Three Political Languages?
The binaries Americans use to think about politics conceal three underlying political languages.
Post 7 (Part One): 18 February 2025
The binaries Americans use to think about politics—left/right, liberal/conservative, Democratic/Republican—conceal three underlying political languages. Exposing these makes some aspects of U.S. politics make (a bit) more sense and helps us reason about the way forward. This will not be easy: Not only are some elements of the three languages well hidden, their names overlap with the labels we attach to our binaries. That’s both annoying and confusing but can’t be helped. This is a large topic, so I am breaking up today’s post into two parts, with the second half coming tomorrow. Today, I will define the three political languages in a rough way. Tomorrow, I will show how our political binaries are built using these elemental parts. All this demands a bit of patience from readers, but it will be worth it; I will rely on this basic method many times in the months to come.
The three political languages are liberal, conservative, and republican. While not a complete list, these and their variants cover most of the American political vocabulary.1 As public philosophies, each of these three expresses a coherent but incomplete worldview that we draw upon when we think about political questions. The incompleteness is important; each language is tailored to deal effectively with a particular set of political needs but may be silent about others. We rely on all three of these philosophies because we need to address a full range of political questions: we have to protect individual freedom, we have to belong to a community, and we have to govern ourselves.
The easiest way to start is to say what each public philosophy is especially good at. This can be thought of as its function. Liberalism checks public power. Republicanism enables collective action. Conservatism defines the community. That’s provocatively reductionist, but it highlights the way the worldviews interact. Built to protect individuals from government, liberalism provides little guidance about how to use government to advance the public good. Republicanism, in contrast, is about the practice and preservation of self-government. These are complementary strengths—we can harness both approaches to our benefit. The promise of this positive interaction will be a major theme of this publication.
Liberalism and conservatism interact too, but it is anything but positive. Liberal individualism does not support strong stories of peoplehood and can erode the ties that bind us together as a society. Strengthening those bonds is what conservatism does best. But this does not suggest complementary roles for liberalism and conservatism. Conservatism builds ties that erode individual freedom and undermine the equality of persons; they are illiberal. Liberalism or republicanism, or both together, must find a way to meet the real need for community that conservatism satisfies. This is the biggest challenge facing liberal democratic national states today. It is why I go on so much about membership.
The three philosophies are not monoliths, each fracture almost endlessly. Staying in my reductionist mode, however, I will say that each has two main variants. Most of the core principles of liberalism belong to what I will label traditional liberalism—a set of ideas that became coherently organized in the 17th but were only fully formed in the mid-19th century. They are well summarized by the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. (“We hold these truths…”). The great flaw in this worldview is its inability to address private systems of inequality. In response, thinkers have been developing egalitarian liberalism ever since. Egalitarians attempt to address material inequality without explicitly rejecting any of the basic tenets of traditional liberalism. The philosopher John Rawls made the best overall effort. He asks society to justify imbalances of private power in a way that is analogous to the way liberals have always asked governments to justify the use of public power. Economic inequalities, he reasoned, can be justified when they provide the greatest possible benefit to the least advantaged (e.g., because of a higher general level of prosperity).2 After wrestling with this for years, I have concluded that the egalitarian reaction to traditional liberalism has not proven very useful politically. Traditional liberal ideas continue to dominate American political thinking, left and right, especially when we are talking about economics or when freedom is invoked. Instead, I increasingly look to civic republicanism as a way to complement traditional liberal ideas.
As noted in the post on “Real Freedom”, civic republicanism divides into aristocratic and democratic variants, depending on whether citizenship is viewed as limited or universal. Aristocratic versions accept as full members only those with enough personal resources to be independent, free that is. Democratic versions understand that it is our collective duty to ensure that every person has access to this level of resources; that is, that every person be free. This is the essence of social citizenship. The insights of republicanism developed during and after episodes of self-government dating back to the Greek city states. Although they are part of our understanding of the political world, we often fail to see republicanism as a coherent worldview or public philosophy. In discussing “republicanism” in the early American republic, for example, Gordon Wood referred to it simply as “classical politics”3 (in contrast to what feels like “liberal” politics, though that is not Wood’s terminology). Despite its long history, a relatively small set of core elements define republicanism—a focus on the office of citizen, the role of virtue in public life, a style favoring balancing interests through complex institutional arrangements (“mixed” government), and a fixation with the preservation of the institutions of self-government. Soon I will devote whole posts exploring the core tenets of civic republicanism.
Modern conservatisms differ mainly on the source of identity upon which the community is defined. There are many of these, which can be combined, but the main division is between identities rooted in religious belief and those based on ethnic or racial identities. The cultivation and exploitation of these identities is the mainspring of conservative politics, but the function this serves is the preservation of status and the current hierarchical order. The engine of religion is most often engaged to counter threats to the existing gender order and to preserve the family (“family values”). Ethnic and racial identities, in contrast, are often mobilized to win macro-level political conflicts by weakening and breaking multi-racial class-based coalitions. As I suggest at the outset, self-described “conservatives” in America are not always conservative in the identity-driven sense I use here. We need to sort that out if we want to respond effectively to the rising threat identity-based conservatism poses to basic liberties in America and elsewhere.
I’ll continue this thread tomorrow…
<All of the posts in On Social Citizenship connect. I recommend that readers go back and read the first entry in the series.>
Notes
Image: Author’s sketch. Our screens show only red, green, or blue. The illusion of yellow is made by showing pixels of light with adjacent red and green elements. In politics, I say we can look at yellow and find the red and the green.
1. The list does not include “socialism.” Lots of ink has been spent on the why-no-socialism-in-America question. At some point, I may have to add to that. The short version of my take is that socialism (worldwide) is a reaction to traditional liberalism. In America, traditional liberalism is so strong the reaction arises almost entirely from within liberalism (egalitarian liberalism) which opponents are quick to falsely equate with “socialism” and, I will argue, with policy solutions grounded in civic republican principles, even though they are not recognized as such. I’ll fill in a lot more details in later posts.
2. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Revised Edition (Harvard University Press, 1999).
3. Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Norton, 1969).