Whigs and Tories, Jacobins and Fascists

Our political discourse is debauched, and the political terms we use on a daily basis and hear bandied about in the media have become detached from their history and root meanings. In my posts over the years I have tried to be careful about my uses of such terms as liberal, conservative, radical, reactionary, centrist, fascist, authoritarian, socialist, populist, communist, etc., and I have tried to scrape the rust off older words like Whig, Jacobin, Tory, and subsidiarity. I'm hardly original in my use of them.  But many readers who have come to this blog without having read  previous posts do not understand how I use them, so I thought I would do a little review.  This will be somewhat repetitive for long-time readers, and space requires that it be somewhat schematic, but might be worth your time, especially if there's any discussion of it in the comments section.  The idea is to provide a map for our political attitudes and to suggest where I, at least, think the true center lies. 

I would say that the first distinction lies in whether a political impulse is future or past oriented. Traditionalist societies are past-oriented, and tend to see time as a cyclical rather than a linear process. The important stuff happened in the past, in illo tempore, a golden age, and in the worldview of such societies, if there has been any movement in history, it has been a slow process of degradation since the time of the great ancestors and culture heroes of the mythic past. Past-oriented, traditionalist societies were the norm throughout the globe until the 15th century when the modern impulse was born in Europe. And with modernity a tidal shift occurs in the way its leading figures began to think about time--they began to think of history not as decline from a golden age in the past, but as progress toward a eutopian future, a movement from Eden to the New Jerusalem--not as something given by the divine, but achieved through human striving. 

But insofar as traditionalists linger in modern societies, they are a faction that remains more past and authority oriented and resistant to this idea that history moves forward, and religious traditionalists typify this kind of attitude in the U.S as well as the Middle East. The Vatican, even as late as the mid-twentieth century, found Teilhard de Chardin's ideas about how biological evolution was part of a larger spiritual evolution repugnant because they were uncomfortable with Darwin.

So in the West at the time of the Renaissance/Reformation, what had been the future-oriented historical orientation that lay dormant within the Judaeo/Christian promise/fulfillment infrastructure awoke and immediately came into conflict with the entrenched, past-oriented, authoritarian, crown-and-altar establishment. Cultural history since then has been the story of the struggle between between future-oriented reformers and past-oriented traditionalists and authoritarians. To be a reformer means that you believe a better world is possible. If you think everything is just fine the way it is, you are likely to think that reform and the idea of progress is "sentimental hogwash," to quote Mr. Potter in Capra's It's a Wonderful Life.

In the Anglo-American societies, the Mr. Potters are Tories and the George Baileys are Whigs. Whigs are not anti-capitalist, but they strive to find ways to humanize capitalist institutions. In the nineteenth century they supported the national bank, and they were the political faction that attracted a high-minded civic idealism and a role for the state. Most abolitionists and others concerned about the spread of slavery into the new territories were Whigs, and later Conscience Whigs.  They morphed into the Republican Party after the shock of the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas/Nebraska Act, and the Whig high-mindedness of the Conscience Whigs was carried after that by the Republican Party, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt the best exemplars of the mentality about which I speak.  But the Republicans passed the torch to the Dems by the time FDR moved into the White House, and the Dems have since then, mostly in a fairly degraded form, became the custodians of this spirit of Whiggery.

Whigs, while they are future-oriented and progressive, are opposed to a more radically reformist attitudes I will broadly characterize here as 'Jacobin'.  Edmund Burke, although usually thought of as a conservative thinker, was in fact a Whig, which means he was also anti-Tory. Whigs like Burke were sympathetic to the American Revolution, but appalled by the French Revolution. The first was a Revolution conducted mainly by Whigs; the second by the "let's re-invent humanity" Jacobins. There's a huge difference, but Tories tend to lump both Whigs and Jacobins  together, and in our day the epithet to dismiss them is "socialist." Whigs are subsidiarists, not socialists. (For more on subsidiarity see my post here. Slacktivist also has a good discussion here.)

I doubt that the term 'Whig' is going to make a comeback into our political discourse, but for me "Whiggery" at its best represents the golden mean, the the true integrating center among all political attitudes, and I think of Whigs as those people who inhabit that center, whether they are in the more normal parlance thought of as conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat.  To the right of the Whig center are the Tories, who are the complacent conservadems and Republican  defenders of the status quo. They are the ones the media considers centrist, when it's perfectly apparent that they are not. And on the extreme right are the fascists. Left of the Whig center are what we have come to think of as secular liberals, and further left the radical reformers I refer to as Jacobins. Obviously no political factions in the U.S. have been called either fascists or Jacobins.  I'm defining them more by the underlying principles that guide their thinking and action, not by the labels they give themselves.

Tories, because they are comfortable with the current power and wealth arrangements, oppose or don't believe in progress and don't care about innovation unless it promotes their interests; Jacobins are radical proponents of progress who think that it can be engineered by politicians top-down. Whigs (at their best) are centrist because they combine an ideals-driven future-orientation with a principled conservative's respect for traditional wisdom; they believe that history moves forward, but that we must conserve that which is life-giving from the past. History for the Whig is not bunk. 

A typical Jacobin, to the far left of the Whig believes that tradition is mostly full of superstitious, irrational nonsense, quaint, at best, but mostly harmful. They generally support the idea that societies ought to find a way of wiping away its traditions and the religious claptrap associated with them, and start over tabula rasa with a rational blueprint from which an ideal society can be engineered. A secular liberal is a moderate Jacobin, someone who believes social progress is possible, but like the Jacobine tends to understand progress in secular terms, and as over-against a repressive, irrational traditionalism. The Jacobin is not averse to the use of violence and twisting the truth to achieve its political objectives. The Liberal or progressive want to achieve similar ends, but through the democratic procdess.