Liberal Conservatism, or, Conservative Liberalism

The modern left/right divide, which dates to the pre-terror days of the French Revolution, has grown calcified, stale, and altogether useless. Both” conservative” and “liberal” philosophies, as we now know them— for the two designations meant something quite different only a century ago—suffer from internal contradictions that render their hard line ideologues intellectually bankrupt. What is needed is a new synthesis, retaining the best from both and jettisoning what is outmoded or simply foolish.

In the past twenty or so years, due in part to the Reagan “revolution” and the end of the Cold War in particular, the right has largely placed left on the defensive. The ignominious disintegration of the Eastern Bloc a few short years after glasnost, with its concomitant revelation of what exactly etatist central planning had done to the countries it infected, correctly showed people that democratic capitalism was the only viable option for creating free and prosperous societies. This probably bore a larger effect on the general public than the large-scale grass-roots mobilization by the right, combined with expansive financial largesse directed toward” think tanks” and the media, that the left blames for conservative gains in the 1970s and 1980s. But, overall the results of the latter should not be dismissed either, and have been a sustained destructive force.

Take Bill Clinton, whose centrist philosophy essentially hewed to the basic lessons of the Soviet collapse: anti-welfare state, militantly free trade, and so on. Despite his obvious tendency toward moderation and compromise, he is still described as nothing less than the reincarnation of Mephistopheles in some right-wing circles. This is ridiculous, similar to the antiwar protestors who compare Bush and Cheney to Nazi commandants. Moreover, it points to the distressing extremism that has metastasized in conservative rhetoric since the Reagan years.

Even to that extent, things have gotten worse of late. When the Reaganites came on the scene, they had a decent scholarly imprimatur, despite the seemingly limited cerebral capacities of their commander-in-chief. Whatever one may agree or disagree with in the 1980s conservative pillars of thought like (domestically) Charles Murray’s Losing Ground and (geopolitically) Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s Dictatorships and Double Standards, they were serious and valuable intellectual undertakings, and have virtually nothing in common with the more recent fulminations of the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, and Bill O’Reilly for whom simply acting obnoxious and incensed has come to equal rational political debate.

The brain rot of that right-wing punditry is an outgrowth of the strange coalition that the conservative movement forged when it gathered steam in the 1970s and then took power in 1980, a coalition that is still in force today. I refer to the merger of two fundamentalisms, one Christian and evangelical (Pat Robertson, the 700 Club, etc.), the other secular and academic, based upon the free-market absolutism of the likes of Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom. The two have made something of a devil’s bargain, in that they are incompatible while pretending that they are not. How so? I am no liturgical expert, but I know that any rudimentary reading of the Bible shows Jesus of Nazareth to be, if not an outright Communist, then at least that dread designation, “bleeding heart.” For example:

No one can be the slave of two masters: he will either hate the first and love the second, or be attached to the first and despise the second. You cannot be the slave of both God and of money. (Matthew 6:24)

Jesus Said, “If you wish to be perfect, go and sell your possessions and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;” then come, follow me.” But when the young man heard these words he went away sad, for he was a man great wealth. Then Jesus said to his disciples, “In truth I tell you, it is hard for someone rich to enter the kingdom or Heaven. Yes, I tell you again, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for someone rich to enter the kingdom of Heaven.” (Matthew 19:21-24)

More accomplished sociologists than I, of course, have persuasively linked a certain “Protestant Ethic” to a certain “Spirit of Capitalism;” nevertheless, the above presents an irrefutable irony. Officially, the Christian right, based upon a Biblical back-to-basics, should reject an ethos that places the unfettered individual accumulation of wealth above social responsibility—not that history reveals any shortage of religiously sanctioned hypocrisy. It is perhaps this cognitive dissonance that leads to the tendency toward smug absolutism hard line conservatives demonstrate in the modern political debate. A marriage of fundamentalisms, even if they contradict each other, guarantees people who are sure, that they are right, and that whoever disagrees spells the doom of humanity. The left is hardly exempt from this phenomenon, though its psychology is different.

What follows are postulates that I believe to be true entirely apart from the determinism of either traditional religion or religion without a celestial God—which is to say egalitarian Marxism. They will be backed up by explanations I hope may persuade those who call themselves “liberal” and who call themselves” conservative,” as well as those, like myself, who take a certain intellectual pride in rejecting any such personal definition.

1. “God” has no place in public affairs; “morality” does. Religious creeds are documents made by men for men, as debatable as Marx’s Kapitalor Rousseau’s Social Contract. No modern state can function along the lines dictated by any organized religion. Though it is the Islamic world that currently suffers the most under this delusion, all human societies must guard against it, and praised be any conservative who actively seeks to stamp out the undue and untoward influence Christian fanatics have in the Gap. I would much rather be ruled by John Locke and Thomas Hobbes than by the “God” who supposedly dictated the Qu’ran or Old Testament. That religion is an “opiate” for the masses does not mean it is useless or bad; conversely, just because Marxism failed does not mean religion is de facto a positive. Secular humanism, my preferred antidote to organized religion, does not imply that one may not speak of “morals” in public debate. Anyone remotely attuned to humanity’s checkered past realizes that those who claim to speak for “God” should in no way be granted an exclusive patent on morality. Rejecting Soviet communism in favor of liberal democracy was not simply a pragmatic or economic choice—it was a moral one. A preponderance of gray does not mean there are no absolutes: freedom versus tyranny, enlightened values versus despotic ones, and so forth. Likewise shall go the dedication of the free world to continue fighting fascism, dictatorship, and yes, eVIl,wherever we may find it. It is in that sense, as well as a practical one, that in my lifetime I have supported war against Slobodan Milosevic, the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein.
2. “Family values” are indeed supremely important; but the term has been grossly misused. The religious right shock troops who prate about” family values” often seem most interested in matters jokingly tangential to the problems they should rightly be describing. Media censorship is the most consistently galling of these—violent rap lyrics, sex-drenched Hollywood, Murphy Brown the single mom, etc. Cultural productions illustrate situations; they don’t create them. The splintering of the extended family network through industrialization, urbanization, and modernity was a great social upheaval, with corollaries proving to be good and bad. More recently, the breakup of the post-WWII nuclear family has been quite simply a social disaster. Conservatives are correct that there is no—I repeat no—state solution to the lack of a supportive and morally guiding family, which includes father and mother. It matters little to me whether the father, the mother, or both earn the paycheck. The sexual revolution—a combination of scientific (better contraception) as well as social forces—was admirable in its relaxing of stuffy mores and its freeing of single women and homosexuals. But, liberals must realize that to observe, in retrospect, that such a revolution took its toll in the AIDS crisis and in drastically increased illegitimacy does not automatically make one a Falwell-type wacko. There is no substitute for the traditional family structure, and no amount of progressive schooling or government largesse will help communities where familial breakdown has led to welfare dependency, widespread out-of-wedlock birthrates, drugs, crime, and the like&mdashuntil real “family values” return and those communities want to help themselves.
3. The state can help; the state cannot work magic. The recent Limbaugh/Gingrich animosity toward everything touched by the federal government has got to go. Conservatives who insist that the government has never and will never help anybody show a painful ignorance of their country’s history-and that of the world besides. There are legitimate complaints to be made about Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” and its ilk, but unless one acknowledges that the Great Society programs did noticeably reduce American poverty in the 1960s and early 1970s he should not be taken seriously as a critic of New Deal liberalism. Likewise: federal land programs to settle the western territories, the railroads and later the national highways, social security, the GI Bill, Medicare/Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), Community Development projects and Enterprise Zones… the list goes on and on. Pro-state progressives have much to be proud of in the history of the United States. But, ultimately, uplift must come from within every individual. The state can nurture initiative; it cannot create initiative. Families, communities and (often faith-based) local entities save lives in a way that government bureaucracies never can. Federal redistribution of funds can help facilitate such programs, but it is not a substitute for them.
4. The state can do harm.The “end welfare as we know it” debate that followed the Gingrich takeover in the mid-1990s housed much hyperbole and demagoguery from right-wing circles, as did Reagan’s famous use of “welfare queens” in his own campaigning. Nevertheless, the fact that conservatives abused and exaggerated the welfare problem for their own political gain does not absolve liberals in their support of destructive policies. I support a general social safety net to protect those who fall through the cracks and I believe any modern industrialized state should guarantee its citizens universal health care. (One of the great shames of the 1990s-era right was their outright slander against the Clinton health care plan, which actually would have inaugurated something considerably simpler and more effective than the mess we have now.) And yes, as we’ve all heard, the majority of welfare recipients —and here “welfare” means Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)&mdashhave been white. It remains, though, that in the late 1960s AFDC was greatly expanded specifically to target inner city blacks. Under the “Great Society” aegis, AFDC paid poor black women to have illegitimate children-period. The fact that such a claim still evokes fevered rage from liberals attests to its discomfiting truth. The left excoriated President Clinton for incising AFDC, but they did so ignorantly: Clinton did not end the welfare state, he reorganized it, to the extent that a greatly expanded EITC (began, incidental1y, under Bush I)now accounts for larger federal outlays than AFDC ever did. All in all, current EITC is a great improvement upon 1960s and 1970s AFDC. I believe a generous social safety net for all vulnerable citizens is both moral and pragmatic, but the artificial creation of an underclass mired in anti-family welfare dependency was one of the unabashedly negative outcomes of the sociopolitical upheavals of the 1960s.
5. Social libertarianism (SL), yes; economic libertarianism (EL), no. I support progressive income taxation, which is government intervention in economic affairs and (limited) state redistribution of wealth. The methods by which that wealth should be redistributed must always be hotly debated, and I outlined above an instance wherein transfer payments certainly did more harm than good. But on the whole, I reject modern conservatism’s wholehearted embrace of EL and concomitant overt hostility toward SL. Here’s why: The argument that even steeply progressive taxes would discourage any human being from making as much money as he can seems completely absurd. I’d prefer to hand over three quarters of $20 million than keep every cent of $20,000, and so would any other sane person. Liberals are also correct that unchecked avarice will not alchemical1y help al1 of society&mdashthe rising tide lifts al1 boats, “trickle-down” economics, and so forth. Now, one will often hear that capitalism is “morally neutral” or even a “necessary evil,” the latter of which vaguely implies that we will someday find a better system to supplant it. Nonsense. Capitalism has its amoral underside, but on the historical balance sheet, it is unequivocally a force for good and uniquely amenable to related positives like liberal democracy and human dignity, the latter of which we have because of capitalism and not, as the left would like to believe, in spite of it. However, the right must stop casting any government effort to curb capitalism’s rank excesses (and there are many) as an evil communist takeover/resurgence. The ” night watchman” state is a wishful fiction. In the last 20 years, the Savings and Loan fiasco and, more recently, Enron-gate render painful1y obvious the need for a state sector that is independent of&mdashindeed hostile toward—laissez-faire capitalism. This is because in a modern, post-industrial society, the economic actions of the individual have far-reaching social consequences. Moreover, that which is good for the individual is not necessarily good for his society. Social1y, it’s a different story. Whereas the existence or nonexistence of federal oversight in, say, the banking industry affects the general well-being of major sections of the population, the individual’s personal decisions for his/her own body do not have such far-reaching effects, except in certain extreme cases. By this I include one’s decision to: have any sort of consensual sex, take any sort of drug, terminate a pregnancy, end one’s life consciously and voluntarily, and enjoy any cultural production or media. The one of these that usually causes the most debate or discomfort among the political center is the issue of narcotics, all of which I believe should be immediately legalized and regulated in the same manner as nicotine and alcohol. Certainly, drug abuse is a horror and can cause immense societal ills. However, I think that on balance, the social negatives engendered by years of police interdiction are worse than those we might exacerbate with full decriminalization. First, the worst crime said to derive from the drug trade would by its nature disappear if one could buy crack at Kmart&mdashthat is, there would be no need for competing criminal syndicates, wherein the sheer amount of money involved ensures savagery. Second, even if we grant that legalization might result in increased abuse and misdemeanor crime, I firmly believe such a measure would be a proper price to pay for ending the disastrous” war on drugs,” as it has been prosecuted from the early 1970s to today. It is the “war on drugs” that created the racial profiling fiasco as we know it today; it is the “war on drugs” that locked an entire urban underclass into a draconian legal system; it is the “war on drugs” that has created the horrific phenomenon of for-profit prisons. The “war on drugs” is a domestic policy disaster comparable to the Vietnam War, and like Vietnam, it is being perpetually lost without a single defeat in battle. So, with war in mind, last but not least:
6. Winning the Cold War does not make us perfect; but the fact that we made/make mistakes does not mean there are no simple cases of right against wrong. Any leftist who has read his” Chomsky For Beginners” knows the litany of American support for venal or repressive regimes during the Cold War. In Guatemala, the CIA replaced democratic Arbenz with a military clique, and a bloodbath ensued; we backed the Shah and Suharto and the House of Saud; we propped up Park and Diem, Marcos and the Greek colonels, as well as right-wing dictators all over the Southern Cone; we did not turn on apartheid South Africa until the bitter end; and so forth. The record is far from spotless, and, in some cases, it is even sickening. And yet, though I will never tire of attempting to dissuade the right from its vapid lionization of Ronald Reagan, the man was brave and correct when he uttered the famous words” evil empire” and, thus, armed the Afghan Mujahedin against the Soviets. I do not even claim this on strategic grounds, as in the conservative “we outspent them” mythos that seeks to explain the collapse of the Warsaw Pact as a result of the 1980s arms buildup. My view is, I think, far more patriotic. Our system worked, theirs didn’t. We survived Vietnam because we have a strong society built on basic moral and human needs; they did not survive Afghanistan because their society was a stale and corrupt autocracy that had for 70 years denied basic decency and dignity to its subjects - indeed, the famous” anti-imperialism” theorist VI. Lenin was, ironically, the same nouveau Tsar who brutally held together Russia’s 19thcentury empire when the other European powers were dissolving theirs. The same communists who decried capitalism’s” exploitation of the worker” behind the façade of “formal democracy” reinstated serfdom, treated their workers worse than any factory boss ever has or ever will, and murdered more people than Hitler. Meanwhile all while the Western left hemmed and hawed, apologized, and prevaricated.

One hoped that with the convulsions of 1989 certain lessons were hammered home once and for all. But, considering the response of the left—and, to be fair, much of the paleoconservative right—to the crises of the decade that followed,culminating in our current fight against Islamic fascism and Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath slaughterhouse… we realize that the more things change, the more they stay the same. We hear the same nonsensical rationalizations, the same tendency to blame one’s own society for precisely the sins of its enemies: imperialism, intolerance, simple-minded moralizing, etc. The great French political theorist, Jean-Francois Revel, observed in How Democracies Perish that liberal democracy is the first civilization in history to blame itself for the fact that another civilization wishes that it be obliterated. When manned missiles liquidated the World Trade Center, it was our “cowboy” president and his “neocon” advisors, and not the left, who seemed to reject this canard on a gut level. If they gain in popular stature as a result, then no nefarious corporate machinations or rightwing conspiracies can be blamed.