Those of you who don't know who Richard Weaver is, or was, join the club. I had no clue until I found
Ideas Have Consequences on a reading list from the internet. (I hate to admit it, but when it comes to reading lists, the conservatives do a much better job than we do. Liberal reading lists for some reason always seem to come with one book called
The Exciting World of Mushrooms, for reasons that I can guess at but would rather not openly speculate about.)
Somehow, though, an interesting thing happened on the way to Chapter IX: I realized that in spite of Weaver's being a Tory (from North Carolina, no less!), a neo-platonist (usually the philosophical underpinning of totalitarians), and a bit of a crank (jazz is one of the symptoms of the fall of western civilization), he's also very much now one of us.
This may not be as surprising as I originally found it. After all, Weaver started as a bit of a socialist and was a firm liberal in his early career. His conservatism is not part of some new ideological drift on his part, but is a reaction to what he saw as elements of liberalism that had gone astray, and he may well have been right, in
some circumstances.
For instance, the end of the book gets quite interesting. Weaver not only condemns corporate capitalism ("Behind these [the various corporate names: General, Standard, International, American...] every sort of adulteration can be practiced, and no one is shamed, because no one is identified; and, in fact, no single person may be responsible"(141), but he makes a very strong case for both fiscal government responsibility ("Adulteration can, of course, be a useful political weapon, and one of the first steps taken by a recent reform administration in the United States was the inflation of currency"(140) and private property rights ("Private property, in the sense we have defined it, is substance; in fact, it is something very much like the philosophic concept of substance. Now when we envision a society of responsible persons, we see them enjoying a range of free choice which is always expressed in relation to substance"(146).
Now, what does all this mean, and why is it at all important? It's important because Weaver, a philosophical godfather of the modern conservative movement in America, is clearly speaking to platform issues that liberalism, and the Democratic Party, can make use of that strongly resonate with Americans. His argument for private property, for instance, doesn't stem from any silly rationale about how capitalism is great because people can do whatever they damned well want with what they own. Instead, it's an argument about the power of private property in giving the people resistance to authoritarianism of all sorts, and in creating a kind of democratic morality that springs from our having a collective interest in the civic workings of our society. Likewise, private property helps to protect us against the adulteration of our currency and our future productivity by making it harder for immoral administrations to put policies in place that rob us of our own future value.
His comments on corporations are again not aimed at offering silly Marxist notions about how all factories should be owned by the people, but instead is an argument about how the anonymity of corporations allows them to operate without responsibility, because there is no individual who has a moral stake in what the corporation does. If you think that some of that sounds like the sort of thing that Bernie Sanders might say, well, it's interesting how the worm turns, isn't it?
Nearly as interesting to me as the economic argument that Weaver is making is the argument that he puts forward concerning mass media. He refers to this as the Stereopticon, and in a fascinating and prescient discussion, he makes the case that the media (specifically newspapers, in the context of the following quote), "are under strong pressure to distort in the interest of holding attention." Notice again that this is the sort of argument that could be made by Democratic politicians and that fully resonates with the public: NOT that the media is "liberally biased," but that it is "industrially biased" in the sense that "this is profitable practically, for the opportunity to dramatize a fight is an opportunity for news. Journalism, on the whole, is glad to see a quarrel start and sorry to see it end"(97).
Finally, let me point out something that Weaver states early on, and that I also think has some resonance, if our side were to make proper use of it. "Our age," Weaver says, "provides many examples of the ravages of immediacy, the clearest of which is the failure of the modern mind to recognize obscenity." It would be too much for me to attempt an abstract of exactly what Weaver means by obscenity here. Some of it I disagree with (for instance, he finds jazz an example of the decline of standards in music, and I strongly disagree with that, as I would with someone who argued that rock music, or country blues, are an example of declining musical standards), but he does manage to make a powerful statement that could be used by adherents to liberalism as a rejection of some of more extreme elements of modernism--one of which is the irritating philosophy of moral relativism that we gravitate towards when we lose a sense of hierarchy in our understanding of the world around us.