Another brilliancy from Keith Parsons.
BACK TO LIBERALISM—AND CONSERVATISM
In my past few posts I have tried to understand the extremes of both the left and the right—the woke left and the Christian Nationalist right. The allusion is hackneyed but apt: We are like Odysseus trying to sail between Scylla and Charybdis.
How do we chart a course between twin totalitarianisms that are superficially opposites but deeply congruent in their contempt for liberal democracy? Liberal democracy, what Karl Popper called "the open society," is fully actualizable only where certain universal values are respected, such as the equality of all humans in rights and dignity, equal opportunity to advance as far as your talent and efforts will carry you, and equality before the law. Further, accidents of birth and circumstance, such as sex, race, ethnicity, religion, or national origin, confer no advantages or disadvantages.
Of course, every actual society falls far short of these ideals. The American legal system, for instance, makes a mockery of the concept of equality before the law. It is a system that shakes down the poor, and as for the flip side of the coin, the one-word definition of "impunity" given by Ambrose Bierce still holds: wealth.
The woke left and the Christian Nationalists do not seek to make these ideals consistently apply but reject them entirely. For the woke, such ideals as equality and universal rights are smokescreens for the perpetuation of oppression. Rather than equality, people should be treated unequally with the historically disadvantaged given advantages and the historically advantaged disadvantaged. For instance, medical care should be apportioned by race rather than medical need, e.g., the preferential admission of black and Hispanic cardiology patients over whites. [N.B., I am not making this up. See Yascha Mounk The Identity Trap, pp. 5-6.] For Christian Nationalism (CN), patriarchy is divinely ordained. Women are to be subordinate to men in public life and in private. Under CN, will all varieties of belief and unbelief be treated equally? Christianity will be more equal than the others.
Scratch a woke leftist or a Christian Nationalist and you get a totalitarian. Each is fully committed to an absolute, unquestionable, and all-inclusive ideology that permits no deviation or opposition. Each has a vision for remaking American society that is obnoxious and unworkable.
What will happen if there is systematic discrimination against white people, as envisioned by the woke? Like all revanchist programs, this one would make a bad situation much worse. White people will just buy more guns, vote in more law 'n' order politicians, build more prisons, and produce more George Floyds. And lawsuits. If you think America is a litigious society now, wait until the woke policies of reverse discrimination are widely implemented. In short, if you want to make racism a much worse problem than it is, there would be no more fiendishly effective means than the woke program of vindictive social injustice.
Will America go gently into the Christian Nationalist night? Republicans are already getting major blowback from the repeal of Roe v. Wade. Whenever abortion is on the ballot, even in deep red states, choice wins. Do Christian Nationalists really think that women will slink off quietly to Gilead? They probably do believe it. Once you fall down the rabbit hole of Christian Nationalism you will believe just about anything—except the truth. In reality, the CN program is grounded in a vision of an America that never was, a Norman Rockwell/Frank Capra vision of an America of hardworking, churchgoing white people where minorities were invisible, girls were girls, and men were men. Didn't need no welfare state. Everybody pulled his weight. Those were the days!
Only those days never existed and that vision is especially inapt now. Pluralism has won. Diversity is a fact. Women are liberated. Minorities are uppity. LGBTQ people are out of the closet and will not go back. CN has already lost; the USS White Christian America has already sailed and nothing will call it back into port.
Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
The path back to sanity is a recovery of liberalism—and conservatism. Liberalism and conservatism in their modern forms grew up around a particular pivotal event—the French Revolution. The Bastille was stormed on July 14, 1789. In 1790, a young Frenchman wrote to Edmund Burke, a member of Parliament from Ireland, to ask his thoughts on the Revolution. Burke's answer was published as Reflections on the Revolution in France, and ran on to over three hundred pages. I once heard someone described as like a man with a mouth full of bread and cheese jumping up from the table to shout that he would not stand for any more bloody nonsense. That is the way that Reflections reads. It sounds like all three hundred pages were written nonstop in the white heat of passion. However, it is not just a tirade. Burke provides the basis of conservative thought for the next two hundred years. The arc from Edmund Burke to William F. Buckley is clear and consistent.
Burke's basic objection to the Revolution is that it addressed the purported abuses of the ancien régime not by reforming the bad and preserving the good—as England had done in the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688—but had destroyed everything, root and branch. King, Church, and nobility, the institutions that had guided France for hundreds of years, were simply dismantled and the state was put into the hands of a committee of ignorant tyros. Unrestrained by tradition and ancient institutions, the basis of government was entrusted to a spurious "reason" that ignores the accumulated lessons of history and offers metaphysical speculation instead. The consequence of this wholesale deracination of all that is venerated and traditional will be disaster. With remarkable prescience, Burke predicted that the ideals of revolution would turn bitter and ultimately lead to a military dictatorship, a prophecy energetically fulfilled by Napoleon.
The basic principles of conservatism as articulated by Burke are these:
1) Society is an organic development, not an artificial creation. Like an organism, it is vastly complex, and all its parts are intricately interconnected. Hence, you cannot change one part without affecting the others. Radical and precipitous change therefore is more likely to do harm than good.
2) Reason is a necessary but fallible instrument. “Pure reason” is not an adequate tool for defining the basis or foundation of morality or law. Rather, tradition, custom, and intuition must also be consulted. Tradition, custom, and intuition are the repositories of the accumulated wisdom of a society.
3) The members of a society are not bound together like parties to a business contract, but as partners in something much larger, deeper, more noble, and more inclusive. What binds us is not a contract, but a sense of identity, belonging, shared history, and shared values.
4) The institutions and traditions of society are to be regarded with reverence and awe. Religion is therefore to be honored and promoted since it inspires people with that sense of reverence for good things and discourages the antisocial vices that undermine the health of society.
In short: a conservative is one capable of reform but always disposed to conserve. The conservative will always oppose those who recklessly reject the established customs and traditions that have guided our ancestors and which plant our feet on solid ground, not the quicksand of radical ideology.
The radicalism of Christian Nationalism would have been abhorrent to Burke.
Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)
Burke's book drew immediate and vigorous reactions, most notably by Tom Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. Paine wrote The Rights of Man and Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Men (She would later write the more famous A Vindication of the Rights of Women) as explicit and pointed rebuttals to Burke's work. Their opinions were considered radical at the time, but have since become mainstream to liberal thought. Wollstonecraft's reply was a blistering polemic. Paine was also polemical but also more constructive, so I will summarize his conclusions here:
1) Tradition is not sacrosanct and inviolable. It may contain wisdom or it may be fossilized cruelty and stupidity. Tradition cannot be allowed to trump basic rights. Agreements made by previous generations may and must be altered if they are contrary to good of the people.
2) Inherited titles and status are dangerous nonsense. Status should be earned by talent and hard work. In short, meritocracy, not aristocracy.
3) There are human rights, rights that all share equally in virtue of their humanity. The basic function of government is to preserve and protect those rights.
4) The proper form of government for human beings is a constitutional republic. In a hereditary system, you may have the fortune to have a good ruler, but his or her descendants will eventually be evil or incompetent.
5) Free enterprise and free trade is to be the basis of the economy, which implies internationalism.
BUT
6) There must be a system of social welfare supported by taxation to prevent the evils of extreme poverty. Everyone benefits if people are not left in utter destitution. A system that "sends the young man to the gallows and the old man to the workhouse" is bad for everyone.
When the Woke recklessly scorn these ideas, they need to be reminded how radical they were in the eighteenth century and the ancient abuses they opposed (See Susan Neiman, Left is Not Woke).
I think it is obvious that neither of these sets of ideas is absurd. Both bear considerable truth, and that is why a healthy society needs both liberals and conservatives. Conservatives are needed to remind us that change, even with the best of intentions, is often harmful because no one can foresee all of the consequences of our actions. The intended cure may turn out to be worse than the disease. An infamous example was when reformers looked at the old, dilapidated neighborhoods in inner cities and decided to clear them and replace them with modern high-rise apartment buildings. However, the destruction of the old neighborhoods destroyed those communities and their networks of mutual support. Soon, the "projects" became a byword for urban malaise, rife with crime, drug use, and despair. Conservatives remind us that the good intentions of reformers can pave the road to hell.
Liberals, however, remind us that some injustices are so bad, that they must be corrected even at the cost of rocking the ship of state. If tradition puts your foot on my neck, then I get to end that tradition by any means necessary and damn the consequences. I would say that if civil war and 600,000 Americans killed was the price for ending the moral obscenity of slavery, then so be it. Conservatism all too often lapses into a defense of power and privilege, and liberals are needed to speak truth to the powerful and the privileged and curb their abuses. Liberals know that the arc of history will not automatically bend towards justice; we have to bend it. Progress is possible, but it is not inevitable and requires hard work, compassion, and intelligence.
Liberal democracy is not a static condition but an ever-unfolding process that requires opposing sides to argue out their differences. Compromise is therefore inevitable and essential. Despite the passions of the moment, liberals and conservatives should recognize that their competition is in a broader sense cooperation and that the common good can only be served by hammering out differences in good faith. If, on the other hand, this give-and-take is destroyed, and one side seeks power exclusively for itself while demonizing the other side, then something new and dangerous has emerged. When power becomes an end in itself, and you are willing to resort to any means to get it, then you have repudiated the dialectics of freedom for the cold commands of tyranny.
That our politics are now polarized has been said so often that the assertion has become platitudinous, but a truism is still a truth. In fact, the degree of polarization is so great that now some are saying that we are in a "cold civil war." I do not think that this is an exaggeration. If we don't talk, we will eventually fight. Trump and top Republicans have already said that they will not commit to accepting the results of the 2024 election. Freedom cannot survive in a country where election results are acceptable only if your side wins. What cannot be settled at the ballot box will be settled in the streets.
To restore sanity, the left has to return to liberalism, and the right has to return to conservatism. The left must follow Susan Neiman's lead and explicitly repudiate the woke cynicism and tribalism and reaffirm its historic commitments to universality, justice, science, and progress. I do not know if the right can get back to sanity. Even if Trump loses the election, there will still be Trumpism and the whole festering mass of hate and irrationality that now dominates the right. If they cannot be cured, they will have to be beaten. I hope for the sake of our country and our planet that we can do it.
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An excellent piece Ed. I will share by me and to the Gulf Coast Freethinkers.
Classical liberalism became neo-liberalism and is on its way to become woke liberalism. I'm still a classical liberal...