What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?
Philip E. Agre
August 2004
Web version: http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/conservatism.html
Liberals in the United States have been losing political debates to
conservatives for a quarter century. In order to start winning again,
liberals must answer two simple questions: what is conservatism, and
what is wrong with it? As it happens, the answers to these questions
are also simple:
Q: What is conservatism?
A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.
Q: What is wrong with conservatism?
A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and
civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality
and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the
modern world.
These ideas are not new. Indeed they were common sense until
recently. Nowadays, though, most of the people who call themselves
"conservatives" have little notion of what conservatism even is.
They have been deceived by one of the great public relations campaigns
of human history. Only by analyzing this deception will it become
possible to revive democracy in the United States.
//1 The Main Arguments of Conservatism
From the pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the self-regarding thugs of
ancient Rome to the glorified warlords of medieval and absolutist
Europe, in nearly every urbanized society throughout human history,
there have been people who have tried to constitute themselves as
an aristocracy. These people and their allies are the conservatives.
The tactics of conservatism vary widely by place and time. But the
most central feature of conservatism is deference: a psychologically
internalized attitude on the part of the common people that the
aristocracy are better people than they are. Modern-day liberals
often theorize that conservatives use "social issues" as a way to
mask economic objectives, but this is almost backward: the true goal
of conservatism is to establish an aristocracy, which is a social
and psychological condition of inequality. Economic inequality
and regressive taxation, while certainly welcomed by the aristocracy,
are best understood as a means to their actual goal, which is simply
to be aristocrats. More generally, it is crucial to conservatism
that the people must literally love the order that dominates them.
Of course this notion sounds bizarre to modern ears, but it is
perfectly overt in the writings of leading conservative theorists
such as Burke. Democracy, for them, is not about the mechanisms of
voting and office-holding. In fact conservatives hold a wide variety
of opinions about such secondary formal matters. For conservatives,
rather, democracy is a psychological condition. People who believe
that the aristocracy rightfully dominates society because of its
intrinsic superiority are conservatives; democrats, by contrast,
believe that they are of equal social worth. Conservatism is the
antithesis of democracy. This has been true for thousands of years.
The defenders of aristocracy represent aristocracy as a natural
phenomenon, but in reality it is the most artificial thing on
earth. Although one of the goals of every aristocracy is to make
its preferred social order seem permanent and timeless, in reality
conservatism must be reinvented in every generation. This is true
for many reasons, including internal conflicts among the aristocrats;
institutional shifts due to climate, markets, or warfare; and
ideological gains and losses in the perpetual struggle against
democracy. In some societies the aristocracy is rigid, closed, and
stratified, while in others it is more of an aspiration among various
fluid and factionalized groups. The situation in the United States
right now is toward the latter end of the spectrum. A main goal
in life of all aristocrats, however, is to pass on their positions
of privilege to their children, and many of the aspiring aristocrats
of the United States are appointing their children to positions
in government and in the archipelago of think tanks that promote
conservative theories.
Conservatism in every place and time is founded on deception.
The deceptions of conservatism today are especially sophisticated,
simply because culture today is sufficiently democratic that the
myths of earlier times will no longer suffice.
Before analyzing current-day conservatism's machinery of deception,
let us outline the main arguments of conservatism. Although these
arguments have changed little through history, they might seem
unfamiliar to many people today, indeed even to people who claim
to be conservatives. That unfamiliarity is a very recent phenomenon.
Yet it is only through the classical arguments and their fallacies
that we can begin to analyze how conservatism operates now.
1. Institutions
According to the first type of argument, found for example in Burke,
social institutions are a kind of capital. A properly ordered society
will be blessed with large quantities of this capital. This capital
has very particular properties. It is a sprawling tangle of social
arrangements and patterns of thought, passed down through generations
as part of the culture. It is generally tacit in nature and cannot
be rationally analyzed. It is fragile and must be conserved, because
a society that lacks it will collapse into anarchy and tyranny.
Innovation is bad, therefore, and prejudice is good. Although
the institutions can tolerate incremental reforms around the edges,
systematic questioning is a threat to social order. In particular,
rational thought is evil. Nothing can be worse for the conservative
than rational thought, because people who think rationally might
decide to try replacing inherited institutions with new ones,
something that a conservative regards as impossible. This is where
the word "conservative" comes from: the supposed importance of
conserving established institutions.
This argument is not wholly false. Institutions are in fact sprawling
tangles of social arrangements and patterns of thought, passed down
through generations as part of the culture. And people who think
they can reengineer the whole of human society overnight are generally
mistaken. The people of ancien regime France were oppressed by the
conservative order of their time, but indeed their revolution did
not work, and would probably not have worked even if conservatives
from elsewhere were not militarily attacking them. After all, the
conservative order had gone to insane lengths to deprive them of the
education, practical experience, and patterns of thought that would
be required to operate a democracy. They could not invent those
things overnight.
Even so, the argument about conserving institutions is mostly untrue.
Most institutions are less fragile and more dynamic than conservatives
claim. Large amounts of institutional innovation happen in every
generation. If people lack a rational analysis of institutions,
that is mostly a product of conservatism rather than an argument for
it. And although conservatism has historically claimed to conserve
institutions, history makes clear that conservatism is only interested
in conserving particular kinds of institutions: the institutions that
reinforce conservative power. Conservatism rarely tries to conserve
institutions such as Social Security and welfare that decrease
the common people's dependency on the aristocracy and the social
authorities that serve it. To the contrary, they represent those
institutions in various twisted ways as dangerous to to the social
order generally or to their beneficiaries in particular.
2. Hierarchy
The opposite of conservatism is democracy, and contempt for democracy
is a constant thread in the history of conservative argument.
Instead, conservatism has argued that society ought to be organized
in a hierarchy of orders and classes and controlled by its uppermost
hierarchical stratum, the aristocracy. Many of these arguments
against egalitarianism are ancient, and most of them are routinely
heard on the radio. One tends to hear the arguments in bits
and pieces, for example the emphatic if vague claim that people
are different. Of course, most of these arguments, if considered
rationally, actually argue for meritocracy rather than for
aristocracy. Meritocracy is a democratic principle. George Bush,
however, was apparently scarred for life by having been one of the
last students admitted to Yale under its old aristocratic admissions
system, and having to attend classes with students admitted under
the meritocratic system who considered themselves to be smarter
than him. Although he has lately claimed to oppose the system of
legacy admissions from which he benefitted, that is a tactic, part
of a package deal to eliminate affirmative action, thereby allowing
conservative social hierarchies to be reaffirmed in other ways.
American culture still being comparatively healthy, overt arguments
for aristocracy (for example, that the children of aristocrats learn
by osmosis the profound arts of government and thereby acquire a
wisdom that mere experts cannot match) are still relatively unusual.
Instead, conservatism must proceed through complicated indirection,
and the next few sections of this article will explain in some
detail how this works. The issue is not that rich people are bad, or
that hierarchical types of organization have no place in a democracy.
Nor are the descendents of aristocrats necessarily bad people if
they do not try to perpetuate conservative types of domination over
society. The issue is both narrow and enormous: no aristocracy should
be allowed to trick the rest of society into deferring to it.
3. Freedom
But isn't conservatism about freedom? Of course everyone wants
freedom, and so conservatism has no choice but to promise freedom to
its subjects. In reality conservatism has meant complicated things
by "freedom", and the reality of conservatism in practice has scarcely
corresponded even to the contorted definitions in conservative texts.
To start with, conservatism constantly shifts in its degree of
authoritarianism. Conservative rhetors, in the Wall Street Journal
for example, have no difficulty claiming to be the party of freedom
in one breath and attacking civil liberties in the next.
The real situation with conservatism and freedom is best understood
in historical context. Conservatism constantly changes, always
adapting itself to provide the minimum amount of freedom that is
required to hold together a dominant coalition in the society. In
Burke's day, for example, this meant an alliance between traditional
social authorities and the rising business class. Although the
business class has always defined its agenda in terms of something it
calls "freedom", in reality conservatism from the 18th century onward
has simply implied a shift from one kind of government intervention
in the economy to another, quite different kind, together with a
continuation of medieval models of cultural domination.
This is a central conservative argument: freedom is impossible unless
the common people internalize aristocratic domination. Indeed, many
conservative theorists to the present day have argued that freedom
is not possible at all. Without the internalized domination of
conservatism, it is argued, social order would require the external
domination of state terror. In a sense this argument is correct:
historically conservatives have routinely resorted to terror when
internalized domination has not worked. What is unthinkable by design
here is the possibility that people might organize their lives in a
democratic fashion.
This alliance between traditional social authorities and the
business class is artificial. The market continually undermines
the institutions of cultural domination. It does this partly through
its constant revolutionizing of institutions generally and partly
by encouraging a culture of entrepreneurial initiative. As a result,
the alliance must be continually reinvented, all the while pretending
that its reinventions simply reinstate an eternal order.
Conservatism promotes (and so does liberalism, misguidedly) the idea
that liberalism is about activist government where conservatism is
not. This is absurd. It is unrelated to the history of conservative
government. Conservatism promotes activist government that acts in
the interests of the aristocracy. This has been true for thousands of
years. What is distinctive about liberalism is not that it promotes
activist government but that it promotes government that acts in the
interests of the majority. Democratic government, however, is not
simply majoritarian. It is, rather, one institutional expression of
a democratic type of culture that is still very much in the process of
being invented.
//2 How Conservatism Works
Conservative social orders have often described themselves
as civilized, and so one reads in the Wall Street Journal that
"the enemies of civilization hate bow ties". But what conservatism
calls civilization is little but the domination of an aristocracy.
Every aspect of social life is subordinated to this goal. That is
not civilization.
The reality is quite the opposite. To impose its order on society,
conservatism must destroy civilization. In particular conservatism
must destroy conscience, democracy, reason, and language.
* The Destruction of Conscience
Liberalism is a movement of conscience. Liberals speak endlessly of
conscience. Yet conservative rhetors have taken to acting as if they
owned the language of conscience. They even routinely assert that
liberals disparage conscience. The magnitude of the falsehood here
is so great that decent people have been set back on their heels.
Conservatism continually twists the language of conscience into
its opposite. It has no choice: conservatism is unjust, and cannot
survive except by pretending to be the opposite of what it is.
Conservative arguments are often arbitrary in nature. Consider, for
example, the controversy over Elian Gonzalez. Conservatism claims
that the universe is ordered by absolutes. This would certainly make
life easier if it was true. The difficulty is that the absolutes
constantly conflict with one another. When the absolutes do not
conflict, there is rarely any controversy. But when absolutes do
conflict, conservatism is forced into sophistry. In the case of
Elian Gonzalez, two absolutes conflicted: keeping families together
and not making people return to tyrannies. In a democratic society,
the decision would be made through rational debate. Conservatism,
however, required picking one of the two absolutes arbitrarily (based
perhaps on tactical politics in Florida) and simply accusing anyone
who disagreed of flouting absolutes and thereby nihilistically denying
the fundamental order of the universe. This happens every day.
Arbitrariness replaces reason with authority. When arbitrariness
becomes established in the culture, democracy decays and it becomes
possible for aristocracies to dominate people's minds.
Another example of conservative twisting of the language of
conscience is the argument, in the context of the attacks of 9/11
and the war in Iraq, that holding our side to things like the Geneva
Convention implies an equivalence between ourselves and our enemies.
This is a logical fallacy. The fallacy is something like: they
kill so they are bad, but we are good so it is okay for us to kill.
The argument that everything we do is okay so long as it is not as
bad as the most extreme evil in the world is a rejection of nearly
all of civilization. It is precisely the destruction of conscience.
Or take the notion of "political correctness". It is true that
movements of conscience have piled demands onto people faster than
the culture can absorb them. That is an unfortunate side-effect of
social progress. Conservatism, however, twists language to make the
inconvenience of conscience sound like a kind of oppression. The
campaign against political correctness is thus a search-and-destroy
campaign against all vestiges of conscience in society. The
flamboyant nastiness of rhetors such as Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter
represents the destruction of conscience as a type of liberation.
They are like cultists, continually egging on their audiences to
destroy their own minds by punching through one layer after another
of their consciences.
Once I wrote on the Internet that bears in zoos are miserable
and should be let go. In response to this, I received an e-mail
viciously mocking me as an animal rights wacko. This is an example
of the destruction of conscience. Any human being with a halfways
functioning conscience will be capable of rationally debating
the notion that unhappy bears in zoos should be let go. Of course,
rational people might have other opinions. They might claim that
the bears are not actually miserable, or that they would be just
as miserable in the forest. Conservatism, though, has stereotyped
concern for animals by associating it with its most extreme fringe.
This sort of mockery of conscience has become systematic and
commonplace.
* The Destruction of Democracy
For thousands of years, conservatism was universally understood as
being in opposition to democracy. Having lost much of its ability
to attack democracy openly, conservatism has tried in recent years
to redefine the word "democracy" while engaging in deception to make
the substance of democracy unthinkable.
Conservative rhetors, for example, have been using the word
"government" in a way that does not distinguish between legitimate
democracy and totalitarianism.
Then there is the notion that politicians who offer health care
reforms, for example, are claiming to be better people than the rest
of us. This is a particularly toxic distortion. Offering reforms
is a basic part of democracy, something that every citizen can do.
Even more toxic is the notion that those who criticize the
president are claiming to be better people than he is. This is
authoritarianism.
Some conservative rhetors have taken to literally demonizing the very
notion of a democratic opposition. Rush Limbaugh has argued at length
that Tom Daschle resembles Satan simply because he opposes George
Bush's policies. Ever since then, Limbaugh has regularly identified
Daschle as "el diablo". This is the emotional heart of conservatism:
the notion that the conservative order is ordained by God and that
anyone and anything that opposes the conservative order is infinitely
evil.
* The Destruction of Reason
Conservatism has opposed rational thought for thousands of years.
What most people know nowadays as conservatism is basically a public
relations campaign aimed at persuading them to lay down their capacity
for rational thought.
Conservatism frequently attempts to destroy rational thought, for
example, by using language in ways that stand just out of reach of
rational debate or rebuttal.
Conservatism has used a wide variety of methods to destroy reason
throughout history. Fortunately, many of these methods, such as
the suppression of popular literacy, are incompatible with a modern
economy. Once the common people started becoming educated, more
sophisticated methods of domination were required. Thus the invention
of public relations, which is a kind of rationalized irrationality.
The great innovation of conservatism in recent decades has been the
systematic reinvention of politics using the technology of public
relations.
The main idea of public relations is the distinction between
"messages" and "facts". Messages are the things you want people
to believe. A message should be vague enough that it is difficult
to refute by rational means. (People in politics refer to messages
as "strategies" and people who devise strategies as "strategists".
The Democrats have strategists too, and it is not at all clear that
they should, but they scarcely compare with the vast public relations
machinery of the right.) It is useful to think of each message
as a kind of pipeline: a steady stream of facts is selected (or
twisted, or fabricated) to fit the message. Contrary facts are of
course ignored. The goal is what the professionals call "message
repetition". This provides activists with something to do: come up
with new facts to fit the conservative authorities' chosen messages.
Having become established in this way, messages must also be
continually intertwined with one another. This is one job of pundits.
To the public relations mind, the public sphere is a game in which
the opposition tries to knock you off your message. Take the example
of one successful message, "Gore's lies". The purpose of the game
was to return any interaction to the message, namely that Gore lies.
So if it is noted that the supposed examples of Gore lying (e.g., his
perfectly true claim to have done onerous farm chores) were themselves
untrue, common responses would include, "that doesn't matter, what
matters is Gore's lies", or "the reasons people believe them is
because of Gore's lies", or "yes perhaps, but there are so many other
examples of Gore's lies", or "you're just trying to change the subject
away from Gore's lies", and so on.
Many of these messages have become institutions. Whole organizations
exist to provide a pipeline of "facts" that underwrite the message of
"liberal media bias". These "facts" fall into numerous categories and
exemplify a wide range of fallacies. Some are just factually untrue,
e.g., claims that the New York Times has failed to cover an event
that it actually covered in detail. Other claimed examples of bias
are non sequiturs, e.g., quotations from liberal columns that appear
on the opinion pages, or quotations from liberals in news articles
that also provided balancing quotes from conservatives. Others are
illogical, e.g., media that report news events that represent bad
news for the president. The methods of identifying "bias" are thus
highly elastic. In practice, everything in the media on political
topics that diverges from conservative public relations messages is
contended to be an example of "liberal bias". The goal, clearly, is
to purge the media of everything except conservatism.
The word "inaccurate" has become something of a technical term in
the political use of public relations. It means "differs from our
message".
Public relations aims to break down reason and replace it with mental
associations. One tries to associate "us" with good things and
"them" with bad things. Thus, for example, the famous memo from
Newt Gingrich's (then) organization GOPAC entitled "Language: A Key
Mechanism of Control". It advised Republican candidates to associate
themselves with words like "building", "dream", "freedom", "learn",
"light", "preserve", "success", and "truth" while associating
opponents with words like "bizarre", "decay", "ideological", "lie",
"machine", "pathetic", and "traitors". The issue here is not whether
these words are used at all; of course there do exist individual
liberals that could be described using any of these words. The
issue, rather, is a kind of cognitive surgery: systematically creating
and destroying mental associations with little regard for truth.
Note, in fact, that "truth" is one of the words that Gingrich advised
appropriating in this fashion. Someone who thinks this way cannot
even conceptualize truth.
Conservative strategists construct their messages in a variety of
more or less stereotyped ways. One of the most important patterns
of conservative message-making is projection. Projection is a
psychological notion; it roughly means attacking someone by falsely
claiming that they are attacking you. Conservative strategists engage
in projection constantly. An commonplace example would be taking
something from someone by claiming that they are in fact taking it
from you. Or, having heard a careful and detailed refutation of
something he has said, the projector might snap, "you should not
dismiss what I have said so quickly!". It is a false claim -- what
he said was not dismissed -- that is an example of itself -- he is
dismissing what his opponent has said.
Projection was an important part of the Florida election controversy,
for example when Republicans tried to get illegal ballots counted
and prevent legal ballots from being counted, while claiming that
Democrats were trying to steal the election.
* The Destruction of Language
Reason occurs mostly through the medium of language, and so the
destruction of reason requires the destruction of language. An
underlying notion of conservative politics is that words and phrases
of language are like territory in warfare: owned and controlled by
one side or the other. One of the central goals of conservatism,
as for example with Newt Gingrich's lists of words, is to take control
of every word and phrase in the English language.
George Bush, likewise, owes his election in great measure to a new
language that his people engineered for him. His favorite word,
for example, is "heart". This type of linguistic engineering
is highly evolved in the business milieu from which conservative
public relations derives, and it is the day-to-day work of countless
conservative think tanks. Bush's people, and the concentric circles
of punditry around them, are worlds away from John Kerry deciding
on a moment's notice that he is going to start the word "values".
They do not use a word unless they have an integrated communications
strategy for taking control of that word throughout the whole of
society.
Bush's personal vocabulary is only a small part of conservative
language warfare as a whole. Since around 1990, conservative rhetors
have been systematically turning language into a weapon against
liberals. Words are used in twisted and exaggerated ways, or with the
opposite of their customary meanings. This affects the whole of the
language. The goal of this distorted language is not simply to defeat
an enemy but to destroy the minds of the people who believe themselves
to be conservatives and who constantly challenge themselves to ever
greater extremity in using it.
A simple example of turning language into a weapon might be the word
"predictable", which has become a synonym for "liberal". There is no
rational argument in this usage. Every such use of "predictable" can
be refuted simply by substituting the word "consistent". It is simply
invective.
More importantly, conservative rhetors have been systematically
mapping the language that has historically been used to describe the
aristocracy and the traditional authorities that serve it, and have
twisted those words into terms for liberals. This tactic has the dual
advantage of both attacking the aristocracies' opponents and depriving
them of the words that they have used to attack aristocracy.
A simple example is the term "race-baiting". In the Nexis database,
uses of "race-baiting" undergo a sudden switch in the early 1990's.
Before then, "race-baiting" referred to racists. Afterward, it
referred in twisted way to people who oppose racism. What happened
is simple: conservative rhetors, tired of the political advantage that
liberals had been getting from their use of that word, took it away
from them.
A more complicated example is the word "racist". Conservative rhetors
have tried to take this word away as well by constantly coming up
with new ways to stick the word onto liberals and their policies. For
example they have referred to affirmative action as "racist". This
is false; it is an attempt to destroy language. Racism is the notion
that one race is intrinsically better than another. Affirmative
action is arguably discriminatory, as a means of partially offsetting
discrimination in other places and times, but it is not racist. Many
conservative rhetors have even stuck the word "racist" on people just
because they oppose racism. The notion seems to be that these people
addressed themselves to the topic of race, and the word "racist" is
sort of an adjective relating somehow to race. In any event this too
is an attack on language.
A recent example is the word "hate". The civil rights movement had
used the word "hate" to refer to terrorism and stereotyping against
black people, and during the 1990's some in the press had identified
as "Clinton-haters" people who had made vast numbers of bizarre
claims that the Clintons had participated in murder and drug-dealing.
Beginning around 2003, conservative rhetors took control of this
word as well by labeling a variety of perfectly ordinary types of
democratic opposition to George Bush as "hate". In addition, they
have constructed a large number of messages of the form "liberals hate
X" (e.g., X=America) and established within their media apparatus a
sophistical pipeline of "facts" to support each one. This is also an
example of the systematic breaking of associations.
The word "partisan" entered into its current political circulation
in the early 1990's when some liberals identified people like Newt
Gingrich as "partisan" for doing things like the memo on language that
I mentioned earlier. To the conservative way of politics, there is
nothing either true or false about the liberal claim. It is simply
that liberals had taken control of some rhetorical territory: the word
"partisan". Conservative rhetors then set about taking control of the
word themselves. They did this in a way that has become mechanical.
They first claimed, falsely, that liberals were identifying as
"partisan" any views other than their own. They thus inflated
the word while projecting this inflation onto the liberals and
disconnecting the word from the particular facts that the liberals had
associated with it. Next, they started using the word "partisan" in
the inflated, dishonest way that they had ascribed to their opponents.
This is, very importantly, a way of attacking people simply for having
a different opinion. In twisting language this way, conservatives
tell themselves that they are simply turning liberal unfairness back
against the liberals. This too is projection.
Another common theme of conservative strategy is that liberals are
themselves an aristocracy. (For those who are really keeping score,
the sophisticated version of this is called the "new class strategy",
the message being that liberals are the American version of the Soviet
nomenklatura.) Thus, for example, the constant pelting of liberals
as "elites", sticking this word and a mass of others semantically
related to it onto liberals on every possible occasion. A pipeline
of "facts" has been established to underwrite this message as well.
Thus, for example, constant false conservative claims that the rich
vote Democratic. When Al Franken recently referred to his new radio
network as "the media elite and proud of it", he demonstrated his
oblivion to the workings of the conservative discourse that he claims
to contest.
Further examples of this are endless. When a Republican senator
referred to "the few liberals", hardly any liberals gave any sign
of getting what he meant: as all conservatives got just fine, he
was appropriating the phrase "the few", referring to the aristocracy
as opposed to "the many", and sticking this phrase in a false and
mechanical way onto liberals. Rush Limbaugh asserts that "they
[liberals] think they are better than you", this of course being
a phrase that had historically been applied (and applied correctly)
to the aristocracy. Conservative rhetors constantly make false or
exaggerated claims that liberals are engaged in stereotyping -- the
criticism of stereotyping having been one of history's most important
rhetorical devices of democrats. And so on. The goal here is to make
it impossible to criticize aristocracy.
For an especially sorry example of this pattern, consider the word
"hierarchy". Conservatism is a hierarchical social system: a system
of ranked orders and classes. Yet in recent years conservatives
have managed to stick this word onto liberals, the notion being that
"government" (which liberals supposedly endorse and conservatives
supposedly oppose) is hierarchical (whereas corporations, the
military, and the church are somehow vaguely not). Liberals are
losing because it does not even occur to them to refute this kind of
mechanical antireason.
It is often claimed in the media that snooty elitists on the coasts
refer to states in the middle of the country as "flyover country".
Yet I, who have lived in liberal areas of the coasts for most of my
life, have never once heard this usage. In fact, as far as I can
tell, the Nexis database does not contain a single example of anyone
using the phrase "flyover country" to disparage the non-coastal areas
of the United States. Instead, it contains hundreds of examples
of people disparaging residents of the coasts by claiming that they
use the phrase to describe the interior. The phrase is a special
favorite of newspapers in Minneapolis and Denver. This is projection.
Likewise, I have never heard the phrase "political correctness" used
except to disparage the people who supposedly use it.
Conservative remapping of the language of aristocracy and democracy
has been incredibly thorough. Consider, for example, the terms
"entitlement" and "dependency". The term "entitlement" originally
referred to aristocrats. Aristocrats had titles, and they thought
that they were thereby entitled to various things, particularly the
deference of the common people. Everyone else, by contrast, was
dependent on the aristocrats. This is conservatism. Yet in the
1990's, conservative rhetors decided that the people who actually
claim entitlement are people on welfare. They furthermore created
an empirically false association between welfare and dependency.
But, as I have mentioned, welfare is precisely a way of eliminating
dependency on the aristocracy and the cultural authorities that serve
it. I do not recall anyone ever noting this inversion of meaning.
Conservative strategists have also been remapping the language that
has historically been applied to conservative religious authorities,
sticking words such as "orthodoxy", "pious", "dogma", and
"sanctimonious" to liberals at every turn.
//3 Conservatism in American History
Almost all of the early immigrants to America left behind societies
that had been oppressed by conservatism. The democratic culture that
Americans have built is truly one of the monuments of civilization.
And American culture remains vibrant to this day despite centuries
of conservative attack. Yet the history of American democracy
has generally been taught in confused ways. This history might be
sketched in terms of the great turning points that happened to occur
around 1800 and 1900, followed by the great reaction that gathered
steam in the decades leading up to 2000.
* 1800
America before the revolution was a conservative society. It lacked
an entitled aristocracy, but it was dominated in very much the same
way by its gentry. Americans today have little way of knowing what
this meant -- the hierarchical ties of personal dependency that
organized people's psychology. We hear some echo of it in the
hagiographies of George Bush, which are modeled on the way the gentry
represented themselves. The Founding Fathers, men like Madison,
Adams, and Washington, were, in this sense, products of aristocratic
society. They did not make a revolution in order to establish
democracy. Quite the contrary, they wanted to be aristocrats. They
did not succeed. The revolution that they helped set in motion did
not simply sweep away the church and crown of England. As scholars
such as Gordon Wood have noted, it also swept away the entire social
system of the gentry, and it did so with a suddenness and thoroughness
that surprised and amazed everyone who lived through it. So
completely did Americans repudiate the conservative social system of
the gentry, in fact, that they felt free to mythologize the Founding
Fathers, forgetting the Founding Fathers' aristocratic ambitions
and pretending that they, too, were revolutionary democrats. This
ahistorical practice of projecting all good things onto the Founding
Fathers continues to the present day, and it is unfortunate because
(as Michael Schudson has argued) it makes us forget all of the
work that Americans have subsequently done to build the democratic
institutions of today. In reality, Madison, Adams, and Washington
were much like Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union. Like Gorbachev,
they tried to reform an oppressive system without fundamentally
changing it. And like Gorbachev, they were swept away by the very
forces they helped set into motion.
The revolution, though, proceeded quite differently in the North
and South, and led to a kind of controlled experiment. The North
repudiated conservatism altogether. Indeed it was the only society
in modern history without an aristocracy, and as scholars such as the
late Robert Wiebe have noted, its dynamic democratic culture was most
extraordinary. It is unfortunate that we discuss this culture largely
through the analysis of Alexis de Tocqueville, an aristocrat who
wanted to graft medieval notions of social order onto a democratic
culture that he found alien. In the South, by contrast, the
conservative order of the gentry was modified to something more
resembling the oppressive latifundist systems of Latin America,
relieved mainly by comparatively democratic religious institutions.
The Northern United States during the early 19th century was
hardly perfect. Left-over conservative hierarchies and patterns of
psychology continued to damage people's minds and lives in numerous
ways. But compared to the South, the North was, and has always been,
a more dynamic and successful society. Southern conservatism has
had to modify its strategies in recent decades, but its grip on the
culture is tragically as strong as ever.
* 1900
Something more complicated happened around 1900. Railroads,
the telegraph, and mass production made for massive new economies
of scale, whereupon the invention of the corporation gave a new
generation of would-be aristocrats new ways to reinvent themselves.
The complicated institutional and ideological events of this era can
be understood in microcosm through the subsequent history of the word
"liberal", which forked into two quite different meanings. The word
"liberal" had originally been part of an intramural dispute within the
conservative alliance between the aristocracy and the rising business
class. Their compromise, as I have noted, is that the aristocracy
would maintain its social control for the benefit of both groups
mainly through psychological means rather than through terror,
and that economic regulation would henceforth be designed to benefit
the business class. And both of these conditions would perversely
be called "freedom". The word "liberal" thus took its modern
meaning in a struggle against the aristocracy's control of the state.
Around 1900, however, the corporation emerged in a society in which
democracy was relatively strong and the aristocracy was relatively
weak. Antitrust and many other types of state regulation were not
part of traditional aristocratic control, but were part of democracy.
And this is why the word "liberal" forked. Democrats continued
using the word in its original sense, to signify the struggle against
aristocracy, in this case the new aristocracy of corporate power.
Business interests, however, reinvented the word to signify a struggle
against something conceptualized very abstractly as "government". In
reality the new business meaning of the word, as worked out in detail
by people like Hayek, went in an opposite direction from its original
meaning: a struggle against the people, rather than against the
aristocracy.
At the same time as the corporation provided the occasion for the
founding of a new aristocracy, however, a new middle class founded
a large number of professions. The relationship between the
professional middle class and the aristocracy has been complicated
throughout the 20th century. But whereas the goal of conservatism
throughout history has primarily been to suppress the mob of common
people, the conservatism of the late 20th century was especially
vituperative in its campaigns against the relatively autonomous
democratic cultures of the professions.
One of the professions founded around 1900 was public relations.
Early public relations texts were quite openly conservative, and
public relations practitioners openly affirmed that their profession
existed to manipulate the common people psychologically in order
to ensure the domination of society by a narrow elite. Squeamishness
on this matter is a recent phenomenon indeed.
* the 1970's
The modern history of conservatism begins around 1975, as corporate
interests began to react to the democratic culture of the sixties.
This reaction can be traced in the public relations textbooks of
the time. Elaborate new methods of public relations tried to prevent,
coopt, and defeat democratic initiatives throughout the society.
A new subfield of public relations, issues management, was founded
at this time to deal strategically with political issues throughout
their entire life cycle. One of the few political theories that has
made note of the large-scale institutionalization of public relations
is the early work of Jurgen Habermas.
Even more important was the invention of the think tank, and
especially the systematic application of public relations to politics
by the most important of the conservative think tanks, the Heritage
Foundation. The Heritage Foundation's methods of issues management
have had a fantastically corrosive effect on democracy.
* the 1980's
The great innovation of Ronald Reagan and the political strategists
who worked with him was to submerge conservatism's historically
overt contempt for the common people. The contrast between Reagan's
language and that of conservatives even a decade or two earlier
is most striking. Jacques Barzun's "The House of Intellect" (1959),
for example, fairly bristles with contempt for demotic culture,
the notion being that modern history is the inexorable erosion
of aristocratic civilization by democracy. On a political level,
Reagan's strategy was to place wedges into the many divides in
that era's popular democracy, including both the avoidable divides
that the counterculture had opened up and the divides that had long
been inherent in conservatism's hierarchical order. Reagan created
a mythical working class whose values he conflated with those of
the conservative order, and he opposed this to an equally mythical
professional class of liberal wreckers. Democratic culture in the
sixties had something of a workable theory of conservatism -- one that
has largely been lost. But it was not enough of a theory to explain
to working people why they are on the same side as hippies and gays.
Although crude by comparison with conservative discourse only twenty
years later, Reagan's strategy identified this difficulty with some
precision. People like Ella Baker had explained the psychology of
conservatism -- the internalized deference that makes a conservative
order possible. But the new psychology of democracy does not happen
overnight, and it did not become general in the culture.
* the 1990's
In the 1990's, American conservatism institutionalized public
relations methods of politics on a large scale, and it used
these methods in a savage campaign of delegitimizing democratic
institutions. In particular, a new generation of highly trained
conservative strategists evolved, on the foundation of classical
public relations methods, a sophisticated practice of real-time
politics that integrated ideology and tactics on a year-to-year,
news-cycle-to-news-cycle, and often hour-to-hour basis. This practice
employs advanced models of the dynamics of political issues so as
to launch waves of precisely designed communications in countless
well-analyzed loci throughout the society. For contemporary
conservatism, a political issue -- a war, for example -- is a
consumer product to be researched and rolled out in a planned way
with continuous empirical feedback from polling. So far as citizens
can tell, such issues seem to materialize everywhere at once, swarming
the culture with so many interrelated formulations that it becomes
impossible to think, much less launch an effective rebuttal. Such a
campaign is successful if it occupies precisely the ideological ground
that can be occupied at a given moment, and it includes quite overt
plans for holding that ground through the construction of a pipeline
of facts and intertwining with other, subsequent issues. Although in
one sense this machinery has a profound kinship with the priesthoods
of ancient Egypt, in another sense its radicalism -- its inhuman
thoroughness -- has no precedent in history. Liberals have nothing
remotely comparable.
//4 The Discovery of Democracy
Humanity has struggled for thousands of years to emerge from the
darkness of conservatism. At every step of the way, conservatism
has always had the advantage of a long historical learning curve.
There have always been experts in the running of conservative society.
Most of the stupid mistakes have been made and forgotten centuries
ago. Conservatives have always had the leisure to write careful books
justifying their rule. Democracy, by contrast, is still very much
in an experimental phase. And so, for example, the 1960's were one
of the great episodes of civilization in human history, and they were
also a time when people did a lot of stupid things like take drugs.
The history of democracy has scarcely been written. Of what has been
written, the great majority of "democratic theory" is based on the
ancient Greek model of deliberative democracy. Much has been written
about the Greeks' limitation of citizenship to perhaps 10% of the
population. But this is not the reason why the Greek model is
inapplicable to the modern world. The real reason is that Greek
democracy was emphatically predicated on a small city-state of a few
thousand people, whereas modern societies have populations in the
tens and hundreds of millions.
The obvious adaptation to the difficulties of scale has been
representation. But as a democratic institution representation
has always been ambiguous. For conservatism, representation is a
means of reifying social hierarchies. The Founding Fathers thought
of themselves as innovators and modernizers, and the myth-making
tradition has thoughtlessly agreed with them. But in reality
the US Constitution, as much as the British system it supposedly
replaced, is little more than the Aristotelian tripartite model of
king, aristocracy, and gentry (supposedly representing the commons),
reformed to some degree as President, Senate, and House. Many
people have noted that George Bush is consolidating executive power
in a kind of elective kingship, but they have done little to place
the various elements of Bush's authoritarian institution-molding
into historical context. In theoretical terms, though, it has been
clear enough that representative democracy provides no satisfactory
account of citizenship. Surely a genuine democracy would
replace the Aristotelian model? Fortunately, there is little
need to replace the Constitution beyond adding a right to privacy.
After all, as historians have noted, Americans almost immediately
started using the Constitution in a considerably different way than
the Founders intended -- in a democratic fashion, simply put, and
not an aristocratic one. The president who claims to be "a uniter
not a divider" is hearkening back to the myth-making of a would-be
aristocracy that claims to be impartial and to stand above controversy
while systematically using the machinery of government to crush its
opponents. But his is not the winning side.
Not that democracy is a done deal. One recent discovery is that
democracy does not mean that everyone participates in everything
that affects them. Every citizen of a modern society participates
in hundreds of institutions, and it is impossible to be fully informed
about all of them, much less sit through endless meetings relating to
all of them. There are too many issues for everyone to be an expert
on everything.
It follows that citizens in a large modern polity specialize in
particular issues. In fact this kind of issue entrepreneurship is
not restricted to politics. It is central to the making of careers in
nearly every institution of society. Conservatism claims to own the
theme of entrepreneurship, but then conservatism claims to own every
theme. In reality, entrepreneurship on the part of the common people
is antithetical to conservatism, and conservatism has learned and
taught little about the skills of entrepreneurship, most particularly
the entrepreneurial cognition that identifies opportunities
for various sorts of useful careers, whether civic, intellectual,
professional, or economic. Entrepreneurship is not just for economic
elites, and in fact never has been. One part of democracy, contrary
to much socialist teaching, is the democratization of goods and
skills, entrepreneurial skills for example, that had formerly been
associated with the elite. American society has diverged dramatically
from that of Europe largely because of the democratization of
entrepreneurship, and that trend should continue with the writing down
and teaching of generalized entrepreneurial skills.
The real discovery is that democracy is a particular kind of social
organization of knowledge -- a sprawling landscape of overlapping
knowledge spheres and a creative tension on any given issue between
the experts and the laity. It is not a hierarchical divide between
the knowledge-authorities in the professions and a deferential
citizenry; instead it democratizes the skills of knowledge-making
among a citizenry that is plugged together in ways that increasingly
resemble the institutional and cognitive structures of the
professions. This generalized application of entrepreneurial skills
in the context of a knowledge-intensive society -- and not simply
the multiplication of associations that so impressed Tocqueville
-- is civil society. The tremendous fashion for civil society as
a necessary complement and counterbalance to the state in a democracy,
as launched in the 1980's by people like John Keane, has been one
of the most hopeful aspects of recent democratic culture. Indeed, one
measure of the success of the discourse of civil society has been that
conservatism has felt the need to destroy it by means of distorted
theories of "civil society" that place the populace under the tutelage
of the aristocracy and the cultural authorities that serve it.
Economics, unfortunately, is still dominated by the ancien regime.
This consists of three schools. Neoclassical economics is founded
(as Philip Mirowski has argued) on superficial, indeed incoherent
analogies to the mathematics of classical mechanics whose main notion
is equilibrium. Economies, it is held, are dynamic systems that
are constantly moving to an optimal equilibrium, and government
intervention will only move the economy to the wrong equilibrium.
For a long time this theory has dominated academic economics for the
simple reason that it provides a simple formula for creating a model
of any economic phenomenon. Its great difficulty is that it ignores
essentially all issues of information and institutions -- important
topics in the context of any modern economy. Austrian economics
(associated with Hayek and Mises) began in the context of debates
about the practicability of central planning in socialism; as such, it
is organized around an opposition between centralized economies (bad)
and decentralized economies (good). Although preferable in some ways
to neoclassicism in its emphasis on information and institutions, as
well as its rhetorical emphasis on entrepreneurship, it is nonetheless
hopelessly simplistic. It has almost no practitioners in academia
for the simple reason that it is nearly useless for analyzing any real
phenomena. A third school, a particular kind of game theory based on
the work of John Nash, does have elaborate notions about information
and at least a sketchy way of modeling institutions, and as a
result has established itself as the major academic alternative to
neoclassicism. Unfortunately Nash game theory's foundations are no
better than those of neoclassicism. Whereas neoclassicism, though
ultimately incoherent, is actually a powerful and useful way of
thinking about the economy, Nash game theory is based, as Mirowski
again has argued, on a disordered model of relationships between
people. Fortunately it has no particular politics.
The state of economics is unfortunate for democracy. Conservatism
runs on ideologies that bear only a tangential relationship to
reality, but democracy requires universal access to accurate theories
about a large number of nontrivial institutions. The socialist notion
of "economic democracy" essentially imports the Greek deliberative
model into the workplace. As such it is probably useful as a counter
to conservative psychologies of internalized deference that crush
people's minds and prevent useful work from being done. It is,
however, not remotely adequate to the reality of an interconnected
modern economy, in which the workplace is hardly a natural unit.
A better starting place is with analysis of the practical work
of producing goods in social systems of actual finite human beings
-- that is, with analysis of information and institutions, as
for example in the singular work of Thorstein Veblen, John Commons,
Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Polanyi, John von Neumann, Mark Casson,
Joseph Stiglitz, Paul David, Bruno Latour, and Michel Callon.
This work emphasizes knowledge and the very general social conditions
that are required to produce and use it. Simply put, knowledge is
best produced in a liberal culture. This is why the most prosperous
and innovative regions of the United States are also the most
politically liberal, and why the most conservative regions of the
country are also the greatest beneficiaries of transfer payments.
Liberals create wealth and government redistributes it to
conservatives. This is, of course, the opposite of the received
conservative opinion in the media, and indeed in most of academia.
But it is true.
Another connection between democracy and a modern economy is the
democratic nature of entrepreneurialism. People who reflexively defer
to their social betters will never learn the social skills that are
needed to found new types of social relationships. This was clear
enough in the interregnum in the 19th century between the fall of the
American gentry and the rise of the modern corporation. An economy
of generalized entrepreneurialism, moreover, requires an elaborate
institutional matrix that is part public and part private. As
scholars such as Linda Weiss have argued, the conservative spectre
of a conflict between government and entrepreneurial activity is
unrelated to the reality of entrepreneurship. To be sure, much has
been learned about the kinds of government policies that do and do
not lay the foundation for economic dynamism. It is quite correct,
for example, that direct price controls in competitive commodity
markets rarely accomplish anything. (Labor markets are a much more
complicated case, in very much the ways that neoclassical economics
exists to ignore.) Free trade would also be a good thing if it
existed; in practice trade is distorted by subsidies and by uneven
regulation of externalities such as pollution, and "free trade"
negotiations are a kind of power politics that differs little from
the gunboat diplomacy that opened markets in a one-sided way in former
times. The point is scarcely that markets are inherently democratic.
The economic properties of infrastructure and knowledge create
economies of scale that both produce cheap goods (a democratic effect)
and concentrate power (an anti-democratic effect). Conservatives
employ the democratic rhetoric of entrepreneurialism to promote the
opposite values of corporate centralization. But the 19th century's
opinions about the political and economic necessity of antitrust
are still true. More importantly, a wide range of public policies
is required to facilitate a democratic economy and the more general
democratic values on which it depends.
Lastly, an important innovation of democracy during the sixties was
the rights revolution. Rights are democratic because they are limits
to arbitrary authority, and people who believe they have rights cannot
be subjected to conservatism. Conservative rhetors have attacked
the rights revolution in numerous ways as a kind of demotic chatter
that contradicts the eternal wisdom of the conservative order. For
conservatism, not accepting one's settled place in the traditional
hierarchy of orders and classes is a kind of arrogance, and
conservative vocabulary is full of phrases such as "self-important".
Institutions, for conservatism, are more important than people.
For democracy, by contrast, things are more complicated. The rights
revolution is hardly perfect. But the main difficulty with it is
just that it is not enough. A society is not founded on rights
alone. Democracy requires that people learn and practice a range of
nontrivial social skills. But then people are not likely to learn or
practice those skills so long as they have internalized a conservative
psychology of deference. The rights revolution breaks this cycle.
For the civil rights movement, for example, learning to read was
not simply a means of registering to vote, but was also a means
of liberation from the psychology of conservatism. Democratic
institutions, as opposed to the inherited mysteries of conservative
institutions, are made of the everyday exercise of advanced social
skills by people who are liberated in this sense.
//5 How to Defeat Conservatism
Conservatism is almost gone. People no longer worship the pharaohs.
If the gentry were among us today we would have no notion of what
they were talking about. For thousands of years, countless people
have worked for the values of democracy in ways large and small.
The industrialized vituperations of conservative propaganda measure
their success. To defeat conservatism today, the main thing we have
to do is to explain what it is and what is wrong with it. This is
easy enough.
* Rebut conservative arguments
This is my most important prescription. Liberals win political
victories through rational debate. But after a victory is won,
liberals tend to drop the issue and move along. As a result,
whole generations have grown up without ever hearing the arguments
in favor of, for example, Social Security. Instead they have heard
massive numbers of conservative arguments against liberalism, and
these arguments have generally gone unrebutted. In order to save
civilization, liberals need a new language, one in which it is easy
to express rebuttals to the particular crop of conservative arguments
of the last few decades. And the way to invent that language is just
to start rebutting the arguments, all of them. This means literally
dozens of new arguments each day.
Do not assume that rebutting conservative arguments is easy, or
that a few phrases will suffice. Do not even assume that you know
what is wrong with the conservative arguments that you hear, or even
indeed what those arguments are, since they are often complicated
and confusing in their internal structure. Do not just repeat a stock
response that worked for some previous generation of liberals, because
your audience has already heard that response and already knows
what the counterargument is. Conservative rhetors have invested
tremendous effort in working around liberals' existing language.
In the old days, racists were racists and polluters were polluters.
But those old labels do not win arguments any more. Liberals
must now provide new answers in plain language to the questions that
ordinary citizens, having heard the arguments of conservatism, now
have. Do environmental regulations work? Why do we protect the civil
liberties of terrorists? Are liberals anti-American? What do we need
government for anyway?
* Benchmark the Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal's opinion page is the most important
conservative publication, and it is often described as a bulletin
board for the conservatism. A better metaphor, however, would be
a war room. Day by day, the Wall Street Journal's editors detect
liberal arguments coming over the horizon, and immediately they gather
up and distribute the arguments that conservatives will need to rebut
them. Since the retirement of its late editor Robert Bartley, the
Journal's opinion page has become more sophisticated. The crude lies
and belligerent irrationality of the Bartley era have not disappeared,
but they have certainly been attenuated. Daniel Henninger in
particular does something interesting with clouds of associations that
are subrational but not quite fallacious.
Liberals should not imitate the antireason of the Journal or other
distribution channels of conservative opinion. Instead, as part of
the hard work of inventing democracy, it will be necessary to tell the
difference between methods that liberals ought to be applying in their
own work, such as the day-to-day rebuttal of arguments, and methods
that liberals need to analyze and place in the same category as the
priesthood of Egypt.
* Build a better pundit
Political pundits in the media today are overwhelmingly conservative,
and the few liberal pundits are overwhelmingly journalists rather than
ideologists. It is difficult to identify a single pundit in the media
who consistently explicates liberal ideology. It is time to build a
democratic punditry.
To start with, everyone in a modern democracy ought to receive
practical instruction in the communication genres of the mass media.
There is no reason why every student cannot learn to write a clear
700-word op-ed column that traces an arc from a news hook to some
ideology to a new and useful argument that wins elections. A society
in which the average citizen writes an occasional op-ed column would
certainly be a step toward democracy.
But even if the skills of punditry are widespread, there is no
substitute for professional pundits who can make "brand names" of
themselves in the media, and talented people will not make careers
out of democratic punditry until they are reasonably assured of
being able to make money at it. This is where think tanks and their
philanthropic funders come in. Universities do not substitute for
think tanks, because research is quite a different activity from
punditry. Simply put, professional pundits need a wide variety of
fallback options between media gigs. Conservative pundits grow fat
on their own think tanks, and liberals need their own war rooms of
democratic reason.
* Say something new
Conservative rhetors win audiences largely because the things they are
saying seem new. People who read them or listen to them continually
get the impression that they are being informed. If news and opinion
editors seem biased against liberals, one reason is simply that
liberals are not delivering the goods. Whenever you get ready to
express a political opinion in the media, first ask whether you have
ever heard that opinion in the media before (as opposed, for example,
to scholarly works). If so, figure out what the counterarguments are
-- because there will be counterarguments -- and then proceed to base
your column on the counterarguments to that. Get ahead of the curve.
* Teach logic
Democracy requires that the great majority of citizens be capable
of logical thought. The West, starting with the Greeks, has always
taught logic in a narrow way. Logic does include the syllogism, but
it also includes a great deal of savoir faire about what constitutes
a good argument, a good counterargument, and a good counterargument
to that. In particular, the citizen must have a kind of map of the
arguments. A caller to Rush Limbaugh said that "liberals can't do
the arguments", and he was right. Existing curricula on "critical
thinking" are unfortunately very weak. They should be founded on
close analysis of actual irrationality.
Many on the left unfortunately abandon reason because they believe
that the actual basis of politics is something they call "power".
People like this have no notion of what power is. For example,
they will argue that reason is useless because the powers that
be will not listen to reason. This is confusion. The purpose of
reason is not to petition the authorities but to help other citizens
to cut through the darkness of conservative deception.
Others on the left believe that reason is the property of the elite.
This is true historically, but that is simply because the essence of
conservatism is to deprive the common people of the capacity to engage
in democracy. Many bad theories of democracy actually reinforce
conservatism, and this is one of them.
Similarly, others on the left argue that requiring politics to be
based on reason tilts the playing field in favor of the elite. This
is historically true as well, and politics based on money does the
same thing. But that is reality. The fact, again, is that democracy
needs the citizenry to be educated, and the skills of reason are the
foundation of democratic education. Democracy cannot be established
in any other way. Aristocratic rule is not reinforced by the use of
reason. The situation is quite the reverse: in order to fight off
democratic values, conservatism must simulate reason, and pretend
that conservative deception is itself reason when it is not. Many
conservative pundits, George Will and Thomas Sowell for example, make
their living saying illogical things in a reasonable tone of voice.
Democracy will be impossible until the great majority of citizens can
identify in reasonable detail just how this trick works.
* Conservatism is the problem
Contemporary conservatism's discourse is engineered with tremendous
sophistication to get past the specific arguments that liberals know
how to make. Conservative strategists, moreover, are willing to
achieve their goals incrementally, depending on the arguments that
liberals are capable of making at a given moment. Of course it is
important for liberals to make the arguments against each increment.
But it is more important to explain what conservatism is in general,
and then to explain what is wrong with it.
For example, I once heard Rush Limbaugh discussing with a listener
how school vouchers were just a conservative tactic, and how
conservatives' real goal was to eliminate public funding for education
altogether. This is the sort of thing that loses elections, and yet I
have never heard a liberal pundit discuss it.
The extreme nature of conservatism -- not just the extremity of
its rhetoric but the oppressiveness of its prescriptions for society
-- is clear enough in the conservatives' own literature, but American
culture no longer has the categories to identify what it is. Indeed,
one can hear fascism, never mind conservatism, on the radio any day of
the week. But Americans have mostly forgotten what fascism even is,
so that they can listen to fascist rhetoric and it will actually sound
kind of fresh.
* Critically analyze leftover conservative theories
Liberal ideology is in disarray. After all, conservative ideology
has dominated human thought for thousands of years, and it takes
concentrated effort to liberate oneself from it. Such intellectual
liberation will never happen without a detailed history of
conservative theories -- which is to say, the ways in which these
theories have been designed to subordinate people's minds to a
hierarchical social order dominated by an aristocracy. Lacking
such a history, liberal ideology draws in random and confused ways
on conservatism, giving it a sentimental update without particularly
changing it. Or else liberalism spins out into something wishfully
called radicalism, which at best inverts conservatism into something
that does not work as well and does not liberate anyone either.
A genuine tradition of liberatory social thought does indeed exist,
but it must be disentangled from its opposite.
As an example, let us consider the notion of social capital, which has
been fashionable among both conservatives and liberals for some time
now. The conservative version of the social capital is a medieval
ideology that justifies the hierarchical conservative order in terms
of the values of community. This medieval notion of community is
particularistic in nature: everyone in a community is knitted to
everyone else through a system of roles and relationships into which
they are born, and which they supposedly accept and love. This
network of relationships is made to sound harmonious, and objections
to it are made to sound divisive, by neglecting to mention the
oppression of the life-long hierarchical bonds that make it up. This
is the kind of society whose passing Tocqueville lamented, and that
is at the core of modern conservatism in authors such as Robert Nisbet.
For Nisbet, modernity could only be understood in a negative way
as an erosion of the particular types of community and order that
traditional institutions provided. This is what many conservatives
mean when they value social capital, regret its decline, and urge its
revival.
This notion of social capital should be contrasted, for example, with
Ernest Gellner's notion of the modern democratic citizen as "modular",
that is, as capable of moving about within the society, building and
rebuilding relationships and associations of diverse sorts, because
of a set of social skills and social institutions that facilitate
a generalized, dynamic mobility. The modular citizen gets a place
in society not through birth or the bonds of an inherited order but
through a gregarious kind of entrepreneurial innovation.
The difficulty with too many liberal notions of social capital is
that they are oblivious to the tension between conservatism and
democracy. As a result, they are vague and ambiguous as to the
nature of social capital, how it might be measured, and what kinds
of institutions might erode or encourage it. For example, a theory
of social capital that locates it in plain numbers of social network
connections is insufficient because it undervalues social skills and
overvalues particularistic forms of community that are not adaptive
in a dynamic modern economy. This is how liberals end up quoting
Tocqueville and sounding indistinguishable from conservative theorists
of "intermediary institutions".
Social capital is just one example of a general crisis of liberal
ideology. The first step in resolving this crisis to get clear about
what conservatism is and what is wrong with it.
* Ditch Marx
Post-sixties, many liberals consider themselves to be watered-down
Marxists. They subscribe to a left-to-right spectrum model
of politics in which they, as democrats, are located in some
hard-to-identify place sort-of-somewhat-to-the-left-of-center, whereas
the Marxists have the high ground of a clear and definite location
at the end of the spectrum. These liberals would be further out
on the left if they could find a politically viable way to do it.
Conservative rhetors concur with this model, and indiscriminately
calling liberals communists is back in style. This is all nonsense.
Marxism is not located anywhere on a spectrum. It is just mistaken.
It fails to describe the real world. Attempts to implement it simply
created an ugly and shallow imitation of conservatism at its worst.
Democracy is the right way to live, and conservatism is the wrong way.
Marx was a brilliant analyst for his time. His analysis of
technology's role in the economy was wholly original. He was the
first to analyze the structural dynamism of a capitalist economy.
But his theory of modern society was superficial. It overgeneralized
from the situation of its time: the recent discovery of economies
of scale, crude market institutions, no modern separation of ownership
and control, and a small middle class. Marx followed the political
economy of his day in analyzing markets as essentially independent of
the state. But this is not remotely the case.
One difficulty with Marx, which is the topic of a vast literature,
is that his theory requires a periodization of history that does
not correspond to historical reality. Capitalism, for example, is
supposed to be a discrete totality, but claimed starting dates for
this totality range across a good four hundred years. His economistic
analysis of society, though indisputably productive in the way that
many powerfully wrong ideas are, makes history seem more discontinuous
than it is. In fact, the relationship between conservatism and
democracy is more or less constant throughout thousands of years of
history. One evidence of this, for example, is Orlando Patterson's
stunning discovery that Western notions of freedom were invented by
former slaves in the ancient world and have remained more or less
constant ever since.
In economic terms, Marx's theory is mistaken because he did
not analyze the role the capitalist plays as entrepreneur. The
entrepreneur does an important and distinctive type of work in
inventing new ways to bring together diverse factors of production.
Now in fact the nature of this work has remained largely hidden
throughout history for a wide variety of reasons. Because Marx had no
notion of it, the capitalist's profit seemed to him simple theft. It
does not follow, though, that entrepreneurs earn all of their money.
The theories of mainstream economics notwithstanding, serious how-to
manuals for entrepreneurs are quite clear that the entrepreneur
is trying to identify a market failure, because market failures
are how you make money. The relationship between entrepreneurship
and the state is much more complicated than economics has even tried
to theorize. Capitalists, moreover, are not a class. Particular
networks of capitalists and other well-off or otherwise connected
personages may well try to constitute themselves as an aristocracy,
but this is a phenomenon with several more dimensions than just
economics.
Nor is Marxism of any use as politics. All that Marx offered to
people who worked in deadening factory jobs was that they could
take over the factory. While unions and collective bargaining
exist in many contexts for good economic reasons, they are an
essentially medieval system of negotiations among orders and classes.
They presuppose a generally static economy and society. They are
irrelevant to knowledge-intensive forms of work. Nor do they provide
any kind of foundation for democratic politics. People want their
kids to be professionals, not factory workers, and democracy helps
people to knit themselves into the complicated set of institutions
that enable people to build unique and productive lives.
* Talk American
Despite all of the conservative attacks, American English remains a
useful language. So use it, and learn to say democratic things in it.
There is a style of academic "theory"-talk that claims to be advanced
and sophisticated but actually lacks any precision. "Privilege",
for example, is not a verb. If new words are needed and are actually
good for analyzing the deception of conservatism or the invention
of democracy, go ahead and teach them. Integrate them into the
vernacular language.
While you are at it, forget the whole strategy of the counterculture.
Be the culture instead.
* Stop surrendering powerful words
Many liberals abandon any word that conservatives start using.
That means, since conservatives systematically lay claim to every
word of the English language, that liberals have been systematically
surrendering powerful words such as family, nation, truth, science,
tradition, and religion. This has made it increasingly difficult
for liberals to explain what they believe. There is no alternative:
if conseratives have been twisting a powerful word, then you have
to explain in concise American English what the word really means
and how the conservatives have distorted it. Contest the signifiers.
Use the words.
* Tipper Gore is right
Snoop Dogg's music really is garbage. Some liberals, however, argue
that racists hate rap and so therefore any disapproval of rap abets
racism. This is bad logic and stupid politics. If racists hate rap
then the logical, rational, politically efficacious thing to do is to
say that some rap is good and some rap is bad, and that good rap is
an art form like any other, and that the bad rap exists because the
people who rap it are bad people.
Do not be afraid of losing contact with young people. If all you
know about youth culture is Snoop Dogg, then I suppose it is time
for some focus groups. Use the focus groups to identify language
that Martin Luther King would approve of. Besides, there is plenty
of good politics in mass culture, as cultural studies professors
have explained at length.
Nor should you be afraid of losing campaign contributions from the
entertainment industry. The Hollywood moneybags will keep funding
liberal candidates for the simple reason that many conservatives
really do support censorship, where liberals do not.
That said, there is certainly a disconnect between some liberal
entertainers and the liberals who win elections. Some entertainers
are willing to get up on stage and embarrass John Kerry. Scorn them.
* Assess the sixties
Make a list of the positive and lasting contributions of the sixties.
Americans would benefit from such a list.
* Teach nonviolence
The spiritual leader of modern liberalism, Martin Luther King,
taught nonviolence. This has been narrowly construed in terms of not
killing people. But, as King made clear, it has other meanings as
well. You have to love your enemies. This is difficult: the reality
of conservatism is so extreme that it is difficult even to discuss
without sounding hateful. There is also an intellectual dimension to
nonviolence. Nonviolence means, among other things, not cooperating
in the destruction of conscience and language. Nonviolence implies
reason. Analyze the various would-be aristocracies, therefore,
and explain them in plain language, but do not stereotype them.
Nonviolence also has an epistemological dimension. Few of us have
the skill to hate with a clear mind. Conservatism is very complicated,
and you cannot defeat it by shouting slogans. This is the difficulty
with Michael Moore. He talks American, which is good. But he is
not intellectually nonviolent. He is not remotely as bad as Ann
Coulter, and liberals have criticized him much more thoroughly than
conservatives have criticized Ann Coulter. But he is not a model for
liberal politics. There is no doubt that Martin Luther King would be
in George Bush's face. But how? That is why liberals need a language.
* Tell the taxpayers what they are getting for their money
Civilization requires a substantial number and variety of public
services, which in turn require moderate and reasonable amounts
of taxes. Despite decades of conservative rhetoric, a majority of
Americans are perfectly happy to pay their taxes. And yet liberals
keep letting conservatives clobber them with rhetoric that makes
taxes sound like a bad thing. It is time for liberals to stop losing
this argument. To start with, do not talk about amounts of money
("we should spend $15 billion on health care"). Instead, talk about
what the money buys ("we should provide medical care to 15 million
children"). And stop letting Bush call his tax policies "tax cuts":
he is not cutting those taxes; he is just postponing them.
* Make government work better for small business
The market continually undermines both conservatism and democracy.
Both systems must continually improvise to accommodate it.
The difference is that conservatism pretends to be a timeless
order whereas democracy is all about experiment, innovation,
and entrepreneurial culture. Conservatives have historically tried
to include entrepreneurs in their coalition, even though conservatism
is almost the opposite of the cultural conditions of a modern economy.
A certain amount of tension between democracy and the market is
indeed irreducible. But a great deal has been learned about markets
and their relationship to government, and the democratic culture of
innovation can reduce the unnecessary tensions between small business
and government while providing for social values such as urban design,
consumer information, and the environment.
An excellent example of this is duplicative paperwork. Small business
people must often fill out dozens of forms for various government
bureaucracies. This is a significant expense. These forms should be
combined and given a clean and unified interface. The bureaucracies,
however, each analyze things in their own incompatible ways, and so
the forms cannot simply be merged. Like much of democracy, this is an
interesting design matter.
* Clone George Soros
George Soros is an excellent citizen. Conservatism has gotten so
out of sync with the conditions of a modern economy that significant
numbers of wealthy people, especially young entrepreneurs who live and
breathe the liberal culture that makes successes like theirs possible,
would be happy to help build the institutions that a democratic
society needs. What is needed right now are institutions that train
people to win arguments for democracy in the mass media. Antireason
has become thoroughly established in the media, and it will take real
work to invent languages of reason that are fresh and cool. And this
work just costs money.
* Build the Democratic Party
Your model should be Pat Robertson. He is as extreme on the right
as anybody in the United States is on the left. Yet his people took
over large parts of the Republican Party. They did this in three
ways: laboriously designing a mainstream-sounding language, identifying
large numbers of talented activists and training them in the
day-to-day work of issue and party politics, and building their own
communications systems. Liberals should do the same.
Now, many liberals argue that the Democratic Party would magically
start winning again if it would only move to the left. This is lazy
nonsense. The Democratic Party has moved to the right for the simple
reason that liberals do not have a language that wins elections. To
take over the Democratic Party, liberals need to replace the left-wing
policies that do not work and, for the policies that do work, get a
language that moves 51% of likely voters to vote Democratic.
Other liberals argue that the Democratic Party, and the "system" in
general, are irretrievably broken, and that they must build a third
party, such as the Green Party with its endorsement of Ralph Nader.
The difficulties with this notion are hard to count. For one,
splitting the left is a certain recipe for centuries of aristocratic
domination. For another, building a party with only people who share
your opinions to the nth degree is a certain recipe for factionalism
and isolation. For another, the Green Party is a chaotic mess
that has no serious chance of becoming a mass-based political party.
Life under aristocratic domination is horrible. The United States
is blessed to have little notion of what this horror is like. Europe,
for example, staggered under the weight of its aristocracies for
thousands of years. European aristocracies are in decline, and Europe
certainly has its democratic heroes and its own dawning varieties
of civilized life, and yet the psychology and institutions that the
aristocracies left behind continue to make European societies rigid
and blunt Europeans' minds with layers of internalized oppression.
People come to America to get away from all of that. Conservatism
is as alien here as it could possibly be. Only through the most
comprehensive campaign of deception in human history has it managed
to establish its very tentative control of the country's major
political institutions. Conservatism until very recently was quite
open about the fact that it is incompatible with the modern world.
That is right. The modern world is a good place, and it will win.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Sun Aug 15 2004 - 19:14:34 PDT