I have been over many months now arguing that the terms conservative and liberal don't really mean much and create more confusion than they clarify. At the root of the meaning of conservative is to conserve, but the people who call themselves conservative in this country are not conserving but destroying a system set up in the middle of the last century that found a working compromise between the agenda of the corporate hard right and the socialist hard left. We called it the New Deal.
Liberalism historically has meant the bourgeois rejection of the older medieval crown-and-altar narrative and of the feudal and mercantilist economic arrangements associated with it. Liberalism today means everything from the laissez-faire Libertarian no-taxes, no-regulation agenda of the economic right to the movement to give gays and lesbians marriage rights. The word Progressive is sometimes substituted for Liberal, but it doesn't help much. Its amorphous conceptually and describes a mood more than it does a political program.
Although I have called myself a progressive on occasion, I don't find the phrase apt anymore to describe what I'm about. I feel more comfortable describing myself as a Burkean conservative which in this political climate is a centrist position. I, like Burke, am opposed to top-downism of the Jacobin right or left; I am for gradual social and political evolution, I am pro-republic and anti-empire, and I am for conserving the social and political gains already made. If this is a radical agenda, it is a radically centrist one.
I have also argued in posts like Religion and Politics, that one of the most important things we can do to bring some coherence to our politics is to separate out our social discourse into three spheres: the political, the cultural, and the economic. Much of our confusion is rooted in the conflating the cultural and the political. The cultural sphere is the sphere of freedom, where citizens have the right to pursue the kind of life, values, thinking they choose (or were acculturated to) without the interference of anyone else so long as they don't infringe on the rights of others. If people want to join the Heaven's Gate cult or to be atheists or Catholics or whatever, they are free to do that, and their right to do so is guaranteed by a pact developed in the political sphere that we call the Constitution.
The point is that the cultural sphere should be free as possible from interference from political sphere so long as basic rules are followed which boil down to respecting the freedom of others to pursue the life that they choose. Freedom in the Cultural sphere is an essential central value in a pluralistic globalizing world. Dialog and debate and between groups with different values should be an important part of our social discourse in the cultural sphere, and there is nothing wrong with trying to persuade members of other groups to change their views. But no group can forcefully impose its values and worldview on the others, and the Dominionist agenda of the religious right is to be rejected as un-American without any need to debate it because its essential program crosses that line. This group ought not be pandered to; its program should be roundly and universally repudiated by all Americans serious about maintaining a political sphere organized by Constitutional principles.
No one cultural narrative can be imposed on the political sphere; that's why the lingua franca of the political sphere must remain secularese--it's the only practical language to be used in a society where groups with different cultural narratives can speak to one another. And as I've said before, secularese is essentially "rights" language, not traditional-values language. So people with traditionalist values, and anyone else, have every right to promote their interests in the political sphere, but they have to do it speaking secularese and by following the constitutional rules. The idea of having any depiction of Moses or the ten commandments in the courtroom or the legislature defies this principle. This secular principle governing the political sphere does not require the diminution of religion in the cultural sphere; it simply respects the idea that in a pluralistic society the political sphere must be as culturally neutral as possible.
The political sphere is the sphere of power and of setting up the rules by which different factions in a complex society can resolve the conflicts that arise between them as they pursue their different interests. We have a basic set of rules and democratic institutions and procedures set up in this country for resolving those conflicts, and they are very vulnerable to be manipulated by factional concentrations of power and wealth which leads to the tyranny that the republic was founded in the first place to combat. So a basic principle in the political sphere for our form of republican democracy is that any trend that undermines the power of people to shape their own political destiny should be unequivocally repudiated.
That is not a leftist idea; it's central to the whole idea of America. And yet many Americans are complacent about the threat to the Republic that is being posed by hard-right factions which have been aggregating power and wealth and have been manipulating the system in a way that undermines the commonweal. Bill Moyers, one of the most eloquent defenders of the American Republic puts it this way in a speech he gave recently at Occidental College:
Things have reached such a state of affairs," the journalist George Orwell once wrote, "that the first duty of every intelligent person is to pay attention to the obvious." The editors of The Economist have done just that. The pro-business magazine considered by many to be the most influential defender of capitalism on the newsstand, produced a sobering analysis of what is happening to the old notion that any American child can get to the top. A growing body of evidence - some of it I have already cited - led the editors to conclude that with "income inequality growing to levels not seen since the Gilded Age and social mobility falling behind, the United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society." The editors point to an "education system increasingly stratified by social class" in which poor children "attend schools with fewer resources than those of their richer contemporaries" and great universities that are "increasingly reinforcing rather than reducing these educational inequalities." They conclude that America's great companies have made it harder than ever "for people to start at the bottom and rise up the company hierarchies by dint of hard work and self-improvement."
It is eerie to read assessments like that and then read the anthropologist Jared Diamond's book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail He describes an America society in which elites cocoon themselves "in gated communities, guarded by private security guards, and filled with people who drink bottled water, depend on private pensions, and send their children to private schools." Gradually, they lose the motivation "to support the police force, the municipal water supply, Social Security, and public schools." Any society contains a built-in blueprint for failure, warns Jared Diamond, if elites insulate themselves from the consequences of their own actions.
So it is that in a study of its own, The American Political Science Association found that "increasing inequalities threaten the American ideal of equal citizenship and that progress toward real democracy may have stalled in this country and even reversed."
This is a marked turn of events for a country whose mythology embraces "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" as part of our creed. America was not supposed to be a country of "winner take all." Through our system of checks and balances we were going to maintain a healthy equilibrium in how power works - and for whom. Because equitable access to public resources is the lifeblood of any democracy, we made primary schooling free to all. Because everyone deserves a second chance, debtors, especially the relatively poor, were protected by state laws against their rich creditors. Government encouraged Americans to own their own piece of land, and even supported squatters' rights. In my time, the hope of equal opportunity became reality for millions of us. Although my parents were knocked down and almost out by the Great Depression, and were poor all their lives, my brother and I went to good public schools. The GI Bill made it possible for him to go to college. When I bought my first car with a loan of $450 I drove to a public school on a public highway and stopped to rest in a public park. America as a shared project was becoming the engine of our national experience.
Why is this basic centrist idea of "New Deal" America being undermined? Moyers goes on:
We are talking about nothing less that a class war declared a generation ago, in a powerful polemic by the wealthy right-winger, William Simon, who had been Richard Nixon's Secretary of the Treasury. In it he declared that "funds generated by business... must rush by the multimillions" to conservative causes. The trumpet was sounded for the financial and business class to take back the power and privileges they had lost as a result of the Great Depression and the New Deal. They got the message and were soon waging a well-orchestrated, lavishly-financed movement. Business Week put it bluntly: "Some people will obviously have to do with less... .It will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more." The long-range strategy was to cut workforces and their wages, scour the globe in search of cheap labor, trash the social contract and the safety net that was supposed to protect people from hardships beyond their control, deny ordinary citizens the power to sue rich corporations for malfeasance and malpractice, and eliminate the ability of government to restrain what editorialists for the Wall Street Journal admiringly call "the animal spirits of business."
Looking backwards, it all seems so clear that we wonder how we could have ignored the warning signs at the time. What has been happening to working people is not the result of Adam Smith's invisible hand but the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual propaganda, the rise of a religious literalism opposed to any civil and human right that threaten its paternalism, and a string of political decisions favoring the interests of wealthy elites who bought the political system right out from under us.
To create the intellectual framework for this revolution in public policy, they funded conservative think tanks that churned out study after study advocating their agenda.
To put muscle behind these ideas, they created a formidable political machine. One of the few journalists to cover the issues of class, Thomas Edsall of the Washington Post, reported that "During the 1970s, business refined its ability to act as a class, submerging competitive instincts in favor of joint, cooperate action in the legislative area." Big business political action committees flooded the political arena with a deluge of dollars. And they built alliances with the religious right - Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition - who gleefully contrived a cultural holy war that became a smokescreen behind which the economic assault on the middle and working classes would occur.
Nothing matters more than opposing this agenda, and to say so is not a leftist or progressive position. It's a profoundly conservative position, because it seeks to conserve the republic and the commonweal, and it should be the position of every American with common sense.