Dr. Larry P. Arnn's Imprimis answers Questions

Dr. Larry P. Arnn’s Imprimis answers Questions
In pursuit of the truth - cinops be gone - Thursday, Dec. 27, 2012

Dr. Arnn is the twelfth president of Hillsdale College. Imprimis is a publication of the College with over 2,600,000 readers monthly. It is free. www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis.asp

The following is adapted from an interview by Hugh Hewitt for the Hugh Hewitt Radio Show on the day after the election, Nov. 7, 2012. (December 2012 Issue)  (Hugh is on daily 3-6 PM., KLAC 870)

Hugh Hewitt: (HH) In his introduction to The City and Man, Leo Strauss wrote this: “The crisis of the West consists in the West’s having become uncertain of its purpose.” Is that applicable to what we see in our politics today?

Larry P. Arnn: (LPA) It is certainly true that the vast majority of our nation’s elites today - those who welcome the results of yesterday’s election - are creatures of modern historicist thought, which explicitly rejects the kind of objective principles - equality under God, inalienable rights - equality under God, inalienable rights - on which America was founded. According to modern historicism, the only objective truth is that one can’t know an objective truth.

President Obama embraces this view in no uncertain terms in his book The Audacity of Hope: “Implicit … in the very idea of ordered liberty,” he writes, is “a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or ‘ism,’ any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single unalterable course ….” So much for individual rights & limited government.

HH: You mentioned Reagan, who always seemed to know, as Solzhenitsyn knew, that it was all papier-mâché in the Soviet Union - that you could poke a stick through it and it would fall apart. It was held together by fear. But modern bureaucratic government operates in such a way as to gain people’s allegiance and trust. Isn’t that a significant difference between the two?

LPA: The experts who run the modern bureaucratic state think they are architects of a perfectly rational society. They think of themselves as scientists, and of the running of government as something more like science - the science of administration - than politics.

They think they can coordinate society comprehensively so that no one is left out. That’s why they think of their work as something good and as something high.

The problem is that what they are trying to do defies human nature - the human nature that led James Madison to write famously that men are not angels, and that led the Framers of the Constitution to divide government in order to limit government - and so what these experts are doing will ultimately lead to despotism.

But to speak directly to your question, Hugh, there are many indications that there’s a deep and even intensifying opposition to bureaucratic government today. People don’t like it, and they don’t trust it. They want less of it. And I don’t believe that yesterday’s election signified any change in that. Now, how to harness that opinion politically is the challenge. No one has yet been able to capitalize upon it.

HH: What would be your advice as to what constitutional conservatives should be saying?

LPA: One obvious theme to strike is that people didn’t vote for, and don’t support, higher taxes and bigger government. But conservative statesmen have to get better. Calvin Coolidge once said that great statesman are “ambassadors of providence, sent to reveal to us our unknown selves.”

What that means is that great statesmen are not going to be around very often. I’d say that the standard of conservative statesmanship today is improving, but too few prominent conservatives are skillful at explaining the problem of the modern bureaucratic state.

This form of government proceeds by rules, and rules upon rules, and compliance with those rules, and compliance with those rules become a key activity of the entire nation. That results in bureaucracy, and in the inefficiencies of bureaucracy. Constitutional government, on the other hand, proceeds by clearly states laws…

George H. Kubeck