I think you’re right that conservatism and liberalism are ways of forming opinions and not actual opinions. The way I learned it, they are beliefs, which generate attitudes, which generate opinions. I believe big government is inherently bad, so my attitude toward government is suspicious, so my opinion about what it says is that, now matter how good it sounds, they’re not telling us something.

Beyond that I think your piece is flawed because it doesn’t follow through on the very premise you get right. The things you say define conservatism are actually attitudes or opinions, not the belief itself. The same is true of what you say about liberals.

Why not try the definitions of the actual words? Conservatives are people who wants to conserve their way of life. They believe in their way of life and they believe it is worth conserving. It is that set of beliefs that informs all their attitudes and opinions. The fact that they like to listen to “ordinary” people isn’t what defines them. They listen to ordinary people because people they consider ordinary are like them and say things they like to hear. They don’t like experts and big government because they tend to challenge their way of life, not do things that conserve it.

Conservatives can disagree because, while they all want to conserve the American way of life, they don’t all agree on what exactly that is or the best way to conserve it.

They come into conflict with liberals because liberals, as the name says, are open to new and different things. Many times those things are discovered by experts, who then come up with plans and systems to “fix” bad things or spread good things. These new things often challenge the existing order. That challenge often upsets those who favor the existing order, and they fight not only the new things they don’t like, but those who seem to like them or who want to allow them to continue to challenge the existing order.

You’ve no doubt heard the old saying about someone who isn’t liberal when they’re young doesn’t have a heart, while someone who isn’t conservative when they’re old doesn’t have a brain. That’s because the older we get, the more we have at stake when someone challenges the existing order. We’ve built our lives around it, we are comfortable in it, and we don’t want people screwing with it. A young person has much less to lose, and is therefore more easily swayed by appeals to the heart, or to his intelligence.

I’d like to say that your piece is also not even-handed, and that will cost you with readers who value fairness. However, I’ve listened to too many Rush Limbaugh shows to believe that. People like validation, and, it seems to me, conservatives like it a lot. So if you submit your article, which paints conservatives as down-to-earth, reasonable, god-fearing people and liberals as cold eggheads, you’ll probably please the conservatives. And you don’t care what the liberals think anyway, right?

Since liberalism dominates most aspects of life and culture, what is there for conservatives to conserve?

Thanks for the comments.

The view that conservatives favor the status quo while liberals are open to new and different things doesn’t seem to stand up when liberalism defines the mainstream and people say conservatism tends to extremism. Some other explanation of the difference is needed.

I don’t think the most basic thing is attachment or non-attachment to how one lives. Otherwise almost everyone would be conservative. Liberal academics and lots of other liberals are very attached to their way of life. And conservatives are often quite dissatisfied with things around them in which they participate just by living in the world. Many conservatives (e.g., those Christians who take the doctrine of human sinfulness seriously) have their doubts about even the private aspects of their own lives.

The decisive issue I think is how one comes to know what’s good and bad, what one should or shouldn’t do. The basic conservative answer is that such knowledge comes from all sorts of sources most of which can’t be demonstrated or usually even fully articulated. We therefore know what’s good and bad more by experience than by formal science, and since we’re social beings we know it with the aid of the traditions that sum up the collective experience of the people to whom we’re connected. In addition, since what experiences we have and what they tell us depends on what we’ve been up to, we know what’s good and bad by trying to orient ourselves toward what is good.

The reason “ordinary people” and “daily life” are the reference points for conservatism is that how to act is not a specialized expertise but something each of us has to learn by experience, by absorbing the experience of others (including tradition) and by trying to act as we should. Further, the social knowledge that helps us act well mostly exists informally, in habits, attitudes and institutions that grow up and become valued among people living together and trying to orient themselves toward a somewhat coherent common notion of what’s good. Good and evil and knowledge of good and evil are all around us and not off in a laboratory somewhere.

The reference point can’t be just any ordinary people or daily life though. For example, it can’t be the ordinary people one meets in the daily life of a maximum security prison. That is the point I make in the last section of the piece. What those terms have to refer to is ordinary people and daily life as they exist in a setting in which moral experience and tradition can function normally—that is, in a community that is more or less self-supporting, self-governing, not subject to constant disruption, not hopelessly divided morally, and so on. Conservatism therefore favors a certain sort of setting, and for that reason it can become quite radical and not at all attached to the way things actually are.

Liberals I think have an attitude toward questions of how we know what’s good and what to do that’s more in line with modern natural science. I don’t think it lacks even-handedness to say that or to judge that the conservative view is better. And I don’t think in a very short piece written for a conservative audience concerned with what “true conservatism” is that fairness requires developing everything liberals could say for themselves. If I can suggest ways for the particular audience to understand their own beliefs better that’s quite a lot to do in one column.

Mr. Ferrare is indignant that the editor of a conservative web site is criticizing liberalism, because, Mr. Ferrare argues, that is not even-handed and will drive away liberals.

His complaint, which he has repeated several times now, is simply a variation on the standard liberal position that ANY serious conservative view is hateful and disruptive of social order.

For anyone who’s still interested, here’s a revised version:

What is a Conservative?

We’re all convinced there’s something called conservatism that opposes something called liberalism, but people disagree on what it’s all about.

Many people think conservatism is a set of opinions, but that doesn’t explain why conservatives differ among themselves and argue about what true conservatism is. Others say conservatives just favor the status quo. In a time when there are TV commentators who call conservatism “extremist” that view doesn’t stand up. Whatever explains conservatism, it can’t be that conservatives like the way things are.

My explanation for conservatism is that it is less an opinion or an attachment to some particular thing than a way of forming opinions. It is not so much what you think as how you think that makes you conservative. That’s one reason conservatives can disagree among themselves, and it’s why there are two great opinion blocs, liberals and conservatives, that continue to confront each other in the same way regardless of how the issues change.

What I think explains more than anything else the difference between conservatives and liberals is that conservatives accept the way ordinary people think about things in daily life, while liberals believe in experts. That doesn’t mean conservatives are dumb and liberals are smart, although some people think so. Instead, it means that liberals and conservatives have different ideas what it is to be reasonable. Intelligence is not the difference. While most academics are liberal, great literature is based far more on everyday thought and experience than on the findings of experts.

Who you trust determines what you’ll do. Since liberals believe it’s most reasonable to trust experts, they believe in social programs. Experts need a vehicle for exercising their expertise and giving it influence over society, and that’s what social programs are for. As believers in social programs liberals are tolerant of taxes, bureaucrats and centralized government, and they downplay things like family, religion and personal morality that can’t be planned or administered. They look upon society from the standpoint of a top bureaucrat whose job it is to run everything, and so view it as a collection of interchangeable individuals with no important ties to each other. What happens to people they explain by reference to an overall system that ought to be managed and made the same for everyone.

In contrast, conservatives take their cues from the things that define the ordinary daily life of ordinary people—family, business, church, neighborhood, kinship, personal integrity and so on. For conservatives the attitudes and loyalties that make those things work are what life’s all about. They look upon a man’s happiness or unhappiness not as a product of the grand system of society in general but as the result of far more specific things—his individual skill, integrity and effort, his connections to family, friends, neighbors and coworkers, and sometimes his luck. Those things can’t possibly be made equal for everyone, and conservatives believe that the attempt to make them equal wrecks far more things than it helps.

Conservatives favor religion and family values because those are the things that keep daily life together and give it purpose and value. They emphasize reducing taxes and regulation because they believe people make their own decisions better than experts and bureaucrats. They are patriotic and law-abiding because they believe loyalty and integrity make the world go round, and because they feel an obligation to the country that lets their family and community exist in peace and safety. In comparison with liberals they downplay equality. It’s not that they favor inequality, but they think it’s stupid to force the issue. And they note that liberals themselves can’t solve the problem, since the bureaucrats who force everyone to be equal can’t themselves be equal to the people they control.

When you try to put something in a nutshell you raise questions. One question my definition of conservatism raises is what I mean by “ordinary life” and “ordinary people.” Someone might object that those things are different in different times and places, in the Old South and in present-day San Francisco, so that on my definition conservatism could include anything from slavery to gay marriage depending on the situation. That kind of objection contributes to arguments about “true conservatism.” If someone is fiscally conservative but soft on social issues is he a true conservative who’s just adapting to new circumstances, or is he on his way to liberalism?

To my mind the answer is that conservatism can’t be simply a matter of how things happen to be at the moment. The “ordinary life” to which it appeals has to include a notion of the normal functioning of human nature under free institutions. Otherwise it could take any distorted form, and it would make no sense to use it as a standard. Slavery is therefore out, because it’s not a free institution. But so is the current attempt to redefine marriage—the enduring union of one man and one woman for mutual support and the rearing of children—so that it can mean anything or nothing.

The attack on marriage, on the rights and obligations it involves, and on the customs and attitudes that support it destroy the ability of ordinary people to carry on their lives and raise the next generation independently. If Mom and Dad aren’t around, the government is going to step in and get involved in all the affairs of life. Maintenance of traditional marriage and all that goes with it is therefore necessary on a view that takes as its standard the free and productive functioning of ordinary human arrangements in daily life. Conservatism needs a certain sort of setting, and it can’t slight the “social issues.” Nor—to extend the point—can it be more than a distant aspiration in a politically-correct multicultural welfare state. Because conservatism cannot be simply a status quo outlook, but must promote a society in which the conservative outlook can work, I believe that there is a true conservatism that under some conditions can radically oppose the way things are.

Excellent and thoughtful work from Jim, as usual. If I might add a point or two, however, he leaves out at least one important aspect of liberalism: namely, that it’s a revolt against God and the created order. This is a fundamental ingredient of liberalism, and since conservatism at least in part must be defined in opposition to liberalism, it should be mentioned. Solzhenitsyn nailed it nicely in his Harvard speech.

How do we discover and then order public and private goods? For the liberal, the standard is human desires and appetites—e.g., he views approvingly what got our first parents tossed out of the Garden. For the conservative, it must come down to good and evil as objective and immutable realities, ordained by God. Sometimes the connection to a transcendent order is obscured and even a conservative may not be consciously aware of it, but it’s there nonetheless.

I think Jim has touched on this in other fora, so it’s not news to him, but I just thought I would suggest it for the sake of this nice little essay for the South Carolina site.

Thanks to Seth Williamson for his comments. I was of two minds on the issue he raises and decided to leave the notion of a morally authoritative created order implicit in the references to the role of religion in holding life together and giving it its point, and to the normal working of human nature as a standard. I was worried about raising too many issues in the middle of a discussion I haven’t been involved in. I will think about it again though.

I do not disagree with Mr. Williamson’s characterization of liberalism as a revolt against God, but I wonder what Mr. Ferrare thinks about such an “extreme” and “anti-social” point of view. ;)

I guess I had that shot coming, because I just had to close my comments with a little jab or two. I’ll take one in return, with a smile. My serious comment — absent the snideness — was that it will drive away readers who value fairness, not that it will drive liberals away from a conservative site. I don’t exclude all conservatives from the group of readers that values fairness. I’m fairly sure you don’t, either.

Mr. Auster also misses my point when he says I think conservative views are hateful and disruptive of social order. Never said it, didn’t imply it. I would submit Mr. Auster is drawing inferences through a fairly distinct filter and ends up thinking anyone who disagrees with him the way I do is a liberal spouting one of several stock assertions that can be easily dismissed with stock counter-assertions.

What I said, and what I’ve said previously, is that the posts are slanted too far toward conservatives and demonize liberals. Conservatives are the salt of the Earth and liberals are evil eggheads lacking any touch of humanity. It’s bad rhetorical technique. People are tired of polarized debate and a little considered opinion is in order.

I don’t think the comments are hateful or disruptive, just poorly presented (which is not the same as badly written) and sometimes wrong.

And I wouldn’t have complained about how you presented your points if I thought you were way out in right field to begin with. Though I disagree with some of the points, mostly I disagree with the way they’re stated.

For the record, I’m neither fully conservative nor fully liberal. I’ve got more than 25 years in the Army, so I have very strong — and probably very conservative — ideas about itegrity, loyalty and personal responsibility. I absolutely believe in moral authority (especially in a leadership context) and that there is a good and right order that exists outside of any set of circumstances.

I also think our government is too intrusive, though I’d probably add a few areas you think the government ought to control and exclude some you think it shouldn’t (or would that be vice versa?). The problem is, anyone who thinks about it can see that government actions don’t affect everyone equally, and the government isn’t supposed to favor one group of Americans over another. When it does, I think the government should step in and undo the damage it has done. In those cases I favor government programs, which I’m sure would set off your liberal alarm.

But I shouldn’t have to state my beliefs to simply disagree with how you’re writing.

I don’t understand the complaint about “driving away readers who value fairness.” Your assumption seems to be that it’s somehow “unfair” to speak the truth as we see it because we might alienate liberals.

Jim was analyzing the tendency which in our lifetimes has been called liberalism. He wasn’t making personal attacks on you or other liberals or suggesting that you can’t have good qualities. In fact, I believe he’d agree that human beings tend to be inconsistent creatures. To the extent that you believe in, say, moral authority and personal responsibility, you’re not a consistent liberal, which fact you’ve already conceded. But this circumstance does not invalidate his general analysis of liberalism, which stands or falls on its own merits and which should be criticized for such—not because it may hurt the feelings of liberals who happen across it.

There was no complaint in my post. I simply pointed out that if you say only good things about one side, and only bad things about the other, it comes across as unfair. Again, minus my snide remarks, that makes some people look at the piece as slanted and it lessens the piece’s effectiveness. Didn’t say anything about hurting anybody’s feelings (even in my snike remarks), didn’t say anything about whether or not it was fair for Mr. Kalb to speak the truth as he saw it. I didn’t even say he was wrong. I just said it came across as slanted, and that would drive some people away.

My other point was criticizing the piece strictly based on its merits. I agree with his distinction between liberals and conservatives, I just don’t think it’s the determining difference, which is how he presents it. I think listening to ordinary people is one of the character traits of conservatives, but not the one that determines whether you are conservative or not. It’s a fairly simple assertion and I stated it fairly simply.

My guess is that you’ve decided I’m liberal and you read my posts with that in mind and consider whatever I say an attack on conservatism. I don’t consider myself a liberal, took pains to point that out, yet you still label me a liberal. As I said, it’s a guess. But you seem an intelligent person, and yet you take fairly obvious statements and get the wrong thing out of them. I suggest you read the posts again without putting any emotion into it or making assumptions based on your estimation of me as a flaming liberal. If you still get what you got before, I can only assume I need to continue to work on my own communication skills.

It seems to me that it is a nominalist mistake to place too much merit in what any particular individual happens to think he is or happens to want to think he is. Mr. Ferrare’s second to last paragraph in the comment prior to this latest is sufficient to determine that he has a strong alliegence to liberalism, if we take his own words seriously. The implication that a person defines himself rather than simply choosing loyalties is also a strong indicator. To the extent that Mr. Kalb’s essay is (or any assertive statements whatsoever are) true it will naturally be biased against error; and methinks Mr. Ferrare doth protest too much. If liberalism is in error why should a principled person attempt to present it as an “unbiased” Hegelian antithesis rather than as what it is: error?

Since you weren’t clear about your own position and employed a formulation I most often seem to hear from liberals (e.g., Some of my opinions are liberal, others conservative); and since you seem to regard a straightforward analysis from a conservative point of view as “slanted,” I don’t think it was that much of a stretch to assume you were a liberal. The adjective “flaming” is your own.

As far as only good about one side, only bad about the other, you have to remember it was only a few short paragraphs on a subject which could occupy an entire library. The length doesn’t allow for a lot of nuance.

Just to clarify, Mr. Williamson’s “you” I believe denotes Mr. Ferrare.

The notion that “some of my opinions are liberal, others are conservative, therefore I get to define myself and cannot be pidgeonholed as either by a truth other than myself” is itself a strong commitment to liberalism. That sort of radical self-determination, as distinguished from personal loyalties to things that transcend ourselves, is sufficient to place a given individual determinately in the liberal category.

The key points about Mr. Ferrare’s obvious liberalism (obvious to everyone but himself) have been made very well by Matt and Mr. Williamson. I would just add that the insistence on “balance” in all issues is another typical liberal position. The liberal attitude is: All issues have (at least) two sides, and the proper approach in discussing any issue is to give mathematically equal representation to both sides. This is the formal operating philosophy of the news media and in the liberal academy. But it is only formal. In reality, liberals decisively favor the liberal side in any issue; they are not neutral and balanced; they have a substantive position that they push. Thus the insistence on “balance” is really a ploy (whether conscious or not) to make it practically impossible for conservatives to advance any substantive conservative position while freeing the liberals to advance their substantive position. To tell a tiny, powerless conservative web site that it ought to treat the liberal position equally with the conservative position is really to say that any truly conservative voice is, by that very fact, biased. If put into practice consistently, it would mean that no conservative voice could exist anywhere.

This same paradigm applies across the board. For examples, liberals formally say that all cultures should be treated equally, but what they really mean is that the traditional Western culture shall be marginalized and silenced, while various non-Western and anti-Western cultures will be promoted.

But even if liberals do remain consistently “balanced” in particular instances, such “balance” is still false and dishonest. For example, when the media attributed equal reasonableness to those who believed O.J. Simpson guilty and those who believed him innocent (because white America and black America had “different perspectives”) the media were really favoring the view that he was innocent, because to treat the false as equally valid with the true is to favor the false.

To sum it up in a phrase: Liberal neutrality is a fraud.

To sum it up in another phrase: The belief in equality necessarily results in a double standard whereby the worse is favored over the better.

Re liberalism as a revolt against God:

I’ve always like the passage in Heschel’s “I Asked for Wonder” where he says that Man’s revenge for being cast out of the Garden of Eden is that he is building his own Paradise, here on Earth, and that he won’t allow God in it.

Liberalism is about constructing that man-made Paradise. Conservatism is about living in the world made by God, and about recognizing its origin in something larger than ourselves.

Reading parts of this thread again including the following exchange between Mr. Ferrare and me, I was reminded of Matt’s and my discussion of nominalism in a more recent thread, “Anti-Lookism is not extreme”.

I wrote:

His [Mr. Ferrare’s] complaint, which he has repeated several times now, is simply a variation on the standard liberal position that ANY serious conservative view is hateful and disruptive of social order.

Mr. Ferrare replied:

Mr. Auster also misses my point when he says I think conservative views are hateful and disruptive of social order. Never said it, didn’t imply it. I would submit Mr. Auster is drawing inferences through a fairly distinct filter and ends up thinking anyone who disagrees with him the way I do is a liberal spouting one of several stock assertions that can be easily dismissed with stock counter-assertions.

———————————

Now, first of all, I did not say that Mr. Ferrare said or thought that conservative views are hateful and disruptive of social order. I said HIS VIEW was a VARIATION on the STANDARD LIBERAL VIEW that conservative views are hateful and disruptive of social order.

And this is what leads me back to nominalism. When is it legitimate to make a connection between a particular thing and a larger class of which the particular thing seems to be a part? Are such larger classes real? I raise this point because liberals have occasionally gotten annoyed with me when I would say to them something similar to what I said to Mr. Ferrare. On one hand, their annoyance is justified; no one wants to be arbitrarily labelled as having a position that he doesn’t actually share. On the other hand, it seems necessary to make connections between particular opinions and general ideas if we are to understand their true meaning. Many views stated by liberals or conservatives ARE typically liberal or conservative and we can’t understand them adequately unless we understand the larger class to which they belong.

If I may make another generalization, it occurs to me that liberals, much more than conservatives, resist such generalizations; it’s almost always liberals who say “I’m not a liberal; don’t put a label on me, I judge each issue by its own merits,” etc. etc., while conservatives, by contrast, frankly see themselves as conservatives and liberals as liberals and see politics as a clash between these larger classes. Liberals, by (typically) refusing to admit the existence of those larger classes (except to attack hateful and reactionary conservatives), are showing that they don’t want there to be a discussion of first principles.

I’m not saying liberals are the only ones to avoid first principles. For example, many conservative journalists and columnists are “activists” rather than “thinkers” and are simply in the mode of attacking liberals whatever the issue of the moment happens to be; they are not willing to think critically about the larger implications and possible flaws of the conservative position. Nevertheless, in general, conservatives admit the objective reality of the classes “conservative” and “liberal,” and liberals deny it.

All of which is a longwinded way of agreeing with Matt’s point that liberalism seems to be aligned with nominalism.

One of the other common tendencies is for “I define myself you can’t say what I am” liberals to invoke a nominalist ontology as a way of willing one’s own redemption. I may share some notions with Marx but I am not responsible for the murders committed in the name of Marxism, because my view is nuanced thus and nuanced so. I (the nominalist) completely control the implications of my own views, since I construct my own views for my own purposes, and of course my purposes are always morally good. The fact that I split an intellectual hair or two makes me pristinely innocent of all the firing squads, gas chambers, and deliberately orchestrated famines. Repentence and redemption are entirely unnecessary, and all those murders were just unfortunate occurrences that we can blame on the unfeeling universe or on the backwardness of religion which, as a violently backward impediment to utopia, is really their root cause.

Of course the actual reality is that the individual liberal is a slave of principle rather than vice versa; so nominalist commitments are a form of personally assertive emancipation.

Yes. Another (less extreme) example is the feminists who insist that “their” feminism is not that nasty extreme feminism, but just a nice, reasonable feminism.

I saw Phyllis Schlafly once on C-SPAN addressing a college audience, delivering a withering critique of feminism. During the question period, a young woman stood up and said, “This is not what _I_ mean by feminism; what _I_ mean by feminism is blah blah.” Mrs. Schlafly replied: “Well, I’m speaking of the recognized feminist movement and the statements made by the people recognized as its leaders.” In other words, Mrs. Schlafly was insisting there there was an objectively existing feminist movement that one could discuss and draw conclusions about. The young woman didn’t want to be held to that; she wanted a good feminism that would be whatever she wanted it to be, even if no one else in the world had ever heard of it. Mrs. Schlafly is one of the few intellectual figures on the American right smart enough to respond adequately to that kind of legerdemain, er, nominalism.