Participating in liberal democratic politics means joining or supporting a political party. It means taking sides about some central political issues. W. S. Gilbert got it bang to rights when he wrote in lolanthe:
I often think it’s comical
How nature always does contrive
That every boy and every gal
That’s born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal,
Or else a little Conservative!
Gilbert was talking about nineteenth-century Britain, of course; in other countries the names and the emphases would be different. American Democrats and Republicans are perhaps not as distinct personalities as Liberal and Conservative, and twentieth-century Britain would require attention to the Labour Party. Further, we must remember that the actual names of political parties are opportunistic: mere names, not descriptions of doctrine. Republicans are no less democratic than Democrats, and Democrats just as republican. But Gilbert was right in thinking that in modern politics liberal and conservative tendencies are basic, and also that everything tends to reduce to two.
Certainly not one. Political scientists long accepted the terminology of ‘the one-party state’, but only because they were confused. The very word ‘party’ implies that there must be another party of the same basic kind. The essence of politics is debate, and there must be something to debate with. A party that monopolizes power and talks only to itself, like the ruling communist parties of the twentieth century, can only be totalitarian, which is to say despotic, and therefore quite distinct from politics. In every liberal democratic state, then, there will generally be two dominant parties, with several others on the margins of political power, not to mention a host of political sects which sometimes compete at elections. This sketch of the opinionative reality of a modern state needs to be completed by recognizing that parties are closely connected with a miscellany of pressure-groups, interest groups, vocational organizations, public relations firms, lobbyists, churches, and any other body which from time to time feels the need to influence the decisions of an increasingly ubiquitous state.
Parties seek to win elections, but this does not quite mean to ‘capture the power of the state’. Indeed, it happens just as much that the state captures them. Policies that sound impressive in electoral rhetoric can turn out to be invitations to disaster once the incoming ministers discover their implications. The experience of government tends to mitigate the noisy contrasts of political debate, for government is a limited and responsible business while democratic politics is a game in which teams vie for victory. Risks must be taken, there are winners and losers, favoured candidates lose the race to rivals whom no one had taken seriously before, and all this constitutes a spectacle which inspires and enlivens partisans. As Edmund Burke expressed the benefits of competition in politics: ‘He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.’ The basic constitutional point is that the electorate can ‘throw the rascals out’.
Gilbert thought that political partisanship was innate, and there may indeed be some universal disposition which supports political tendencies. The American philosopher William James suggested that human beings are either tough-minded or tender-minded, and some have thought socialists, with their talk of compassion, to be tender-minded, while conservatives, who these days tend to support the free market, are tough-minded. This is not a view which will long survive a close inspection of contemporary political leaders.
Sometimes the complexity of parties is identified with the abstract issue of promoting or resisting change. Changes may, of course, be good or bad according to judgement, but conservatives have a generalized disposition to dislike change as such, while liberals welcome it. This distinction in turn is sometimes given a biological basis: the young are eager for change, but grow more conservative as they age. Certainly it is true that the young are significantly different in politics, being given to investing their boundless enthusiasm in ideas of social transformation – as did the Young Turks, the Bolsheviks, Mussolini’s Fascists, Hitler’s Nazis, and the youthful enthusiasts of the 1960s. This is not, on the face of it, a reason for encouraging the political engagement of the young!
Alternatively, parties may be identified with interests, so that the rich are conservative while the poor are liberal or socialist. The modern version of this classical understanding of politics derives from the Marxist idea that modern states are the arenas of a concealed war between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The idea suffers from two major disadvantages. The first is that in a war, one side seeks the total defeat of the other, whereas political debate, being a form of sport, is a type of competition in which each side needs the other. Just as you cannot play football without a competing team, so you cannot engage in politics without competing parties. The idea of the class war is therefore a covert way of recommending an end to politics and its replacement by leaders who will bring about the one true community. The second disadvantage of the idea that political parties merely reflect interests is that very significant numbers of workers vote for conservative parties while many rich and middle-class people espouse radical programmes, including the redistribution of wealth in the name of equality. Political scientists who start off with this idea have spent a lot of fruitless time scratching their heads over such phenomena as the blue-collar Republican or the Tory working man. The reality is that politics is about persuasion, and no brute fact about voters reliably tells us how they will think or act.
These ideas all help to illuminate aspects of a complex and shifting scene, and they mitigate what is the most plausible error in the understanding of parties: namely, to identify them with doctrines, sometimes called ideologies. Principles and programmes are important in politics, but both are trumped by circumstance. The problem is that circumstances are so infinitely various that the student of politics is forced to attend to doctrines which at least have some degree of intellectual coherence. In many cases, doctrine is almost the only guide we have as to how policy is moving; in any case, it has an intellectual attraction of its own which makes it worth study, however clear one must always be about its limited role in the actual exercise of authority.
The reader will have noticed that we have so far recognized liberalism and conservatism, but given only glancing mention to socialism, in some respects the official doctrine of left-wing parties in modern politics. In disentangling this area, only the most delicate footwork will do, and part of the argument will be incomplete until we deal with ideologies in a later chapter. Let us deal with the matter narratively, and base ourselves on British experience, which has been widely copied.
While division into party or faction has always been found in politics, and Cavalier fought Roundhead in the middle of the seventeenth century, the first recognizable political parties in England were the Whigs and Tories, who distinguished each other as enemies in 1679 over the bill to exclude James, Duke of York, from the throne because he was a Roman Catholic. Tories tended to believe in order and obedience, while Whigs, an aristocratic faction, based politics on the consent of a limited electorate as expressed in the institution of Parliament. Success in English politics over the next century nevertheless still depended largely on royal favour, and it was long before parties became respectable, and the institution of an opposition an integral part of the constitution.
The philosopher of the Whigs was John Locke, whose doctrines that government must rest on the consent of the governed, and that men have a natural right to life, liberty, and property are the basis of one version of liberalism. They were brilliantly echoed in the American Declaration of Independence of 1776, which talks of the inalienable right to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. Here, then, was a doctrine which challenged the inherited traditional ways, and appealed to the disposition to reform both politics and society. The claim to be free from whatever restraints cannot meet the test of reason may plausibly be seen as the claim which has built the modern world, and for this reason the term ‘liberalism’ has acquired two meanings: first, as a specific political tendency in modern politics to be contrasted with conservatism and other doctrines; and second, as the archetypical attitude to which all modern European politics belongs.
The actual name liberalism only came into currency in the 1830s, the decade of political naming, in which socialism and conservatism also acquired their present names. But already by this time British politics had bifurcated in response to the defining event of modern politics. That grand question was how to understand what began to happen in France in 1789. Charles James Fox, one of the leading Whigs, believed that the French were at last following the path England had taken back in 1688; his friend Edmund Burke thought that the French revolutionaries, deriving their destructive policies from the abstract principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, were a new and thoroughly bad phenomenon. They were abandoning tradition in order to subject France (and soon Europe) to the brutalities of an abstract blueprint which must, Burke believed, destroy humanity. Burke’s response to the French Revolution anticipated all the arguments used in the West against communism. Both the French and the Russian version of utopianism ended by drenching their countries in blood. Burke had predicted that this would happen in France long before the first head rolled off the guillotine.
Burke in effect founded conservatism by his diagnosis that liberalism as a political doctrine of reform found it hard to distinguish itself from doctrines of social transformation which, in their vain and destructive search for a perfect society, would destroy politics altogether. The basic arguments are brilliantly laid out in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). What further entangled the understanding of politics with the confusions of despotism was the currency of the distinction between left and right. Originating as a metaphor based on the seating of factions in the French revolutionary assembly, left and right came to stand for revolution and reaction, two concepts which Burke and other exponents of politics would regard as equally unpolitical. According to Burke, politics is based, rather, on the concepts of preservation and reform, and it takes off not from abstract ideas of social perfection, but from the circumstances of the present.
What, then, of socialism? It arises from the fusion of two nineteenth-century phenomena: first, the idea that society is basically a factory whose products ought to be equally distributed among those who work in it, and second, the actual enfranchisement of the new class of industrial workers in the course of the century. Socialism finds its distinctiveness in its concern for the poor, and it seeks to legislate policies such as the redistribution of wealth and state provision of welfare which will equalize conditions of life. It is hostile to luxury and the idleness of the rich.
What is it that distinguishes socialism from liberalism and conservatism? As a doctrine of reform in a modern society, socialism would seem to have more in common with liberalism’s bent for reform, and indeed in Britain the Labour Party rose under liberalism’s wing and eventually replaced the Liberal Party as the self-declared party of reform. On the other hand, it was the Conservative Shaftesbury who introduced the Factory Acts in the 1840s, and conservative governments which after 1951 continued and extended Labour’s Welfare State. When in 1985 British coal-miners went on strike against a Conservative government which wanted to make the mines economically efficient, the Labour Party had been supporting an essentially conservative policy of subsidy in order to preserve the mining villages.
This is a common situation. Parties steal each other’s clothes and poach each other’s supporters as part of the great game of politics, often with relatively little concern for doctrinal consistency. Liberals who used to stand for free trade became defenders of subsidy and protection with the so-called New Liberalism of the 1890s. Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government after 1979 was accused of betraying conservatism and espousing classical liberalism. Circumstances so change the colour of politics that what looks to a party like the right policy in some circumstances may look completely different a generation later. One of the most fascinating facts of modern politics is the failure of a successful socialist party to emerge in the United States. The Democratic Party has, of course, adopted many of the policies that would be called ‘socialist’ in Europe, and ‘liberal’ as an American political term means something far closer to socialism than its European counterpart. For almost any justification of policies will be abstract, and in new circumstances, will commit a party to more than it really wants. When that happens, policy or doctrine (and sometimes both) will have to be adjusted.
In actual politics, the formula that liberals, broadly, favour reform, and conservatives stick with tradition, points us in the right direction, but no more. In any case, it leaves us with the problem of socialism. Is socialism a tendency no less profoundly entrenched in politics than liberalism and conservatism? Or is it a movement which, transcending the ups and downs of political life, aims at something much grander than politics: a permanently better society? The basic point, we may suggest, is that socialism may refer either to belief in a fully just society, or to a political tendency to favour egalitarian and redistributive reforms when possible. Whatever it might be like, a fully just society would need no serious politics; it would be one of those projects of perfection which we shall call ideologies and which we shall discuss presently. And this is what the term socialism commonly signifies, especially to its adherents. That is why it has acquired a genuinely political partner, often called social democracy, where the addition of democracy signifies the political commitment which recognizes that the state is an institution that must respond to the current tastes and desires of its members, and therefore that any conception of a finally perfect state is incompatible with the very activity of politics itself.