Revisiting Conservative Liberalism

As I have described it "conservative liberalism" entails a conservative usage of classically liberal institutions for conservative ends, with conservative thinking shaping their theorization, organization and administration. Thus you get a political society premised on the liberal-recognized rights of life, liberty and property, and limited, rule-of-law-bound, representative government, leaving a large private sphere in the arrangement we think of as "liberal democracy and capitalism." Yet this rights-based political society with its limited, representative government is premised not on the liberal's reliance on reason, egalitarian views or desire for progressive, emancipatory change, but rather a deep pessimism about human reason; elitist defense of a highly unequal social structure, privilege and the "social order" they underlie; and a consequent aversion to change; that together determine who gets political power, and how they exercise it. Thus does conservative liberalism set "property rights above human rights," the limitation of government above representative government, and capitalism above democracy in an arrangement designed to thwart alteration rather than enable it. Realizing this scale of valuations partly through a distribution of political authority along lines that not only make any change not strongly and durably backed by the elite exceedingly unlikely (checks and balances, etc.), but also partly by cutting non-elite groups out of the system of rights and representation to varying degrees (formal limits to the franchise in the old days, a the rejection of limits to the rich and powerful in leveraging their advantages to decide elections and otherwise influence office-holders) conservative liberals tirelessly defend the "compromise" on the basis of the view that property is the foundation of freedom, markets as the locus of freedom and the state rather than private actors as the great threat to that freedom, and that any alteration to the arrangement would produce a more oppressive order rather than a more equal or democratic one.

One may speak of the United States as having been established as a conservative liberal polity with the ratification of its Constitution in the eighteenth century and that it has remained so ever since. However, as represented within the country's political life by the politicians, parties, media outlets, public intellectuals afforded any significant platform, and the agenda to which participants in mainstream dialogue are obliged to limit themselves if they want to remain participants in it, it seems possible to say that conservative liberalism (especially in its "centrist" form) more completely circumscribes "legitimate" political discourse in America than it does in any of the other major conservative liberal states synonymous with "actually existing" liberalism. Indeed, it is telling that even those ordinarily spoken of as "liberals" in the American dialogue are, in classical terms, highly conservative in their philosophical premises (especially where "liberal" really means centrist), as the American political mainstream can seem to offer nothing but differing "flavors" of American conservatism to the voter in that way Gore Vidal summed up all too well when he wrote of the country as having but one party, the Property Party, with the Democratic and Republican parties its "two right wings." Underlining all of this is how ready the "liberals" ever are to "reach across the aisle" as they preach "bipartisanship" in the name of "consensus" and "unity" (even where the right is nowhere near so "pragmatic" or "civil" or "pluralistic" as they are), and how they never deign to extend a hand to those to their left in like manner, in only one aspect of the marginalization of the left to such a degree that there has never been a major, nominally left, labor or working class party in the United States.

The conservative liberal conventionally holds that this is the natural expression of the country's culture, be it the right speaking of "Americanism," or the center speaking of an historic "consensus" behind the principles and arrangements described here, with both conventionally attributing the faintness of dissent in any way describable as radical, and especially class-based, anti-capitalist dissent, to this. By contrast those affiliated with that marginalized dissent, inclined to see conservative liberalism as mere "bourgeois democracy" or oligarchy ever threatening to turn into something more formally illiberal than that, and alert to how claims for "tradition" and "consensus" obscure hard realities of power, stress instead a host of historical factors that prevented the left's becoming a force such as it has been elsewhere in the Western world. Thus do they point to the extreme incohesion of a racially divided American working class continually fragmented and re-fragmented by a flow of diverse immigrants with highly varied personal aspirations that employers and other power-holders cynically played off against each other; the intensively cultivated illusion of the possibility of and aspiration to upward mobility; and the extreme violence with which the champions of the status quo have met any challenge to it from such dissenters, and the ways that all this came together to successfully (though not necessarily permanently) undermine the development of any sort of working class, labor or left politics. However, even as they point out that there were times when it was stronger than conservative liberals admit, they do not dispute the extreme limitation of left tendencies as a practical force in American politics, or how profoundly this has shaped American political life. Indeed, they least of all dispute the extent to which the prejudices of the right are the conventional wisdom of society; the anti-intellectualism and overall tepidity of American political debate; the slightness of reform efforts and the fewness of concessions to working people in America; the consequent condition not merely of extreme socioeconomic inequality by the standards of the industrialized liberal states of the West, but extreme inequality in political power; the conception of just what freedoms like the freedom of speech mean so pointedly seen in the past few years; and how all these are far easier to understand when one acknowledges the fundamental fact of conservative liberalism.