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What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong
with It?
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
ancient 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. A
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.
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