Beginning students of American history have been confused for generations by the mysterious reversal of the early American political spectrum in modern times. How, they wonder, did the liberal Jeffersonian banner, glorifying a weak central government, strong states rights, and a strong individualism along with its identification with farmers and workers, come to be to be taken up by modern conservatives while conservative Hamiltonianism, with its upper-class elitism and its reliance on a strong central government favoring monied interests, has been taken up by modern liberals?
That has always been a good question. One answer that sufficed for a while was given by Herbert Croly, a theoretician of the turn of the century Progressive movement, who argued that industrial capitalism had made it necessary to adopt Hamiltonian means in order to achieve Jeffersonian ends. That answer always struck me as more clever than substantive, but now I would argue that the entire question may have been superceded by a transformation no less intriguing and no less dramatic.
I’m referring to the fact (and I believe it is a fact, not an interpretation) that in our own day, on a number of fundamental, defining issues, conservatives have been sounding more and more like liberals and even radicals— and not like liberals of a few centuries ago but liberals as recent as the 1960s. And liberals, playing their part in this game of ideological musical chairs, have been sounding more and more like the conservatives and reactionaries of the recent past.
Readers of this blog will know that one of my central arguments is that from the earliest stirrings of the abolitionist movement in the 19th century until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 it was liberals who led the struggle for colorblind non-discriminatory equality. In what I regard as a tragic wrong turn, they abandoned what had been that core principle before the ink on the 1964 act was completely dry, and began to demand racial preferences.
This racial about-face soon led to others: liberals, who had always been stalwart defenders of the First Amendment, and often even First Amendment absolutists, changed direction here as well and began demanding and then defending speech codes that regulated speech on campuses and regulations banning speech that may be thought to create a “hostile environment” in the workplace. They even suppport regulation of political speech in campaigns, under the name of campaign finance reform. In the old days the attempt to restrict speech was associated with conservatives; today, it’s more likely to come from liberals or feminists.
But this is old hat, at least here. What’s new hat is a similar transformation that has taken place in the foreign policy arena since 9/11. Michael Kinsley regards President Bush as a “wooly minded” Wilsonian idealist, although Andrew Sullivan notes that Kinsley somehow neglected to mention 9/11 in trying to account for Bush’s change of heart.
Sullivan also links to an impressive article by Peter Berkowitz. Berkowitz noted that the Bush doctrine of bringing freedom and democracy to the middle east echoed to a certain degree
an old doctrine, a return to, and bold reaffirmation of, the legacy of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan who, in prosecuting the final decade of the Cold War, championed the superiority of the moral and political ideas for which the US and Britain stood.
“But,” Berkowitz insisted, and in this I think he is absolutely right,
it would be a great mistake to see the Bush doctrine as conservative in a simple, partisan sense.
For what the president has given voice to are convictions central to the liberal tradition. Freedom is not just good for Americans or for the British. It is good for all people everywhere, because it reflects a universal aspiration, a permanent inclination of the human heart. While forms of government for securing individual rights will vary, as will the choices individuals and peoples make about how to take advantage of the blessings of freedom, no individual wishes to be imprisoned, tortured, or enslaved. Individuals should not be forced to be free, but free nations may be compelled to use force to counter the threat posed by governments that subjugate their own people and threaten the liberties of other nations.
These convictions are nurtured by the tradition of John Locke, who maintained that all men and all women are by nature free and equal. And the tradition of the authors of The Federalist, who believed that the experiment under way in America was relevant to all mankind, because all mankind had interest in discovering whether government based on the consent of the governed and devoted to protecting the rights of individuals was possible. And the tradition of John Stuart Mill, who identified the “permanent interests of man as a progressive being” with the spread of liberty in a manner consistent with the principles of liberty.
After quoting a part of the above, Andrew Sullivan asks, “Now when will real liberals realize this?”
But this question is misguided. It assumes that those on the left in the U.S. are still “real liberals.” They aren’t. Or to put that point a different way, liberalism isn’t what it used to be.
