Longtime readers here will remember one of my pet peeves, that the words conservative and liberal have lost their meanings in terms of contemporary American politics. Perhaps my background in linguistics is what makes me sensitive to this issue, but here's something that nicely encapsulates the problem and why these meanings are relevant.
What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It, an essay by Phillip Agre, a professor of information studies at UCLA. Let's get right to 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.
He's right about which questions to ask, but his first answer is only half right. His next answer -
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.
- is so loaded with vague and hateful judgements that it's useless. What's suprising about this is that he gives us a much more useful answer to the first question later in his essay, in terms of 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.
There's my preference for linguistic definitions again. I tend to think words mean what they mean, and conservatives want to conserve. When I say Agre's first answer is half right, I mean that societies with strong institutions tend to have entrenched aristocracies. It's a by-product of institutions but not necessarily intentional, and Agre quickly shows us why this distinction is important:
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.
His attempt to classify institutions is strictly arbitrary, and reflects what appears to be the author's leftist bias. Social Security stultifies society, it makes it difficult for lower wage earners to accumulate wealth and change their place in the economy. From that standpoint Social Security is the single most aristocratic institution in the U.S., although you could credibly argue that spot belongs to the public education system. The American Left is the most conservative political force in the country, because of its support of such institutions.
Posted by Walter at August 21, 2004 10:24 AM