Thinking Conservatively

I haven’t done the personal blogging thing in a while, and don’t have any plans to pick it back up. At the same time, we’re at an interesting inflection point in our nation’s political history and I think (fantasize?) that I might be able to add some helpful perspective on the Conservative mindset and where it’s headed given recent events, namely the presumed GOP nomination of Donald Trump.

Maybe it’s always been this way, but it’s become clear to me recently that people make political commitments in two really distinct ways. One group tends to operate intuitively, feeling an internal compulsion acutely, and then acts in support of the subjective truths that they experience viscerally. Support comes in the forms of explanations of strongly felt positions, and it certainly shows up as advocacy. The other group, tends to operate from first principles – about human nature, about the basis for right and wrong – and then tends to experience strong feelings depending on how those principles are being treated and applied. ESFP vs. INTJ, or right brain vs. left brain, are too simplistic but you could add them as other dimensions to think about the contrast I’m trying to describe.

This way of looking at human political interactions has been really enlightening for me. One, I’ve always struggled with the reality of brilliant people with whom I have deep political agreements. It’s not that I think I’m brilliant and wonder whether my opponents are actually stupid, but more like how really smart people could believe such different things about how we should govern ourselves. Another way this awareness has helped me is that I’m finding, in my interpersonal interactions, that the same intellectual – emotional patterns extend beyond politics proper to other core convictions like religion, social structure, economics, and so on. It’s truly helped me tailor my message and listening patterns to how I perceive someone else is viewing the world.

If you’re still with me, allow me to now pivot hard to my real point: the Conservative mindset – at its most intellectually buttressed – is an argument from first principles. It is not, properly, reactionary, or mean-spirited, or exclusive. Far from those common misperceptions, it’s actually intensely interested in seeing humanity – all of it – flourish. While it’s true that much of Conservative ethics have been allied with traditional Christian values, I would argue that that is incidental, not causal. Now, as Christian values are being jettisoned, so too are Conservative principles for government. Though I’m a Christian, I’m not troubled by the first, and deeply troubled by the second. I’m not troubled by the prospect of living as a Christian in a non-Christian society primarily because the entire New Testament presupposes this reality. To bemoan the downfall of the Church in America is like a paratrooper becoming suddenly alarmed that after having jumped he’s surrounded by the enemy. Not that non-Christians are my enemies – at all – but you get the idea.

I’m troubled by the decline of Conservative thought, though, because regardless of what you choose to think about religion, you absolutely have an interest in preserving the cornerstone first principal of Conservatism, which I believe is this:

• Human flourishing requires vigilance against coercion

That’s one reason why Conservatives are so horny (pardon the expression) about the Constitution: it enshrines the positive side of the non-coercion coin: liberty. And by the way, liberty can only really ever be understood in an individual sense.

Maximizing liberty and minimizing coercion, I assume, are things that very nearly all of us can get behind enthusiastically. But there are two corollaries from this principal that begin to point out the distinctive of Conservative thinking and explain Conservative political policies. Those are:

• The price for liberty is equality and vice versa
• All government, at every level, and with every structure, functions through coercion

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I don’t think I’ll get into proving those points here, but I’m open to follow up conversations. For now, I’ll assume that they’re self-evidently true. A whole host of Conservative policies follow from these points. Perhaps two of the biggest are:

• Equality before the law is the only variety of equality that is truly desirable
• The smaller, more localized government is, the better.       

And once you see those things, a bunch of other, more specific Conservative political ideals become clearer: Capitalism is just the economic result of liberty; markets need more information and less regulation to function well, and they nearly always function better than bureaucracy; with rare exception do you have “better” designs for another person’s life than they have for their own; government is not community, and so on.

Good intentions are the sole property of neither Liberals nor Conservatives, of course. But what we think of as “liberal” turns out to be in at least a dangerous if ignorant state of coexistence with coercion. How? Well, Liberals believe that government is a positive force in people’s lives. But, clearly the more laws we have, the more coercion we’ll be subjected to. Liberals believe that equality is desirable over inequality, especially in the case of wealth. But, certainly, any advancement of equality comes at the price of forced reduction in liberty. Liberals believe that social programs will make people’s lives better. But, by whose standard do they measure “better?” Their own? Liberals uphold democracy as inherently good. But they fail to recognize that a majority which enslaves is on no higher moral ground than the monarch who does the same.

I’ve griped plenty on Facebook about Clinton and Trump because of their massive character defects. But Sanders is a very different story. I think Sanders appeals to a lot of people for the same reason that Obama did: they behave like genuinely good people. But their views – indeed the views of the entire intellectually self-aware Progressive left – are decidedly not accommodative of liberty in any way, shape, or form. Paternalism? Yes. Equality? Yes. Statism? Yes. Collectivism? Yes. But not liberty. Unless of course you construe liberty as only positive liberty, which, if you think long enough about it, is really equality by a different name.

My hope in briefly explaining the Conservative mindset is not that you’d feel less annoyed by Conservatives but that you’d come to see that Conservatives – true Conservatives and their increasingly similar cousins, Libertarians – are the last bastion of liberty in the United States. 2016 seems beyond reach. But, I think that if the Conservative mindset is understood better, and especially if the link between collectivist thinking and coercion is more firmly established, we stand a chance at preserving for future generations the true American virtue: liberty.