Reformers and radicals must convince the subordinated and disenfranchised that they have rights and power. Conservatives are different. They are aggrieved and entitled--aggrieved because entitled--and already convinced of the righteousness of their cause and the inevitability of its triumph. They can play victim and victor with a conviction and dexterity the subaltern can only imagine, making them formidable claimants on our allegiance and affection. Whether we are rich or poor or somewhere in between, the conservative is, as Hugo Young said of Maggie Thatcher, one of us.
But how do they convince us that we are one of them? By making privilege democratic and democracy aristocratic. Every man, John Adams claimed, longs "to be observed, considered, esteemed, praised, beloved, and admired." To be praised, one must be seen, and the best way to be seen is to elevate oneself above one's circle. Even the American democrat, Adams reasoned, would rather rule over an inferior than dispossess a superior. His passion is for supremacy, not equality, and so long as he is assured an audience of lessers, he will be content with his lowly status:
"Not only the poorest mechanic, but the man who lives upon common charity, nay the common beggars in the streets...court a set of admirers, and plume themselves on that superiority which they have, or fancy they have, over some others.... When a wretch could no longer attract the notice of a man, woman or child, he must be respectable in the eyes of his dog. 'Who will love me then?' was the pathetic reply of one, who starved himself to feed his mastiff, to a charitable passenger who advised him to kill or sell the animal."
It took the American slaveholder to grasp the power of this insight. The best way to protect their class, the masters realized, was to democratize it. Make every man, or at least every white man, a master, and so invested would he be in his mastery that he'd work to keep all others in their place. The genius of the slaveholding class was that it was "not an exclusive aristocracy," wrote Daniel Hundley in Social Relations in Our Southern States (1860). "Every free white man in the whole Union has just as much right to become an Oligarch." To that end, Southern politicians attempted to pass legislation and provide tax breaks to ensure that every white man owned at least one slave.
A century before Huey Long cried "Every man a king," a more ambiguous species of democrat spoke virtually the same words, to different effect. The promise of American life was to rule over another person. By and large, American conservatives have not defended an ancien régime of king, priest and lord. Nor have they appealed to antimodern arguments of tradition and history. Instead, they have surrounded an array of old regimes--in the family, the factory and the field--with fences and gates as they descant on mobility and innovation, freedom and the future.
Making privilege palatable to the democratic masses is a permanent project for conservatives, but each generation must tailor it to the contours of its times. In 1960, Goldwater's challenge was set out in his book's title: to show that conservatives had a conscience. Not a heart--he lambasted Eisenhower and Nixon for trying to prove that they were compassionate--or a brain, which liberals from John Stuart Mill to Lionel Trilling had doubted. Political movements often have to show that they can win, that their cause is just and their leaders are savvy, but rarely must they prove that theirs is a march of inner lights. Goldwater thought otherwise: to attract new voters and rally the faithful, conservatism had to establish its idealism and integrity, its absolute independence from the beck and call of wealth, from privilege and materialism--reality itself. If they were to change reality, conservatives would have to divorce themselves, at least in their
self-understanding, from reality.
In recent years, it has become fashionable to dismiss George W. Bush as a true believer who betrayed conservatism by abandoning its native skepticism and spirit of mild adjustment. Goldwater was independent and ornery, the argument goes, recoiling from anything so stultifying (and Soviet) as an ideology; Bush is rigid and doctrinaire, an enforcer of bright lines and gospel truths. Elements of this argument are found on the right (Andrew Sullivan, George Will and even John McCain) and on the left (Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Sidney Blumenthal and John Dean).
But this argument ignores the fact that conservatism has always been a creedal movement--if for no other reason than to oppose the creeds of the left. "The other side have got an ideology," declared Thatcher. "We must have one as well." To counter the left, the main reason for its existence, the right has had to mimic the left. Goldwater understood that, which is why it is strange to hear so many liberals today looking to him and his followers--everyone from Birchers to Focus on the Family--as a model for grassroots change. By focusing so intently on Goldwater, liberals overlook the fact that historically it has been the left that has tutored the right.
Reactionary theologians in eighteenth-century France mobilized against the left by aping its tactics. They funded essay contests, like those in which Rousseau made his name, to reward writers who wrote popular defenses of religion. They ceased producing abstruse disquisitions for one another and instead churned out Catholic agitprop, which they distributed through the very networks that brought enlightenment to the French people. Similarly, the slaveholders of nineteenth-century America looked to and admired the fastidiousness and industry of the abolitionists. "As small as they are," John C. Calhoun declared, they "have acquired so much influence by the course they have pursued."
Goldwater learned from the New Deal. During the Gilded Age, conservatives had opposed unions and government regulation by invoking workers' freedom to contract with their employer. Liberals countered that this freedom was illusory: workers lacked the means to contract as they wished; real freedom required material means. Goldwater agreed, only he turned that argument against the New Deal: high taxes robbed workers of their wages, rendering them less free and less able to be free. Channeling John Dewey, he asked, "How can a man be truly free if he is denied the means to exercise freedom?"
FDR claimed that conservatives cared more about money than men. Goldwater said the same about liberals. Focusing on welfare and wages, he charged, they "look only at the material side of man's nature" and "subordinate all other considerations to man's material well being." Conservatives took in "the whole man," making his "spiritual nature" the "primary concern" of politics and putting "material things in their proper place."
This romantic howl against the economism of the New Deal--similar to that of the New Left--was not a protest against politics or government; Goldwater was no libertarian. It was an attempt to elevate politics and government, to direct public discussion toward ends more noble and glorious than the management of creature comforts and material well-being. Unlike the New Left, however, Goldwater did not reject the affluent society. Instead, he transformed the acquisition of wealth into an act of self-definition through which the "uncommon" man--who could be anybody--distinguished himself from the "undifferentiated mass." To amass wealth was not only to exercise freedom through material means but also a way of lording oneself over others.
In "Conservative Thought," an unjustly neglected essay from 1927, Karl Mannheim argued that conservatives have never been wild about the idea of freedom. It threatens the submission of subordinate to superior. Because freedom is the lingua franca of modern politics, however, they have had "a sound enough instinct not to attack" it. Instead, they have made freedom the stalking horse of inequality, and inequality the stalking horse of submission. Men are naturally unequal, they argue. Freedom requires that they be allowed to develop their unequal gifts. A free society must be an unequal society, composed of radically distinct, and hierarchical, particulars.
<http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080623/robin>
[And while I am reposting old material, here's one to bookmark from Daniel Davies:]
As Kieran said, we're not necessarily all Isaiah Berlin fans on this site. But some of us are, including me, and I'd like to make use of one of his biggest contributions; the distinction between negative and positive liberty. Basically it's pretty intuitive; negative liberties are the absence of forcible restrictions on you doing something, positive liberties are the provision of the means for you to actually do something. As one might imagine, the libertarian half of the internet, on which Cato can reliably be located, tends to slag off positive liberties and claim that only negative liberties can legitimately be described as "Freedom!".
So let's look at the categories under which countries are scored [by the Cato Institute]. There are five major headings.
1. Size of Government: Expenditures, Taxes and Enterprises
2. Legal Structure and Security of Property Rights
3. Access to Sound Money
4. Freedom to Exchange with Foreigners
5. Regulation of Credit, Labor and Business
Of these, 4 and 5 are pretty straightforwardly negative liberties, 1 is a negative liberty under a charitable interpretation which allows the taxation of income to be considered a form of restriction on liberty, but 2 and 3 are quite clearly positive liberties. A sound and stable medium of exchange (including a stable financial system), and an honest and impartial judiciary and legal system are things that the government provides for you, so that you can make decent use of your economic freedom. Now one might possibly argue that in a perfect anarchocapitalist world these could be provided by someone other than the government, but even granted that incredibly arguable proposition, Cato have given away far too much. Including the two positive liberties in their index of economic freedom is equivalent to the admission that economic freedom is not really worth anything unless you have the ability to make use of it. Which opens the door for everyone else to
point out that "access to sound money and security of property rights" are all that you need in the way of positive liberties if you happen to be rich, but that if you aren't then you also need education, basic healthcare and social security.
This is, if I remember, what Isaiah Berlin ended up concluding; that once you let in any sort of positive liberty, it is powerfully difficult to avoid ending up with a concept of liberty that includes all and any of the compenents of what people need to live a good life. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that the philosophical usefulness of the concept of "Liberty!" as a motivating force for theories of political morality, is rather more limited that the rhetorical attractiveness of the word would suggest. As it stands, Cato have constructed an index of what rich people need in order to enjoy their money. Which is exactly what they're paid to do, but it doesn't really have all that much to do with economic freedom in _anyone's_ sense of the word.
<http://crookedtimber.org/2003/07/11/cor-baby-thats-really-free/>