If someone asked you to fill in the blanks below, what word or phrase would you use?
A __________ is someone who has a conviction--rooted in his understanding of the history of human events--that the intervention of government into private matters beyond a few basic matters tends to produce worse outcomes for society. This is the philosophy of limited government and individual freedom and responsibility that has been the major driving force behind the _______ movement.
Mark Shepherd, in the
post below, fills in the blanks with "conservative." But I for my part might just as easily have filled in those blanks with "liberal" or perhaps "classical liberal."
Consider, for example, an opening blurb from Wikipedia's
entry on liberalism:
Broadly speaking, liberalism seeks a society characterized by freedom of thought for individuals, limitations on the power of government, wealth, and religion, the rule of law , the free exchange of ideas, a market economy that supports private enterprise , and a transparent system of government in which the rights of minorities are guaranteed.
Except for its desire to limit the "power of wealth," I don't think this definition of liberalism is too far off from Mark's definition of conservatism. Importantly, the desire for limited government and the protection of individual liberties is central to both philosophies. And Wikipedia's
definition of classical liberalism seems even closer:
Classical liberalism (also called classic liberalism) is a political ideology that embraces individual rights, private property and a laissez-faire economy, a government that exists to protect the liberty of each individual from others, and a constitution that protects individual autonomy from governmental power.
If the fundamental definitions of (at least classical) liberalism and conservatism are nearly identical, and (let us assume) that Mark is right in attributing greater fidelity to "conservative" ideas to Republican principles, then why do we not see more people who vote republicans describing themselves as "classically liberal"? One explanation, of course, might be that "classical liberalism" is simply an archaic term that has been subsumed by "conservativism". Another explanation might be that calling someone "conservative" denotes a different kind of identification than terms like "classical liberals". I believe the latter explanation is more true than the former.
People like to talk about political spectrums. Politicians and individuals describe their beliefs and policies as lying more or less at some point along the spectrum. But a "spectrum" is a poorly suited device to gauge a political philosophy because it is uni-dimensional. A single dimension of analysis might be valid if all political opinions could be devolved to a single fundamental question, but it is not obvious that any such fundamental starting point exists. One's opinions on libertarianism vs. utilitarianism, environmental protectionism vs. unhampered development, life at conception vs. life at delivery, penal systems as deterrence vs. punishment vs. rehabilitation and any number of other political debates are unlikely to all be decisively determined by reference to a single fundamental question or opinion. As such, our political orientations exist not on a uni-dimensional spectrum but in a multi-dimensional "space" (not to be limited to three dimensions), with one dimension per each independently resolved political debate.
But even if political philosophies cannot be placed on a spectrum, there is one important way in which politics is uni-dimensional. As I have argued before (in a post on the old redivy.org location which I cannot access now but will link to if the redirect function from that location is fixed), our political system really only allows for two mainstream parties:
It is the particular nature of the American political system that the winner takes all – whoever gets a simple majority in a given election (either of popular or, what correlates strongly, electoral votes) gets complete representation. Whoever loses gets nothing. In order for a “party” to be viable, it has to be able to court a majority – national, state, or local. This means that parties must be coalitions: they must court a wide range of people, philosophies and interests.
And, of course, only two parties can effectively court majority coalitions in the long run. Thus, in at least one respect, political self-identification can proceed along a uni-dimensional spectrum. Do you tend to vote for/identify with Party A, or Party B? It seems to me that the terms conservative, moderate, and liberal (as it is used now, rather than as it was meant in classical liberalism) are less concrete philosophies than identifiers for location along the partisan spectrum. If you tend to vote or identify as a Republican, than you self-identify as a conservative. If you vote Democrat, you're a liberal. If you don't identify with either party (or don't like to admit that you do) then you might identify as a moderate. But "conservatism" is no more a concrete and internally coherent philosophy than the Republican party is the movement of any such philosophy. Attempts to describe conservatism in such a way are no more likely to be apt than similar attempts to define "moderatism".
Why think that conservatism denotes less a philosophy than a place in the political spectrum? Without going out of my way to provide examples, let me say that I am simply not convinced that any sort of decisive majority of those who self-describe as "conservatives" (or for that matter as liberals or moderates) possess a fundamental and mutually reconcilable philosophy (and one not possessed by the other groups; it would not be particularly illuminating, for example, to say that all conservatives believe in "freedom"). There are plenty of people out there who are likely to describe themselves as conservatives because they believe in the importance of a religious society, or because they want to preserve "American" heritage and the English language against the encroachments of immigration, or because they believe in the sanctity of marriage, or because they support the armed forces, or because they believe in isolationism and "America First", or because they want tougher penalties for criminals, or because they prefer the paternalistic policies their state would enact to the paternalistic policies that the national government would enact, or because they want stronger national government interference into public mores.
None of the above policies fit easily into the definition of conservatism that Mark gives, but it would be rather arbitrary to reject these not uncommon opinions as "unconservative", contrary to the claims of their advocates. Mark's definition of conservatism seems less an accurate definition of what conservatism "is" than a specific subset of conservative claims and beliefs that he finds palatable. Certainly, I agree with most of philosophy that Mark expounds (he is perhaps more result oriented than I), and I agree that this philosophy might lead one to vote Republican. But to the extent that he attempts to identify this philosophy as"conservatism" I think he is overambitious. If conservatives are only a part of the Republican coalition, then who are the rest? Libertarians? The definition I might give of libertarians would overlap strongly with the one Mark gives of conservatives. Christians? I think most ardent Christians who vote Republican are likely to self-describe as conservatives regardless of how well their definition of the movement aligns with Mark's. Neo-conservatives? They would be better described, I think, as a subset of conservatives with certain foreign policy preferences. Perhaps there is concrete movement within the Republican party with the philosophies that Mark advocates below. And certainly I have no more authority than Mark to decisively define or name an entire political movement. But it seems to me that the term "conservative" is vastly more relevant as a simple denominator of partisan preference than as a meaningful description of personal philosophies or (even more) policy preferences.
Update: I just realized that
I'm not the only one that thinks Mark is describing classical liberalism.
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