Why We Need a New Understanding of American Politics
The Failure of Liberals to Comprehend Conservatism
We are a few steps away from our denouement, from showing in detail how such an analysis of family-based moral systems contributes to an answer of the puzzles we started with and sheds light on why conservatives and liberals have the political policies they have. But first, it would be useful to show why such an account is needed. Existing attempts by liberals to understand conservative politics have failed. We will begin with three analytic failures by liberals:
1. Conservatism is “the ethos of selfishness.”
2. Conservatives just believe in less government.
3. Conservatism is no more than a conspiracy of the ultrarich to protect their money and power and to make themselves even richer and more powerful.
THE SELFISHNESS HYPOTHESIS
Let us begin with the mistake of Michael Lerner of Tikkun magazine, whose “politics of meaning” has been endorsed by Hillary Rodham Clinton. Lerner (Tikkun, November/December 1994, pp. 12, 18) gets some things right: he correctly perceives progressive-liberal politics as being centered on nurturance and community, what he calls “the ethos of caring.” But he is quite mistaken when he dismisses conservative politics as being no more than “the ethos of selfishness.” He has missed the conservative moral vision and missed the fact that American voters appear to be responding to that moral vision.
If Lerner were right, simple pragmatic appeals to self-interest should work on conservatives. They don’t. If he were right, conservatives in California would have endorsed the Single Payer Initiative, since it would have saved them money. If he were right, conservatives would not be endorsing the replacement of AFDC welfare payments with orphanages, since orphanages cost more than AFDC does. If he were right, conservatives would not be endorsing the Three Strikes legislation and all the money to be spent on prisons that it entails. Simply pointing out to conservatives that these policies do not serve their selfish interests should end the matter right there. It has been pointed out, to no effect.
Lerner’s “ethos of selfishness” hypothesis does not explain the moral fervor of the conservative majority as it took over Congress at the beginning of 1995. It does not explain the focus on family values. It doesn’t even explain why the conservatives advocate the death penalty, or why they want to abolish the NEA, or why they oppose abortion. The selfishness hypothesis simply does not explain conservative policies.
THE LESS-GOVERNMENT HYPOTHESIS
Why does conservative politics take the shape it does? Why should conservatives be proposing orphanages? Abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency? Abolishing the arts and humanities endowments? Is it merely, as is repeated over and over, that conservatives want less government and liberals want more?
That cannot be true. Conservatives don’t merely want less government. They want to raise spending for the military—even bring back Star Wars—not reduce it. They want to build more prisons. There is no move to eliminate the drug enforcement agency. Or the FBI, or the intelligence agencies. There is no outcry to stop bailouts of large corporations, like Lockheed. Or eliminate nuclear power development. Or to stop funding computer research. There is no attempt to charge airlines for the training of pilots by the Air Force. Or to charge automobile companies for the building of highways. If conservatives simply wanted less government spending or wanted government to pay for itself, there are a myriad of other cuts and reforms they could be proposing. The Less-Government Hypothesis is simply false. It does not explain what conservatives do and don’t want to spend money on. Conservatives want to spend on some things and not others. What determines which ones?
THE CYNICAL LIBERAL RESPONSE
Anthony Lewis (New York Times op-ed page, February 27, 1995) lists the following conservative budget cuts: repeal of the National School Lunch Act; ending the WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) program that has reduced infant mortality by providing nutrition to impoverished mothers and children; and legislation making it harder for investors to sue in cases of securities fraud. He comments:
Looking at that list of actions taken and planned, one can hardly miss the theme. The purpose of one measure after another is to enrich those who have money and power in our society and reduce the modest help this country gives to the poor and the weak. Manufacturers and drug companies would gain. Sick children and poor mothers would lose.
This is an example of the cynical liberal response to conservative government.
The cynical liberal response is that conservative politicians are all tools of the ultrarich and the big, multinational corporations the rich control. Under the Reagan and Bush administrations, there was a massive redistribution of wealth toward the ultrarich, so that now the top 10 percent of families control 70 percent of the nation’s wealth. The Reagan administration added three trillion dollars to the national debt, and redistributed it to the ultrarich, making the rest of the country pay interest on the debt, which amounts to 28 percent of the federal budget every year.
The cynical liberal response is that conservatives want to continue spending on (1) the means of social control such as the military, the police, the intelligence services, and prisons, and on (2) aspects of government that help make the rich richer, say, the funding of computer research, or nuclear power, or the Air Force’s training of pilots which benefits the airlines, or the bailouts of large corporations.
The cynical liberal response is that the ultrarich are attempting to take over the intellectual life of the country to ensure their domination. One step has been to finance a network of right-wing think tanks. Eliminating the National Endowment for the Humanities would eliminate a major source of funding for non-right-wing research. Eliminating the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would curtail public discourse in a way that would serve thought control. Controlling the purse strings of public universities would be another step in thought control. Setting the agenda for moral education would be still another.
There is much to be said for the cynical liberal response. Much of it is true. Yet it has major flaws and is far from the whole story. First, it is a demonization of conservatives. It assumes that they are either rich, evil, self-serving power-mongers, or their paid agents, or dupes. The conservative ranks may well contain some of each. Yet most conservatives are not rich and see themselves as working for the benefit of the country rather than for their own benefit. There are too many idealistic conservatives of good intentions and moderate means for the demonization theory to be true.
Second, the conspiracy theory attributes too much to competence and to centralized control. Political life in America is not run from the top by a smooth-functioning machine. It is messy. American politics is not something that yields readily to rational control. A well-financed smooth-functioning machine can do a lot in political organization and propaganda, but it cannot implant a totally different worldview in tens of millions of minds. It must use ideas that are already there and well respected in the culture.
Third, the conspiracy theory does not explain why conservative rhetoric can make sense to so many people who did not previously vote conservative. It does not explain why such people simply did not experience cognitive dissonance and disbelief when they heard the campaign rhetoric. The cynical liberal explanation is the Orwellian one, that any Big Lie repeated often enough will be believed. But that assumes an old-fashioned stimulus-response view of the human mind that both ignores what is known about the human brain and ignores the effects of culture. We are all immersed in American culture. Our cultural knowledge is physically encoded in the synapses of our brains. People do not get new worldviews overnight. New ideas are never entirely new. They must make use of ideas already present in the culture. No conspiracy of the ultrarich explains why conservative ideas make sense to people and what sense they make.
Fourth, the conspiracy theory does not explain the details of conservative political positions. Why should the death penalty be in the interest of the ultrarich? How can the rich get richer on the Three Strikes and You’re Out law, which requires heavy government spending on prisons? How would orphanages serve the interests of the ultrarich? Why should the ultrarich want to get rid of the National Endowment for the Arts? The conspiracy theory simply doesn’t explain many important conservative policies.
Moreover, even where the ultrarich do benefit from conservative policies, a deeper explanation is in order. Why should conservative morality serve ultrarich interests? What links are there between conservative family values and the interests of the ultrarich? Simply positing a conspiracy of the ultrarich does not answer these questions.
In short, I do not believe the cynical liberal claim that the details of conservative political policies are just due to a self-serving ultrarich conspiracy, though the interests and finances of the ultrarich are certainly engaged. Indeed, I have not heard any liberal account of conservatism that makes sense of conservative policies, or the conservative world-view, or conservative language. I think there is a deeper explanation that comes out of the cultural role of the Strict Father model of the family and the moral schemes that fit that model.
The Conservative Failure to Understand Conservatism
Even the views of conservative thinkers don’t really help in characterizing what conservatism is. There are three principal conservative descriptions of conservatism.
1. Conservatism is against big government.
2. Conservatism is for traditional values.
3. Conservatism is just what the Bible tells us.
We have already seen that the first is false. As for the second, take what William J. Bennett, one of the major conservative intellectuals, says:
Conservatism as I understand it . . . seeks to conserve the best elements of the past. It understands the important role that traditions, institutions, habits and authority have in our social life together, and recognizes our national institutions as products of principles developed over time by custom, the lessons of experience, and consensus. . . . Conservatism, too, is based on the belief that the social order rests upon a moral base. (References, C1: Bennett 1992, p. 35)
Bennett’s account doesn’t help much. It doesn’t say what is to count as the “best” elements of the past and why. Racism, colonialism, witch-burning, child labor, and even the sale of children as indentured servants are not among the “best” elements of American tradition. But it is not clear by what criterion something is to count as “best.” Bennett mentions traditional institutions, but government and public schools are not traditional institutions that count for conservatives. He mentions consensus, but conservatives support views where there is no consensus—anti-abortion legislation, the abolishment of social programs, and so on. He mentions a “moral base” but gives no general account of why conservative views of morality are to count as “moral,” while liberal views of morality are not to count as “moral.”
The same problem inheres in the claim of right-wing religious groups who state that conservatism is just a matter of following the Bible. The Bible cannot be applied to politics or much else without a lot of selection and interpretation. The National Council of Churches also urges following the Bible, but gives it a liberal interpretation. Liberation theology also follows the Bible, with an often revolutionary interpretation. What, exactly, characterizes a conservative interpretation of the Bible? Until this prior question is answered adequately, it will be hard to understand just which Christians see their religion as fitting conservative politics and why. We will discuss this in Chapter 14.
What all this suggests is that conservatives themselves are not particularly good at characterizing what unifies their own political philosophy. Nor does it appear that liberals are any better at characterizing political liberalism. Theoreticians of liberalism see their job as normative, not descriptive, as saying what liberalism should be rather than describing what it actually is. Not surprisingly, the normative theoretical characterizations of liberalism do not do a very good descriptive job. Thomas Spragens, Jr., provides a typical view:
The essence of liberalism as a normative doctrine is its focus on the protection of rights as the central (perhaps the only) purpose of political society. Its essence as a social theory is its focus on autonomous and separate individuals as the sum and substance of society. A properly ordered society, therefore, is centered around contractural relationships among these individuals. (References, C4: Spragens 1995)
This does not in any way distinguish between contemporary liberals and conservatives. The question to be asked is “Which rights count?” Conservatives declare the right to keep what you’ve earned, the right to own machine guns, the rights of the unborn, the right to do anything you want with your property, the right to form a private heavily armed militia, and so on. If it is liberals who fear the coercive power of the state, why is it that conservatives are trying to destroy federal power and liberals are trying to preserve it? Without an account of what rights count and what coercive powers of the state are bad, the classical theory of liberalism cannot distinguish political liberalism from conservatism.
Other classic liberal theories focus upon liberty and equality jointly. Rawls, for example, adds to liberty an account of equality in which any inequalities must benefit the most disadvantaged members of society. This tells us nothing about why political liberals favor ecology, why they are not anti-abortion, why they defend funding for the arts, and so on. From the abstract realms of liberty and equality, you can’t get down to the nitty-gritty of real political stands on issues.
The communitarian critiques, on the whole, don’t do much better than the classical liberal views. They correctly point out that the classical liberal myth of the autonomous individual entering into social contracts with other autonomous individuals doesn’t make much sense. Individuals are not and never were autonomous. We are social through and through, and social life necessarily demands responsibilities as well as rights. But which responsibilities and why? Conservatives also stress responsibility. What’s the difference?
Another common claim has to do with the liberal and conservative views of human nature: conservatives think that people are basically rotten and have to be subject to authority and disciplined, while liberals think that people are basically good and can decide what to do for themselves. That theory just doesn’t jibe at all with contemporary liberal and conservative politics. Liberals don’t think that people out to maximize their profit can be counted on to do the right thing—not to pollute, not to create unsafe working conditions, not to make unsafe products, not to discriminate unfairly. It’s the liberals who are suspicious of human nature on many issues and the conservatives who are trusting.
Michael Lerner, as noted above, is on the right track when he talks about “the ethos of caring” as being central to liberalism. But he does not spell out just what the details of that ethos are and why it leads to the particular stands that liberals tend to hold. Moreover, conservatives, too, “care” about many things—the morals of their children, the rights of the unborn, what is taught in our schools, the victims of crimes, the effects of our society on sex, drugs, and violence. How does the caring of conservatives differ from the caring of liberals? It is not caring alone that makes the difference.
I believe that the answer, or at least a large part of it, has to do with Strict Father and Nurturant Parent morality. I will argue that these opposed moral visions lie behind the worldview differences between conservatives and liberals. I will also argue that variations on these moral systems can explain the rich variety of positions within each camp.
The remaining step in the argument remains to be taken: what links the family and family-based morality to politics?