I've struggled over this critique of basic conservative principles to try to arrive at a particular point as logically and as sequentially as I can. The point is that ideally every segment of American society would have had a hand in constructing the original table, a seat at the original table, a say in what issues and problems should be addressed and enough power to negotiate policies that would give each group as much satisfaction as possible in a world of conflicting agendas and values.
There wouldn't have been slavery. Everyone would be equal (in a way that would take too much space to discuss in this essay). And lots of other nice, ideal things.
But the fact is that everyone didn't have a seat at the table and many groups of Americans have struggled mightily to achieve better lives. Banding together, in collectives, to make things better has been a strategy of necessity and choice. Conservatives have waged a mighty war to present Individualism as the "American Way," a self-serving strategy to keep from having to share power. This is what needs to be exposed.
Individualism’s Theory Of Liberty
A Definition Of Liberty: In the part of his conduct which merely concerns himself an individual’s independence is of right absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind the individual is sovereign. [J.S. Mill]
Conservatives have two thoughts about liberty. One is that it is part of human nature as it exists in nature and the other is that liberty is a "right" given to humans by God [or is part of the Objective Moral Order]. So, liberty is either part of the "natural law" or a "natural right."
The Origins Of Liberty
A third theory, after natural right or natural law is that liberty is a consequence of history. Here’s the historical explanation for liberty.
For 1500 years European history was marked by continued strife between church and state, lords and kings, and Catholics and Protestants. From the sparks of those struggles came the first fires of human liberty. [Fareed Zakaria]
Notice that in this explanation liberty was not always in existence. It had small beginnings in different times and places and has evolved not as a whole but in pieces. Milton Friedman corroborates the idea that liberty is a relatively new occurrence on the human scene.
We tend to forget how limited is the span of time and the part of the globe for which there has ever been anything like political freedom. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Western world stand out as striking exceptions to the general trend of historical development_.[ Friedman]
This explanation is in direct conflict with the natural law and natural rights theories of liberty which place liberty’s origin within an Objective Reality outside of human history.
Liberty Doesn’t Create Itself: It’s Been A Struggle
There is a confusion among conservatives about what is cause and what is effect regarding liberty and another confusion about the need for human action in the creation of liberty.
For it took action by men to create liberty. It took a civil war, the Emancipation Proclamation, an amendment to the Constitution, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and much more to create greater, though not yet equal, liberty for Negroes; and to win greater liberty for women it took agitation, an amendment to the constitution, a feminist movement and much more.
Conservatives’ Narrative About Liberty
Conservatives have created and embraced - so it’s not just Libertarians - an elaborate and tortuous narrative about the place and importance of liberty in American society. But remember, though they try to impress you that liberty is their highest value, their highest value is actually "order and stability," i.e., maintenance of the status quo.
What we are witnessing today is the final outcome of the social and moral disintegration of the stable, organized, integrated society we think of as characterizing the high Middle Ages in the West, where everyone normally had a place in society, and found no difficulty in defining his identity in terms of his belonging. [Will Herberg in 1969, on the challenge to the status quo that occurred during the 1960s]
I’ll use "freedom" and "liberty" as being synonymous. Conservatives pepper their speeches with acclaim for the United States because we are free or have liberty. It’s about two things: being able to choose from a lot of options and being free from coercion concerning our choices, usually free from government coercion.
Conservatives typically derive liberty as a right from God, emanating from the Objective Reality.
Foremost among the transcendent values is the individual’s use of his God-given free will, whence derives his right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force. [The Sharon Statement]
Political And Economic Liberty
Conservatives contend that political and economic liberty go together; in fact, that economic liberty assures political liberty.
Capitalism is the only economic system that is compatible with political liberty. It has been a decisive instrument in preserving freedom through maintaining private control of economic power and thus limiting the power of government. [The Sharon Statement]
Limiting The Power Of Government
The assertions that conservatives make about the evils of big government and collectivism play a big part in their thinking about liberty, so we need to know what it is they say. We have a couple of contrasting beliefs right off the bat.
The State is our enemy. [Frank Chodorov]
But Burke sees it differently. He who gave us our nature to be perfected willed therefor the State. [Edmund Burke]
I’ll use the terms "The State" and "government" interchangeably. Conservative attitudes raise a host of questions and I won’t have the space to deal with them all here. The big problem is that conservatives lump all governments together, ignoring time, place and history. Another problem is that they pick a few examples of governments, such as Nazism, and generalize. And another problem is that Individualism, which recognizes only the individual and rejects the notion that society even exists, has a difficult time reconciling itself to the very existence of any government. Then there is the problem of human nature. Our evil and depraved human nature seems to be the source of the basic skepticism that conservatives have about government.
The conservative wants political freedom precisely because he fears the fundamental nature of man. [M. Stanton Evans]
There it is. The basic conservative concern and the reason for the genesis of the elaborate and convoluted dance with modernism, the free-market and government. A common refrain among conservatives, based on this assessment of man’s nature, is that:
Government should be structured so that bad men can do the least harm.
Stanton and other conservatives tie together freedom, the free-market, man’s nature and limited government in one nice package. Freedom is based on mistrust of human nature.
The Problem Of Coercion
To have an orderly and stable society government must have a monopoly on violence. [George Will]
The existence of The State presents a direct contradiction of the notion of liberty, which includes in its definition the admonition that the coercion of one person by another is justified only to prevent that person from harming someone else.
The Libertarian - as well as the fusionist Meyer - position holds that violence must be strictly limited to defending the freedom of individuals, their rights to person and property, against violent interference by others. [Murray Rothbard]
Murray calls The State the "social instrument of legalized violence," which is otherwise referred to as "the police power of the State." And yet it is thought by conservatives that government is the greatest threat to the coercion of the individual.
The fundamental threat to freedom is the power to coerce, be it in the hands of a monarch, a dictator, an oligarchy, or a momentary majority. The preservation of freedom requires the elimination of such concentration of power. The "Market" acts as a check to the power of government. [Milton Friedman]
But Hayek recognizes a contradiction for conservatives.
The conservative attitude is difficult to reconcile with the preservation of liberty. In general, it can probably be said that the conservative does not object to coercion or arbitrary power so long as it is used for what he regards as the right purposes. Like the socialist, he is less concerned with the problem of how the powers of government should be limited than with that of who wields them; and, like the socialist, he regards himself as entitled to force the value he holds on other people. [Friedrich Hayek]
Contemporary conservatives, for instance, see nothing wrong with using the police power of The State to enforce their views on morality, including a prohibition against abortion and gay marriage.
The Problem Of Power And The Status Quo
Timing is everything. Things generally happen in tandem, though not necessarily at the same time and in the same degree. So it is that the accumulation of economic and social power in the United States preceded the development of government. The government that was created reflected the priorities of those already with power and the police power of government was exercised in conformance with their interests.
Conservatives assert that there exists an "American Tradition," which all citizens have some obligation to follow. What actually exists is a tradition from which many Americans were excluded in the forming. The poor in America at its founding were one such group.
Throughout the secret discussions at the Constitutional Convention it was clear that this distrust of man was first and foremost a distrust of the common man and democratic rule. [Richard Hofstadter]
Laws and governments may be considered a combination of the rich to oppress the poor and preserve to themselves the inequality of the goods, which would otherwise be soon destroyed by the attacks of the poor, who if not hindered by the government would soon reduce others to an equality with themselves by open violence. [Adam Smith]
Conservative Fears of Collectivism And The Welfare State: Or The Nanny Individualists
The establishment of the welfare state entails the surrender, bit by bit, of minor freedoms which, added together, can alter the very shape of our existence. [Buckley]
Conservatives warn of dire consequences in the loss of liberty if a nation creates a Welfare State. Liberty is a preference of conservatives and is not, as they try to convince us, a mandate from God.
The United States has adopted social security and Medicare and Medicaid - two socialist programs - and most of our citizens are quite happy to give up some liberty - if that is the case - in exchange for these social programs. Most Americans feel that conservatives’ dire predictions have not come to pass. "The very shape of our existence" may have changed, but most Americans believe it has changed for the better.
Something, indeed almost everything, about the modern state causes it to swell. The principal cause is the modern citizenry. Conservatives have not faced the fact that "the public" is a quilt of constituencies for government programs. [George Will]
Choosing A Better Life
At no time in my reading of conservative literature have I seen support for policies that will enable American citizens to choose policies that will purposely lead to a better life for them as they perceive it. Conservatives always emphasize that their highest value is individual choice no matter what the consequences.
The dire warnings that conservatives make about the Welfare State have the intention of taking away from individuals the opportunity to choose Social Security and other social programs. It tells us that Individualists are not really in favor of choice, but only in favor of choices of which they approve. Ultimately conservatives end up claiming that they know what’s best for everybody.
The Free-Market
Conservatives would have you believe that you are a traitor to America is you have even the slightest bit of skepticism about a mysterious process for which no one can take responsibility.
We believe that the market economy, allocating resources by the free play of supply and demand, is the single economic system compatible with the requirements of personal freedom and constitutional government, and that it is at the same time the most productive supplier of human needs.[The Sharon Statement, which is the first statement of principles of the modern conservative movement, September 11, 1960]
When conservatives advocate the creation of a system in which "bad men can do the least harm." it is assumed that conservatives are speaking of the potential evils of men who have the reins of government, but to be consistent the free-market ought to be viewed with the same "mistrust of human nature" as it is in government. This is not the case.
When Individualists stress individual rights they tend to assume that the individual acting for himself will act in a socially beneficial way. To the Traditionalists the history of the twentieth century does not sustain that assumption. [George Nash]
Nash references the Traditionalist view that the morality of man has degenerated in the
20th century. Traditionalists believe that morality should be a check on the potential evils that bad men can do in the free market. Neo-conservative Irving Kristol points out that Adam Smith assumed that morality would hold potential evil in check, but Kristol believes that the modern free-market has become a system that is indifferent to the morality of the individual.
Smith never did reduce man, as modern economic thought does, to the status of a naked individual who is the sum of all his individual appetites. He understands that men are not just producers and consumers, and that our religious and political traditions are bound to affect, in a powerful and pervasive way, our economic performance. [Irving Kristol]
Friedman and the Libertarians have a couple of problems. One is that most people have really strong constraints about their voluntary choices. Power and money make some people more equal than others.
The other problem is that people come with values already determined if they are adults. They come with already determined economic and social status. Friedman’s view of the free-market is that every individual is interchangeable with every other individual.
Free-market theory also contains a number of assumptions which are just not true. It ignores differences in social and economic power among individuals and assumes that power is distributed in a democratic way across the population. It also assumes that it’s very birth was instantaneous and disconnected from government and the rest of society’s institutions. Not true.
A free market economic system is a system. It is a public product, a creation of government. It requires an educational system, banking and currency systems, highly developed laws of commerce and much more. [George Will]
Mysterious Processes
The free-market is the paradigm of a social order emerging spontaneously from the interplay of decentralized choices, from the workings of a mysterious process that can be comprehended as an historical whole, or what the Traditionalists would call tradition. [Buckley and Kesler]
You may remember that people like Hallowell and Rothbard are skeptical that the processes of history which produce institutions and traditions [the Burkean and utilitarian models] produce only good traditions. And given the presumed evil and depraved nature of man it would seem a good bet that man would produce evil institutions even more frequently that good institutions.
Hayek and Friedman have presented us with a theory which says that the interactions between individuals in the Market nullify the inherent evil in each individual and in some mysterious way midwife only good consequences. Hayek even describes his system as a "third way," which doesn’t rely on supernatural causes. I think Hayek doesn’t recognize the supernatural when he sees it.
Conservatives tie freedom to this model of process in a free-market and extend it to society as a whole, the "spontaneously emerging social order" Buckley and Kesler cite.
We believe that liberty is indivisible, and that political freedom cannot long exist without economic freedom. [The Sharon Statement]
I will simply submit that we should be skeptical about the rhetorical claims of
conservatives about freedom and the free-market and let Burke have the last word here.
Is it because liberty in the abstract may be classed among the blessings of mankind, that I am to seriously felicitate a madman, who has escaped from the protecting restraint and wholesome darkness of his cell, on his restoration to the enjoyment of light and liberty? [Edmund Burke]
Limitations On Liberty
Conservatives don’t believe in total or unrestrained liberty. So, when they tell you about liberty they are lying, at least by omission. Conservatives see boundaries on liberty.
Some form of constraint is necessary to let men live together. [M. Stanton Evans]
Conservatives assume a status quo when they talk about liberty, an American Tradition upon which citizens agree. A society has a right to defend itself from those who would overturn its basic principles.
Does a free society prove false to itself if it denies civil liberties to Communists, Nazis, or anyone else who would use these liberties as a means of destroying the free society? The answer is plain that it does not. [Harry Jaffa]
Morals must be restraints on complete freedom, they must determine what is permissible and what not. I am afraid that there must be limits even to tolerance. [Willmoore Kendall]
Repression is an unpleasant instrument, but it is absolutely necessary for civilizations that believe in order and human rights. [Buckley]
The problem with all this is that conservatives have a preference for order and stability
against the desires of other American citizens for a better life.
Who Is To Choose?
I’ve been trying to show that conservatives’ condemnation of The Welfare State is basically a preference for a status quo which has at one time or another serially marginalized blacks, poor people, workers, immigrants, women, gays and anybody else you can name who might threaten the status quo. At any given time there is only so much material and social power to be distributed and in order to give anything more to those on the lower end of the power scale the haves would have to give some of their stuff to the have-nots. That, they emphatically have not wanted to do. So they have concocted a scheme whereby the have-nots can only improve their lives if our economy grows. The have-nots must earn their better life through hard work in the free-market. Rather than any noble dedication to liberty this is simply a con job designed to preserve the status quo.
To those with the tragic vision the fundamental question is: Who is to choose? [Thomas
Sowell
Sowell correctly states that there is never enough to go around and that making one group better off usually makes another group less well off. [His analysis of spontaneous order is ill conceived as I have discussed]. Trade-offs must be made, Sowell continues, and somebody must choose the ground rules for how the trade-offs will be made.
The question, now as always, is not whether elites shall rule, but which elites. [George Will]
And Milton Friedman does acknowledge the positive role of government in our society.
Government is essential both as a forum for determining the "rules of the game" and as an umpire to interpret and enforce the rules decided upon. [Milton Friedman]
Hayek, Sowell and Friedman all begin their theories at a point in time or in their minds when the marginalized have already been marginalized: they are already slaves or already poor. They never got a seat at the table. They got lost, became a given in the vague and unspecified "inherent nature of things."
George Will seems to come closest to getting it, but doesn’t get it.
There has never been any doubt that certain inequalities are constitutive of sound social policies; they are prerequisites for desirable social ends. A just society is not one in which the allocation of wealth, opportunity, authority and status is equal. Rather, it is one in which inequalities are reasonably related to reasonable social goals. Questions as to how much equality of material condition society needs or morality demands or the economy can stand are less interesting than this question: How equal a distribution of ideas and sentiments is needed for social cohesion and all that derives from it? [George Will]
If I understand Will’s last sentence correctly he is reflecting the oft heard claim that America is a success because "the poor don’t want to overthrow the rich, they want to become rich." They have bought into the free-market paradigm.
What I question about Will’s statement is who determines what the desirable social ends are. I have the same problem with the passage from Hayek.
The problem is how self love may receive such direction as to promote the public interest by the evolution of well-constructed institutions that successfully channel individual efforts to socially beneficial aims. [Friedrich Hayek (We see a potential conflict with Sowell here, for Sowell would point out that meeting one group’s aims would lessen another group’s aims)]
Again, who determines what is socially beneficial and how? If we had included slaves and women in determining our social aims we might today live in a somewhat different society.
RECAP AND SUMMARY
It would be a lengthy catalog that listed all the conservative misrepresentations about the way the world is and works. I’ll just recap with a few of the most pervasive.
Mater si, Magistra no
In 1961 William F. Buckley wrote a comment in National Review rejecting Pope John XXIII’s encyclical which supports liberal social policies. If Buckley and the Pope can’t agree, who can?
This demonstrates one of the primary flaws of conservatism. Individually conservatives tell us that they know the mind of God, but collectively they cannot agree. An Objective Moral Order may exist but conservatives don’t know what it says.
Human Nature is Depraved And Immutable
There is a contradiction between the conservative views that human nature is immutable and that morality - presumably a part of human nature - degenerated somewhere between the 9th and the 20th century. If morality can degenerate it can also improve, which means that human nature is not immutable. This is a contradiction between two basic conservative principles.
Character Is The Single Cause Of What Happens To Individuals
This is an example of the conservative preference for simple, single causation for all conditions and events. The Biological Model of causation says that conditions and events are caused by complex, interacting antecedents and I believe this is the way the world really works.
Conservatives do postulate the existence of a mysterious process that has numerous individual exchanges. But they do not imagine that the process has complex interactions which may have negative consequences for anyone. They believe that whatever happens is inerrently
justified and this is another example of their preference for simple causation.
Conservatives’ view of human nature fits the same pattern. I prefer a more flexible and malleable view of human nature that is open to learning, growth, change. Those attributes of human nature are absent from the conservative perspective.
Preference For Abstract, "Un-Moored" Principle
Conservatives’ Individualism is disconnected from any specific time and place and, hence, applies to nothing. This preference for principle allows conservatives to imagine that the United States in the 21st century is no different than Germany in the 1930s. It also allows conservatives to ignore just about any historical condition that doesn’t neatly fit into their scheme. We don’t hear a word of events such as industrialization or urbanization as being important causes in how the world got to be the way it is. This preference for principle does allow them to embrace their single cause theories and to ignore the fact that people and societies learn, develop and grow.
God, Personal Responsibility, Mysterious Processes, Just Deserts and Competition.
Conservatives cite each one of the above, during different discussions, as cause, single cause, but cause. No doubt an agile conservative mind can make this all work out, but it’s going to be hard and include a lot of sophistry. They are in contradiction to one another.
Bibliography
My primary sources were two anthologies: Keeping The Tablets, by William F. Buckley, Jr. and Charles R. Kesler; and The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, by George H. Nash. Two websites were also very useful: The American Conservative Union website and The Intellectual Conservative website.