I find Paul Rosenberg’s efforts at intellectualism fascinating in the same way that I find car accidents fascinating. You have to slow down and look carefully to see just how all the damage was created. His post today is almost incoherent, but I particularly like his effort to define modern-day conservatives as the progeny of feudal lords and modern-day liberals as the progeny of the bourgeoisie.
The origins of modern conservatism lie in the European landed aristocracy, descended from a predatory warrior class. Although tens of millions of self-identified conservatives today are culturally, historically, and/or genetically far removed from those origins, there is nonetheless a continuity in the kinds of life activities that such a culture breeds.
Similarly, the origins of modern liberalism lie in the European urban middle class-the burghers, or bourgeoisie, who inhabited a very different life-world, with some very different kinds of activity, much of which centers around the finding of facts, and all manner of intellectual pursuits that flow from or depend on factual knowledge. This includes all manner of occupations dating back centuries, even millennia-from artisans to shopkeepers, traders, lawyers, bankers, doctors and teachers-as well as occupations that scarcely existed as such more than two to five generations ago, such as scientists, technicians, engineers, etc.
Since this is a fundamental error, we need not consider the merits of Rosenberg’s essay beyond this point. It’s not easy to precisely define the term bourgeoisie. It can mean middle class or upper middle class. It can mean the class of people normally called ‘small businessmen or women.’ The rise of large corporations has done damage to the coherency and usefulness of the term by rendering it as somewhat of an anachronism. In Marxist theory, the bourgeoisie were the new ruling class (replacing the aristocracy) and the owners of the means of production.
The bourgeoisie were Republicans in the revolutionary (anti-Monarchial) sense, in that they wanted equal rights, rights of representation, etc. The intellectual basis for the bourgeois ‘Republican’ revolutions in France and America was derived from the Enlightenment philosophers, but the bourgeoisie as a class were not known for their intellectual achievement. They could be considered progressive in the sense that they fought against the privileges of the L’Ancien Régime, but within the new paradigm of Republican government, they were to develop into what we know as The Right.
They owned the mills, the factories, the mines and other going concerns. They were the capitalists and they had an antipathetic relationship with labor from the beginning.
Today’s Republican Party is shrinking rapidly and becoming more heavily influenced by it’s religious wing. But the heart of the Republican Party has always been the class of people that do the hiring. From the top moguls to the common shopkeeper, those that create jobs rather than seek them have been the core of the GOP. That is why the Republican Party has always been business-friendly, anti-union, for lower regulation and less taxation on capital. The chief political challenge of the hiring class has always been their numerical inferiority, which leads them to seek allies from the job-seeking class.
It’s not hard to do the math on the rest of this. Convincing members of the job-seeking class to join you in your hiring-class agenda is not an intellectual exercise but an emotional one. Therefore, the Republican Party’s intellectual apparatus has developed in a way that eschews the rules of academia or even mainstream journalism. They are not ‘reality-based’ because their mission is not to win a debate but to win converts to a cause.
In any case, the modern conservative movement may include the progeny of the old aristocracy (for tax purposes, if nothing else) but it is mainly the party of the bourgeoisie. Contrary to Rosenberg’s contention, the bourgeoisie have never been an engine of intellectualism. As they have evolved in America, they have been the exact opposite.
