Conservative Liberalism: Some Thoughts

I have remarked the sloppiness of most people, professional commentators most certainly included, with political language--even that political language which has well-established, very lucid definitions almost universally accepted by those educated in fields such as political science (something those commentators tend not to be, no matter how much elitism-mongering idiots will jump up and down pointing to their Ph.ds and J.D.s from so-called "good schools"). This is the more important because a nuanced vocabulary is essential to discussing anything illuminatingly, with politics no exception.

Considering those politics it seems to me that one term that merits wider understanding and usage is "conservative liberalism." One may speak of this as an ideology which is conservative in the fundamentals of its political philosophy, but (in its particular way) accommodated to and defensive of a liberal societal structure. Those conservative fundamentals are to be found in their pessimism about "human nature," and the potential of reason to be of use in understanding or managing human beings and their affairs, and going with it an inclination to a view of society as an "organic," naturally hierarchical entity, and respect for traditional institutions and values--against the liberal's confidence in human rationality, egalitarianism and skepticism toward tradition and readiness to change existing arrangements in line with their values. However, they accept the societal arrangements classical liberalism is credited with producing, with their stress on individual right assured by the "rule of law" and representative institutions.

In this combination of conservative theorizing with liberal institutions the former has a shaping effect on the design and operation of the latter. The adherent of conservative liberalism is likely to be in earnest that liberal rights and institutions should not upset a social order that is anything but equal. They are thus likely to stress some rights over others--rating the right of the property holder more highly than other human rights (a tendency at its extreme in the defense of slavery on the grounds of respect for the property rights of a slave's owner in pre-Civil War America). The conservative liberal is also likely to desire a limitation of representative government as a necessity for preserving (acceptable) representative government, as by limiting the franchise to exclude those who might be thought likely to vote "irresponsibly," and also limiting the consequences to votes that would appear to them "irresponsible" when and where they do happen, most obviously procedurally, but also by attempting to put the most important areas of life "outside politics" so as to make them untouchable by such "irresponsible" action. Thus do they support qualifications for the franchise that will exclude the most threatening elements in the population (e.g. with a property qualification that excludes the propertyless), support checks on the actions of elected politicians (for instance, checking a popularly elected legislative body with a more senior legislative body not directly elected by the public, and the legislature as a whole with judicial review by an unelected judiciary), and favor limits on government's sphere of competence altogether (for instance, via legislation or interpretation of the law so as to constrain rather than enable government, particularly with respect to its authority over property holders), thus sharply reducing the chances of the kinds of change that would be threatening to the social order--most obviously keeping the poor from using their votes to challenge the elite's power and privileges. As this preference for "liberty" over "fraternity" and "equality" implies, the conservative liberal is apt to be more attached to liberal capitalism than to liberal democracy, and to see the market as the domain of freedom as against a state in which, should it go beyond their view of its legitimate functions (above all, the protection of property), they are quick to see tyranny--by comparison with the "less conservative" liberal, who will often see it as necessary for the state to regulate property in order to preserve liberty.

In understanding the conservatism of this form of liberalism some will argue that liberalism has been conservative from the start--that liberalism has always been just an ideology of property owners pursuing their interests, speaking of "the rights of man" when this was an effective weapon against absolutism, feudalism and the princes of the Church who stood above them in the Old Regime, while even then ready to preempt any challenge from the peasants and proletarians and others below them. (Indeed, it seem relevant that while just about every scholar of the matter seems to identify Edmund Burke as the founder of the modern conservative tradition, there are those who also claim Burke--who had been a Whig and not a Tory--for the liberal camp.) However, whatever one thinks of that claim conservative liberalism is what people have long had in mind when they spoke of conservatism in the modern world, differentiating it from that side of the liberal tradition that placed more stress on equality and less on absolutist notions of the right of property ownership. It would also seem that in American history such conservative liberalism has generally constituted the range of mainstream politics, from the framing of the Constitution forward, with challenge to it, if more present than the "consensus historians" and their contemporaries cared to acknowledge, still tending to be an effectual force only for short periods, and if extracting important concessions in the process, still consistently neutralized and marginalized over the longer run. So does it remain today, especially in the wake of the "neoliberal" turn of American politics, and the embrace of neoliberalism by the Democratic Party that represented the "left" option put before the voter.