Conservative Liberalism's Crisis of the 1940s, and Centrism's Emergence

In its "limitation of freedom to save freedom" the more conservative current within liberalism relied on a great many devices, some of which had fared less well than others over the years--as the difference between the early nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, and especially how things stood in the world in 1945. Two of these devices seem especially worth remarking as such. One was the limitation of the franchise, so as to deny those who were thought likely to be dangerous to the social order a vote as far as possible. Another regarded the use of the franchise by those who did have it, insofar as they might have been inclined to vote other than what the elite thought the "right" way--via religious indoctrination, with alongside that "old time religion" preached from the pulpit to mind the lower orders to keep their places the religion of "Lockean, atomistic individualism, wedded to Horatio Alger" in the economic sphere certainly an element of the package.

By the 1940s, in the wake of what Arno Mayer has very rightly called "The Thirty Years' Crisis" and the demise of the order that had preceded it, neither of those devices was plausible. At this point where the franchise was concerned nothing but universal suffrage would do, with at this point the barriers of sex and race having lost any legitimacy they had ever had in the eyes of much of the world, and Jim Crow-like subterfuges along with them. At the same time even much of the Establishment, for all its loyalty to the old world, reluctantly conceded that the old-fashioned economic liberalism was pretty much dead, while even those who thought it had a future (the Mont Pelerin crowd, for example) were always alert to the unpopularity of their views (and frankly given to undignified displays of self-pity on that score, such as hit you in the face today when you read Friedrich von Hayek, for example).

Confronting that situation the particular form of conservative liberalism that we call centrism had a particular response to that. Yes, the demand for universal suffrage was irresistible, while the old sort of religious appeal was implausible, not least in the economic and social sphere. And so what centrism relied on was a new religion--a theory of "totalitarianism"-obsessed anti-extremism that was really a thinly disguised Anti-Communism, made the more potent by the permanent quasi-war of the Cold War--the demands of which required that those who had the vote exercise it, and if necessary be made to exercise it, in a particular fashion. They would have the vote, and indeed their desire for change would get a measure of official acknowledgment--but they would not have "ideology," or mass movements, they would have to be "civil" and "pragmatic" as they accepted that the social system was not up for discussion, limited their desire for change to tweaks of that system, and took constant disappointment in stride, while never, ever, thinking of pursuing their goals in any other way. In short, they would have the vote, but the terms of the conversation were to be such that anyone wanting to be treated as a legitimate participant in the mainstream dialogue was required to give up everything that in practice is required to actually make progressive social change happen.

As foundations for conservatism go it was far from the most robust, lacking in positive emotional appeal of the kinds that conservatism traditionally relied upon. Yet there can be little question that it stuck, so much so that this whole way of thinking about politics survived the waning and passing of the Cold War, decades after, via the professional politicians and the news media and those the powerful esteem as "experts," continuing to define for the mainstream what is possible, and in doing that generally telling the public that, faced with unpalatable candidates and platforms in election after election as those in power snarlingly refuse to address any of the problems it cares about, must simply "hold its nose and vote", even as the notion that doing otherwise at all would mean a direct, one-way ticket to the hell on Earth of Orwell's Oceania became ever more fantastic a notion.