Verbosities

An interesting op-ed from the WSJ this morning, I had a few disjointed thoughts on it I wanted to get down...


OpinionJournal - Featured Article

The Conservative Mind: The American right is a cauldron of debate; the left isn't.

BY PETER BERKOWITZ
Tuesday, May 29, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

The left prides itself on, and frequently boasts of, its superior appreciation of the complexity and depth of moral and political life. But political debate in America today tells a different story.

On a variety of issues that currently divide the nation, those to the left of center seem to be converging, their ranks increasingly untroubled by debate or dissent, except on daily tactics and long-term strategy. Meanwhile, those to the right of center are engaged in an intense intra-party struggle to balance competing principles and goods.

One source of the divisions evident today is the tension in modern conservatism between its commitment to individual liberty, and its lively appreciation of the need to preserve the beliefs, practices, associations and institutions that form citizens capable of preserving liberty. The conservative reflex to resist change must often be overcome, because prudent change is necessary to defend liberty. Yet the tension within often compels conservatives to wrestle with the consequences of change more fully than progressives--for whom change itself is often seen as good, and change that contributes to the equalization of social conditions as a very important good.

That's one hell of a euphemism: "preserv(ing) the beliefs, practices, associations and institutions that form citizens capable of preserving liberty." Just about any Goldwater conservative would tell you that the preservation of ideological institutions isn't what preserves liberty, it's the acceptance of institutions but the laissez-faire approach to these institutions by the state that creates an environment of true liberty. What I think the writer is getting at is there are conservatives that believe that liberty/freedom/security is a manifestation of policy and theory cascaded to the people, as opposed to an inherent and fundamental truth for which our society exists but does not manufacture.

Libertarians believe freedom is inherent and belongs to the individual. When liberty and freedom become a construct of a set of "beliefs, practices, associations and institutions," there is no freedom, there are only explicitly endorsed rights.

To be sure, some standard-order issues remain easy for both sides. Democrats instinctively want to repeal the Bush tax cuts, establish government supervised universal healthcare, and impose greater regulation on trade. Just as instinctively Republicans wish to extend the Bush tax cuts, find market mechanisms to broaden health care coverage and reduce limitations on trade.

But on non-standard issues--involving dramatic changes in national security and foreign affairs, the power of medicine and technology to intervene at the early stages of life, and the social meaning of marriage and family, the partisans show a clear difference: the left is more and more of one mind while divisions on the right deepen.

Again, attaching a specific morality or social meaning to science or marriage is an assigned distribution of liberty, therefore not a freedom. It applies to the "dramatic changes in national security and foreign affairs" as well. When those rights are delineated up front, as opposed to retro-fitted back to the Constitution when challenged, they are no longer a freedom.

What's interesting about this piece so far is that the classic Libertarian viewpoint has historically aligned with the Republican party. If you accept the supposition that the left is "of one mind" about these issues, it should follow that the construct is an intervention-versus-non-intervention argument. However, the left is hardly of one mind about these issues, aside from providing distinct opposition to the ideas the right has proposed.

Consider Iraq. The split among conservatives has widened since Saddam was toppled in the spring of 2003. Traditional realists continue to put their trust in containment, and reject nation-building on the grounds that we lack both a moral obligation and the requisite knowledge of Arabic, Iraqi culture and politics, and Islam. Supporters of the war still argue that, in an age of mega-terror, planting the seeds of liberty and democracy in the Muslim Middle East is a reasonable response to the poverty, illiteracy, authoritarianism, violence and religious fanaticism that plagues the region.

In contrast, Democrats today are nearly united in the belief that the invasion has been a fiasco and that we must withdraw promptly. Indeed, rare is the Democrat (Sen. Joe Lieberman was compelled to run as an Independent) who does not sound like a traditional realist denying both America's moral obligation to remain in Iraq and its capacity to bring order to the country.

I love this - in the first paragraph he essentially explains the reason realists are saying we shouldn't have engaged in nation-building in the first place, then he goes and assigns the Democrats the "traditional realist" viewpoint of denying "America's moral obligation" to Iraq. Unfortunately, many/most of the legislators on the left voted for the AUMF for Iraq, so it's not quite as easy as he's making it to call Dem congressmen "realists." I'd argue that they're responding to a mismanaged war with an attempt to demand the administration uses diplomacy instead of force to engage other countries in the region to let Iraq settle this thing on their own. Whether or not you believe that's a valid strategy is beyond the point, the distaste for the war on the left isn't because Democrats are opposed to nation-building as a concept. What did we think was going to happen when Saddam was deposed?

Consider also abortion rights and embryonic stem-cell research. Here too, the right is torn, with the social conservative wing opposed to both, and the small government, libertarian wing supporting both. No such major divisions are in evidence on the left. Rare is the progressive man or woman who opposes abortion rights, or who regards the destruction of embryos as the taking of human life, or even as a dangerous precedent corroding our respect for the most vulnerable among us.

And look at same-sex marriage. Again, the right is rent by serious difference of opinion. A crucial segment of those who voted for Bush in 2000 and 2004 think that the Constitution should be amended to protect the traditional understanding of marriage as a union between one man and one woman. Another crucial segment of the Republican coalition rejects alteration of the Constitution to advance debatable social policy, preferring that states function as laboratories of innovation.

Meanwhile, on the left, despite ambivalence among the rank and file, all that remains to be decided at the elite level is how and in what ways to endorse same-sex marriage. Few doubt that presidential candidate John Kerry's opposition to same-sex marriage in 2004 was driven more by political calculation than moral conviction. And rare is the man or woman of the left who, in public debate, identifies competing principles and goods that ought to cause hesitation or doubt about same-sex marriage's justice or benefits to the nation.

Is the right really fractured by this, or has their party been hijacked by neoconservatives and authoritarian ideals? I watched the GOP debate, and I didn't see too much in the way of intellectual diversity on stem-cells or abortion, and there's no chance any one of those candidates would have endorsed same-sex marriage. If there's a fractured ideology on the right, it's not issue-driven, it's on the ideal as to whether the government should be getting their hands dirty dictating who deserves what set of rights, and who deserves another.

This absence on the left of debate or dissent about moral and political ends has been aided and abetted by many of the party's foremost intellectuals, who have reveled in denouncing George W. Bush as a dictator, in declaring democracy in 21st-century America all but illegitimate, and in diagnosing conservatism in America as in the grips of fascist sentiments and opinions.

Well, those things are pretty easy to oppose. Naturally, the left starts to run into problems when instead of asking them what they're against, you start asking what they're for. In addition, they just spent six years as the minority party with a GOP congress that ran roughshod over their ideas, hence the laser-focus on opposition as opposed to pushing a proactive agenda.

A few months ago, Hoover Institution research fellow Dinesh D'Souza published a highly polemical book, "The Enemy at Home," which held the cultural left responsible for causing 9/11 and contended that American conservatives should repudiate fellow citizens on the left and instead form alliances with traditional Muslims around the world. Conservatives of many stripes leapt into the fray to criticize it. But rare is the voice on the left that has criticized Boston College professor and New Republic contributing editor Alan Wolfe, former secretary of labor and Berkeley professor Robert Reich, New Republic editor-at-large and Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Peter Beinart, Berkeley professor George Lakoff, and New York University law professor Ronald Dworkin--all of whom have publicly argued in the last several years that conservatives form an enemy at home.

Wow. Let's make sure we understand what those dangerous liberal intellectuals mean by "enemy," shall we? D'Souza means "fanatics who wish to kill us while we sleep." Wolfe, Reich, et al mean "the opposition party who has been controlling the legislative agenda to our detriment." Liberals should rush to judgement when someone points out they're losing and should try harder to defeat the winners?

One explanation of the unity on the left is its belief that today's divisive political questions have easy answers--but because of their illiberal opinions and aims, conservatives are unable to see this and, in a mere six years, have brought democracy in America to the brink. This explanation, however, contradicts the vital lesson of John Stuart Mill's liberalism that political questions, as opposed to mathematical questions, tend by their very nature to be many-sided. Indeed, it contradicts the left's celebration of its own appreciation of the complexity and depth of politics.

Another explanation is that blinded by rage at the Bush administration and resentment over its own lack of power, the left has betrayed its commitment to grasp the many-sidedness of politics, and, in the process, has lost appreciation of modern conservatism's distinctive contribution to the defense of a good, liberty, which the left also prizes. Indeed, the widespread ignorance among the highly educated of the conservative tradition in America is appalling.

No one thinks that "today's divisive political questions have easy answers," except to say liberals have done a good job at recognizing when the government shouldn't be discriminating on the rights of its people, as well as when they point out naked power grabs and unconstitutional assertions by an administration exercising a unitary executive theory. The framework here is that liberals are knee-jerk assumptive and conservatives are seriously weighing the important issues of our day, which is yet another attempt to either infantilize or effeminize liberals as unserious people. I'd like to see the evidence that liberals think magic wands exist to wave away all the tough problems conservatives should be trusted to handle.

As to the second point, the anti-Bush rage is a real thing, but I'm going to stop just short of this supposed "lost appreciation" of the conservative "defense of a good" here. So far, the conservative defense of this good - liberty - has resulted in an administration that refuses to acknowledge the oversight of either congress or courts, and has openly declared that laws enacted to protect our civil liberties don't apply to their actions in direct opposition to such. Liberals prize liberty as well as security, but have differing ideals as to how tied together those two ideals are and should be.

In contrast to much European conservatism, which harks back to premodern times and the political preeminence of religion and royalty, in America--which lacked a feudal past to preserve or recover--conservatism has always revolved around the preservation of individual liberty. Of course modern conservatism generally admires virtues embodied in religious faith and the aristocratic devotion to excellence. It also tends to emphasize the weaknesses of human nature, the ironies and tragedies of history, and the limitations of reason and politics. At the same time, it wishes to put these virtues and this knowledge in liberty's service.

Let me make this really easy to understand. Instead of the classical Libertarian view that freedom is inherent, modern conservatives feel that it is only those that are deserving that shall possess it, and the current prism for determining virtue is derivative of faith-based ideals.

Balancing the claims of liberty and tradition, or showing how liberty depends on tradition, is the very essence of modern conservatism, the founding text for which was provided by Whig orator and statesman Edmund Burke in his 1790 polemic, "Reflections on the Revolution in France." The divisions within contemporary American conservatism--social conservatives, libertarians, and neoconservatives--arise from differences over which goods most urgently need to be preserved, to what extent, and with what role for government.

Again, we're meant to believe that these schools of conservative thought are opposed by a singluar and monolithic "Liberalism." No reasonable person could assume this to be anything but a half-truth cut from whole cloth.

The rest of the op-ed discusses a few philosophers and/or economists who informed what the author sees as modern conservative ideals, but which he acknowledges have been corrupted by impure fractions within his party. In whole, his argument seems to be that Liberals don't have serious discussions over ideas, while conservatives have been unable to come to consensus as a result of these widening fissions of ideals. It's a pretty typical piece in its subtle notions painting conservatives as the adults, and finding various euphemisms to discuss trimming civil liberties as a necessary insurance policy for future freedom.

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