To the Left, ‘Conservatism’ a Catch-All
The term “conservative” is used elastically these days, normally to indicate something that the author using the term dislikes. And while many such writers tend indeed to dislike conservative ideas, the objects of their dislike are rarely conservative in any sense a conservative would recognize.
A few years ago, the late Christopher Hitchens spoke of fringe elements in Jerusalem seeking the expulsion of Arabs as “Israeli conservatives” – surely a surprise to Likud, Yisrael Beiteinu, and other groupings that comprise the vast bulk of Israeli right-of-center politics.
Reuters thinks Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a “conservative,” and the New York Times even headed its report on his election as president with the title “New Conservative President Takes Power in Iran.” Actually, Ahmadinejad is a radical among radicals in the Iranian hierarchy, with a penchant for Holocaust denial and harping on erasing Israel from the page of history. But then, the Associated Press regards him as “ultraconservative,” so the Times appears measured by comparison.
Now, David Greenberg at Slate thinks the recently deceased writer Gore Vidal was a “conservative.”
Vidal was neither insecure nor stupid, but if he can be described with a straight face as conservative, then just about anyone else can be as well. If conservatism comprises respect for custom, institutions, religious faith, the Judeo-Christian tradition, and limited government, Vidal was as anti-conservative as one could be. He regarded monotheism as “the great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture.” He despised Ronald Reagan and supported the Democrats across the decades, even once running (unsuccessfully) as a Democrat for congressional office in New York. But that was altogether too mainstream for him. For two years (1970-1972), he chaired the People’s Party, a short-lived grouping that promoted legalizing marijuana and instituting such decidedly unconservative devices as a minimum wage and even a maximum wage.
In 2004, he supported the presidential candidacy of far left Democrat Dennis Kucinich.
In short, Vidal was a political crank of the left. He was also an avid and perennial peddler of conspiracy theories. He believed that Winston Churchill was a malefactor who helped infiltrate “little Englander” film directors and producers into 1930s Hollywood to valorize Albion and to incite the American public out of neutrality and into the war. He believed to the grave that Franklin Roosevelt deliberately provoked Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor so as to facilitate U.S. entry into the war. Vidal’s isolationist stance was all of piece with that of Father Charles Coughlin — a thorough-going radical, though one also often deemed conservative by those who should know better — and like Coughlin’s, was thoroughly laced with anti-Semitism. Vidal also befriended through correspondence the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
Greenberg is too well-read not to have known all this, and his piece shows that he has no illusions about Vidal being a paragon of immoderate bigotry and nastiness. How does Greenberg connect this blighted record to conservatism? On inspection, the connection rests on the exceedingly slender reed of Vidal having once said “I think of myself as conservative.” But then perhaps Vidal was, by his own lights — a conserver of patrician aloofness, avuncular unpleasantness, and drawing-room bigotry, all of which were going out of fashion in his lifetime. But as a lucid estimate of his political pedigree? Obviously Greenberg found it too tempting to tar conservatives with the brush of nastiness that was the bread and butter of progressives, whom leftists today would prefer be remembered as something they were not.
The procedure of discovering new “conservatives” seems to rest in transferring to fictitious conservatives all the ugly traits, vicious sentiments, and rancid rancors that have disfigured actual leftists.
This procedure has been going on since at least the time of the Soviet Union’s terminal phase, when Western journalists, inebriated with Gorbymania and the prospect of a hip, glastnosted, and perestroikaed Soviet Union, labeled the Bolshevik hardliners in the Kremlin old guard who looked on askance at all this as “conservatives.” An odd label when one thinks that these same people mounted the 1991 coup in an effort to keep old-style Bolshevism alive.
Unless diehard Marxist-Leninism or Stalinism has something to do with the thinking of Edmund Burke, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, the Marquess of Salisbury, Michael Oakeshott, Elie Kedourie, or William F. Buckley, the promiscuous abuse of the term “conservative” debases language and ideas to irreverent ends.
Yep. The political world needs a vocabulary, no disagreement there.
But it’s not just the left that conflates. The term “The left” seems to cover everything from stalin through to people who think maybe the government maybe has a legitimate role to play in providing public services.
And neither side is too quick about rejecting the outliers in their own ranks. What I find more interesting that who the left thinks is conservative, is who the RIGHT thinks is conservative. I don’t think anne coulter is conservative. Nor glenn beck. I also don’t think michael moore is particularly liberal, either (there are a few choice words that apply much better, IMHO).
Ahmedinehad obviously isn’t conservative. He’s a social hard-liner and a foreign-policy moron with a single trick that appeals to the angry and poor with a twisted memory of times past.
But as long as the work keeps trying to boil complex questions into one-dimensional comparisons … what are you going to do? Once upon a time, words had actual meanings, but now they’re just labels to throw at opponents.
“The term “The left” seems to cover everything from stalin through to people who think maybe the government maybe has a legitimate role to play in providing public services.”
If the public service is defined by the Original Constitution then no one would consider it “The Left”. But it isn’t defined that way at this time. It, like all things left, is intentionally redefined on a basis of the need to control the narrative. Relative morality means just what you want it to mean if you are a leftist.
Govt does have a legitimate role in providing govt services to the public and they are defined by the Constitution. Reduce govt to its original scope and you will see a large leap in the economy and a vast improvement in your daily life.
The term “left” didn’t even exist then. But the French revolutionary left were the revolutionaries, modeled to a limited extent after the American revolutionaries. the French “right” were the royalists.
This is why the “left-right” paradigm doesn’t work in the US. In common usage, “left” is socialist, but in historical fact, our conservatives, who want to preserve the original intent of the revolution, are technically closer to “left”.
This plainly isn’t true. Even public works project — a thing with which the Founding Fathers were familiar and about which they were enthusiastic — can earn one the leftist epithet, since it isn’t being built by the private sector.
It’s always built by a private contractor, and usually engineered by a private engineering firm. The government doesn’t actually build anything. Never did, except for a few small wartime military projects.
Not true. The Tennessee Valley project, and similar works on such rivers as the Mississippi, were conducted primarily by the government itself, through bodies designed for such (such as the Tennessee Valley Authority) or by the Army Corps of Engineers. Likewise was true of much of the construction work done on infrastructure during the Great Depression – say what you will about the New Deal, it did give a big boost to inferastructure, and primarily NOT subcontracted.
Subcontracting for such things is the standard now, but it wasn’t always. A lot of stuff was made directly by government employed workers.
Federal, State, or Local government…that is the question.
The Right threw out David Duke.
The Left kept Al Sharpton.
QED.
(“Liberal” no longer means “liberal”, but “leftist”.)
This is merely the result of the leftists (yes, it is a general term, though not as general as “collectivists”) falsely claiming to be “liberal” or “progressive”, and anti-democratics to be “Democratics”. OTOH, the “conservatives” were people trying to prop up the monarchies.
Meanwhile, the leftists and semi-leftists have had a successful 5th column operation to undermine the Republicans to the extent that, at least according to RL, they’re modifying the rules to prevent any influence by the genuine Republicans.
All the more reason to refute the perversions of the language and reclaim the high ground of liberal respect for natural individual rights.
Fabians
Minority Identity Political groupings (ie various racists, sexists, tribalists)
and Robert Byrd
I agree with Techno. But I did attempt a glossary that distinguishes between factions of the left and of the right. Here is the link: http://clarespark.com/2009/12/16/perceptions-of-the-enemy-the-left-looks-at-the-right-and-vice-versa/. This has been a popular blog.
Or, if you want more on the left, particular the distinction between Marxists, Leninists, and anarchists, see this one: http://clarespark.com/2012/08/16/marx-rivals-and-our-enigmatic-president/.
Trotskyists, Fabians, Naitonalist Socialists, Feminist-Marxists, Maoists, Social Democrats, Communists
You haven’t been paying attention to the Akin controversy, have you?
That is pure BS, excuse me. The Republicans,including the candidate, commentators,bloggers etc immediately tripped over each other rushing to denounce the guy. Mitt Romney denounced him before even obama! People demanded he leave the contest, he chose not to. You cannot say that the Republicans have defended him in any way. PACS pulled their money from his campaign.
Never mind. I apologize. I should not write, read & watch the convention at one time
“You haven’t been paying attention to the Akin controversy, have you?”
Only because he said something utterly stupid, and it got out. His actual policy position is hardly different to the mainstream GOP position on abortion.
But limbaugh’s still going strong, and he’s no less offensive or ridiculous. Coulter’s said things equally offensive. Let’s take a poll of most popular “conservative” pundits:
http://conhomeusa.typepad.com/survey/2010/12/the-republican-grassroots-ten-favorite-pundits.html
A third of them are (or peddle) crackpots (beck, coulter, limbaugh), and I can’t seriously describe three more as conservative (hannity, malkin and o’reilly) they’re just shills; caricatures of conservatives, who do it for the big piles of lovely money. And newt’s just a bipartisan cynic. Krauthammer’s a neocon.
Al sharpton’s just an ambulance chaser who inserts himself into other people’s situations, whether they like it or not. You’d have to make a pretty long list of popular liberal figures before he appeared on it.
Are there any _really_ left-wing pundits/icons in the US? I mean actually left-wing, not just “democrat supporters”. Before answering, think about what left wing really means: Actual socialism (no, not social democracy – that’s not left wing, not in the way krauthammer or coulter are right wing). I wonder if anyone can list, let’s say, 5 actual communists or socialists with any significant national US political following.
90% of the people here think they’re “Conservative”. If by saying Conservative they actually mean “Nationalist Progressive Socialist”, they’d be correct.
So few Constitutional Conservatives.
Now, all over PJ Media I see reference to “socon”, which is used as an epithet to possibly mean “Social Conservative” or “Southern Conservative”. Most of the time, those people aren’t “Conservative” either, they’re just a different brand of Progressive from the Prog who’s bitching.
Will the Progs ever get back to the truth? Can we get back to a Left/Right spectrum that transitions from Totalitarianism to Anarchy? The Progs want to muddy the waters by taking concepts that are essentially along the Y-axis and attribute them to the X-axis.
It’s like saying Nazis were “Right Wing”, just because they were nationalists. I suppose it works, though. A lot of Constitutional Conservatives assumed Bush was “Conservative” due to his nationalism. He wasn’t Right of Center, of course, he was obviously to the Left. He never met a big government solution he didn’t love.
I clearly remember the BBC reporting that the Communists who had launched a coup against Gorbachev were ‘right wingers’.
Very telling of the innate bias at work.
Four researchers at UC Berkeley reviewed 88 journal articles, books, conference papers, speeches, interviews and judicial opinions to look for patterns in conservatism. They concluded that conservatives are characterized by “fear and aggression, dogmatism, intolerance of ambiguity, avoidance of uncertainty, need for cognitive closure and terror management.” They called their study “an elegant and unifying explanation” of political conservatism and stressed that it was not judgemental. They declined to do a parallel study of liberalism on the ground that there is far more written material about conservatism. Among those they classified as conservative were Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Castro, Khrushchev, and Ronald Reagan. The researchers were Jack Glaser, Frank Sulloway, John Jost, and Arie Kruglanski and their title was “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition”, 2003. They admitted that their study might be seen as a partisan political exercise (I can’t imagine why).
My taxes subsidize this stupidity, but Moonbeam wants me to vote to raise my taxes. Don’t think so.
“Liberal” and “conservative” are useless labels these days. Bring back Zombie’s political spectrum.
http://pjmedia.com/zombie/2010/10/11/the-electric-tea-party-acid-test/
I agree with your comment about the utility of the categories “liberal” and “conservative.” The modern practice of categorizing political perspectives using the uni-dimensional spectrum that ranges from “left” to “right” had its origins in the general assembly during the French Revolution. Things have changed considerably since then, of course. So, it is time for a fresh look.
The one virtue of the left/right spectrum is its simplicity, but that is also its big problem; it is far too simplistic. It misses the complexities of points of view. It obscures the differences and exaggerates the similarities both within and across categories on the spectrum.
I will have to study Zombie’s typology more carefully, but I think this multidimensional approach is enormously helpful. There are other examples and possibilities.
However, the elevation of a schema of political thought is itself a political problem. It is a problem of the possession and exercise of political power, particularly the control of political discourse. Who benefits from the use of categories such as “left,” “right,” “liberal,” and “conservative”? Who controls our political vocabulary? What will it take to change it?
It’s not perfect, but it’s a huge improvement over “liberal/conservative” or “left/right”.
Reminds me of the use of the term “ultra-Orthodox”, defined as a religious Jews doing something I disagree with. (The New York Times actually used the term in the ’40s to refer to religious Zionists.)
Sort of like a (rich) liberal’s (!!) definition of “rich”: somebody who makes more than me.
The problem is that conservative and liberal aren’t literal antonyms. “liberal”, properly speaking, can be defined by a specific strain of thought in western history (Locke, Montesquieu, Bastiat, Paine, Jefferson etc.). “Conservative”, properly speaking, just means a political movement which respects tradition or the status quo. The result of this, is that “American conservative”, in a country with “liberal” traditions, means something totally different than “Iranian conservative”, in a country with none.
The broad-spec use of the word “conservative”, without the necessary qualifiers, betrays a fundamental premise of the “new left”(progressives, collectivists etc.). They view traditionalism as being wrong in and of itself, regardless of the individual tradition being observed.
‘Cept for islam. That tradition is special.
The late Sen. Hayakawa from California was an entertaining figure, not least when he delved into the mysteries of his chosen field of semantics. Words are manipulated all of the time, by politicians, journalists, academics — hell, even by my mother. It is what people do. My own preference is to analyze whether specific proposals centralize power in the hands of an elite or whether there is left to individuals a freedom to choose. I don’t much care whether you call this conservative or liberal, but I cherish the freedom to choose. It’s no accident that I use a phrase associated with the late, great Milton Friedman.
I agree that it is ridiculous to call Gore Vidal a conservative, but Ahmadinejad is a different matter. First, since “conservative” is a relative term, and since he wants to conserve the current theocratic regime, he is a conservative in that sense. But secondly, he’s on the far, far right, much farther to the right than any conservative in America (not counting the Islamists who are here). One can see this by considering his hopelessly backward views on women and gays. And it’s a good bet that if he were here in America, he would want to ditch the Constitution for shari’a. I just don’t see how he counts as a leftist. The fact that most leftists seem to think he’s one of them doesn’t persuade me in the least. He’d cut their throats given half a chance.
Iran is a theocracy based on Islam with Shari a law as their constitution. Islam based on Shari a law is facism, a collectivist ideal with Arab nationalism where individual rights are completely subjagated by Shari a law, giving the rulers complete authority over the masses. This is why Shari a law is completely incompatable with the US Constitution. Our Constitution is based on individual rights. Conservatives believe in our constitution based on individual rights to life, liberty and property such as described in John Locke’s writings that was the basis of our founding fathers forming our Declaration of Independence and constitution. Leftists are collectivists, where government has all the power over the rights of the people, such as described in Plato’s Republic, Hobbes Leviathan, Thomas Moore’s Utopia etc. Iran and Armadinijad are collectivists who control the lives of their people and are equal to the worst of colllectivists and leftists of history such as Lenin, Stalin, Hitler. I think it is time for democrats who belive in our constitution as written to take back their party from the solcialists, progressives and communists, who call themselves the left.
Leftists are collectivists only because they are egalitarians, and they see collectivism as a way of achieving their egalitarian goals. I just don’t see that there’s anything particularly egalitarian about shari’a law, nor about Plato’s Republic, nor (say) Louis XIV’s France. If collectivism means nothing other than the government having all (or a great deal of) the power over the rights of the people, then there can be non-leftist collectivist systems, too, and that is where I would put the current Iranian regime.
“How poor must your grasp of conservatism be to think Gore Vidal and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are conservative”?
About as poor as the grasp of most of the writers here.
Gee, Oz. Thanks for the insight.
You assume that the word “conservative” has only one meaning — referring to the word’s Burkian definition. Plainly, conservative has many meanings. One might term Ahmadinejad “conservative” in so much as he opposes change in his society. One can stretch this even further. Putin can be seen as “conservative” in that he wishes to restrengthen old institutions (even Stalin, in his substance as the “red czar” might be seen likewise in this light). Consider all of those folks claimed by both Conservatives and Progressives. Jefferson & Hamilton. Lincoln & TR. To call the term elastic is to be too restrictive.
A lot od dictionary and thesaurus-worthy comments about ideological labels, but what matters today is much more elemental. That Obama was labeled a “centrists” or “moderate” by those carrying water for him is a disgrace. But in their own minds this was an “accurate” description of Obama’s worldview.
That the positions of the Democratic Party are considered “mainstream” is also inaccurate. The party may not be “Marxist,” nor even truly “Socialist,” but the Euro-style “social democratic” bent of the Democratic leadership is definitely left of the true American mainstream.
Today terms and words are thrown about as labels meant to describe and villify an opponent. Thomas Hobbes believed terms must be defined before any political discourse. If we define our terms before each discussion that provides us a base to build an agreement and understanding upon. Terms with the definitions once commonly “known” have lost their meaning. They need to be redefined and stated.
What follows next should logically be a discussion of the political continuum. Most think the political continuum to be a horizontal line. I suggest based upon the criteria that is created from the definition of terms the continuum would not have to be a horizontal line but may be a circle.
After the continuum is established, we may then categorize who is “left” or “right” of a given point based upon estabilished criteria. Each discussion would need its own established continuum for left/right discussion.
You’re correct about the use of labels to vilify. The problem is, if you call a liberal a liberal, he’ll take it as a compliment. The same is true if you call a conservative a conservative, and by and large, I have to wonder whether many on each side realize that.
In my debates with progressives, they tend to group people into “the good” who want humans to make positive progress, and “the bad” who would cling to the past. Since it is obvious that their “progress” is good, those who disagree have no real arguments against progress, and therefore are full of hate against those who would be helped. (They don’t need to listen to those “fake” arguments against progress)
Since everyone defines progressives as “left”, then the “right” is hateful and bad. Since Hitler and Stalin were bad, they must then be on the “right”. (they went so far to the left that they wrapped around to the right, or so I have been told)
Even though progressives make their arguments with more wit than this (good right brain thinking), their logic is this juvenile (bad left brain thinking).