The Advocate

I, Conservative

Mark Goldblatt

It’s rare that a single passage encapsulates an entire benighted mindset, but Michael Kinsley accomplished the trick the Sunday after the November presidential election in his Washington Post postmortem on the Bush-Kerry outcome. Declaring that we now live in the “Disunited States,” one side conservative and one side liberal, Kinsley writes: “We on my side of the great divide don't, for the most part, believe that our values are direct orders from God. We don't claim that they are immutable and beyond argument. We are, if anything, crippled by reason and open-mindedness, by a desire to persuade rather than insist. Which philosophy is more elitist? Which is more contemptuous of people who disagree?”

For its sheer callow narcissism, Kinsley’s passage calls to mind Jesse Ventura’s notorious pronouncement in Playboy that organized religion is “a crutch for weak-minded people,” or perhaps, going further back, Allen Ginsberg’s passionate declaration in the opening of “Howl” that he’d seen the “best minds of [his] generation destroyed by madness.” Such statements invariably tell you more about the intended audience than about the actual state of things. Just as the typical Playboy reader would naturally regard churchgoers as superstitious hayseeds denying themselves pleasures of the flesh out of an irrational attachment to fairy tales, and just as the typical 1950s bohemian would naturally identify doped-up poets bopping around the Village—rather than, say, physics geeks pulverizing atoms at Princeton—as the true geniuses of his era, likewise, the typical liberal nowadays naturally holds an exceedingly warped view of the relative reasonableness of liberals versus conservatives. Indeed, if you travel in left-liberal circles—and I live in Manhattan and teach at a State University college, so I do—you’re struck not only by the heartfelt rage towards conservatives but also by a kind of reflexive snobbery. Liberals, in general, see conservatives as brutish God-drunk bigots determined to crush whomever stands in their way in order to preserve the inequities of the status quo; by contrast, liberals see themselves as worldly, open-minded, kind-hearted paragons of social virtue whose guiding principle is their determination to look out for those less fortunate than themselves.

As wrongheaded as such perceptions are, they merit scrutiny—and Kinsley’s formulation is especially telling. In supposing that liberals are “crippled by reason and open-mindedness, by a desire to persuade rather than insist,” Kinsley slyly suggests that conservatism’s ace in the hole is its narrow-mindedness—the fact that it’s not responsive to counterarguments. The hidden premise here is that liberals, though not fanatically tied to particular policies, ultimately know what’s right—in Kinsley’s words, “a society where women are free to choose abortion and where gay relationships have full civil equality with straight ones”—and the only reason they cannot turn conservatives from their errant opinions is conservatives’ own prejudice and obstinacy.
Kinsley ironically resembles the medieval Iconoclast who thought that the main obstacle to converting Jews and Muslims to Christianity was the offense given by iconic images of Jesus; if only these were eradicated, Jews and Muslims could be won over. Such thinking rules out the possibility that Jews and Muslims might have coherent belief systems of their own.

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Setting aside Kinsley’s navel-gazing, it’s nevertheless true that a cognitive divide runs through American politics. It’s worrisome, but also perhaps inevitable since what’s at stake runs deeper than specific courses of action. Indeed, there are foundational differences between liberals and conservatives, irreconcilable epistemologies which underlie what each groups deems reasonable. On this score, several general observations can be made.

Conservatives, the vast majority of whom come from one or another Judeo-Christian tradition, tend to accept on faith that human nature is unchanging and prone to sin, or at minimum not altogether virtuous. Every just government must acknowledge, as its actuating principle, that people cannot be perfected, and thus, that societies will always be plagued by individual wrongdoing and collective inequities. In short, conservatives are never utopians. They point to the horrific body counts rung up by would-be utopian societies that attempted to alter human nature—Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China—as evidence of the dangers of governments refusing to recognize this basic truth.

The vast majority of liberals also come from one or another Judeo-Christian tradition, and many still cling to it, but they are loathe, as Kinsley notes, to claim their values are “direct orders from God.” This is a caricature of conservatism of course. Every liberal’s dream conservative is a cross between Archie Bunker and Elmer Gantry; their nightmare is a cross between Victor Davis Hanson and Thomas Sowell. But Kinsley is onto something here since liberals, despite their backgrounds, are more likely to imagine themselves as products of Enlightenment secularism. (It’s worth noting that the same week as Kinsley’s column appeared, Garry Wills used a New York Times op-ed to ask whether America, in light of Bush’s re-election, could “still be called an Enlightened nation.” Times regulars Maureen Dowd and Nicholas Kristof echoed the theme.) Kinsley’s sense of liberals’ openness to persuasion derives, without question, from an Enlightenment sensibility. This matters because one of the hallmarks of the Enlightenment was its rejection of the doctrine of mankind’s inherently sinful condition. In contrast with conservatives, liberals tend to regard human nature as essentially malleable—and, thus, to support government policies which propose, directly or indirectly, to tinker with human nature, to make human nature more perfect. Liberals, unsurprisingly, are readily drawn to utopian visions, inspired by collectivist rhetoric wherein everyone pulls together. But of course realizing such a vision requires remaking human nature.

This is where liberals get mugged by reality. For human nature is not malleable, much less perfectible—conservatives have simply got that right. It’s also the central insight of Freud and the central error of Marx. Even worse for the intellectual life of liberals is the fact that their commitment to utopianism engenders a kind of schizophrenia of ideals: on the one hand, a utopian society would have to establish and maintain equality; on the other hand, a utopian society would have to safeguard liberty (or else wind up dystopian, as in Brave New World). The trouble is that the two goods—liberty and equality—are fundamentally incompatible. If people have the liberty to capitalize on their natural abilities, a hierarchy will necessarily emerge that undermines equality. The only way to ensure equality, thus, is to prevent people from capitalizing on their natural abilities—in other words, to deny them liberty. Bill Gates’ kids and Michael Jordan’s kids are born with advantages most other kids will likely never overcome. Do we therefore deny Gates and Jordan the freedom to provide advantages for their families? If we do that, what is their incentive to excel? Would we be a better society if we stifled the excellence of a Gates or a Jordan?

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In a nutshell, what makes liberals liberal and conservatives conservative are their different responses to the tension between liberty and equality.

When liberty and equality come into conflict, conservatives pay lip service to equality but tend, in the final analysis, to favor liberty. Conservatives believe they’re making the world a better place, but “better,” for them, is never a utopian ideal; it just means “more prosperous” and “more free.” It’s not that conservatives are against improving the lives of the poor—which is, of course, an egalitarian impulse. It’s just that they point to the fact that most government efforts to redistribute wealth have resulted in less total wealth, and thus, the poor winding up worse off than before. Favoring liberty over equality is wholly consistent with conservatives’ non-utopian aims since they can argue, on a preponderance of evidence, that the liberty to excel, even though it fosters actual inequality, ultimately creates greater wealth to benefit the collective. The shorthand for this comes from the movie Wall Street: “Greed works.” Wealthy societies are awash with inequities, but even those at the bottom are well off compared with those in poorer societies. As Adam Smith wrote, "In competition, individual ambition serves the common good."

Certainly, the conservative priority of liberty can become dogmatic—which perhaps (to be fair) accounts for Kinsley’s perception of conservatives as unreasonable. Indeed, it can even place conservatives on the wrong side of history. This happened during the civil rights movement, a moment in which the equality demands of African Americans should have trumped the liberty demands of whites to determine the character of their communities. It’s happening again now, as I have argued elsewhere, in the gay marriage movement. The demands for equality by homosexual Americans should trump the liberty demands of heterosexuals to define marriage in traditional terms. But there’s a logical consistency to conservative positions, even when wrongheaded.

By contrast, liberals tend to favor equality when liberty and equality come into conflict. Though liberals pay lip service to notions of individual liberty, they often seek to curtail liberty when they deem it incompatible with their egalitarian agenda. The phenomenon of political correctness in the workplace and on campus is a manifestation of the liberal commitment to equality at the expense of the liberty to express intellectually incendiary, or emotionally hurtful, ideas.

Unlike conservatives, however, who readily acknowledge the tension between liberty and equality, liberals won’t admit such an opposition; if they did, they’d have to abandon their utopian visions. They’re determined to make the world a better place, but if you ask them to define “better,” they’ll reply “fairer” and “freer”—logic be damned. This is the nature of utopianism; it’s why liberals struggle in debates with conservatives. Conservatives accuse them of attempting to stifle liberty, and cite instances where it’s plainly the case—for example, utilizing the federal tax code to redistribute wealth, or outlawing election campaign contributions above a certain dollar amount—but liberals won’t own up to what’s going on. They’ll claim that they’re fighting corruption, or the potential for corruption, or oppression, or greed itself; they won’t admit that they’re curtailing liberty. Their commitment to utopianism trumps even their commitment to speaking the truth.

Which returns us to Kinsley’s observation about liberal “open-mindedness.” I suspect what he’s actually perceiving in not open-mindedness but logical mushiness. Conservative politics tends to flow in a direct line from conservative premises—and the premises themselves are taken as axiomatic. Hence, to liberals like Kinsley, conservatives seem unreasonable. Liberal politics, on the other hand, constitutes a theoretical grab bag. Liberals gravitate towards whatever seems likely to make society fairer, but also whatever seems likely to make people freer, except when the two conflict, and then, well, what does it matter if the two conflict? What matters is that liberals’ hearts are in the right place.

That, for liberals like Kinsley, is the very definition of being open-minded.

Mark Goldblatt (English 1990) teaches at F.I.T. He is a widely published columnist and the author of Africa Speaks, a satire of black urban culture. His website is MarkGoldblatt.com.