Michael Bérubé - American Airspace

How to Tell a Liberal from a Conservative

Guest Post by John McGowan

When French voters rejected the EU constitution this summer, many of them did so in the name of defeating “neo-liberalism.” Conservatives on this side of the Atlantic instantly became walking examples of schadenfreude as they pretended to feel deep concern about Europe’s future, gloated over this slap (as they read the vote) at the very notion of international or supranational institutions, and clucked their tongues at how the social democracies of the Continent refuse to get with the program of globalization.

The French apparently understand “neo-liberalism” to mean international free trade and externally imposed (by the EU or by the World Bank or IMF) fiscal discipline on nation states. Both policies weaken an individual nation’s attempt to control its own economic destiny, have sent many traditional jobs from the rich North to the poor South and East, and pressure governments to cut back or utterly eliminate entitlement and safety net programs for their citizens. The oddity is that such policies would be considered “neo-liberal,” since in an American context they are associated with “neo-conservatives”—and why American conservatives would feel so gleeful at the French public’s wide-scale rejection of those policies.

To unpack these complexities would take a book. The history of liberalism, in particular, is one of multiple twists and turns—and some outward reversals of direction. Plus there are many liberalisms; Adam Smith and John Rawls have just about nothing in common, yet each is recognizably a liberal thinker. There is simply no way to produce a coherent account of a single ideology called “liberalism.” I believe, in fact, that liberalism is best understood as a range of responses to the conditions of modernity—responses that are often local and specific, that are not coordinated with other liberal expedients, and that belie the holistic “ism” applied to various liberal thinkers and liberal practices.

So I think we’ll do better if we consider the liberal and the conservative as exhibiting markedly contrasting sensibilities. The very word “liberal,” of course, enters the English language to denote an open-handed and open-minded person. It carried that meaning for hundreds of years before it took on political connotations. (I read recently that Leigh Hunt and Byron’s periodical, The Liberal [1822], was the first to use the term in our current political sense. So Locke, Jefferson, and Smith would not have thought of themselves as liberals—at least not in the way we think of them as such today.)

What are the hallmarks of liberalism as a political sensibility?

1. In any political conflict, the liberal assumes that all the advantages lie with those at the top of the prevailing social hierarchy. For that reason, the liberal believes that every benefit of the doubt—and every concrete material benefit—should flow to those on the bottom. The liberal, in other words, recognizes that power and advantage accumulates in any society—and is committed to undoing that power and accumulation wherever possible. By way of contrast, the conservative is always a member of the “party of order,” convinced that only by maintaining authority can society be preserved and chaos averted. The liberal thinks that authority hardly needs any extra help; the centripetal forces of society are so strong that our efforts should be thrown on the side of the centrifugal. The multiplication and dispersion of power is the best remedy to the tendency of power to coagulate—and dominate. We’ll worry about anarchy when it rears its ugly head, but not let that boogie man frighten us into placing too much power into too few hands.

Probably the surest litmus test for distinguishing one with a liberal sensibility from someone who has a conservative one is the individual’s response to modern cities. Liberals find the multi-ethnicity, cacophony, and jostling crowds energizing and thrilling. Conservatives find those same cities emblems of social chaos (and, in the American context, dens of iniquity). The conservative response to the city is “there ought to be a law.”

For this reason, conservatives can never be libertarians. Thoreau’s “the best government is the one that governs least” runs directly counter to the conservative fear of chaos. Conservatives will never deliver a smaller government. They may idealize and heighten the power of corporations—and hence want to lessen government regulation of businesses—but they will also invariably want to enhance the authoritative branches of government: the military, the police, and laws pertaining to morals.

2. The contrast between the liberal’s cavalier attitude toward authority and the conservative’s repeated jeremiads about authority’s decline is out there in full view, with both sides explicitly acknowledging their views—and contesting the views of the other side. But there is a more subterranean difference. Classic conservatives like Edmund Burke insisted that hierarchy was essential to social order. But the equality of citizens in modern democracies has become an unassailable touchstone since (at least) the early part of the 20th century. (Again, it would take a long time to trace the history of the idea of equality—and of its ascendance to its present untouchable status.)

I have been reading Brian Barry’s Why Social Justice Matters (Polity, 2005), a book with many virtues along with a few vices. I recommend it highly—even though it is depressing reading since it is mostly a scathing indictment of American and British governmental policies of the past twenty years. (He is particularly incensed by “New Labour’s” record.)

Barry’s great strength is making it very clear that only substantial equality—both political and economic equality—can count as “social justice” within the terms that everyone—conservative or liberal—professes to accept. He shows how notions of “equal opportunity” are always used to justify actually existing inequalities—and that such notions are, at best, incoherent if measured against actual differential results and are, at worst, just shams produced to avoid really working to produce equality. And he shows in all too abundant and painful detail how American and British social policy since the days of Reagan and Thatcher have been directed to insuring that, as Billie Holiday put it, “them’s thats got shall get, and them thats not shall lose.”

So that’s where I suggest we look when we want to tell—beneath all the justifications and sophisticated arguments and frothing at the mouth of public political discourse—who is a liberal and who a conservative. A liberal is someone who works to further equality in a patently unequal society. A conservative is someone who talks equality, but who endorses and promotes policies that increase the take for them thats already got more than the average share. (And that holds as much for America as a nation, with its immense takings from the world’s supply of wealth and oil and other goods, as it does for the various segments of America’s own population who float far above the masses.)

Conservatives are about, when push comes to shove, offering justifying reasons—economic ones like inventiveness and ingenuity or moral ones like virtue and hard work—for some folks having so much more than others. In their heart of hearts, conservatives really believe that the world is only just when there is inequality since then each person is getting what he or she truly deserves. The notion that a just world would be an equal one is foreign to them. Hence the huge divide in sensibility. The successful deserve their success, the unsuccessful deserve their lot —and the virtuous few should have authority over the untrustworthy many. Those are the bedrocks of conservatism.

I am well aware that some liberals will fail this litmus test, but I’m with Barry in his assessment of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. The failure lies not with the test. I don’t know enough about Blair to say, but I think Clinton did (and still does) possess a liberal sensibility. He never felt the conservative need to assure the worse off that they were reaping what they had sowed. But his policies were conservative in their effects because he believed that the only way to retain power was to give the powerful more of everything—and he could only do that by taking away from the less powerful.

Posted by on 09/19 at 08:43 PM

Brilliant.

I am afraid, however, that your last paragraph is a bit obtuse. No doubt Clinton was a DLCer, but without an example or articulation of the rationale, I’m not sure the Clinton indictment works at the end of your post.

Clinton did many un-liberal things, and many liberal things. I don’t often think of him as giving the powerful more of everything (he did raise their taxes...unthinkable nowadays, even for Dems). I do think of him as taking away from the less powerful. That said, a little bit more would be appreciated.

But I’m greedy. Your explanations of underlying motivations and sensibilites was incredibly refreshing for this liberal.

Posted by on 09/19 at 10:42 PM
I’ve always been under the impression that the “liberal” in “neoliberalism"--understood not only in France but in much of the world to mean “international free trade and externally imposed (by the EU or by the World Bank or IMF) fiscal discipline on nation states"--referred to what used to be called Manchester Liberalism, which made a principle (or fetish) of free trade and low tariffs, as against 19th century (British) Conservatism which favored protection. Both were “parties of order” vis-à-vis Chartism and the labor movement; neither was much concerned with social justice, which is why British working people needed to form the Labour Party to get their needs addressed.

Posted by on 09/19 at 11:17 PM
I like this account in several ways. One, not altogether admirable, is that it outlines reasons to feel good about being a liberal. (Yay team!) But I fear it is open to criticism on the ground of arbitrariness. How can we argue that this is a more accurate or more powerfully explanatory account of “liberalism” than some negative one—nanny-statism, for example? (Not to venture into the extreme cartoons of liberalism offered by Limbaugh etc.) This would not be a serious objection if you were offering a fresh model of liberalism as exhortation, the better to revivify the party and better the world. But it seems you’re offering this model as analysis, and in that light it looks a bit like self-flattery.

Posted by on 09/20 at 12:08 AM
John,

I’ve particularly liked your observation (here and in ‘The Case Against Wal-Mart’ on http://www.mcgowans3.com) that conservatives don’t feel like justice is getting done unless someone is being punished. I think this is crucial to understanding the conservative approach to public policy.

Most conservatives are deeply worried about someone, somewhere, getting a “free ride.” They are willing to put procedures in place that disqualify people who legitimately claim certain rights or public services from exercising or obtaining them in the name of preventing “fraud.” The most egregious recent example of this was Florida’s purge of legal voters along with felons from its voter roles, but there are countless others.

Posted by Nick on 09/20 at 12:38 AM
Come on, Jack, Bill Clinton is a liberal but just for some reason crafted policy that was conservative?

Something is wrong in the nature of your test, or the diction is crafted in a way to make this last paragraph sputter, for of course that should not be. Why would Clinton behave that way?

I used to think that Clinton did so in the face of an impossibly vicious propaganda environment, the utterly disgraceful US journalism corps. For reasons I do not know I have begun to doubt that the last two years. I have no idea why Clinton crafted such un-liberal policy.

I’d give a lot to know. Clinton doens’t seem like a coward to me.

Thanks for the brilliant work.

Posted by on 09/20 at 07:47 AM
rootless is right. The general interpretation here in Europe when we say neo-liberalism is the modern laizze-faire (sp?) economic policies propagated by American administrations for the past forty years, coupled, since the Reagan administration, I guess, with neo-conservative policies like a strong police apparatus, a weak freedom of speech, global military dominance, alliance with christian fundamentalism, etc. Also, the tendency for laizzes-faire to be anything but fair. Or laizzes, for that matter. I.e. that certain barriers are kept intact, while others are completely opened.

I never really liked the term neoliberalism, because of precisely the connotation you talk about, where liberalism is a word for the liberal left.

But really, we oughta get past terms like conservative and liberal. They’ve been completely emptied of meaning.

Posted by martin g.l. on 09/20 at 09:28 AM
I like your distinctions, John, at the same time that I find them a bit too self-congratulatory. Is there anyinsight the conservative tends to have that the liberal tends to lack? Are there any conservative arguments that aren’t just a mask for punitive and selfish impulses?

Posted by on 09/20 at 11:43 AM
I like the essay, but I disagree with important parts of it.

Firstly, I think that your puzzlement at where “neo-liberalism” came from is a consequence of not taking socialism (well, social democracy) seriously enough. Conservatives and libertarians like to elide the differences between liberals and socialists, and so do some liberals. But socialists generally don’t. Socialism isn’t simply a matter of having a liberal sensibility and being more radical than other liberals. To a socialist, the category “neo-liberalism” makes sense, even if the differences between neo-liberalism and general US-liberalism are still distinguishable.

Second, I think that you’re doing an injustice to Clinton. This isn’t the place for extended Clinton-defense—that just plays into the hands of Republicans, who love to talk about those days—but his total record does not, I think, really show someone who gave the powerful more of everything.

Posted by on 09/20 at 11:57 AM
Michael:

The oddity is that such policies would be considered “neo-liberal,” since in an American context they are associated with “neo-conservatives”

[...]

As others have metioned, the term “neoliberalism” refers to a set of economic policies in which what’s liberally applied are laissez faire techniques.

Here’s a Wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism

And a related article:

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=376

I believe the term was first used by Latin American analysts (or perhaps, observers of the Latin American economic scene) to describe the American dictated austerity measures demanded by the IMF in return for “development loans”.

.d.

Posted by D. Monroe on 09/20 at 11:57 AM
I would add Sidney Hook’s exhortation that “more important than any belief a man holds is the way he holds it” to the essential definition of liberalism. A liberal democracy is an attemtp to balance indvidual liberty with the need for social cohesion, and it is progressive in the sense that policies (and ideas) are adopted, revised, or abandoned in light of their practical consequences and/or new information. Which is why I believe you have the range of liberal ideas that can’t neatly be categorized.

Conservatism, on the other hand, is essentially a reactionary position, which might account for its tendency to lead to ideological dogmatism. However, a conservative position is sometimes warranted to resist radical change, but that position need not spring from a reactionary mindset. F.A. Hayek touched on this subject in his essay, Why I Am Not a Conservative.

http://hem.passagen.se/nicb/cons.htm

Posted by Hume's Ghost on 09/20 at 12:37 PM
rootless is correct about the European use of the term “Neo-Liberal”. It’s shorthand for those who are, in my opinion, fanatic advocates of free markets to solve all our problems. In the US, they’d be labeled “Neo-Cons”.

As regards the Liberal Party in GB, they were strong free-traders, but also did much in the late 19th and early 20th Century to expand the franchise. And reading about the Liberal Administrations of Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith in the first part of the last Century is instructive. Primarily because of the impetus of LLoyd George (w/ help from Winston Churchill), the Liberals gutted the power of the House of Lords, and introduced National Health Insurance and other social programs, and attempted to introduce Home Rule in Ireland. I think they did so BOTH to fend off the still tiny Labour Party and because they thought it the right thing to do.
The old Liberal Party wasn’t destroyed by the Labour Party, it destroyed itself during WWI.

Very thoughtful essay.

Posted by on 09/20 at 12:38 PM
Yup, “Strange Death of Liberal England"--good book. I’m not sure the old Liberal Party hadn’t already begun to self-destruct before the war, though. The impetus given Labour by the 1905 Taff Vale court decision--limiting trade unions’ direct participation in politics--may have begun the process, which the subsequent battles over the Lords and the 1906 Budget accelerated.

Posted by on 09/20 at 12:49 PM
Very nice post, John. Five years ago I would probably have tended to agree with your account of Clinton, but now, in retrospect....

As others have pointed out, it’s not only the French that understand the term “neoliberalism” that way. It’s the rest of the planet, including Great Britain and Australia. The term was first used in the early 1980s, to designate the economic measures imposed by Thatcher, Reagan, and Pinochet.

The prefix “neo” stresses the fact that the “free trade” promoted by these new rightwing coallitions has very little to do with laissez-faire classically understood, since their policies include relentless state action to favor the most powerful oligopolies. In Robert McChesney’s words: “policies and processes whereby a relative handful of private interests are permitted to control as much as possible of social life in order to maximize their personal profit.”

The sentence “Liberals find the multi-ethnicity, cacophony, and jostling crowds energizing and thrilling”, for example, would not make any sense in Europe, where liberal parties are actively working to expel immigrants any way they can.

Which leads me to the socialist point that liberals and conservatives are two sides of the same coin… But that’s another matter.

Best regards to you and to Michael.

Posted by Idelber on 09/20 at 12:58 PM
The oddity is that such policies would be considered “neo-liberal,” since in an American context they are associated with “neo-conservatives”

WTF? Unless you are arguing that Clinton was a neo-conservative, this makes no sense. You seem to deflate and marginalize what is in fact a nuanced critique of--and above all--what “liberal” has come to mean. Neo-conservatives aren’t even worthy of critique, they’re so transparently despicable.

Posted by Alfredo on 09/20 at 03:04 PM
One more point on the death of the old Liberal Party in GB, if you can stand it. rootless has a point, the Liberals were starting to have problems even before WWI. The Unionist Liberals peeled off, and basically supported the Tories, mainly over Irish Home Rule (they were agin’ it). These Liberals had problems w/ the Conservatives over free trade issues, but were gradually turning Tory on most other questions. But the real break-up began when LLoyd George engineered the ouster of Asquith as PM in 1916, to head a Coalition w/ the other parties to prosecute the war. Asquith and his supporters went into Opposition (and never forgave LLoyd George). In the 1920s, Liberal politicians and voters went to either the Tories or Labour, depending on the person’s particular view on a number of issues, leaving a rump Liberal Party.

Posted by on 09/20 at 05:02 PM
Thanks for the Eureka moment, John! Lately, I’ve spent more time learning things I didn’t know nearly so well as I once thought I did, and the philosophical underpinnings of American political parties are three of them. Your assessment that “there [may be] simply no way to produce a coherent account of a single ideology called ‘liberalism’” makes utterly elegant and historical sense, especially as I reflect on the mental gymnastics I’d performed in trying to fashion a coherence where there was none.

May I hand off another Gordian knot? Is there any rational way to understand what political wellspring Bush drank from in launching a national fundraiser for rebuilding efforts in Iraq? (The article I read originally appeared in the Chicago Trib, with Washington correspondent Cam Simpson as author; it ran in the local paper with the subhead “Expert says plan will be ‘a hard sell’"--perhaps the understatement of the year.)

Posted by on 09/20 at 05:08 PM
Nick wrote(up there near the top): “Most conservatives are deeply worried about someone, somewhere, getting a “free ride.” “

I think embedded in this is part of what John was alluding to in trying to differentiate between liberal and conservative. Conservatives argue passionately against progressive economic distributions that focus on programs that provide benefits for individuals. They do not however argue against regressive distributions that provide “free rides” for corporations. It is the difference between someone and some thing. Corporate largesse, particularly that which we have seen in the no-bid contracting for services paid for w/ US taxpayer dollars, is only tacitly critiqued when the few audits that occur reveal the most gross cases of fraud or theft. When billions have gone missing shoulders are shrugged and a few meely words are said. Yet when thousands of deeply poor descendents of slaves are generalized for their criminal behaviors in the face of starvation and lack of water, the loud voices call forth attacks on their welfare mentality. Liberal idealogues would like the “free rides” to be at least spread around to the poorest people too.

I just finished reading Dave Toke’s 2000 book: GREEN POLITICS AND NEO~LIBERALISM. In it he critiques twenty years of neoliberal policies on Great Britian and Europe, albeit from a green political standpoint. His research is fairly damning and predicted the rejection that would come later--such as the NO! vote in the EU constitutional referendum.

Posted by on 09/20 at 05:25 PM
Lefty and I are getting way off topic, but I thought this was too good not to share. As Lefty says,
“the real break-up began when LLoyd
George engineered the ouster of Asquith as PM in 1916, to head a Coalition
w/ the other parties to prosecute the war. Asquith and his supporters went
into Opposition (and never forgave LLoyd George)

Shaw--can it be in “Back to Methuselah”?--has a lovely exchange in which a Lloyd George-like character ("Joyce Burge” if I recall correctly) tells an Asquith type that “It was the war that found you out.” “The war did not find me out,” returns Asquith, “because it did not find me in.”

Posted by on 09/20 at 05:40 PM
Thanks to all. I was going to chime back in about ten comments back, but was interrupted (by the man from Porlock?). And, of course, the conversation has moved on since that time four hours ago--and in ways more productive than my contribution would have spurred.

I imagine us all with worlds enough and time in some congenial place (maybe called the blogosphere, but maybe less virtual) arguing passionately about Clinton, the fate of the British Liberal party, the differences (if there are any) between neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism, and the relation of liberalism to social democracy. I care about all of these topics--and you have shown how they are all relevant to chasing the hare I started here.

Posted by mcgowan on 09/20 at 07:56 PM
The same attention to detail could be used to posit that all neo-cons, and by extension conservatives in general, are fascist.

Fascist, I mean conservatives, (sorry) are even less inclined to use the label “fascist” than progressives and liberals are to use “liberal.”

Currently, the only fascist quality missing from this administration “death squads” or other roaming enforcement groups. “Internal state sanctioned terrorist” if you will.

For more, go to: http://207.44.245.159/article7478.htm
http://www.oldamericancentury.org/14pts.htm
http://www.cursor.org/stories/fascismi.php
http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/082103F.shtml

Posted by on 09/22 at 10:57 AM
“The liberal, in other words, recognizes that power and advantage accumulates in any society—and is committed to undoing that power and accumulation wherever possible”

Are liberals for undoing the power and advantage that has accumulated to those with academic tenure? Are liberals for undoing a single instance of power and advantage that has accumulated to liberals?

“Liberals find the multi-ethnicity, cacophony, and jostling crowds energizing and thrilling.”

Yet for some reason these same liberals will spend large sums not to live in cities ‘multi-ethnic’ neighborhoods.

“In their heart of hearts, conservatives really believe that the world is only just when there is inequality since then each person is getting what he or she truly deserves.”

Or perhaps conservatives believe we live in a fallen world, which can never be entirely just, and that attempts to achieve justice other than applying the same rules and standards to everyone (something liberals oppose) are at best wasteful and at worst disastrous.

Posted by carter on 09/23 at 12:37 AM
Excellent essay! In a few paragraphs you summarize most of my one-year blogging output (including the Village vs. City - or College - sensibility).

The big difference, in my opinion, is in the worldviews: hierarchical for conservatives and interactionist for liberals. However, there’s a caveat - something you allude in your post - that liberalism changed immensely over time. Prior to at least 1965 (or even later - this is still an ongoing gradual change), liberalism was also hierarchical (it is just a different hiererachy: who is on top and how they got there).

“...Or perhaps conservatives believe we live in a fallen world,...” from Carter’s post above, is one of the key ideas that spawns all of the other conservative notions (that translate into policy, of course). The big questions is: Why on Earth conservatives believe that the world is bad, and will always be bad, and cannot be made good? What is the psychological underpinning (and cause) of such pessimism?

Posted by coturnix on 09/24 at 09:37 PM

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