Who's Right?
This has been a humbling and astonishing few weeks for me. Not every day a pinko like me gets props from Roger Stone! I thank you for all these generous responses. Let me reflect on Joe's first.
A big part of the balance I try to strike in my work is to respect Joe's very important point that "the right," like any complex set of human institutions, is always growing and changing, while still honoring my bedrock sense that there is also some things about "the right" that are in fact unchanging and rather essential--a fundamental facet of the diversity of human character. A big part of my approach to understanding political identity is dispositional: my sense that "right" and "left" are fundamental, and perhaps permanent, ways of being in the world, not a mere list of policy positions; that, as William Gilbert of Gillbert and Sullivan wrote in his libretto for Iolanthe, "every boy and every gal/ That's born into the world alive; Is either a little Liberal/ Or else a little Conservative." Of course the content of these dispositions, and the way they play out in our lives and institutions, are exceptionally complex, and also can, of course, change within the individual over time; and, of course, "rightness" and "leftness" are ideal types that exist to various degrees within each of us in rich combination; and that "left" dispositions can surface within "right-wing" institutions (think of the manic insurgent energy of the young conservative pranksters I write about in Before the Storm) and "right" dispositions can surface within "left-wing" institutions (think of the mid-century union militants whose sense of social solidarity came from an embrace of corporatist Catholic social teaching).
(So many scare quotes. I feel like I'm back in grad school! But this is analytically complex stuff. Sometimes I think I'm forty percent of the way to understanding it all. Other days I think I'm only about eight percent there. I look forward to a lifetime of trying to figure it all out.)
So, yes, Joe and others' work (including my own) mapping the fluid intellectual and institutional terrain of conservatism is crucial. But it can also miss certain forests for certain trees: namely, it can confuse the extent to which "conservative politics" has always been present across American history. One of the things I most regret about my work in Before the Storm is that I uncritically accepted, in Joe's terms, "the Right's own account" of its own postwar history, and especially its own representation of itself as a more or less sui generis formation dating from the formation of National Review. Just as right-wing dispositions are continuous throughout American (and human history), right-wing politics is as well, even at the high tide of the New Deal era; just pick up a random issue of the the Congressional Record from the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, or 1950s, and you will find perorations from Southern Democrats and Midwestern Republicans in no way distinguishable from a Ronald Reagan or Strom Thurmond from 1964 (or 1974, or 1984, or 1994, for that matter). One time recently a conservative man of letters--one of the Davids, I don't remember which one, Frum or Brooks--penned another in the interminable train of self-congratulatory columns about the dynamism of conservatism in the "war of ideas" over the last couple of decades as the secret of their success. I asked David (or David) to name a single one of these conservative "ideas" not present in the Conservative Manifesto of 1937. David's (or David's) answer was revealingly anemic: "broken-windows policing." I thought the whole point of broken-windows policing was to return the maintenance of law-and-order to the status quo ante before the 1960s; glad to be corrected if I'm wrong. (More on the "ideas" fallacy in the self-understanding of conservatism here.)
I'm very excited, therefore, to read Allan J. Lichtman's new book White Protestant Nation, which endeavors to establish the continuities in today's conservative movement back to the 1920s; and I was absolutely staggered to see the degree to which the claims of a sui generis Christian conservative political movement spring up in the 1970s are absolutely eviscerated in the painstaking history provided in Jeff Sharlet's amazing new book The Family, which demonstrates the strong influence of militantly anti-labor Christian conservatives built in the early Cold War years.
This is a complicated story we've only begun to write, and how I'd love an army of disserting history grad students to deploy to begin making a dent.
Please see Sara Diamond's "Roads to Dominion." She did the real heavy lifting in studying the right wing.
May 29, 2008 1:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
From Wikipedia --
Franklin D. Roosevelt blasted the Republican incumbent [Hoover] for spending and taxing too much, increasing national debt, raising tariffs and blocking trade, as well as placing millions on the dole of the government. Roosevelt attacked Hoover for "reckless and extravagant" spending, of thinking "that we ought to center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible," and of leading "the greatest spending administration in peacetime in all of history." Roosevelt's running mate, John Nance Garner, accused the Republican of "leading the country down the path of socialism".
Sometimes it's hard to know "left" from "right."
As New Dealer Rexford Tugwell said, ". . . practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started."
May 29, 2008 1:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, Gilbert & Sullivan: great Social/Plitical Philosophers
May 29, 2008 5:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Nothing gonna stop them as the day follows the night
The Right become the wrong, the Left become the Right"
—Dire Straits, "Ride Across the River"
May 29, 2008 8:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
There must be a way out of here said the joker to the thief________ Bob Dylan
May 29, 2008 10:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thank you for mentioning this, I find it an interesting topic and will try to remember to seek the book out. I know it from the side of understanding a little about Catholic culture during those years. In that situation, "Godless" communism was the fear, labor unions are communist, ergo, labor unions are dangerous. It was a particularly tricky situation in the U.S., where many of the Catholic faithful were working class union members (in Europe, you had more of a long-term general tradition of stereotypes of unions having a Marxist slant, and the Catholic church not being so much "of the people.") That followed through to Vatican animosity to Catholic liberation theology in Latin America. Also interesting is that what happened in Poland as to the fall of the USSR, and the installation of Pope John Paul II, threw a big wrench in this perspective, as "unions" helped restore open Catholicism to Poland. There's no doubt that "the red menace" was seen as a threat to Christianity, that's for sure.
May 29, 2008 1:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
As John XXIII said, "Free your inner Leftie."
May 29, 2008 1:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
the chickens are coming home to roost___Reverend Wright
May 29, 2008 10:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
To extend your thoughtful comments: In America, labor unions wouldn't have arrived so early on without communists at the leading edge. Communist cells were still active as late as the early 60's, when unions such as the UAW were "purged" by figures such as Walter Reuther and Washington allies of Sen.Hubert Humphery's ilk -- the Democrats who would "sanitize" the progressive movement so Union members could stay loyal to their local pubs and not mix with any commie Jews or uppity Negroes.
The history of the Left in America cannot be understood without documenting the role of the Reds and other important allies, socialists for example. Though the common ignorance today that associates American communism fascism is just stupid, as is the conservative triumph of big-speak over history to make the average American think that socialism and communism are the same, and more stupid, that any hint of social structure typified by government programs of such allies as France and Germany are just another step to the Last Days.
From the view of the Right, communism--especially Soviet communism -- most certainly presented a threat to America. They were able to use racism and ethnocentric fears as skillfully as ever to "defeat" it, though they did not defeat some of its core goals-- civil rights and unions, successes they still wish to obliterate.
One reason they were able to use immigration and anti-semitism in their struggle against the Reds was that many Reds were second generation immigrants and many were Jews. The Right had used the same tactic in the 19th century against the Irish in the coal strikes in Pa.
But reading history from from the Right's viewpoint is an important as reading it from the Left's, and one would imagine
also from the viewpoint of historians without bias. (Can you find me such historians, please).
The world is faced with many issues that seem beyond solution from either the Left or the Right. History shows that in times of economic or social upheaval, societies will turn to the Right or the Left. Current dangers, real ones, suggest to me that societies will soon abandon free-market capitalism and move to some kind of stringer centralized control--Right or Left or something else.
So I welcome the Right's interpretation of their history, accurate or not. I'd like to know where I might be going.
June 2, 2008 9:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
Back when I was in school, the dark-ages, I was taught that a conservative was one who believed that some people were born to rule while others were born to be ruled. From that, America could only be called a liberal idea since one's birth would no longer determine one's position in life.
In its time it was a truly revolutionary idea.
Is there a comparable, nice and short modern definition of a conservative?
May 29, 2008 3:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
Try this:
Society is made up of rulers and those who should be ruled. The rulers know each other because they have similar beliefs and attitudes and normally come from superior (i.e. wealthy) families.)
Rulers help their co-rulers achieve their positions of social superiority, and those who need to be rules must accept their inferior positions. Family wealth is proof of social superiority, and families who have wealth should have their wealth protected because they are member of the socially superior class. (Yep. Circular reasoning.)
**************
Another way to say that is that there are two classes of people, and the upper class determines (1) that "class" matters and (2) they determine who belongs in each class. A corollary to this is that the children of the upper class are themselves upper class (i.e. Bush 43.)
If you read the history of feudalism, this is how the feudal upper class developed in Europe. It took about two centuries for the idea that the son of the successful war leader was the best choice for the new war leader, and simultaneously the idea that the war leader needed total command of all subordinate people developed. This became institutionalized into inheritance of command.
Since command originally required control of the land, this also developed into the institutionalization of the idea that the commander "owned" the territory he controlled and distributed that ownership to his immediate subordinates.
Almost all class status goes directly back to military leadership and followers. The government-recognized ownership of property goes back to the evaluation of the war leader of the abilities of his (rural) society to provide knights and troops. (Note that the American natives did not recognize land a "property." This was a very foreign tradition to them.)
Determining the military capabilities of England is what the Domesday Book was all about. William the conqueror was trying to organize his troops in his new domain in order to defend it and prepare for the next war. Land as a property right developed from that military problem. So did class status. But that very evaluation required a military class status of leaders and followers. The king had to be able to immediately call on a few leaders when required, without direct contact with the troops. Social communications only allowed the king to contact a few individuals, each of who had to control and command their own domain.
A similar process occurred in France. You may notice that with the growth of towns and merchants as a social power, the military leaders based on agricultural societies lost their importance, but they retained their social position and power. This was a key cause of the French Revolution. In fact the King had become more powerful than the land-based Barons because of the need for permanent military forces (permanent armies and a navy), which had to be based on taxes on urban merchants with money rather than on land-barons with only the ability to raise rural levies.
But the new mercantile princes also took over the class status previously held by the land barons, and worked very hard to keep it. Money was more important than the ability to raise and command military levies.
When the industrial revolution occurred, the new factory owners replace the merchants and bankers who had previously bought their way to upper social class status originally created by successful war leaders.
The rise of the well-to-do middle class has brought the class status of merchants, bankers and factory owners into question. Europe and Japan - the non-American industrial nations - have answered that question by effectively leveling all class distinctions. America's conservatives find this very hard to swallow.
It is my opinion that America is slow in achieving this appropriate leveling of class status (caused by the industrial revolution) because of the attitudes developed as a result of slavery, the racism that was created to justify slavery, and resulting segregation which was the result of that racism when slavery was declared illegal.
So, Phelicity, to answer your question directly, An American Conservative is one who resists surrendering his or her personal demand for upper class status in an industrial society which has no need and no room for such differential social status.
Class differentials themselves are a way of dealing with slow communications. If communications are slow, a military commander needs to know who he can trust to deal with military threats. It becomes a social question of character and family. But as communications become more rapid and more comprehensive, the question becomes one that is answered by personal history and the knowledge of the individual's education. Family and the highly unreliable concept of character become a great deal less important than knowledge of history and education. The only factor that does not change is personal relationship. That pretty much eliminates "Class" as a factor, since "class" is a description of family background.
More than you wanted to know, isn't it? Sorry, I find it fascinating.
May 30, 2008 1:05 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thank you Richardxx. I agree. It is fascinating. Through the years I have met wealthy and even not so wealthy people of the conservative bent who often have revealed an interesting mind-set. Boils down to they don't practice what they preach. Specifically, what they fault others for doing, when they do it it's not a fault; it's reasonable and always justified.
Years ago their was a prominent woman who went around the country preaching the evils of abortion who, when it was revealed that she had had two, replied that she had to because having a child at her then young age would have been extremely inconvenient and a real detriment to her budding career. Interestingly, she saw absolutely no contradiction between what she preached and what she had practiced. I found that fascinating - and really sick I might add.
I know a man, a professed conservative, who has basically lied and cheated his way through life and has absolutely no use for 'welfare mothers' and let's everyone know it. The 'mother's' sin? She's on the public dole, more specifically but not admitted by him, she's taking money out of his pocket in taxes he's forced to pay - which he does once and while.
Wonder if anyone's done a psychological profile of a conservative/Republican.
May 30, 2008 12:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
Interesting outlook. I might add that as one moves to the mega-level of understanding forces beyond the local histories of countries and indeed civilizations, it's useful to include viewpoints from many areas of thought --structural anthropology and socio-biology to name two, and two mostly shunned by American academics and the Left. Not that the Right has much interest either --just happy onlookers as the Left destroys itself through various types of academic and political celebrity inspired crusades against theory that threatens them.
When the Right points to academic control from the Left, they have a position with some truth. Witness the politically correct lynching of E.O. Wilson at Harvard and beyond.
June 2, 2008 9:49 AM | Reply | Permalink
Additionally, Rick Perlstein's thesis that politics is in some ways "dispoditional" squares with interpretive leanings from several theoretical standpoints, structural anthropology for one, in which its most basic tenet of univerasal opposites in humans (right/left, safety/chaos, for example) has entered academic thought without some on the more detailed analysis of structuralism that some find politically offensive.
June 2, 2008 10:00 AM | Reply | Permalink
might as well get the spelling of dispositional right. Sorry.
June 2, 2008 10:01 AM | Reply | Permalink
I don't think juxtaposing liberalism and conservatism is very useful. I think they're both "good" even if they have proclivities to disagree sometimes.
I'd propose a four cornered diagram, with liberalism and conservatism at the top corners. At the bottom, radicalism and fundamentalism.
I'd divide it top and bottom as rational and irrational. Left and right as potential and familiar.
Ideally one should be at the top, rationally balancing between both the known value of the familiar, and the need to develop new potentials. Both innovation and continuity have value.
On the bottom, both recklessness and stagnation are unintelligent and harmful.
That's my overall complaint against politics on both sides since the 60s. Too much ideological radicalism and fundamentalism. Too few practical solutions and rational optimizations. Way too many self serving interests from big business to cultural identity politics.
May 30, 2008 5:35 AM | Reply | Permalink
I really agree with you, Kozmik. Einstein held throughout his entire adult life that if an answer to a problem wasn't simple, it most likely wasn't right.
As it is now, the two ideologies have become so loaded down with 'barnacles' that like any ships would be, they're no longer sea-worthy. Your solution would send them into dry-dock for a good scraping.
May 31, 2008 11:12 AM | Reply | Permalink
It's always nice to see a theoretician admit that the ship of political theories is often wrecked on the shoals of historical fact.
There was no revolution attributable to Reagan or to conservative ideologues! Ameicans are no more or less conservative than they have ever been!
Since the end of the Civil War there has been a broad swath of the country which forms a conservative, pietistic ethnoreligious community stretching from Montana and the Dakotas down to Texas eastward to Georgia and Florida and up through Virginia. This community votes on value issues -- religious and nativist -- which support its self-esteem. But because for over 100 years half resided in the Democratic Party ("The South Shall Rise Again") and half in the Republican Party ("Remember the Bloody Shirt"), it canceled itself out, and the two parties could disregard it.
But once the South joined the middle of America in the Republican Party, a union which took 30 years (1964-1994) to complete, the community's elected representatives controlled -- just barely -- the federal government.
That those representatives tend to support corporate interests is immaterial. From the community's sense of its regional history it has concluded that politicians rarely improve the economic landscape. That some of its representatives may hold to a conservative political ideology is, also, immaterial. The community is satisfied if its life style is admired and its values are praised.
Ideology me no ideologies. The folks that have elected these recent detestable Congresses don't read National Review and never will.
May 29, 2008 3:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
This is one thing I think Obama gets and I like that about him; see: Tone, Truth and The Democratic Party. What he plans to do with that realization, ah, there's the rub...do we really know?
May 29, 2008 4:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ships and shoals and facts....hmmmm is Lou Dobbs finally getting on your nerves?
May 29, 2008 10:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
Historical facts are often arranged to "fit" the theory rather than the other way around. The theory has to have the ability to explain a great deal in order to be viable, but recalcitrant facts are often accommodated.
This is especially true in the social sciences
May 29, 2008 11:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
Excellent evaluation! Take a look at my above history of class status and see how they fit together.
May 30, 2008 1:12 AM | Reply | Permalink
"That some of its representatives may hold to a conservative political ideology is, also, immaterial. The community is satisfied if its life style is admired and its values are praised."
Well, that's *exactly* how I've been feeling about the Democratic Party since the 1990s. And this year, if anything, such appeals are even more blatant. The DLC wanted Hillary Clinton to run to nab the woman vote? I'll bet they did-- most women can't afford to vote for that plutocratic and libertarian crap on its own merit. I've spent this entire primary season thinking the whole thing is a vast right wing plot.
No, the Democratic Party strategy is every bit as much an appeal to voter's atavistic tendencies as the Republican's is. They're both condescending.
May 29, 2008 8:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
I've never been able to decide whether I think promoting identity politics is patronizing or condescending.
I will say I think that the Democratic Party might be able to reduce conservative middle America's loyalty to the Republican Party: 1) pointing to party corruption and 2) offering some economic benefit which can overcome its sense -- bred in the bone -- that the federal government never does anything for them.
I'm just not sure that universal health care is that economic benefit but can't think of any other.
May 29, 2008 10:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
Pointing to the corruption and offering an alternative that provides an economic benefit is pretty easy.
Take for instance student loans. The conservative theory is we'll take the expensive and inefficient bureaucracy out of the system by privatizing it. That supposedly lets free market competition work it's magic with bankers providing choices that will lower costs to the borrower and doesn't require taxation for a big government program.
Sounds good on paper but in fact what they've done is take a perfectly good government program and given it to banks thus adding another layer of middleman profit to the system. Then Repubs did away with oversight and regulation that would keep bankers from bilking borrowers. They've gone from just taking a cut to becoming profiteers preying on students. It's made banks richer, college education more expensive and hasn't cut government spending at all.
You can see that corruption/economic non-benefit in about every Bush Administration agency or piece of legislation. Medicare's Part D drug program, DoD's purchase of disintegrating 30 year old Red Chinese ammunition for the Afghani Army from a 22 year old kid in Miami, billions of US dollars disappeared in Iraq, Katrina trailers, you name it.
The alternative? Go back to the system that worked before. Government bureaucracy does just fine at the Social Security Administration. It uses only 2% of it's proceeds as overhead. Ever met a Wall St. banker or brokerage house that'd be satisfied
with a 2% profit? That was an effective argument against SS privatization and it is with student loans and whole host of other government functions conservatives have screwed up too.
May 31, 2008 7:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
I would not put the (politically) left and the right in dispositional terms. There is nothing objectionable in doing so but I would not find it particularly illuminating to do so
X is disposed to do a, or feel b, or believe c… etc =(def) Given relevant situation S, X does a or feels b….etc.
How does one acquire a disposition? Either genetically, environmentally or a combination of both. Some dispositions are transitory and unique to a situation. These might be termed non-recurring dispositions. I might be acquire a transitory belief (which is a disposition) that there is a fly buzzing near my left ear as I'm reading a book and that belief will soon vanish along with the memory of the sound. Other dispositions are more enduring.
I guess the question--if I understand --you are posing is: are some of these (political) dispositions innate?
That's a tough one.
Will we ever know? Is there a homo conservatus and a ? I sort of doubt it.
It is either genetic or it is environmental or a combination of both. That much we know.
Are some dispositions innate? Sure. The disposition of the newborn to babble random sounds is innate in (most) newborns. The disposition to not get too close to a flame is not innate. It has to be learned by painful experience.
The disposition to have right wing thoughts and sentiments comes at a much later stage. It is not observed in infants as far as we know. Mainly because we don’t believe that infants have “thoughts”
They have to have traveled quite a ways into enculturation to begin to display one trait more than the other.
That does not mean that the precursors to a complex political affinity cannot be traced to genes.
Who knows, now that the genome has been mapped out we might discover a "right wing" gene and a "left wing" gene. But I doubt it myself.
Even objects have dispositions. A lump of sugar has the disposition to dissolve in warm water. That is, if it were to be immersed in warm water it would dissolve.
Welcome to the world of dispositions.
May 29, 2008 11:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
Some seem strongly disposed towards radicalism or fundamentalism. On one hand you have hyper radicals, practically bipolar in nature, can't sit still. On the other are ultra fundamentalists, rigid, uncreative, monotonous.
Neither seem terribly with it.
May 30, 2008 5:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
I don't have it all thought through yet, but there is an interesting instersection between your inciteful analysis of legitimate mainstream America desire for safe streets, parks, homes, neighborhoods etc. versus the right wing and Republican use of this in racist way (your taserland post); and the whole left is condescending stuff; the Obama "bitter comment" and whole what the matter with Kansas, false consciousness arguments...
...all that and the arguments today over who Obama's VP should be, with Jim Webb held up as the iconographic "White Male Reagan Democrat Conservative War Hero" who will save us from McCain by supposedly attracting the Appalachia and Southerner and small towner and poor white guy vote.
I wonder what Webb might make of NixonLand?
Especially since Webb has been so wrong for so long about Vietnam and the 1960s and 1970s and the DFHs, and Women, etc. Apparently he has recently praised some of the recent "stab in the back" Vietnam books that you reviewed in the Nation.
The contradiction between Webb as anti-Iraq, yet his analysis of Vietnam and post-Vietnam left-right politics of patriotism is exactly the sort of thinking that led to Iraq. Webb needs to re-work through his own internal contradiction on this. Frankly he ought ot apologize to those of us who had got it right back when he was still working for St. Ronnie. One wonders if he will write about his evolution on these topics, and what it means for the scotts-irish appalachia, white working class, reagan democrat tribal vote. That is a book I would buy. Webb is a good writer and sometimes an interesting thinker, and the evolution of his thinking would be interesting. But he cannot be the party's VP. There are members of the white male working class tribe who are also full blooded Democrats (understand why Nixon and Reagan were not so good for the country; pro-women's rights, don't think Vietnam was still a good cause and that those who opposed it early on were unpatritic).
Sorry for the rambling musings... just seeing some cross-currents here.
May 30, 2008 2:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
Jim Webb's conversion seems to have been happening for some time.
The op-ed below he wrote soon after winning his senate seat sure doesn't sound like Reagan's favorite marine does it?
Speaking of class based systems it seems Repubs would like to set up a permanent separate warrior class with their hereditary based GI educational benefits. Stupid and dangerous if you ask me.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009246
"The most important--and unfortunately the least debated--issue in politics today is our society's steady drift toward a class-based system, the likes of which we have not seen since the 19th century. America's top tier has grown infinitely richer and more removed over the past 25 years. It is not unfair to say that they are literally living in a different country. Few among them send their children to public schools; fewer still send their loved ones to fight our wars. They own most of our stocks, making the stock market an unreliable indicator of the economic health of working people. The top 1% now takes in an astounding 16% of national income, up from 8% in 1980. The tax codes protect them, just as they protect corporate America, through a vast system of loopholes."
May 31, 2008 6:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
we are all well aware of that editorial. it is the only reason we are even considering Webb as an economic progressive. Alas, he is STILL really really bad on Vietnam stab-in-back stuff; his sexist misogeny is barely in control; and his actual voting record since being a senator is mediocre (telecomn immunity among other things).
That editorial and his other very reactionary beliefs are not mutually exclusive. Presumably many angry white men hold them.
June 1, 2008 11:46 AM | Reply | Permalink
He is what he is. He's shown he's willing to learn and I give him credit for that. I agree he has a long way to go but he's a hundred times better than Allen.
BTW who is this "we" you speak of? Are you representing some group I'm unaware of?
June 2, 2008 10:02 AM | Reply | Permalink