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Monday, September 19, 2005

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 John McGowan on 09/19 at 08:43 PM
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