Brink Lindsey on Traditional and Liberal Conservatism

Let’s start with John Stuart Mill, On Liberty. You’d think it’s obvious but no one else has suggested it. Why On Liberty? 

I don’t know that it’s obvious since it’s a classic text of liberalism, not conservatism.

Explain that to me.

I think liberals, of both a libertarian, classical, liberal stripe and a more modern egalitarian stripe, see John Stuart Mill as a common ancestor, but he’s not really in the conservative pantheon. Indeed it was Mill who said, ‘While not all conservatives are stupid, all stupid people are generally conservative.’ So he was not only a liberal political theorist but a liberal Member of Parliament, and definitely not a Tory.

Liberal in the European sense, ie libertarian?

He strays from the contemporary libertarian line in a number of respects. But the reason I selected him is that there is a brief passage in On Liberty (in the second chapter on defending liberty of thought and discussion) where he lays forth what I think is the best concise explanation for why there is a left and a right – and why there always will be. Why, even though he wasn’t a conservative and didn’t think much of conservatives, he thought conservatism was a necessary and wholesome part of political life. Let me quote a sentence or two: ‘In politics, again, it is almost a commonplace, that a party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life; until the one or the other shall have so enlarged its mental grasp as to be a party equally of order and of progress, knowing and distinguishing what is fit to be preserved from what ought to be swept away. Each of these modes of thinking derives its utility from the deficiencies of the other; but it is in a great measure the opposition of the other that keeps each within the limits of reason and sanity.’

I think the typical view of politics from inside a partisan mindset is to see politics as a battle of the good guys versus the bad guys. Maybe the good guys are on the left, maybe the good guys are on the right, but it’s this Manichean struggle and the way to get progress is for the good side to win and impose their will. Mill sees through that and sees that, in fact, politics is a dialectical process. At any given time truth is partly on one side and partly on the other. It’s more a battle of half-truths and incomplete truths than of good versus bad. The excesses of each side ultimately create opportunities for the other to come in and correct those excesses. Liberalism, in Mill’s view and in mine, provides the basic motive force of political change and progress. It will go astray, it will have excesses, it will make terrible mistakes – and a conservatism that is focused on preserving good things that exist now will be a necessary counterweight to that liberalism.

Most Americans today think of liberalism in the European sense or libertarianism, as we call it, as part of the conservative movement. Most Tea Party-ers, for instance, would certainly agree with that. Do you see it as sharply distinct from the conservative movement? Are they, in fact, on opposite sides of Mill’s dichotomy?

When I’m talking about liberalism versus conservatism, I’m also talking about modern egalitarian liberalism and not just libertarianism. You can approach it, as I did in my book The Age of Abundance, by looking at contemporary liberalism and its great triumphs in the 60s and 70s – pushing for civil rights and backing the feminist movement. Those triumphs also had excesses and mistakes mixed in with them. We had problems with growing welfare dependency and the crime explosion, problems with runaway divorce rates and family breakdown, all of which summoned up a conservative movement to respond to those wrong turns. So we see the conservative revival of the 70s and 80s basically making the world safe for the liberal social revolutions of the 60s and 70s. Putting aside where libertarianism fits in, you can see the interplay of left and right correcting each other, fixing each other’s excesses and deficiencies in a way that neither side ever intended but works out better than either side ever would have done for itself.

Most of my conservative friends would say that liberalism wins this game because conservatives just correct it and then it continues to roll merrily along.

Yes, I think conservatives are right to feel that they are always behind the eight ball of history. My second and third choices offer an explanation for why that is so and why that is really necessarily so. The wonderful article by Jonathan Haidt, ‘Planet of the Durkheimians’, which he is in the process of expanding into a book, explores his very insightful analysis of different foundations for liberal and conservative morality. When liberals talk about morality they are almost always talking about two different basic intuitions – intuitions about harm and care. That is, we don’t want people to be harmed and we want to care for people when they are hurting. Also, fairness and reciprocity: we want things to be fair, we want like cases to be treated alike. This is the basic liberal morality – whether it is libertarian morality or modern liberal morality, those are the buttons that get pushed that activate a liberal sense of moral outrage. But there are other moral buttons in the human moral imagination that liberals don’t pay much attention to that are still very present and lively and salient in the conservative moral imagination. Those are what Haidt calls the authority foundation, the in-group, out-group foundation and the sacreds versus disgust foundation.