Comments Which Conservatives Block From Their Blogs For January 27, 2021

 Jan 22

To R. Scott Clark and his blogpost that quotes Orwell as saying that intellectuals support totalitarianism. This appeared in the Heidelblog.

Orwell citation is from
    https://www.openculture.com/2014/01/george-orwell-explains-in-a-revealing-1944-letter-why-hed-write-1984.html

Intellectuals are totalitarian according to Orwell?

I think that the follow quotes from the article cited finds a different culprit about which Orwell is warning us:

All the national movements everywhere, even those that originate in resistance to German domination, seem to take non-democratic forms, to group themselves round some superhuman fuhrer (Hitler, Stalin, Salazar, Franco, Gandhi, De Valera are all varying examples) and to adopt the theory that the end justifies the means.

and

With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer.

In essence, Orwell was warning against tribalism. Because with tribalism comes group authoritarianism.

Opposed to the above is democracy. Orwell writes the following about democracy:

But one must remember that Britain and the USA haven’t been really tried, they haven’t known defeat or severe suffering, and there are some bad symptoms to balance the good ones. To begin with there is the general indifference to the decay of democracy. Do you realise, for instance, that no one in England under 26 now has a vote and that so far as one can see the great mass of people of that age don’t give a damn for this?

It is after the above statement that the above quote in Clark's article comes. So it seems that Clark somehow missed the context of what he quoted from Orwell.

One more point, Clark may have overlooked the fact that theologians are intellectuals too.

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Jan 26

To Barbara Elliot and her article that define what conservatism is in idealistic terms. This appeared in the Imaginative Conservative

Attempts at describing one's ideology in idealistic terms, as done above, does nothing more than claim that one's ideology has a monopoly on virtue and implies that it is omniscient. Thus, to adapt the words of Martin Luther King Jr., it proclaims that it has everything to teach other ideologies and nothing to learn from them. And in that we have a centralization of power.

Do conservatives really understand what it means to oppose the centralization of power? After all, they want to limit government as a way of decentralizing power. But that assumes that the centralization of power cannot occur in the private sector. What our nation has seen now and before is that the centralization of power occurs in the private sector and thus for gov't to be able to defend its people from such a centralization of power, it must be big enough to battle it.

Furthermore, when only one class is represented by gov't, which is quite the case in our current situation, you have a centralization of power. The way to decentralize power is to have all classes of people well represented in government and in the power structures in the workplace. Thus, relying on the soviets as they existed prior to Lenin's hijacking of the Russian Revolution or employing a variation of Germany's codetermination laws redistributes power to the working class at the workplace.  Perhaps restructuring our House of Representatives so that people are represented by vocation rather than location is a way of decentralizing power in government.

What we should note is this. That for working democracies, to limit the power of the government too much is to weaken that democracy.

So should the government take care of those in need? That depends on how conservatives plan to motivate people to take care of their families and neighbors. For if they are either unwilling or unable to do that, it is not love that prohibits the government from doing that.

Do conservatives have contributions to make? Certainly. But they are not the only ones and a significant amount of what is written above is highly problematic.