Monday, November 28, 2011

In a True Human Being Liberalism and Conservatism Must Combine

The title of this article is a mangled quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson. (He said "a true man.") The purpose of this article is to explain how it's possible to combine liberal and conservative habits of thought, regardless of your political affiliation.


In an article that was generally unfavorable to Obamacare, I identified myself as a liberal. This seemed to surprise, and perhaps alienate, some e-friends. I worry that it's alienated some lurking local readers, who may or may not have guessed my real identity, but... "A liberal is writing about Gate City, Virginia? Does this writer even know that this is Kilgore country?! I suppose she's in favor of abortion and Christian-phobia and hiring by quotas..."

In the same article, I also identified myself as having a conservative temperament. This probably surprised and alienated other e-friends, including any lurking readers I may still have in Washington. "Is this writer saying there's a genetic reason why people wanted segregation, or escalation in Vietnam, or unfiltered exhaust pipes? Would that mean brain damage...?"

Neither, thank goodness.

What I've said elsewhere on AC, and in real life, is that the words "liberal" and "conservative" are not the names of political parties in the United States. They describe general patterns of thought and behavior. Most of us can be described as doing some things liberally and other things conservatively.

"Liberal" is the English form of the Latin word liberalis, which derived from liber, free, with particular reference to liberi, people who had been enslaved but had recovered their freedom. Describing something as "liberal" is describing it as typical of free citizens. "Liberal arts" were studies of subjects not directly connected to a job, which typically included literature, music, history, and philosophy. Freedmen were characterized as unlikely to have run up a lot of debts or incurred a lot of social obligations, so they were stereotyped as likely to spend money "liberally," generously, sometimes on things they didn't really need just to build good will.

When democratic ideals came up for discussion in post-Renaissance Europe, they were considered "liberal." They were studied at universities that taught the "liberal art" of history, where some people idealized the legendary democracies of ancient Greece and Rome. The idea of giving more freedom or power to the people, even the really radical idea of all people having equal civil rights, came to be considered "liberal."

This did not, of course, mean Communist rather than Fascist; it meant Whig rather than Tory. The original English liberal writers definitely understood freedom to include the right to own private property. In fact, they wanted to give individuals more power to make decisions about the use of their property...to enclose private farms on former "common fields," and sell houses that had previously been "entailed" so that they belonged to families rather than individuals, and pay fewer taxes in aid of what was claimed to be the public good. It's been said, although I've not found verification of it, that a draft of our Declaration of Independence affirmed people's rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of wealth."

Hence every document I've seen that was supported by the Cato Institute has mentioned that "classical liberalism" might, today, be identified with the twentieth century's far right wing.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, liberal ideas began to be contrasted with conservative ideas. "Conservative" derives from the Latin word conservare, which means to preserve things in (or close to) their original condition. At this period, conservative politics were Royalist.

"Revolutionary" ideas at this period were not Socialist or Communist, but anarchist. Jacobinism seems more like a mood swing than like a serious school of thought. The French Jacobins didn't seem to care that they were using terrorism to set up tyrants, or that the new tyranny might be worse than the old kind; they just wanted to get rid of the tyrants they'd had. They might have scorned the Bolsheviks, or Mao's Red Army, or Castro's guerrillas, or the Students for a Democratic Society, or the Taliban, but the biochemistry in all these guys' troubled brains was probably similar. They were reacting to anger more than thinking through an idea.

The idea of socialism originated in post-revolutionary France, apparently as a reaction to the horrors of revolution. The first writers who used this term were the symbiotic team of Auguste Comte and Henri de Saint-Simon, who proposed applying a structure like that of the Catholic Church to a non-theistic humanist society.

Since liberals were the ones who had proposed that a non-aristocrat like Comte might have written something worth reading, and the liberal writer John Stuart Mill sponsored the publication of some of Comte's books in English, there was some limited basis for blaming "liberalism" for tolerating socialism. However, nineteenth-century liberalism was more often blamed for supporting unrestrained capitalism and even Social Darwinism... "ism's" have always tended to get mixed up.

"Liberal," "left-wing," and "socialist" continued to be words used to mean different things until the mid-twentieth century. Confusion could be blamed on the Cold War; if the left wing consisted of people who advocated varying degrees of compromise with the ideas of our Soviet enemies, and a liberal view (of political economics) was the view that left-wingers deserved the right to free speech and fair hearing, then to the extreme right wing "liberals" were clearly somewhere on the left...at least relative to themselves.

There were, however, contexts in which "liberal" and "conservative" had nothing to do with political economics. For example, in the Protestant churches of the late twentieth century, "liberals" were the ones who thought Christians did not need to define themselves by conforming to a long, rigid list of rules, and "conservatives" were the ones who found some meaning or benefit in the rules and thought their churches should keep them.

In the context of the civil rights movement and desegregation, "liberals" were the ones who thought integrating public facilities sounded sensible and cost-effective, as opposed to "radicals" who wanted integration to be the first step toward all-out revolution.

In the context of charitable missions and nonprofit organizations, "liberal" was the kind of support everyone, including right-wing politicians and Moral Majority preachers, wanted to have.

Hillary Rodham Clinton took an interesting long step backward in identifying herself as a "Progressive." Progress is another word that can refer to any number of different things, but Mrs. Clinton was specifically identifying herself with the "Progressive" (left-wing) political thought of a hundred years ago. Those who felt that sufficiently liberal compromises had been made with this movement by 1945 may well ask whether our Secretary of State is more concerned about preserving the system the United States had when she was born (a truly conservative idea), or "progressing" toward the kind of totalitarian socialist government that the original Progressives so admired in Russia.

"Liberal" is still a good word when it's used to describe education, support for good causes, attitudes toward people different from ourselves, or the idea that everyone should have an equal right to learn, speak, write, and be read or heard. However, when Hillary Rodham Clinton has declared that "liberal" in the sense of "willing to grant the right to be heard even to Socialists, as long as they're non-violent" is no longer a useful word or category, I think we can say that this use of "liberal" has been archived in the history of the past century.

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