Conservatives believe in community, piety, law and order, and people minding their place, while Liberals don’t.
Conservatism and Liberalism are the deep and contentious political points of view that have lasted since the Early Modern Period in European life, just as the conflict between church and state was the dominant opposing thought and political reality in the millennium that preceded it. It is a mistake that this central conflict arose when in 1790 the sides were set between left and right because of their seats in the French National Assembly. The roots are much deeper and more profound than that. They arise out of the response to the Scientific Revolution and to the conflict between crown and Parliament in England in the seventeenth century. The roots go deep and become at times unintelligible to one another even if other formulations have arisen as happened when in the second half of the twentieth century political philosophers, primarily Hannah Arendtg, thought the far right and the far left joined up as totalitarian, but by the end of the century there were no totalitarian societies left, except for the anachronism of North Korea, political institutions in China and Russia becoming merely authoritarian in that they only intimidate and murder people who are political opponents while trying to meet their economic and public opinion matters as best they can. Similarly, the combination of Populist rhetoric of common sense easy solutions conjoined with plutocratic interests and power that is the distinctive point of view under Trump seems to me, if I am lucky, it will be retired when Trump leaves the scene, and politics will resume to be the conflict between Liberals and Conservatives. We will see.
I myself am a lifelong Liberal who, like most political consumers, think they make up their own minds about political issues and pick and choose where to stand, while gravitating to most of the issues on my side rather than on the other. So I think climate change is a hoax, just as Republicans say, and I have always been opposed to affirmative action, which a Conservative Supreme Court finally eliminated, but I want more taxes on the rich and more government entitlements and I think Republican policies tend to be cruel and misinformed, just as most Republicans think that Democrats are, at best, misguided and, possibly treasonous. However, as a somewhat scholar, I want to treat Conservatism for its own value, to appreciate rather than condemn its point of view, find why it is appealing as a coherent set of ideas about politics and human nature. And so I will begin.
The root of both points of view were a response to the scientific revolution and to the growing power of parliament and can rightly be placed in the seventeenth century, where Liberalism emerges with the English Bill of Rights, which says that there is a separation of powers, that election of parliament is unencumbered, and there is freedom of speech for at least members of Parliament, the Levelers and the Glorious Revolution their proponents, while Conservatism emerges out of the defense of the Stuart throne and is a version of the divine right of kings that overarching power is necessary and just, perhaps best represented by William Hartrington, who argued that landholders should control the government because they had more at stake than poorer people.
Here are five distinctions between the two points of view that seem on each side to be self-evident to their own followers and easy enough to recognize as attributes of the two points of view. These sentiments can be turned into principles that on each side in combination constitute an ideology that explains the social and political world even if at times they seem to contradict one another, as when Conservatives who want decentralization so as to foster community control come against wanting to impose national restrictions on abortion because their view is that of the particular communities they favor as opposed to big cities which are claimed to be chaotic and hardly communities at all.
The tenets of Conservatism I identify are induced from the ether or the miasma or the cloud from all the broadsides and expositions and snide remarks from the thousands of speakers and writers rather than from the summarized and carefully articulated thoughts of writers lie George Will or Charles Taylor which provide idealized versions of a perspective so as to reference their respectability as an ideology. Scholarship about great Conservatives is not central to the sensibility as it is lived. That is accomplished by consulting the experience of expostulating believers, however partial or muddled as a point of view may be..
Well recognized is the distinction between community and individualism. Conservatives think that social life resides in its elemental form in a community, which is a set of people who live in a geographical area and inevitably engage in the basic functions of social life such as making a living and having families and engaging in some culture. These activities are customary and do not treat themselves as a point of view. There may be environmental factors that lead one way of life or another to develop, such as because rocky New England led to small farms while rich and extensive farmland led the American South into a plantation system, but whatever way of life develops can endure because its various aspects mutually sustain one another. The most systematic proponent o0f this point of view was Talcott Parsons and so even specialized organizations, such as professions, are regarded as kinds of community that protect and sustain their particular calling through group solidarity and internal regulation and a culture intensified calling for that vocation.All people are sustained for their own selves and for their group by their community and to be without their community or to some other community they may join, people are rootless, which means both meaningless and out of sorts.
On the other hand, Liberals think of communities as constructions created institutions so that they can achieve a better chance at achieving particular ends, those ends decided upon in part by custom but largely self directed such as to be a lawyer or a lobster fisherman. Communities are not the identification of happiness but are in groups to enhance individual advancement, as in the time honored phrase, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” Communities are best visualized by Liberals not as small towns but as cities which are constantly inventing and reinventing organizations to suit individual needs, every person an individual because each one is or should be the master of his or her destiny, one or another shackle preventing individual accomplishment progressively vanquished, so that people of color can become President or lawyer and subject only to personal talent. Individuals are within their communities so that the communities can invent non-discrimination laws or monetary support so their individual lives are comfortable and fulfilling. Organizations are more instrumental than are customs or traditional lore. A stellar argument of the Liberal point of view was that of Locke, who thought whole societies could, whenever they wanted to, dissolve a social contract and establish a new one, as had happened in the Mayflower Compact a hundred years before Locke. A compact or contract is by definition a group making a conscious decision to make a collective decision to modify or recreate its constitution. Liberals think that the variety and depth of individuals is the be all and end of existence, each person a precious item where people admire one another’s consciousness and distinctiveness and the good fortune that ain aimless creation has resulted in creatures capable of forming aims.
A second theme or principle of Conservatism is what might be called the belief in “natural piety”, which means a sense of awe and obedience in response to the complexity or intricacy of both the natural and the social world. It was a response to tube desacralization that had gradually emerged in the physical world from the time of Copernicus through Newton, even if Newton had still found a place for God. Nevertheless, for the natural world, as Laplace said a hundred years after Newton, God was an unnecessary hypothesis. The same thing happened in the seventeenth century for the social world. The major systematic philosophers, Hobbes, Spinoza and Leibniz. Provided detailed accounts of how the way the social world worked that substituted psychology, a study of how the social world worked, for a belief in ethics, how it should work, or how a God directed it to work. The very idea of God was twisted around so that it no longer meant a God who intervened into the world with purpose or entered into a featureless soul that was identical with the way the world had to work regardless. Spinoza thought that God could only do what He had to do, no choice about it and Liebnitz thought God produced the best possible world because He could not do otherwise and so humanity should just accept that what is is the only possible world.
This major shift in understanding means to abandon dogma or the details of theology for the experience of the attendance of awe of the natural and social world. It doesn't matter what you think but what you feel. This is William James’s view of religion a hundred years before James: divorcing religious experience from religious thought, and that elaborated by Martin Buber and Rudolph Otto In this view, theology ends with Malebranch’s idea that a miracle intervenes in ev earthy action taken and is replaced, at best, by Adolf Harnack, who argues that whatever evolution takes place in tube collective church is whatever had to be, which is persuasive enough for the early centuries of Christianity, but seems a stretch when it comes to the Social Gospel, which has social sources rather than necessity. The experiential sense of religion as natural piety is well established by the time of Chartes Dickens’ “A Christ6mas Carol”, where religion has been reduced to sentimentality for the poor. But the emphasis on the unfolding of natural piety is realized in the Eisenhower Doctrine that everyone can agree with being religious whatever church they may go to. The Death of God theologians of the Fifties were ratifying the idea by saying they posit a God that has become obscure and Barth's commentary rather than theology. Believe what you will, the aura is everything.
That does not mean that religion is not deeply felt. Whatever his engagement with politics, William Buckley Jr, thought, as do many religionists, that even the American Constitution was subservient to a religious ideology, and that still holds true for Catholic Supreme Court Justices who trim the Constitution to meet their own religious ethical requirements, such as overthrowing Roe bv. Wade. Think, perhaps, that the Scopes Trial is alive and well, a sense of natural piety contending with religious skepticism. A good example and exemplar of the belief in natural piety was Samuel Johnson who maintained an awe of traditional religious beliefs, so much so that he was troubled that David Hume died with equanimity despite, Johnson thought, knowing that Hume would meet his Maker, even though Johnson vigorously showed in his review of Jeremy Soames, that the reasons for natural religion were cruel and fallacious, preferring to settle with an allegiance to faith, whatever residual term that was left to mean.
The Liberal response to natural piety is, to the contrary, to embrace the scientific and social revolution. The vastness of the cosmos is to be appreciated rather than worshiped. It is a subjective, human question whether it sparkles like a Van Gogh painting or whether it is cold and almost endless, a deeply inhuman experience whose confrontation can induce a shiver. The beauty of the foliage, the intricate interplay of mammalian organs, is neither pretty nor does it avoid creating cancer. Nature is a process rather than a person and so has no purpose.The only purposes are done by humans and maybe the higher apes and Liberalism honors that purposiveness and even honors most of the distinctive purposes of people so long as they don’t harm one another, in accord with Asimov’s three laws of robotics as applied to humans: obey laws so long as they don’t harm people.
A third theme or principle of Conservatism is the need to maintain law and order so that a stable society can survive and prosper. Conservatives follow the Hobbes idea that only an exchange of fealty for security can make these two things happen. Communities without authority are anarchic and communities that do not have a rule of law cannot make contracts and therefore become commercially successful. The need for order requires hierarchical order, even if that has been reduced to the traditions of a tribe or the elaborate statutes of a legal system. Looting and other venues of disobedience are a threat to the entire enterprise of keeping a people secure and prosperous because they are threats to the idea of order while personal crimes, like killing a spouse is only an affront to a person rather than to society itself. So looters disrupt the fabric of society while insurrectionists on Jan. 6th are just un peaceful protestors who want a different succession of power.
That is very different from the Liberal view, which is that societies have evolved to the point that institutions are available so that change can take place without major unrest. Government is permanent but orderly constitutional and legislative upheaval and renewal, as when S. M. Lipset argued that elections had the function of avoiding the need for revolution by regularizing legitimate dissent. Not only will new contracts be made to replace antiquated ones, but regular elections and judicial pronouncements will inform a changing cultural perspective so that, for example, civil rights legislation can turn a caste group into an ethnic group and that gay marriage, something never before heard of, can become legislated into law, whether or not the law preceded or followed changing cultural sentiments. Society itself can take up new ends of its own, just as individual people do, and so need not see governments as simply stewards of what always has been or whatever new is inevitable but untrustworthy, the aims refashioned, as they are by Conservatives, only by religion or slow cultural adaptation. Government is a creative force for the advancement of individual well being
A fourth tenet of Conservatism is for people to mind their place within the natural hierarchical order, that order changed only gradually through changes in culture and only then followed up with legislation. Don’t push for female suffrage or civil rights for Blacks until it seems inevitable.Meanwhile, abide by the rules because everyone is subordinate to someone and everyone is subordinate to a sovereign. The king reigns. Liberals think otherwise, that the people are sovereign under the U. S.Constitution and that equality is a goal enforced by legislation even before it is accepted by custom or what seems natural. Some things, however, seem inevitably unnatural to Conservatives and so same sex marriage is an abomination or at least unprecedented, and Conservatives find wearisome or remain strange that women are or get acceptance in the higher professions such as the military and the clergy and that it is just natural for there to be are gender assigned jobs such as bricklayer or airline pilot for men and nurses for women even if those were the result of historical changes, as Florence Nightingale fostering female military nurses.
This tenet of hierarchical place is ubiquitous. Marriage between ethnic groups is frowned upon because it is difficult enough to manage a marriage even between people similar to one another. It was clear in the eighteenth century that a woman who rose to marry a wealthy man was a gold digger and in the nineteenth century a marriage across social classes would be difficult, both parties burdened by their pride and prejudices. Immigrants also know their place by living in enclaves such as Chinatowns and being associated with particular occupations, like running hand laundries or running ethnic restaurants. To a Conservative, it is natural for a person to have a situation rather than regard the situation as circumstantial, as when there a few generations while Conservatives think new immigrants are difficult to digest because they are so backward in their developments.into the American way of life or into any other Western nation was an influx of Pizza parlors into the United States after World War II because they got a taste of Italy and many Italians had immigrated there.
The Liberal alternative is to value the diversity of populations, each people and some parts of a people being ingenious, hardworking and to be merited for their individual as well as differentiating characteristics rather than regarded as deviant or abnormal people. Liberals think of immigration as a set of waves where new immigrants are assimilated in a few generations while conservatives think it difficult to assimilate because the differences between immigrants and residents is so great because of their economic and cultural differences. The immigrant who makes it up the ladder is threatening or a fluke while a Liberal thinks that the pride of accomplishment.
A fifth description or tenet of Conservatism, though not meaning these five to be exhaustive, is the idea that people in the higher ranks of class and ethnicity are better in most ways than people from inferior ranks. They ponder that wealthy people have more intelligence, education, beauty, initiative and morals than do people in the lower ranks and therefore to be provided with greater power. As Mel Brooks put it, “The poor are revolting” which is a pun. The unruly and unreliable have to be disciplined. THey are the freeloaders of society who, as Mitt Romney put it, those who took rather than gave. Liberals, to the contrary, assign virtues to the poor and downtrodden. They are the salt of the earth in “The Grapes of Wrath” and the oppressed are thought of as more spiritually enlightened than those who prance around with their seemingly good manners. George Bernard Shaw liked to tweak the bourgeois by making comic figures who are poor more eloquent than the rich, like Mr. Doolittle in “Pygmalion” or in “Man and Superman” have an aristocrat say to a brigand that he steals from the poor to give to the rich.
It could be said that there is an umbrella under which both Conservatives can both stand and that allows them to cooperate with one another. That common cause is constitutionalism, which means either the U. S. Constitution or the documents or laws or customs which are shared within the nations who follow the Western model of government. Democrats and Republicans, Tories and Laborites, are patriots all because they are either in government or part of the loyal opposition. All of these parties believe in legal process and in individual rights and the peaceful succession of power, even if the Conservatives and the Liberals have different reasons for doing so: Conservatives thinking the transcendence of the document or documents provides authority for an orderly and only slowly evolving society while Liberals think that constitutions protect and promote individual liberty. Constitution based societies are different from authoritarian regimes where elections are rigged and a strong man manhandles opposing figures, all opposition considered disloyal.
But that is not the case. Populists prefer the immediate feelings of the mob over what they consider procedural niceties and so Trump is a Populist rather than a Conservative or a Liberal. But truth be told, Conservatives will fall in line with Populist and strongman tactics because some of their root principles align with theirs. So Trump can arrest on the street people without charge, a clear violation of habeas corpus, a cornerstone of constitutionalism, because the people have green cards or are undocumented, even though the Constitution reigns wherever the American flag flies Immigrants should mind their place and law and order is more important gthan free speech, the principles deeper than mere constitutionalism. The illiberality of Conservatives preceded Trump and will last beyond it just as the illiberality of Progressives preceded and will remain after Trump has left the scene.
I should add, to paraphrase and extend Oliver Wendel Holmes, that the Constitution does not ratify free market capitalism, and neither does Conservatism require it. Deeply Christian Conservatives can treat the free market as a tool for freedoms even more cherished, such as privacy or religious allegiance to piety that is not only natural but supernatural, such as many Catholic believers and also Protestant Evangelicals. The principles I have stated are deeper than the operation of the market even if Conservatives tend to support less taxes for the wealthy while Liberals prefer more taxes on the wealthy because more taxes on the wealthy will support the larger entitlements that will allow people to foster the ability of more people to find each one their own way to individuality.