Three Political Languages (continued)
Our everyday political binaries are combinations of the three public philosophies
Post 7 (Part Two): 19 February 2025
Part one (yesterday) introduced the three political languages (public philosophies) of liberalism, conservatism, and republicanism.
Our everyday political binaries are useful combinations of the underlying public philosophies. The layering can be hard to sort; I will focus on just a few details here. Most confusing is that self-described “conservatives” in America may strictly adhere to a 19th century notion of liberalism (“traditional liberalism”) or be genuinely conservative in the way I use the term here (conservatism proper) or, most likely, subscribe to some combination of the two.
The liberal “conservatives” believe in small government; they are individualistic, rights based, tolerant, almost fetishistically market-centric, anti-regulation, and anti-collectivist. Think John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. In its purest libertarian forms, this worldview can exaggerate individual achievement and merit to comic John Galt-like proportions and make the country, in Milton Friedman’s words, just “the collection of individuals who compose it.”1 These ideas are conservative in the sense that they conserve a particular pre-New Deal, laissez faire vision of America, but conservatism proper is very different. Its central focus is binding society together by defining its boundaries and reinforcing its identity. It seeks to protect and reproduce society’s current order and status hierarchies. Identity itself is defined in opposition to some “other”—external, internal, or both—a posture that requires intolerance of personal difference. This is the absolute essence of the conservative vision of politics. The philosopher Carl Schmitt put it this way: “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.”2 This politics is not individualistic; it is a clash of wholes.
The Languages and the Party Coalitions. The ideology of the American Republican party today is mostly an uneasy combination of these two conflicting styles of conservatism. Since Goldwater, the libertarian (laissez faire) faction has gained support for its unpopular policies by offering nominal support (lip service really)3 for the positions of the identity-based conservatives, first around the issue of race (Goldwater’s move) then around abortion, the most explosive part of a cluster of issues around traditional gender roles and hierarchies—the most potent conservative trigger worldwide. Abortion expanded the conservative base by erasing much of the once unbridgeable divide between evangelical and Catholic religious voters, effectively recognizing Catholics, long part of the “other”, as true Americans. In this century, the immigrant “other” and, lately, “others” based on gender and sexuality, have played increasingly larger roles in the alchemy of identity. With Trump’s ascendancy, the identity conservatives now dominate the coalition—to the point where many small government conservatives are now party-less and the rest of the Republican establishment squirms.
The ideology of the modern (post-New Deal) American Democratic Party is mostly a combination of traditional and egalitarian liberal ideas. Despite what critics on the right probably believe, the policies of the American welfare state are not especially driven by egalitarian liberal principles. Instead, like most American policies, the contours of these policies mainly follow from traditional liberal principles. To an extent that we are uncomfortable acknowledging, the design of American welfare state programs also included significant accommodations for conservative elements and instincts. When race was involved, this reflected the New Deal coalition itself. Prior to the conversion of Southern Democrats to Southern Republicans (starting in the 1960s), the Democratic party was comprised of a similarly awkward coalition between Southern conservative segregationists and Northern economic progressives. Ira Katznelson called it a “strange marriage of Sweden and South Africa.” This was an unstable coalition which failed once the conservatives were in the minority. The modern Republican coalition between economic and religious conservatives feels similarly unstable. We’ll see. The New Deal coalition held between 1932 and 1964, which was quite a while.
The endpoint of this analysis is to understand the politics and substance of policy in terms of these underlying philosophical and factional considerations. That’s a big topic I will post about separately, with a first crack at it coming next week.
Today, Democrats explicitly reject identity conservatism—but only when they can recognize it. I need to underscore this point. This is not the liberal version of identity politics, discussed in Post 3—groups make demands for full membership in identity terms when their exclusion is based on identity—but the conservative one. It is far more pervasive than we usually admit, especially when the touchstones of family, gender, and sexuality are involved. We often take the culturally specific views we grew up with as “natural” rather than “political”; this leaves us susceptible to accept unnecessary conservative restrictions reflexively. We become complicit in illiberal policy. Fortunately, civil rights advocacy, combined with an over-reaching defense of “family values”, can wake us up to this. Consider, for example, how long most so-called “progressives” (me included) held conservative positions on gay marriage. This prohibition violated the basic liberal principle that people ought to have the freedom to make personal choices without state interference so long as these choices do not harm others (and are consistent with everyone else having the same range of choices). It ought to have been easy for liberals of all stripes to recognize this—the speed of opinion shift on this issue is evidence of that4—but it took a long time to overcome the reflexive conservative bias against this particular dimension of equality.
Civic republicanism is missing from this sketch? Over the next several months, the argument I will make is that the most egalitarian American political impulses—including the Fourteenth Amendment, the substance of Roosevelt’s “Second Bill of Rights”, the gist of Brown v. Board of Education, and the effort to deploy affirmative action—reflect republican understandings about the substantive requirements of full membership in society. As I will show, most of these impulses have been stillborn or have been clawed back, leaving a mostly liberal Democratic party “liberalism” (noted in a shift of color in the revised sketch below).
That was a big bite. I hope the color-wheel stuff was not too far off the mark! Next week’s post will begin translating these ideas into the world of policy.
Next Post: The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (25 February 2025)
<All of the posts in On Social Citizenship connect. I recommend that readers go back and read the first entry in the series.>
Notes
Images: Author’s sketches. The first sketch suggests that “conservatism” in the Republican party is a blend of identity-based conservatism and traditional liberalism and the “liberalism” of the Democratic party is a blend of traditional liberalism and egalitarian liberal reaction. Republicanism, in one form or another, influences all of these categories. The second sketch replaces egalitarian liberalism with civic republicanism (as I will present it) to suggest that the “liberalism” of the Democratic party is a mix of traditional liberalism and (some) civic republicanism.
1. Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (University of Chicago Press, 1982), 1.
2. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (University of Chicago Press, 1996), 26.
3. I do not mean to suggest that the “small government” faction’s use of identity-based appeals is entirely strategic (insincere, that is). They may believe them, but their issue priority is “economic freedom” not race or abortion; the prizes are cuts in taxes and regulations. Truthfully, however, they often do strike me as insincere, though I would have no way to know for certain (not sure they would either).
4. The dramatic rise in support for same-sex marriage is an instance of this. In 1988, only 12.1% of Americans supported same-sex marriage, but this percentage rose to 35.6% by 2006, to 50.6% by 2012, and 57.8% in 2014. Landon Schnabel and Eric Sevell, 2017, “Should Mary and Jane Be Legal? Americans’ Attitudes toward Marijuana and Same-Sex marriage Legalization, 1988-2014,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 81:127-172. See also, Jeffrey Lax, Justin H. Phillips, and Alissa F. Stollwerk, “Are Survey Respondents Lying about their Support for Same-Sex Marriage?” Public Opinion Quarterly 80 (2016):510-533. [The answer is “no.”]