"Conservative" Doesn't Mean What You Think

Ed. Note: This is the post I said I would be crossposting at Ambivablog (and Donklephant) in response to comments by her readers here:

Thanks to Amba for inviting me to respond to those of you who take exception to my posts about Normal USA and Whom the Gods would Destroy.  The negative reactions come from either misunderstanding my intent or from fundamental disagreements.  I’d like to address the latter; I think Amba herself did a pretty good job of trying to address the former.  My goal is not not convince anyone I’m right, but only to lay out my case in such a way to promote some serious discussion about bridging a gap between two fundamentally different world views. I challenge you; you challenge me. Deal?

So I think the best way to go about this is to lay out several propositions, any one of which could be developed into a full-length essay.  Challenge me on any one of these, because if you disagree with my conclusion, it’s probably because you disagree with one of these propositions.  This might help to give the discussion some focus. So here goes:

First.  To live in society means to live in a state in which people restrain their liberty for their own and the common good. The best societies are democratic because people get to develop a consensus on the nature and extent of those restraints.  To live in “the state of nature” is to live in a state where everyone is technically free until they run into someone who wants to enslave them. Hegel is the guy who worked out the whole master slave dynamic as it operates in pre-social situations. In the state of nature, might makes right. The powerful dominate the weak. In the state of nature, freedom is something only the powerful really possess. The powerful work hard to aggregate power to themselves, and they are free only until they meet someone more powerful who succeeds in dominating them.  The New Hampshire license plate slogan, “Live free or die” is rooted in this basic dynamic. The aristocrat of freedom is the one who chooses to die fighting rather than to submit to enslavement to save his skin. The duel is a vestige of it as well. The whole idea of entering into society is to develop more civilized mechanisms for working things out so the powerful don’t go round doing as they please to the not-so-powerful.  In its most developed form this alternative is called the rule of law.

Second. No one likes living with constraints, and we all chafe under them. It’s frustrating, and it’s a hassle. People seek wealth and power because the wealthy and the powerful live with fewer constraints. People who have power tend to abuse it.  Why?  Because they can, and that’s the whole point of getting it, to act with as few constraints as possible.  And to be able to act without fear that anyone is going to stop them.  One could argue that this desire is fundamentally a form of infantile narcissism, but I’ll leave that alone for now. The only point that needs to be made here is that it exists and it is a cause for all kinds of social pathology. Societies develop laws, mores, and norms which are designed to put constraints on pathological behavior, and the rich and powerul will always use their wealth and power to loosen things up when it comes to the constraints that they have to live with. They have the resources to make it happen if the rest of us  let them. 

Third. To be a conservative means to conserve. It’s not the same thing as being a man or woman of the right.  To be a rightist means to lean toward the authoritarianism in which might makes right, i.e., to lean more toward the end of social spectrum that is closer to the state of nature in which the exertion of power is the highest value. To be a rightist means, by extension, to celebrate the glories of the military and the control powers of the police which work to do the will of the powerful. To be a conservative, on the other hand, means that you lean toward the rule of law and the preservation of cultural mores and values. I consider myself to be a conservative in the Burkean tradition. Burke in his famous work on the French Revolution decried the Jacobin mentality that led inevitably to the social chaos known as the Terror. The Jacobins’ mistake was the mistake of all social engineers since, that they could systematically dismantle the old system and create from scratch a new one—mostly all that does is create more problems than it solves. I am against Jacobinism in all its forms. (See Claes Ryn for more here.)  I am subsidiarist, which means that I am against all top-downism. I think that initiatives (except in national emergencies)  should come from the bottom up, which is the way it should work in a democratic republic. So I would like to dismiss any idea that I am a socialist, if by socialism is meant the top-downism of command economies, Maoist cultural revolutions, legislated moral behavior, or nation building.   

Fourth. Classical Liberalism in the economic sphere was an ideology which was developed to liberate a new class of capitalist investors from the constraints of mercantilism, the early modern top/down command economic system. Liberalism became associated with the whole cultural shift from medieval aristocrat-centered feudalism to modern bourgeoisie-centered democratic capitalism. Liberal had a progressive meaning in its early stages because it was about progressing beyond medievalism, and later it was associated with the policies that were about progressing beyond the social brutality of 19th Century unrestrained classical capitalism. Classical liberalism unleashed an unprecedented new social dynamic in the world which Schumpeter later called creative destruction. It created unprecedented wealth, technological innovation--and social dislocation and chaos, especially for those whose lives had been agriculture-centered.  There is hardly anyone who will dispute that the transition from a traditional society to a modern capitalist society is brutal.  Is there any one who would argue that it has had a tremendously destructive effect on traditional societies and the values tht came with them? And is there anyone who will argue that the behavior of the early winners in this transition followed the logic described in items #1 and 2 above?  Social Darwinism emerged as the ideology which justified this survival of the fittest mentality, which was just the old law of the jungle rule that the powerful dominate the weak. This system reached its high point in the period between 1870 and World War I.  This early form of capitalism was pretty much as close to being back in the state of nature as modern societies ever got.  Something had to give. 

Fifth. In the social chaos that followed WWI, two great threats emerged—fascism and communism.  Social democracies, first in Sweden, then the New Deal in the U.S., then the Popular Front in France, and so on, were developed as a third way.  According to point #3 above, neither fascism nor communism is conservative—they were both centralized command systems that sought to re-engineer their societies.  All three were attempts to deal with the failures and chaos created by 19th century laissez-faire capitalism. Social democracies, I would argue were relatively speaking, the conservative solution that naturally evolved—in the Burkean sense--in democratic societies in response to the brutality and social chaos created by 19th century classic capitalism.  Fascism and Communism were the Jacobin alternatives.

Sixth. We Americans are human beings and as such we behave no differently than anyone else. The presumption ought to be that Americans who have enormous wealth and power will behave like everyone else in history who have had it, i.e., abuse it, and that they will do what they can to get more. If Social Darwinism was their mythos in the 19th Century.  Ayn Rand Libertarianism is their mythos in this country at least since 1980.  As point #2 states above, no one likes living with constraints, and Libertarianism is the ideology of no governmental constraint. But the problem lies in that taking the no-constraint argument to its logical conclusion, you’re back in the state of nature. In the state of nature the strong dominate the weak. 

These are some questions I put to you, dear Libertarian Ambivablogistas:  Do you or do you not agree that the underlying movement conservative/GOP agenda since the Reagan revolution has been to return this country back to the pre-New Deal era?  If you say no, give me evidence, because the evidence for yes is pretty strong.  Second, if we return to the pre-New Deal era—if we privatize everything, deregulate whenever an industry lobby demands it, reduce taxes to starve the beast so it has no muscle, what means will you have to protect you and your family when the world is dominated by corporations who can act without any counterbalance to restrain them?  Do you really want to return to 19th century power arrangements? What makes you think we won’t if this reactionary agenda is successful? The problem is not big government, but who controls it. And we ordinary Americans have been pretty much sitting around and just letting it be taken from us. And the result is crony-capitalist legislation like the Medicaid Prescription bill.

So where does the real threat come from?  Every system can be abused, but the question for me is in which system do the abuses have the most potential for harm.  In which system are abuses more likely to be redressed?  Libertarians are afraid we’re going to become Soviet Russia, when it is far more likely we are moving toward becoming something like oligarchic Mexico or Brazil. 

I’m for evolution—that’s what the word progressive means to me.  I’m for slow steps forward, keeping what works, improving what doesn’t, but moving forward.  The Reagan/Norquist/Libertarian program is based on devolutionary state-of-nature agenda.  It benefits the already rich and powerful and strips away the tools that ordinary people have to protect themselves from the predations of the rich and powerful. What part of this am I not getting right?  To me nothing could be more obvious.  So if it is I who am befuddled and delusional, make your case.  Give me some evidence or a coherent argument.  Because I haven’t heard it yet.   

Comments

[Pooh]

Saw this at Donklephant. Just wanted to say great post.

[Matt Zemek]

Jack,

Upon seeing the reaction to your post at Ambivablog and Donklephant, what hits me in the face is that people are more interested in defending their turf and playing semantics rather than seeking true liberation and enrichment of society.

This isn't criticism; it's analysis, and I know that for a very long, long while, I was more interested in defending my turf than defending the weak, even if I thought defending the weak was my foremost aim; my words and actions indicated that I was more interested in winning arguments.

Religion--authentic and nourishing--continues to be the hidden but driving force here. I wonder how many of the Ambivablog/Donklephant readers have read your archives on the different spheres and on Cosmopolitans/Puritans, etc.

[Paul Brinkley]

I saw this originally on Donklephant, and am taking the liberty to repost my comment there, here.

Approaching this from the futurist angle.

By my reckoning, if you really believe in evolution, then you know that it doesn't matter whether you believe in it or not. It governs the universe despite disbelief. Anyone who attempts to turn the tide of evolution by building a system that holds things steady has effectively just tried to make a statement that this system will prove fit, and hence it will survive. If it succeeds, it doesn't refute evolution; rather, it, like any other system or even an absence of any system thereof, upholds it all the more.

I may disagree with your characterization of what you call the Libertarian program, but even if I did agree, I contend that if it succeeds to any degree, it is because it is deemed fit to survive, to that degree. Furthermore, I contend that its chance of success as a social structure depends greatly upon its palatability to societies, which depends in turn greatly upon its implementation. If people live under it and find themselves feeling fulfilled and productive, it will spread. If they feel stressed and overcome, it will decline. In either case, what one calls "progressivism" is an alternate societal form, fighting to see which is fittest.

My profound and unassailable powers of prediction foresee that it would likely succeed in some places, and fail in others. Many of the failures would be arguably attributable to what can cause failure in any societal system: the lack of perfect information. If we had perfect information, I suspect either capitalism or communism would work swimmingly in ways intended by their most ardent promoters.

To me, a successful societal system is that which holds stable given the lack of perfect information inherent given the technology of that time. When most people are illiterate and information is copyable only via painstaking manual labor, then a feudal society exhibiting a caste of laborers, landowners, and clerics, plus a sprinkling of artisans, proves very durable. When information is copyable at the speed of electricity (roughly speaking), and greatly outpaces the speed at which the brain can incorporate it and feed back, then a representative or parliamentarian democracy such as that of today's Western nations persists quite well.

In the future, one might envision technology that augments the power of the individual to respond to information, either by cybernetically increasing the brain's capacity to incorporate and consider input, or by replicating its "will" in some external electronic device. As that technology spreads, one would expect the fittest society system to morph from a parliamentarian democracy to perhaps a flatter democratic system.

[Micah]

Great post... I love your manifestoes. :-)Vis--vis Paul's comment: Coincidentally enough, the "feature article" on Wikipedia today was on "Transhumanism". I skimmed that article and could only think of C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength. What Paul describes is the indeed hideous spectre of the abolition of man, and if a person doesn't see that for what it is, I don't know what further discussion can be had with such a person.

[Jack Whelan]

Paul--

I'm not sure I understand where you're going with your comment, but it sounds like a high falutin way to say some things work and some don't. I don't think you have to appeal to evolution to justify such a statement. If your point is that the kinds of social systems that work are those which seem to adequately reflect the technology of their times, again I would agree, but I come at it from a McLuhanite angle which is more than I want to get into here. But I talk about it a little in my post "The Catholic Sensibility," for which you can find a link in the column on the right.

But I'm not sure where you're going with your comment with regard to my post which is a critique of Libertarianism. Are you saying that Libertarianism and evolution have a special complementary relationship?

It might, but that still doesn't make me like it any more or undermine my argument that Libertarianism inevitably leads to the powerful dominating the weak. I refuse to be fatalistic about that.

I don't believe that evolution "explains the universe". It provides a mechanical explanation for a certain limited range of phenomena in the biosphere. In other words, as a Christian I'm fine with evolutionary science explainng the "horizontal" mechanics of biological development over eons of time, but I do not think that the human being is biologically circumscribed. He has access to another, vertical dimension, which I have written about as the dimension of freedome and grace. Human beings are where the vertical and the horizontal meet, and that makes them an X-factor in the ongoing drama of earth history. It's not something for a moment I think is preordained by some cosmic mechanism or law, call it evolution or whatever.

[Paul Brinkley]

I actually agree with you to an extent that conscious will is an X factor in the universe. In fact, in my experience (limited as it is, stuck in one corner of one blue marble among potentially trillions), it's the biggest X factor. There's something inherently unpredictable about it. And its capacity to discover information and share it almost free of cost means that one person with a great idea - a Spark - can significantly alter the course of the entire species.

Nevertheless, humans remain collectively predictable most of the time, despite every single one of them being capable of conscious will. Lower the price on a product, and more people will buy it. Lower its quality, and fewer will. Show talent, and people will applaud; show a threat, and they will seek to reduce that threat. Not every single one of them will respond as we expect, and the exact actions taken will be hard to foresee, but enough will lean in the predicted direction that we can say, yes, it's worthwhile to cut a price or improve quality or cooperate or stand firm or anything else. The Spark just means we may get it wrong occasionally.

WRT the relationship of Libertarianism to evolution:

I see evolution as not just governing biology on earth, but indeed the entire universe. Please understand, I don't ascribe any religious formality to this. (Or maybe I do, and don't know it. How do people feel about their beliefs about how the universe works?) It just strikes me as a sensible way for things to work: if you have some phenomenon which can occur multiple times and in multiple places, and it does so in such a way that causes it to happen more often and in more places, then isn't this a "fit" phenomenon? Why does this phenomenon have to be reproduction? Why can the same be said of the creation of some isotope of carbon, or learning an idea, or adopting a way of living?

I believe one can view Libertarianism as just one more thing trying to survive under the rules imposed by evolution. It survives to the extent that people collectively choose to adopt it and promote it. Same with any social structure anyone proposes as an alternative.

Speaking in a sort of cosmic sense, proving that any of these alternatives is any better than the rest is hard, because of the restrictions at play. How do we measure "better"? In fact, how do we even define it? I could go into a long screed over this, but I'll cut to my point: the only way I can see to define "better" for any social structure at the end of the day is in terms of how well that structure promotes the survival of its society. In that case, see the previous paragraph.

Speaking more specifically. Libertarianism tries to play society like evolution plays the universe. But it defines "fit" in a particular way: the fittest product is the one that provides the most for the least. The tastiest cake, the warmest blanket, the most adept plumber, or the most diplomatic statesman, for the lowest amount of your effort possible.

If the fit dominate the unfit under Libertarian society, then it's because the fit dominate the unfit under evolution, too. (I've often found it strange for liberals to be such champions of evolution theory in schools yet fighting its existence in economics - while conservatives do the same thing in reverse.) There's a certain fairness to this. If you go bankrupt, it's because you didn't make a good enough cake, or you priced it too high. If you lose an election, it's because you didn't offer a good enough resume, or it wasn't good enough to justify a drive to the polls.

There's an "ah! but!" to these points, but this comment is long enough as it is. I leave it here for now.

In the meantime, thanks for the dialogue.

[realpc]

Jack,

I understand your concerns about excessive capitalism. What I do not understand is your lack of concern about excessive socialism.

The old capitalism vs socialism dichotomy is no longer valid. We have seen the misery caused by early, unregulated, forms of capitalism. We have also seen the misery caused by every socialist revolution.

At least capitalism has always led to eventual prosperity and freedom for most.

Every advanced nation now has a mixed economic system, where capitalism and socialism are kept in balance, each prevented from going too far.

Every socialist system has resulted in totalitarianism. I do not think this is a coincidence -- the nature of socialism does not allow individual freedom. Furthermore socialism, even when moderate and combined with capitalism, leads eventually to economic and technological stagnation.

Why do you think Israel gave up socialism?

Progressives admire the social democracies of Europe and want the US to follow their example. But it's more likely they will end up following our example by lowering taxes and encouraging business.

[Jack Whelan]

realpc--

I think your dealing in abstractions, not in reality as it exists in the U.S. My posts are not directed at abstract threats but real ones. Ask yourself: who has the power in this country? Who controls all three branches of government? Who is directing policy--the unions? Or corporate lobbies? The answer is obvious. The unions have hardly any influence anymore even with the Democrats--Clinton ran right over their objections to NAFTA.

Where then is the power base for the left? There isn't one. The left simply has no power in this country, and they pose no threat of any kind. If ever the day comes when there is a real threat from the left, I'll write about that, but right now the left is about as weak and ineffectual as the Kansas City Royals. And Democrats like Bill Clinton and others in the DLC are really center right candidates. They are what we used to call Rockefeller Republicans. Liberal on social issues, but when it comes to power and money, it's all about what Big Money wants. The real threat is the crony capitalist corruption of American politics.

So instead of worrying about a threat that doesn't exist, why not worry about something that does? I'm kind of practical that way.

[realpc]

Jack,

What you said is true -- the left is completely out of power, and utterly frustrated.

So what should they do? More of the same? That will just keep them out of power forever.

The dream of a socialist paradise died, unions turned out to be corrupt, the 1960s sex and drugs culture disgusted mainstream America, Marxist atheism turned off milliions of believers.

The left has nothing to offer except bitter memories. Throw away your past and start something new, if you want power so badly.

A new new left would have to separate from the old counter-culture, and from Marxism. It would have to find a way to tolerate free enterprise.

What would it stand for? Opposing corruption? But everyone hates corruption, except maybe those who benefit from it. Would it stand for civil rights and diversity? Kind of difficult, when the "enemy" appointed the first black female secretary of state.

[Jack Whelan]

realpc--

You're missing my point. It's precisely because the Left is so toothless that we are in danger. There is no counterbalance to the the predators on the right. Who will stop them from doing as they please?

In my opinion, you are too caught up in this abstract discussion of right vs. left and are blind to where the concrete dangers lie. Don't you see how already the system is being corrupted because there is no effective counterbalance or checks to corporate greed?

It's not a question at this point of promoting a left-wing agenda, but of stopping the right-wing agenda to turn this country into a crony capitalist oligarchy. Read my post later today for more on this.

[realpc]

You missed my point, Jack. The Republicans have taken over because the left is so -- not toothless - so wrong about so many things.

Restoring balance would not result from more of the same. The average American does not resonate with leftist ideas and will not vote for a party that represents those ideas. If the Democrats are the party of Howard Dean and Michael Moore, people who hate the Republican party will vote Republican anyway.

I am not caught up in left vs right. I said these categories are obsolete.

Are you against capitalism? Or just excessive capitalism? If you think capitalism is ok, as long as it's controlled, then you believe in compromise.

But you don't like Bill Clinton because he wasn't a socialist. I don't really know where you are coming from.

[Jack Whelan]

If you attend carefully to what I write, you will see that I'm exactly what I say I am. I'm a conservative who seeks to preserve the New Deal compromise against those who seek to dismantle it and return us to the days before regulation, social safety nets, and income tax. I am interested in working within that basic system to evolve a national consensus to deal with pressing issues like national health care and energy, and the environment. I have no radical program. I just want things to evolve.

It's clear to me that social democracy is the natural evolution out of classic 19th century capitalism. It's a system that works effectively not to destroy capitalism but to keep its excesses in check. The power clique in the GOP is doing whatever it can to remove any checks on the ability of corporations to do what they want. If you can't see that, I don't where we can go. Just keep reading, and maybe over time my perspective will begin to appear more plausible to you.

If you want to comment further, why not do it after today's post. Maybe others will become part of the conversation.

[Dan]

Jack,
I like your post. Come over to Angry Bear if you have time. I would like to add a post, or cactus could, using your ideas.

Also Tyler Cowen expresses his notions of libertarianism at Marginal Revolution which I find full of narciscism. He would not agree.