On conservatism

[avevale_intelligencer]

I lifted this quote from bayushisan, commenting in filkertom's journal, as being as close as I've seen to a broad statement of what conservatism ought to be:

Most conservatives simply want the government to leave them alone and let them live their lives, so long as no one is hurting anyone. They tend toward approving of smaller government and want everyone to be free to pursue success beyond their wildest imaginations.

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Wanting the government to leave you alone and let you live your life is a harmless and understandable desire, and I can see the logic in it. Nobody likes to be interfered with by meddling, uninformed bureaucrats hired at vast expense to the taxpayer (that's you) to tell you how to run your farm or bring up your kids. After all, you're perfectly capable of taking care of yourself.

This may be true, but it ignores the possibility of the existence of large numbers of people who for good and sufficient reasons can't take care of themselves. In wanting smaller government, the conservative wants to leave these people, as well as himself, without support. There are various justifications for this: the job of helping people ought to be given to private concerns who can make a profit out of it; people who need help should pull their socks up, get on their bikes, follow their bliss and jolly well make a go of it; Darwin said the strong survive and the weak go to the wall and that's the way it should be; and so on. I could address these one by one, but this is getting long, so let's just leave them there for consideration and move on.

"So long as no-one is hurting anyone." But people do get hurt, for reasons that have nothing to do with them. A highly-paid accountant is caught with his fingers in the till, a company collapses, and five hundred people aged between twenty and fifty no longer have a regular income. Who looks after them? A hurricane hits a city whose flood prevention systems have been skimped for years, and thousands of people are suddenly homeless. Who looks after them? The conservative gets to say "it's none of my business; I didn't fire them or cause their houses to fall down, why should I be forced to pay to support them?" But there comes a time when personal responsibility is not enough. There come disasters into people's lives that they cannot rise above, that they cannot turn into opportunities, that they cannot take in their stride. There come illnesses, old age, accidents, broken marriages, criminal assaults, war. There needs to be government to deal with these things, and it needs to be big because there are an awful lot of people and most of them are suffering.

Everyone should be "free to pursue success beyond their wildest imaginations." Well, that sounds wonderful, doesn't it? I can't argue with that. In fact, I'd go further. Everyone should have success beyond their wildest imaginations. Every nation should be a net exporter of goods. Everyone should have a chicken in their pot, twenty acres and a mule, and a brand new Cadillac with wire wheels. But of course it doesn't work. In a nation where everyone is free to pursue success beyond their wildest imaginations, the majority are in fact free to become intimately acquainted with failure, and this is indeed what happens. A few make it to the sunlit uplands of reasonable comfort, and the rest flounder in the mire, working their guts out just to be allowed to stay where they are, stamping desperately on the heads of those who are in fact under the muck and fighting for a breath of air, grabbing at the ankles of those who have found a slimy outcrop of rock and are scrabbling to get themselves a little higher up on it. You need a pretty wild imagination even to conceive of success in the middle of that struggle. And that is the conservative ideal.

I'm a liberal, and I think that there are enough people in the swamp to gather tree trunks and make a raft. It will involve some people getting down off the rock and into the slime, and it will involve the people who are underneath being allowed to come up and help, and ideally it will involve the people on the sunlit uplands as well, because they can see where the best trees are and they're the most likely to have tools...but if everyone stops competing and works together, and those who have advantage can be persuaded to share some of it with those who have none, it would be possible to build platforms that would float on the surface of the swamp, and have enough room for everyone. And then, when there was time and space to breathe and think and look about us, then we could start to think about getting everyone out of the swamp and finding more sunlit uplands. And that, as I see it, is the liberal ideal. And the fundamental point about it is that it involves thinking, in the most general terms, about people other than oneself.

The conservative ideal, as stated in the quote above, doesn't. The only players in that game are the individual and the government, contentedly leaving each other alone. Which is not to say that conservatives are all selfish--obviously that's nonsense--but it does seem to mean that when they think politically, they think only of people like themselves, who need nothing from government, who have enough to be going on with, who can take care of themselves. They either don't seem to see, or don't seem to care about, the swamp or the people struggling in it.

The liberal ideal tries to encompass all kinds of people, with all kinds of needs, and says that if you have more than you need then you are in a position to help those who have less. It acknowledges the swamp, and the need for as many people as possible to be out of it, before the nation can congratulate itself on everyone being "free to pursue success beyond their wildest imaginations." Because imagination is a wonderful thing, but real life is where people need help, and that's what governments are for if they're for anything at all.

And that's why I'm partisan. That's why I think all governments should be fundamentally liberal (though I think their policies should certainly be enforced and kept in check by conservatives--liberalism is just as capable of going off the rails as we've seen conservatism is) and that's why, whenever I vote, my conscience tells me to vote for the most liberal, or least conservative, option available. And that's why, whatever his faults may be, if I were entitled to vote in an American presidential election, I'd be voting for Obama.

Comments

[earth-wizard.livejournal.com]

I'm a liberal too

A conservative can be divided into 6 key principles:

1. Belief in natural law
2. Belief in established institutions
3. Preference for liberty over equality
4. Suspicion of power—and of human nature
5. Belief in exceptionalism
6. Belief in the individual rights

1. the belief in natural law, means simply that conservatives believe in a higher order of things. Good and evil, justice and injustice, rights and responsibilities are not subjective concepts to conservatives. Human beings do not make the laws of morality, nor are rights conferred upon us by governments but rather by a higher power.

2. The second of these defining principles is a belief in established institutions. American conservatives, for example, believe passionately that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are works of profound genius, and that they provide the best system of law and government possible. More broadly, conservatives believe in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of rule of law and good government.

3. The preference for liberty over equality is the most difficult part of the definition of conservative for most people to understand, particularly since liberty and equality are almost used as synonyms in our times. Put simply, all societies face a fundamental choice between emphasizing freedom or emphasizing equality.

4. The fourth principle that defines conservatives is their suspicion of power and their hatred of big government. In his First Inaugural Address, President Ronald Reagan declared,


"Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we've been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?"

5. The fifth and sixth beliefs of conservatives are closely related. Conservatives believe in exceptionalism because they do not believe in perfect equality. Conservatives realize that some people inevitably have superior abilities, intelligence, and talents, and they believe that those people have a fundamental right to use and profit from their natural gifts.

6. Finally, conservatives believe in individualism. As Barry Goldwater explains, "Every man, for his individual good and for the good of his society, is responsible for his own development. The choices that govern his life are choices he must make: they cannot be made by any other human being, or by a collectivity of human beings."

Within the Conservative movement there are three basic types: 1) Social Conservatives, 2) Fiscal Conservatives, and 3) Libertarian Conservatives.

1. Social Conservatives: Their definition of conservative is influenced by their faith. While they slightly prefer liberty to equality, they despair that liberty also means the freedom to make poor choices; while they believe deeply in individualism and exceptionalism, they insist that as a society we must maximize virtue, sometimes even at the expense of freedom.

2. Fiscal conservatives: are sometimes described as "fiscally conservative and socially liberal." These conservatives are classical liberals, who have become disenfranchised from liberalism, which they see as radicalism for the sake of radicalism. Their own definition of conservative emphasizes the political and economic freedom of the individual, as they believe the individual's spiritual life is outside the realm of government and vice versa.

3. If libertarian-conservatives have a motto, it is that government is no one's mother. Government, these conservatives insist, should not be in the business of saving people from themselves. Moreover, they believe, an enforced morality is utterly meaningless. Human beings cannot be virtuous if they are not free to choose virtue, but rather have it forced upon them.

Many of the ideas of Conservatives have been heavily influenced by the writings of Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom. All liberals should read this just to get a good idea of what the conservatives agenda truly is. As attributed to Machiavelli: "One should keep one's friends close, and keep one's enemies closer."

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Thank you for a useful and thoughtful analysis. There are many points here with which I don't reflexively disagree, though not enough to force me to redefine my position, thank gods. I have a disconnect on the first principle which I'm going to have to think about.

I've never felt that liberty and equality were synonyms, or that they were in opposition. Liberty and *security* could be seen as mutually exclusive, poles on an axis analogous to chaos/order...but to me, liberty and equality are on two separate but complementary axes. (Which begs the question of what's the third...I'll have to think about that too.)

The only other thing I'm not sure about is the fifth principle. Do conservatives really confuse "equality under the law" with "equality of ability"? To put it another way, do they really think that, say, a person in a wheelchair should have a different legal status from a person with two functioning legs? I wouldn't have thought so.

Again, thank you.

[ci5rod.livejournal.com]

Very interesting. There is one point, however, that deserves more consideration, and that's the point where your fourth principle collides with itself. Law and order -- in one sense the ultimate expression of the distrust of human nature -- is one area where no conservative that I've ever known has considered government to be too big.