Auster, a traditionalist Jewish writer who thinks that almost nobody these days is conservative enough. He has just put up on Frontpage an excellent article on the antiwar RIGHT ("The Antiwar Right's Bent View of the World") that I fully agree with and recommend. It no longer comes up on that site unfortunately but there appears to be a complete copy of it here and here

Auster summarizes it as follows:

"The charge of “anger” has, of course, long been a liberal shibboleth used to label, belittle, and dismiss conservatives. This has especially been the case at the New York Times, where the word “anger” as applied to conservatives, both in headlines and the body of stories, would typically appear more often in the paper than “House of Representatives,” “poll,” or “gay.” It is classic politically correct propaganda, a way of portraying any non-liberal position as consisting of nothing but primitive impulses and dark prejudices. Since 9/11, however, the phenomenon of anger-driven politics, both on the left and the antiwar right, has ceased being a politically correct fantasy and has become an all-too-real, indeed formative element in our national politics that renders rational discussion almost impossible much of the time. As such it represents an extremely important development that needs to be understood in depth and resisted."

Auster replies to a critique of it here. and there is an updated and expanded version here

He also has an excellent article here (reproduced here) that explains why American Jews are so overwhelmingly Left-wing. He says that they are actually AFRAID of American Protestant Christians, who are -- as Auster points out -- in fact the very best friends that Israel and the Jews have. Auster does not say so but I think the Jews concerned can be forgiven their paranoia. It is a pity that they are not more up to date but Christians (including Protestants such as Calvin and Luther) DID persecute them for a very long time.

Some other Auster articles of the many I could mention are ones complaining that the Pope is too Leftist and that most modern conservatives are really Leftists. He also thinks that the "neocons" are a bad lot who have GWB in their hip-pocket and that America's largely open borders are a disaster.

I of course agree with SOME of those other articles. I do think the whole neocon conspiracy thing is just paranoia but, as an Australian conservative I am delighted that our government has just about stopped illegal immigration stone dead and that it locks up any illegal immigrants it catches -- as it would anyone else who defies our laws. And I agree that the Holy Father, like most of his predecessors, is not much of a conservative politically.

My disagreements with Auster arise from the fact that I am one of those villains whom he sees as having destroyed conservatism -- libertarians. He rightly notes that libertarian conservatism is one of the dominant forms of conservatism today (the other being Christian conservatism) and makes the correct point that Christian conservatives are pretty strongly influenced by individualistic, liberty-oriented thinking too. Unlike Auster, however, I do not see this as a particularly modern phenomenon. I have done an extensive historical survey showing that belief in individual liberty has always been central to conservatism. Auster, by contrast, seems to think that traditionalism is the main current. I actually see something more basic in conservatism that underlies both traditionalism AND belief in liberty -- a certain cautious pragmatism and mistrust of the goodwill of others. Because of this basic trait of caution, conservatives want as much freedom to make their own decisions as possible and they also like systems that have been tried and tested. But the liking for tradition is in the end just a tool -- a way of being cautious, not something that is compelling for its own sake.

So the basis of Auster's complaint is that modern conservatives are too liberty-oriented and value-free -- and he sees this as something that they have in common with the Left. A related complaint is that modern conservatives have no anchors -- they just go along with whatever seems to be working. The only thing I disagree with there is the idea that Leftists believe in liberty. They don't. They only believe in power. They advocate various liberties from time to time -- e.g. various sexual liberties -- mainly because it suits them as a way of disrupting existing society and thus hopefully getting themselves into power. But for the rest, I would claim that liberty and the good life are the only lasting values for secular conservatives and that going along with what seems to be working is the historic conservative modus operandi. And long may it continue! We have had more than enough of theorists telling us what to do!

I apologize to Auster for having to a degree caricaturized his views above but I was aiming only to give a quick impression of them. His own prolific writings give plenty of detail, explanation and nuance.

Auster made the following brief comment on my post above about his writings:

"I thank Mr. Ray for his sympathetic and thoughtful overview of my writings. However, regarding his main criticism of me, I don't think I ever said that the belief in individual liberty was not part of the American conservative tradition. The difference is between those who understand liberty as being within a moral and constitutional order, and those who see liberty, or rather freedom, as essentially free of any constraints". Mark Richardson is another writer who often makes that sort of point. I find such a view incomprehensible. I know of NO conservative who denies that "rights connote duties" and I know of NO conservative who denies that we are in at least some ways constrained in what we do by "human nature". So the claim that there are conservatives who believe in some sort of absolute liberty is a total straw man.

So it would appear that the differences between Auster and other conservatives lay mainly in matters of emphasis

Border control

Under the heading "Exposing the Open-Borders Arguments", Auster has a very comprehensive article here (also here) arguing against America's current de facto policy of allowing millions of illegal immigrants to flow into the country. Australia has a high immigrant inflow too but we insist on choosing whom we allow in. As a result we mainly get high-quality (hard-working, law-abiding) immigrants from East Asia. We were getting a rash of illegal Muslim immigrants for a short while but Australia's conservative government put a stop to that -- to great public acclaim.

Was Pope John Paul II a conservative?

Auster has a heap of posts and comments up at the moment (e.g. here) about the late Holy Father. Auster is derisive of the view that John Paul II was a conservative. But that depends on what you mean by conservative and Auster has his own view of that. It is certainly clear that JPII was a political centrist but I think one could say much the same of GWB. So is GWB a conservative? NO! I can hear some people shouting. But no real-life politician wins universal approval even from his own side of politics so I think we have to say that in the ordinary meaning of the term GWB IS a conservative.

From my own libertarian conservative viewpoint both GWB and JPII are/were not nearly conservative enough but I think that real-world conservative politics at least from Disraeli on have almost always consisted of finding a safe balance between competing political claims rather than pursuing some hard-line ideology. Hard-line ideologies are for Leftists. So I think Auster's view of the matter misses the point that JPII was of necessity a real-world politician -- so compromises were to be expected of him. Even my great hero, Ronald Reagan, signed into law some pieces of legislation I would rather not think about.

What I think Auster also misses is that political centrism is thoroughly Papal. The attitudes of JPII were simply modern adaptations of traditional Papal thinking. I go into that at slightly greater length here. Papal thinking is in fact the ancestor of the Blairite "third way". The syndicalism that was recommended in the famous 1891 encyclical De rerum novarum of Pope Leo XIII also tried to strike a balance between capitalism and socialism.

Update: I guess I should mention explicitly something I initially thought was too well-known to require comment: That there was one respect in which His Holiness was NOT a centrist -- his stand in favour of individual rights versus the power of the Communist State. So in that respect he was very much a conservative, and a great one.

Winston Churchill was a neocon

I am sometimes amazed by how little history even my fellow conservatives seem to know. Lawrence Auster is of course well-known for the way he agrees with Leftists in his paranoia about the "neocons" so I guess that helps us understand his latest lapse. He has put up a post consisting mainly of a letter from an historian claiming that Winston Churchill was NOT a neocon. In the narrow sense that Churchill was not Jewish and that the term "neocon" is only a recent invention, that does, of course, have to be true.

In the broader sense -- a neocon being a former Leftist who favours foreign military intervention in favour of democracy -- however, to say that Churchill was not a neocon betrays no knowledge of history whatever. He joined the British LIBERAL party in 1904 and served as Colonial Under-Secretary under Campbell-Bannerman and as president of the Board of Trade and Home Secretary under Asquith. So he was in his early years a prominent Leftist in terms of British politics at the time. But, like the neocons, he later (1925) changed his tune and became a prominent Conservative.

And as for foreign interventions in favour of democracy, who was Secretary of War under Lloyd George when Britain sent troops to join the "white" Russians in fighting the Bolsheviks in 1919? It was Winston Churchill! And there is no doubt that Churchill did not repent doing so. One thing he never changed was his fierce opposition to Communism -- an opposition that is also characteristic of the neocons.

And though Churchill was not Jewish, he was at least philosemitic. As Auster notes, Churchill once said: "Where the Jew goes there is oasis. Where the Arab goes there is desert."

So on the four primary neocon identifiers -- Jewishness, anticommunism, Leftist early life and support for military intervention in the cause of promoting democracy -- Churchill scores 3 out of 4 -- and on the Jewishness angle he might be said to have done his best! I gather that not all neocons are Jewish anyway -- particularly if you include the Straussians in what is after all a pretty loose classification to begin with. Some people also say Churchill was a neocon because he was an unabashed defender of the British Empire but for that to be relevant we have to accept that the neocons want an American empire -- which is in my view a brain-dead claim. The idea of America as an empire is antithetical to all American values and traditions and the neocons are far too smart to be unaware of something as basic as that.

Auster does not link to it but the article which started the recent discussion about Churchill as a neocon is here

Paleocons

Auster on Paleocons: Auster is a pretty old-fashioned conservative himself so his critique of the "paleocons" (who as far as I can see are in fact largely anarcho-capitalists rather than any sort of conservative) got a bit of a reaction. Such internecine feuds are normally of little interest to me but this particular feud involves criticism of "psychologizing". The claim is that one should look only at the argument someone is advancing rather than their motivation for making the argument. That is of course the classic critique of "ad hominem" arguments but in cases when an argument makes no sense at the logical level, I think you have to look at the psychological motivation. It is of course my contention that Leftism can ONLY be understood as a psychological rather than a rational phenomenon. Leftist arguments are so inconsistent from occasion to occasion that one has to look at what is behind such a strange phenomenon. So I am on Auster's side in this one. There is of course an argument against speculative or "pop" psychologizing but my 200+ published academic journal articles on political psychology insulate me fairly well from that charge. I do not however rely on any claims of authority to substantiate what I say about Leftist psychology. I do what all scientists do (or should do): Present evidence for what I say. And again, I think Auster does a fair job of substantiating his points in that way.

"Moderate" Muslims?

Auster says that there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim. He is wrong. One of the major religious leaders (and a former Prime Minister) of the world's largest Muslim country is actually pro-Israel. And I'll bet Lawrence does not even know whom I am talking about. That there is no such thing as a moderate ARAB Muslim I might tend to agree with, however. No doubt there are some decent Arabs but they seem to be vastly outnumbered by others whom I can only call disgusting.

It is very encouraging to see an article by Abdurrahman Wahid in the WSJ which sets out the urgency of defeating Islamic extremism. Better known as Gus Dur, Wahid is of course arguably the most respected religious leader in the world's most populous Islamic nation -- Indonesia. As Indonesia is on Australia's doorstep, many politically aware Australians are rather appreciative of Gus Dur and his moderation.


*There is a comprehensive list of Auster's writings here



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