The Battle Over Liberalism

Joe weighs in with a commentary below on Michael Totten’s column on liberalism, which has prompted a lot of discussion around the blogs.

Well, as the designated liberal here, I’d better weigh in, or I’ll lose all my street cred.

[JK: A.L. has added an excellent update to the earlier verison of this post! The last line is a bit of a stunner, but I won’t spoil the surprise…]While I think a lot of Michael, and see some things in his post that can lead us some places, I have to agree with Kieran Healey that what we have is some observations in search of an argument. Now that is a charge that I’m all too aware of, given that many of my own posts tend to do the same things.

But in the background, I’ve been struggling toward an argument on liberalism that will both account for what I (and many others) see as the problems with it, and what I believe is essential about it.

And while I think Michael missed the 10-ring, I think he got his shot onto the target, and I want to look at what he did and see if I can set out the beginning of an argument that builds on what he suggested.

He said:

Liberals are builders and conservatives are defenders. Liberals want to build a good and just society. Conservatives defend what is already built and established.

Close, but not quite.

I’ve been talking for a long time about Romanticism, and about the roots in Romantic thought of much of modern radicalism and even terrorism.

Romanticism, to try and boil a definition down to a sentence, stands on two legs: an unwillingness to be shaped by the world around us, and a desire to remake to world to fit our image of it.

At its most extreme, it leads to the kind of suicidal megalomania that we saw on 9/11.

But it also attaches us to ideals, and makes us willing to fight for them, even when inertia suggests that we would be better off tending our gardens.

When Totten points out that his liberal acquaintances don’t know much about history or about current affairs, I’ll suggest that it is because much of modern liberalism has become an exploration of the internal landscape of our ideas, without the connection to an external world.

In opposition to Romanticism, I’ll suggest that we have Classicism, which I’ll define for this purpose as “knowing one’s place”. Part of that is an inherent willingness to accept authority, and another part has to do with a willingness to accept the concrete reality of place…to accept facts as they are.

Pirsig talked about this in slightly different terms in ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’. He actually goes deeper into it in ‘The Cruising Blues’.

Liberalism…classical Liberalism and again contemporary liberalism as I’m trying to redefine it…was a masterstroke because it found a path between the two movements above, which have defined the poles of social thought for as long as people have been writing about it. It simultaneously created a ‘place’ where people stood, and made that place one that they could control.

I’ve got to get back to work, but I’ll toss this out as a starting point for discussion.

Update:

Here are two good quotes from Robert Pirsig’s article ‘The Cruising Blues and Their Cure’, from Esquire.

An alternative – and better – definition of reality can be found by naming some of its components …air…sunlight…wind…water…the motion of waves…the patterns of clouds before a coming storm. These elements, unlike twentieth-century office routines, have been here since before life appeared on this planet and they will continue long after office routines are gone. They are understood by everyone, not just a small segment of a highly advanced society. When considered on purely logical grounds, they are more real than the extremely transitory life-styles of the modern civilization the depressed ones want to return to.

If this is so, then it follows that those who see sailing as an escape from reality have got their understanding of both sailing and reality completely backwards. Sailing is not an escape but a return to and a confrontation of a reality from which modern civilization is itself an escape. For centuries, man suffered from the reality of an earth that was too dark or too hot or too cold for his comfort, and to escape this he invented complex systems of lighting, heating and air conditioning. Sailing rejects these and returns to the old realities of dark and heat and cold. Modern civilization has found radio, TV, movies, nightclubs and a huge variety of mechanized entertainment to titillate our senses and help us escape from the apparent boredom of the earth and the sun and wind and stars. Sailing returns to these ancient realities.

In the terms I discuss above, sailing is not Romantic, it is Classical. It is about accepting concrete reality, not willing a new one into being.

We call sailing romantic, because it is an escape from what we in the industrialized West see as our ‘reality’, which is one of offices, bureaucracy, and the other manifestations of civilization. But like many of the disciplines I have enjoyed in my life, rockclimbing, sailing, and racing motorcycles, it relies above all on a clear-eyed acceptance of what is real.

That acceptance is not without moral qualities. Pirsig discusses virtue:

Now, however, with a boat of my own and some time at sea, I begin to see the learning of virtue another way. It has something to do with the way the sea and sun and wind and sky go on and on day after day, week after week, and the boat and you have to go on with it. You must take the helm and change the sails and take sights of the stars and work out their reductions and sleep and cook and eat and repair things as they break and do most of these things in stormy weather as well as fair, depressed as well as elated, because there’s no choice. You get used to it; it becomes habit-forming and produces a certain change in values. Old gear that has been through a storm or two without failure becomes more precious than it was when you bought it because you know you can trust it. The same becomes true of fellow crewmen and ultimately becomes true of things about yourself. Good first appearances count for less than they ever did, and real virtue – which comes from an ability to separate what merely looks good from what lasts and the acquisition of those characteristics in one’s self – is strengthened.

And to me, these virtues…getting up and going on, steadfastness…are the root of real virtue.

When Totten talks about “Building” and “Preserving”, I want to shift the focus to “Imagining” and “Accepting”. Now this construction is overly simple and in some ways clearly untrue (liberals have some grounding in reality and conservatives have imagination); but I think that it can serve as an organizing metaphor to understand what I’m getting at. Liberals center their values around imagining, and they want to fashion social worlds that enable them to manifest their imaginings, to materialize the moral good that they can envision. Conservatives center their around accepting, and they want to fashion social worlds that are stable.

Without liberal imagination, we would still be in thrall (literally!!) to kings. Without conservative acceptance of reality we would be – like the B’aath regieme, like Pol Pot – whipping our people to implement the fevered imaginations of our leaders, and struggling with leaders who must have more and more power in order to be able to will their imaginings into reality.

What works is a tension between the two things; a tension within each of us as people, within our politics as a society.

Looking at this, I begin to get a new way of parsing contemporary politics, and an explanation of why the conservatives in power now are really liberals in disguise.

22 thoughts on “The Battle Over Liberalism”

  1. Liberals are builders and conservatives are defenders. Liberals want to build a good and just society. Conservatives defend what is already built and established.

    Random, unorganized thought: this isn’t describing the difference between conservatives and liberals; it’s describing the difference between conservatives and radicals. Preserving the basics versus making root-level changes.

    One of the problems with the word “conservative” as it’s generally used in modern politics is that it retains some of this connotation of “preserving”, along with specific policy positions that can be fairly radical. And one of the problems with the adoption of “liberal” as the opposite of “conservative” is that “liberal” has picked up the connotation of radicalism. This leads to complete linguistic disconnects.

    People who favor absolute freedom of trade – just as one example – would be labeled “conservative”, but their position is in fact a radical one. “Radical conservative” is not at all self-contradictory, although if you take the “defender of the status quo” definition of “conservative” seriously you might think so. The “let’s remake the Middle East into a prosperous democratic paradise (before they kill us all)” approach is generally identified as conservative in modern political parlance… but it’s a quite radical approach.

    Similarly, as an example, people who favored retaining the traditional welfare program were labeled “liberal”, but their position was a very conservative one (in the sense of “preserving”, “resisting change”). The anti-war position generally identified as “liberal” gets a lot of its oomph from the idea that rocking the boat is dangerous, big changes are to be avoided… which is likewise a very conservative way of approaching a problem.

    The distinction between “left” and “liberal” that some people make is, I think, an attempt to differentiate between “conservatives” and “radicals” on that side of the policy spectrum – those who emphasize preservation and gradualism versus those willing to consider root-level change. But there’s no similar distinction between “conservative” and “right”.

  2. A good point, AL, but I wonder if the search for the “correct” viewpoint which is superior to all other viewpoint is an error in itself. I’m not accusing you of doing this, but I see that a lot of the left/right debate is framed in terms of people seeking to prove that their point of view is morally superior to the opposing point of view.

    I think that the best solution is in an ongoing conversation between a variety of principled viewpoints. A John Stuart Mill quote that’s stuck with me:

    “In politics, again, it is almost a commonplace, that a party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life; until the one or the other shall have so enlarged its mental grasp as to be a party equally of order and of progress, knowing and distinguishing what is fit to be preserved from what ought to be swept away. Each of these modes of thinking derives its utility from the deficiencies of the other; but it is in a great measure the opposition of the other that keeps each within the limits of reason and sanity.”

    Although I’m no leftist, and my own inclination is more towards order rather than progress, it’s in my own best interest, and that of every modern “conservative”, that the liberal viewpoint, whether classic or modern “progressive”, stay strong and well-argued, since this will ensure the health of our own philosophy and help guarantee that good ideas are not overlooked simply because they do not fit with our way of thinking.

  3. Sparc-

    *DING* *DING* *DING*

    By George, I think you’ve got it. You say: “wonder if the search for the “correct” viewpoint which is superior to all other viewpoint is an error in itself.”

    You’re absolutely right.

    The grand visions of Le Corbusier made great models and looked good on paper, but they weren’t liveable.

    Neither are the unplanned favelas surrounding Rio.

    The messy, fine-grained, imperfectly planned cities that manage to combine grand vision with incompleteness are the ones that we like.

    More later.

    A.L.

  4. Hey! No fair peeking under the disguise!

    “Looking at this, I begin to get a new way of parsing contemporary politics, and an explanation of why the conservatives in power now are really liberals in disguise.”

  5. Full disclosure: I’m a neo paleo-con with substantial libertarian leanings.

    I like the two Pirsig books you cite, but one of the problems I have with Pirsig is that he is a neo-Platonist. He engages in this “search for reality and authenticity” – as if the punch in the gut in the night from Billy Petrole isn’t authentic. (Bonus points if you know where that comes from…) Pirsig, in other words, chases his tale for the good and real things that are right in front of his face, that have always been there all along.

    I don’t buy Pirsig fully because I’m not sure a strip mall is any less authentic than what it is. Nor is a sailboat more or less authentic and real than any other thing in life; and my bogus job is no better or worse than hammering out horseshoes by hand at an old forge. There are fewer complexities to the smithy than my office… but a Platonist should be able to see that work is work, no matter where you are yoked.

    The return to material and lifestyle authenticity – which is what I think Pirsig is doing – was sort of a hippie offshoot of the 60s. It is profoundly conservative in a lot of ways – witness Rod Dreher’s work on the “Crunchy Conservative” idea.

    Guys like Pirsig make a big deal out of discovering the glory of a quiet morning on a farm, a sunset in the wilds of Montana, or the pleasure of a nice meal after a day of hard work, or hard travel. No offense to Bob Pirsig, but there is a big conservative tradition of that… welcome to the club. Read H.L. Mencken’s memoirs of great breakfasts in a creaky old Victorian house, wood fires, old fashioned rye whiskey, and riding in horsecarts in the city.

    Is Pirsig a conservative by coming around to value things that plain ol’ red state folks value? I know it probably means more to him in that he had to journey from modern complexity to classic simplicity, but I don’t think that makes his sunset better than mine… yr thoughts on this?

  6. Armed Liberal,

    I think you’ve got your definitions of romanticism and classicism almost completely backwards.

    Romanticism, as it developed in the early 19th century, believed that man was very much shaped by the world around him, especially by the past and by the limitations of nature, both his own and the natural world around him. True happiness was found by discovering your groove as a German, Frenchman, etc. and not by trying to remake your world. Romanticism was very deterministic, and thus conservative. In as much as it championed the irrational, it did provide underpinnings for many terrorists, but not as much for radicalism.

    Romanticism was a revolt against classicism, which was developed by the Enlightenment philosophes of the previous century. They “knew their place” only in the sense that they believed the world was run by natural laws (like a clock), which once understood, could be tinkered with to create a new, better world. It was the classists who were the forerunners for all those later radicals who wanted to remake the world, such as Marxists.

  7. Matt-

    I’ll disagree, and suggest that you’re confusing the Romantic attachment for wild places and ‘authenticity’ – much like Marie Antoinette’s authenticity as a shepherd girl – with their belief that the self was outer-determined.

    I’ll suggest Berlin’s book (of which I’m a big fan and have *blogged* a bit…”The Roots of Romanticism”…

    A.L.

  8. “What works is a tension between the two things; a tension within each of us as people, within our politics as a society.”

    It takes a liberal to imagine the boat; a conservative to build it. It takes a liberal to imagine a new destination; a conservative to sail it.

    That is why any great leader is surrounded by a tension of ideas, rather than sycophants.

  9. Matt,

    You are correct insofar as you say “Romanticism was a revolt against classicism” in the sense that, especially as originated by Rousseau, it was a backlash against and critique of the rising commercial order. However, I have to agree with A.L. here because the Romanticists did *not* see the world around them on its own terms. They, well, ‘romanticized’ it. Nature, for the Romantics, was an idealized world of perfect balance, wild beauty, and the forge of human perfection. Its vagaries and violence, when acknowledged, were part of a bigger plan for molding the perfection or character (or ‘authenticity’) of human players. In time this morphed into wildly inaccurate – ‘romanticized’ again – views of primitive societies and aboriginal peoples.

    But, simultaneously, a practical, commercial order was rising whose continued success became absolutely essential to the survival of literally billions of human beings around the planet. Any attempt to return society to a state of nature – as Romanticists advocate – would inflict death and misery of truly horrific dimensions. Thus, defending the system that the classicists have built – the conservative position – should be the core mission of all modern governments.

    A.L. and Sparc have it right – where we differ should lie only in the degree to which we prevent stasis from growing into oppression and the degree to which we experiment with optimizations and improvements to the existing order.

  10. Socialism is dead.

    What is replacing it is an evangelical democratic libertarianism.

    The opposition will be the cultural conservatives.

    Bush represents the new center well in foreign policy.

    Clinton represented it well in actual (as opposed to desired) domestic policy.

    Bush with his weak endorsement of Santorum is already moving to the new center.

    As to parties: I think the Democrats are dead and the Republicans must split. Liberal and conservative will be restored to their original meaning.

  11. That’s an interesting question in and of itself: are the Democrats dead? I can’t see any of the current wannabes winning in 2004.

  12. First, I think you hit on something important when you talked about the tension between liberal and conservative as working. It is one of the overlooked strengths of a two party system that this tension is optimized, in a manner of speaking.

    Also, you said “the conservatives in power now are really liberals in disguise”. This goes both ways. I know more than a few liberals whose answer to “conservative” insistence that people should take care of themselves is a simple “but they won’t.”

  13. O. Bill – I don’t know if you know what a serious question you raise, but either way, my hat’s off to you for raising it.

    What you talk about – “…I’m not sure a strip mall is any less authentic than what it is. Nor is a sailboat more or less authentic and real than any other thing in life; and my bogus job is no better or worse than hammering out horseshoes by hand at an old forge. There are fewer complexities to the smithy than my office… but a Platonist should be able to see that work is work, no matter where you are yoked.” you are talking about one of the central issues I’m struggling with both personally and philosophically.

    I decided a long time ago that for me, working in the ‘real world’ was more authentic than being a philosopher or artist, or being a wandering outdoorsman.

    And the world I live in – urban Los Angeles – is just as concrete to me as the world I see when I hike in the Sierra or sail past Big Sur on the way from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

    But – there’s always one, isn’t there? – there is something in modern, rational society that tends to lead to anomie and alienation; a lack of opportunities for praxis (self-authentication action) that leaves too many people feeling empty and restless.

    Those are the two walls of the chimney I need to climb, and that I believe this society needs to climb if it is to survive.

    Because that philosophical and – dare I say – spiritual weakness is what will ultimately destroy us, far before some environmental catastrophe or external attack. It is what produces, not only Al-Quieda, but Tim McVeigh.

    A.L.

  14. A disclaimer: I know almost nothing about philosophy. I plan to remedy this in the future, but for right now my understanding is quite sketchy.

    That said, I largely agree with Matt. Romanticism, as Rousseau saw it at least, was intended as a counter to Classical ideas of empirical rationality. Locke and Hobbes had their idea of an undramatic but functional society, and Adam Smith would later assign the phrase “enlightened self-interest” to it. I think, based on a limited understanding (see above) that Romanticism lodged an argument against their hugely successful but conceptually boring society: its members had lost their “authenticity”.

    This mythical quantity, possessed in spades by every “noble savage”, had been ignored by modern society, and the Romantics wanted to reintegrate it into civilization. This led to an idealization of aboriginal cultures, rural communities, crying a lot, etc. Whether an action was rationally sound made less sense than whether it was an authentic display of feeling. See the French revolution’s later stages for examples of why this might not be the best idea.

    I think the real poison of Romanticism was its concept of the “general will” – that the individual does not necessarily know what is best for himself, and that he can be “forced to be free” – by the collective state. This led to Marx’s “false consciousness” and has served as an underpinning for dictatorial groups claiming that they know what’s best for the unenlightened masses, and to tyranny.

    I’m less certain of the Romantics’ position on the state of nature. While they unquestionably “Romanticised” nature and the “noble savage”, it can be argued that this represents their fundamental misunderstanding of the world – in their own eyes, they may have been conforming to nature as it was. However, Romantic offshoots like Nietzsche and Marxism, even what I know of Rousseau’s on “Emile”, show a belief in, and obsession with, the perfectability of humanity. And I think it’s that belief that has caused so much misery in the modern world.

    I don’t think the Romantics, as I understand them, fit under any useful label of “conservative”. I see them as quite radical, and indeed quite destructive.

    But A.L. has a point I often make – there is no denying the Romantic urge in people. The rational state of Locke and Hobbes provides security and plenty for the vast majority of its citizens, and a sound platform for life. But the Romantic longing persists. Humans have heroic tendencies, and the rational state is not heroic. People find themselves longing for a cause, a fight, a sense of purpose. “How shall we then live with our wealth and safety?” is an important question, and the crusading impulse in humanity will come out somehow. It behooves a society to have constructive and positive outlets for it available. I could go into why I don’t think this is the state’s concern, but I’ve been long-winded enough for now.

  15. There seems to be a rising agreement that the conservative/liberal and left/right classifications of political thought have broken down. The real discussion right now seems to be on what to replace it with. This is always, in the end, a discussion about the degree to which we will preserve and reform our current institutions and cultural norms, as opposed to overthrowing and replacing them with something new.

    The formulation of this that has held sway from the middle of the Depression through to today has been to question the degree to which change would be radical, with the left arguing for fast and radical change, and the right arguing for slow or non-existent change. I believe that the Cold War ossified both the West and the Soviet Union, but with the end of the Cold War, the centrists have won the debate, with the consensus among the vast majority of people to change, reform or replace our cultural norms and societal institutions at a noticable, but not rapid, pace. We appear to have, as a general rule in the US and Europe at least, decided that we will neither be bound by the past, nor rush headlong into an unknown future.

    I have recently begun to think that the issue now is about who will control those changes. On the one hand, there are the former radical leftists (think A.N.S.W.E.R., Chomsky, Jane Fonda) and the radical rightists (think Buchanan, Pat Robertson, Pim Fortuyn), who believe that the collective expression of a people (whether it be a nation or an organization) is more important that the individuals who comprise it – that we are better off as a society if we allow the state to control vast expanses of our public and private lives. The radical left wants to control our political views while the radical right wants to control our social views. The internal debates within these collectivists are whether the power of the state will be manifested within a largely controlled or a largely self-regulated economy, and whether the US will be isolationist or internationalist.

    On the other hand are those who believe that, while the state must have some power to keep civil order and defend against foreign enemies, the essential point is to allow individuals to control their own life to the extent that they can do so without the state’s intervention. The centrist left wants the state to be more involved, thinking that, for example, individuals are not capable of providing for their own health care as well as is just and right. The centrist right wants the state to be less involved, thinking that, for example, individuals can best handle their own health care needs as long as the government provides for the indigent and very poor. The internal debates within these individualists are the degree to which government should be involved in provision of services, and the degree to which the US needs to be aggressive or reactionary to overseas threats.

    In this spectrum, if looked at one dimensionally, the extreme individualists are the Libertarians, while the extreme collectivists are the various totalitarians (from unreconstructed Stalinists to the neo-Nazis and the KKK).

    Web sites typical of the collectivist point of view include Democratic Underground and Indymedia, while websites typical of the individualist point of view include Winds of Change and InstaPundit.

  16. The radical left wants to control our political views while the radical right wants to control our social views.

    I’m not exactly sure what you’ve classified as constituting “political views” as opposed to “social views”, but I would maintain that both sides want to control the social and the political through state coercion. They both desire (imo) much too high degrees of state control of the individual. The right seems to believe they have the right to legislate what happens in a bedroom between two consenting adults as well as what Americans are allowed to say while the left in many ways also wants control speech, just for different reasons/justifications.

  17. When Totten talks about “Building” and “Preserving”, I want to shift the focus to “Imagining” and “Accepting”…

    I don’t want to be too incendiary in response to what is a very constructive line of thought, but let’s be realistic: for far too many liberals the term “Hallucinating” fits better than “Imagining”.

    Totten virtually makes this point himself when he describes the Nation’s attempts to project its prejudices on a country like Iraq.

    I suppose in a way this is due to an inherent ‘occupational hazard’. If you are concerned about preserving what is in front of you there are at least facts to hand against which to measure your ideas. If your goal is to imagine an ideal future there is no corresponding restraint on loopiness.

  18. The more I think about it, the more revealing Totten’s thesis is.

    In my lifetime leftists, in both the US and the UK, have been focused domestically on good vs bad (with themselves cast as the good vs. conservatives).

    Fair enough, maybe they actually know something about their own country.

    However, wishing to sound like they have something to say about the world outside their own country (trying not to look ignorant) they have continually tried to project onto it a parallel dichotomy.

    The problem is that unlike domestically they themselves can’t be the ‘good’ in this picture: they are not foreigners.

    Consequently, every time there is a conservative administration at home (and many are so far left that to them every real administration is conservative), someone else has to be cast in the good role overseas, so that the US (or the UK) can be the bad.

    But as Totten suggests leftists typically are seriously ignorant about the outside world. Also, I would suggest, while they really care in a personal way about getting to be the good guys themselves domestically (it’s the mainspring of their politics), they don’t much care about the details of who gets to be the superior moral being overseas. These are the two sources of the succession of completely fatuous idolizations of the USSR, China, Nicaragua, Cuba and on and on. Anyone who opposes the US will do.

    It’s pathetic. It’s pathetic because it is narcissism and ignorance proclaiming itself as moral superiority.

    On the other hand I suppose it’s a pretty neat trick to be able to serve it up in a way that it actually impresses people (and gets you tenure)!

  19. Jeff said:
    The radical left wants to control our political views while the radical right wants to control our social views.

    Then linden said:
    I’m not exactly sure what you’ve classified as constituting “political views” as opposed to “social views”, but I would maintain that both sides want to control the social and the political through state coercion. They both desire (imo) much too high degrees of state control of the individual.

    I think I would put it (as long as we’re playing the “there are two kinds of people…” game) that the radical Left believes in complete State control of your money (means of production, affirmative action, taxation as “social policy”, etc.), but no State control of your body (drugs, sex, abortion, etc.). The radical Right wants complete State control of your body, but no State control of your money. They both are fully happy with State control of other things if it advances their basic agendas.

    The individualists don’t want any more State control than can be helped. I think the Founding Fathers would say “a pox on both your houses!”

  20. Actually, DSmith, I would argue that the Radical Left wants complete state control of the body as well: national health care. I believe that every American should be assured access to health care regardless of the ability to pay, but I don’t believe in government-administered papsmears or colonoscopies. We don’t want the government looking into our public library use or tapping our phones, so why do we want the government to know everything about our health and even administer to it.

    Regarding the Radical Right and state control of money, I suspect that neither the left or right extremes are beneficial. What I mean is that the adoption of laissez faire economics could be just as oppressive as state control.

  21. Both extremes employ different tactics (whether based on prejudice, ideology (religion, Marxism), or a romantic notion of “how things should be”) to arrive at the same results: complete state control of the mind, body and economics of a country. This always, without fail, produces horror and degradation.

    No wonder so many people seem to have dropped out of the election/voting process/active politics. There isn’t a party that really represents the beliefs of the majority of the people. Whether this is good or bad…. A third party of moderates? Maybe this is what the Dems will or should become since democratic socialism is not performing well in this country. The more and more I think about it the more and more I believe Clinton completely blew it (no pun intended) during his presidency.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.