Most of the living graduates of Harvard were shivering in tents and log cabins in the Canadian wilderness in the 1780s. That was told to me sixty years ago when I was a boy. Our farm, in the Canadian province of New Brunswick, had been carved from the woods by refugees of what British Lieutenant Colonel John Simcoe described as that “Late Ill-Managed War”, the American Revolution. My history teacher, the great-grandson of Loyalist refugees, told us that the Harvard claim was an exaggeration and that not all the best and brightest had fled north. Our American cousins were a lot like us, he said, and it would be bad manners to say that those who had supported the King and the rule of law were somehow better. We should admire our American cousins who were more inventive and more inclined to take chances than we were because “They burn bright with the liberal idea.” He qualified this by saying that “most of them do not think with the Tory half of their brain” and quoted, with a mischievously raised eyebrow, Robertson, the British General, who had said of his involvement in the military fiasco from which Canada emerged, “I never had an idea of subduing the Americans: I meant to assist the good Americans subdue the bad.”
Centuries later, wounds scarred over, atrocities forgotten, Canadians accept that American political wellness is vital. A tear in the American fabric could mean our own unravelling and so the polarization, diminished civility, protectionism, nativism and resurgent racism in the United States has Canadians concerned. Those with long memories see the revolt on the right as a re-enactment.
Canada’s political culture differs from American and could be instructive at this divisive juncture. Americans listen to politics in monaural, Canadians listen in stereo. We do not hold that either the liberal or conservative view of humanity is self evident, but rather muddle through by seeking balance. The present discord in American politics would benefit from wise voices that can only be heard if one listens in stereo. These voices are not heard because the word conservative is widely misused in American parlance. The Canadian political landscape and the Western European is divided from left to right, but in two separate strands. Liberal political thinking spans that left-right, radical to reactionary, spectrum and so does conservatism.
The United States was born of a liberal revolution. Liberalism has also influenced Canada, but it has a conservative ethos. It is shaped by many peoples who were losers: Indigenous Canadians who have survived military and cultural genocide, those Acadians who, in 1756, fled to the backwoods to avoid ethnic cleansing and then watched as Planters from New England and Irish Protestants from Ulster arrived and built houses on the foundations of their former homes, the Quebecois who were abandoned by France at the bargaining table in 1763, the Loyalists who fled north from the “rebellious colonies” twenty years later with the African Americans, both free and enslaved, who had joined them in the defence of the Crown and, also, from the outset, a trickle and sometimes a stream of lonesome newcomers from unhappy homelands just about everywhere else on earth. One feeling they shared was a longing for another place and time. At best lukewarm to their new circumstance, they hesitantly fashioned a federated nation with a thoughtful conservative bent. They were not triumphal; war weary and wary of disorder, they did not seek liberty, equality or happiness, but rather “Peace, Order and Good Government.” Our instinct is to go quietly, apologize regularly, and hope that practical solutions can bridge our differences. We know that stability and prosperity are tenuous. Tolerance, rooted in a lack of options, sustains us. We have learned that compromise is grudging and that icons are its Achilles heel.
The Left-Right political spectrum that dominates American political discourse places all things liberal or radical on the left and all things conservative or reactionary on the right. This ubiquitous spectrum descends from the liberal French Revolution and it obscures the developments in conservative political thought that followed it. Conservatives, from Edmund Burke onward, developed more modern political insights that saw societal not individual development as the wellspring of human progress.* There are sensible conservative voices in America, but they are muted by confusion and often denigrated by false association. Now, most of those in America who describe themselves as conservative are not conservative at all.** To understand this, suspend for a moment thinking of the word conservative as meaning right wing or reactionary and consider the definitions below. They are essential to understanding this essay. The subtle but profound differences between Canadian and American political culture are often mistakenly seen as Canada being more *liberal’. Canada is actually more conservative than America.
Yuval Levin in The Great Debate (2014) illustrates this clearly in his juxtaposition of Burke’s ideas with those of Thomas Paine. The men wee well acquainted with one another.
Yuval Harari agrees. “In American politics, liberalism is often interpretated far more narrowly, and contrasted with ‘conservatism’. In the broad sense of the term , most American conservatives are … liberal.” Homo Deus, 2015, p.389
If the “left” is defined as tending to a greater distribution of power and resources and the “right” to their greater concentration, then both the conservative and liberal views of human nature have inspired variants that span that spectrum. Liberalism is the belief in the goodness inherent in humans that prevails if pernicious societal forces such as poverty, superstition, and bigotry are transcended. Conservatism is the belief that selfish evil inherent in humans will prevail in the absence of nurturing institutions, positive social mythology and the restraining rule of law. Liberalism sees the fully individuated human being as a logical creature that behaves rationally. Conservatism sees the individual as an emotional, intuitive creature requiring social restraint to behave sensibly. Liberalism values reason, conservatism wisdom. Liberalism liberates, conservatism molds. Liberal thinking is not entirely left-wing; it has moderate centrist as well as rightist variants. Conservative thinking is not entirely right-wing; it has moderate centrist as well as leftist variants.
This is not to say that each of us is either a conservative or a liberal nor that human betterment depends entirely on one view or the other. We are all influenced by these opposite perceptions of human nature, but few of us are ideologues. Most would agree that the best decisions are tempered by both. Most of us, nevertheless, lean one way or the other most of the time and are drawn to organizations that lean in a similar direction.
These definitions jar because the use of the word conservative as a pejorative is entrenched in American political history. Patriot propaganda styled America’s first post-Columbian civil war as a rebellion against the tyrannical authority of a distant kingdom. There is some truth in this narrative, but it obscures the fact that a good deal of the warfare through which the American republic was formed was that of neighbour against neighbour. Tens of thousands of native-born Loyalist Tories who supported legitimate authority by siding with the Crown were stripped of property and subjected to the abuses of violent mobs. If they escaped with their lives (The verb lynch enters the language as the result of the treatment of Loyalists by self styled Patriots) they were expelled as refugees. In the northern wilderness the words Tory and conservative retained a positive connotation and had a profound influence on the evolution of Canada.
Defined in this rudimentary way, both liberalism and conservatism reveal a broader range of political thinking. For example, both ideas have spawned extremist totalitarian aberrations: conservatism, with its emphasis on the primacy of society, stretches from monarchy/theocracy on the right to its most radical heresy, communism, on the far left. Liberalism, with its emphasis on the primacy of the individual, stretches from the anarchist on the left to its most radical heresy, Fascism, on the far right.
<Liberal>
Anarchism< -------------------------------------------------->Fascism
Communism< ----------------------------------->Monarchy/Theocracy
<Conservative>
Conservatives reluctantly own communism, yet at its root is the conservative ideal of the social good. In the aftermath of the American and French Revolutions, liberalism and the capitalist economies that it spawned were critiqued by thoughtful Tories. Conservative positions such as constitutional monarchy, progressive conservatism, social democracy, socialism and, communism, became ideas that, in America, dare not speak their name. They were often purposefully cloaked in republican garb leaving the C word to be used as an invective. Attractive particularly to the rural peasantry and industrial workers in Europe, these conservative notions percolated alongside liberal ideas and fueled the development of democracies. They became viable options on the political landscapes of Europe and the countries emerging from the British Empire, but not in the United States of America. The catastrophe of the First World War propelled conservatism’s most radical variant, international communism, into a prominent role in 20th century history.
Likewise, to see Fascism and National Socialism as liberal aberrations unsettles common parlance. Reactionary populists, right-wing liberals on this spectrum, are angered when their proto-fascist tendencies are exposed. “How dare you! Our forbears fought and died to save the world from the NAZI’s!” This declaration being true does nothing to refute the premise. The liberal revulsion to NAZISM is a classic example of an attempt to purge a perceived doctrinal heresy. The history of human belief systems is replete with such doctrinal revulsions.
In THE APRENTICES SORCERER: LIBERAL TRADITION AND FACISM (2010), Ishay Landa of the Israeli Open University explores fascism’s liberal roots. Liberal thought, he argues, splits between political and economic liberalism revealing a persistent fault line in the liberal edifice. Political liberalism tends invariably to individual equality, universal enfranchisement and hence to the economic egalitarian impulse of democracy. Economic liberalism tends to individual inventiveness, freedom of enterprise, accumulation of personal wealth and a disdain for the encroachment by the masses on personal property. (That monied Americans see philanthropy as a virtue and taxation as an evil is a simple example of this.) He argues that classical liberals such as Locke never imagined a world where each person had equal say regardless of class, gender, education, or ability. They did not foresee how this dialectic tension within liberalism would unfold. Landa examines the nineteenth and early twentieth century thinkers whose writings are often seen as the antecedents of Fascism and sees them as liberals who seek un-liberal solutions to this paradox. He finds in each of these thinkers this liberal conundrum. How can political liberty and economic liberty coexist? Rather than being the nemesis of liberalism, he argues, fascism becomes liberalism’s defensive redoubt when the bourgeois/middle class is threatened by the masses. (Politicians in Western democracies countenance this threat when they campaign to support and expand the “middle” not the “working” class.) As democracy spread, political upheaval lay bare the dichotomy between absolute equality and “equality of opportunity”, between the right of the propertied and/or the educated to vote and “universal suffrage”, between the freedom of informed intellectual discourse and the uncensored freedom of speech.(It struck me as I read Landa, that in one of liberal democracies foundational documents written in 1644, Areopagitica; A speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc'd Printing, to the Parliament of England, Milton attacks all censorship “provided first that all charitable and compassionat means be us'd to win and regain the weak and the misled.” American liberals who champion a free and open iNET now confront their own populist heretics who are “weak” and mislead by q’anon.)
The Sons of Liberty and the Committees of Inspection that spawned the American Revolution by smoking, tarring and feathering or lynching their neighbours and the Committee of Public Safety that orchestrated the terror of the French Revolution were inspired by liberalism. They were harbingers of the ultra-nationalist movements of the 20th century. Radical liberalism can be militant, authoritarian, prone to group-thinking and mob rule. The liberal descendants of the Enlightenment who destroyed the feudal/monarchial order of 19th century Europe marched in hundreds of thousands as lambs to the nationalist slaughter pour la gloire of one country or another from 1914-18. The resulting rudderless remnants of a democratized Germany, its social order having collapsed, begat the ultra-nationalistic NAZIs. Hitler’s dystopia sought to engineer the perfect human being, Stalin’s sought to engineer the perfect human society.
No spectrum perfectly describes any political landscape, but these spectra that depict liberal ideas stretching from left to right and conservative ideas doing likewise better encompass the political fabric of Western democracies. These dual bands reveal political differences in two ways: it is not just a division between left and right (an argument over the distribution of wealth and power), but also about our essential nature and the source of human progress. The dual-banded left-right spectrum glows both bright red and solidly blue at each end. Thoughts distort at the extermites so that the original idea becomes unrecognizable; the totalitarian paradox.
The dual bands can be seen, for example, if we examine anarchism and communism. These radical movements both stand on the extreme left, but they stand across from one another. The anarchists, egalitarian liberals, see individual liberty attained by the destruction of both the capitalists and their puppets who govern. The communists, egalitarian conservatives, see human fulfilment flowing from a classless and inclusively governed society. The anarchist utopia is not governed at all and the communist is governed totally for the good of all.
Examing our poitical thinking on two bands helps to decipher the polarized babble into which we have descended. Right-wing populism is essentially a liberal heresy while the clamor on left is conservatism’s bastard. Like all populist movements each of these loosely defined groups acts from moral certainty, is fraught with internal contradictions, uses rhetorical excess, is prone to zealotry and has herd instincts. Moderate liberals are drowned out by the reactionary liberals on the right and thoughtful conservatives are silenced by the radical disorder on the left. Liberalism and conservatism, properly blended, produce balanced systems that foster stability, creativity, prosperity and human progress. Some blends are politically sound, but others are toxic. Populism, whether left or right, comes from a toxic brew. Understanding these rival groups and the ways in which they annoy one another illuminates the present polarization and reveals how sensible voices, particularly conservative voices, are lost in the resulting cacophony. The argument is not between naive and idealistic liberals of the left and reactionary conservatives of the right as it is usually portrayed. It is the very opposite; a slanging match between left-wing conservatives and right-wing liberals.
Liberalism has old-fashioned variants. The populist American right has proto-fascist tendencies, but it is not conservative; it is individualistic, its economic views are laissez-faire, it favors the least government, decries regulation and disdains bureaucratic authority. The one man, one gun, one vote rhetoric of the Tea Party is radically liberal. The highly personalized religious fervor of the populist right descends from Protestantism. Its sacred cows such as the First and Second Amendments and the rights of the unborn are liberal ideas. It values freedom of speech at least to the extent that “I can say whatever I want”, it is suspicious of professional, snobbish, elites. It dismisses environmental conservation, one hallmark of conservatism, with the skepticism expressed by “drill baby drill”. The belief that human ingenuity will compensate for bad husbandry through adaptive technology is unabashedly liberal. Right-wing populists defiantly describe themselves as “proudly conservative” (thus admitting its shameful connotation) while they are naught but bad-ass liberals who would gleefully throw those who over-govern and over-tax into the harbour.
Conservatism is not the root of the ideas of the populist-right. That said, however, there are conservatives in the oligarchy which funds and manipulates it. The boot-strap liberals of small business and libertarian Ayn Rand ideologues in its leadership may be genuine in their expressed beliefs, but others are conservative oligarchs who use right-wing liberal populism to shelter their wealth from the egalitarian impulse of democracy. Their cynical version of bread and circuses is a disinformation campaign through which they have convinced the dispossessed that a gun liberates, that medical care enslaves, that un-sweated wealth will trickle down and that the government is what stands in the way of the individual’s American Dream. The hucksters chosen to give public voice to the cause are rabble rousers. They have managed to convince people that the “deep state” threatens liberty while at the same time ruling vast corporations that are accountable to the few. The children of this financial/commercial elite exhibit the tedious and ostentatious trappings of a burgeoning aristocracy. Populism of the right diminishes the great liberal intellectual tradition from which it descends and on which so much of modernity is based.
In mirror image, conservatism has progressive and radical variants. The populists of the left who shout down speakers on university campuses, march to battle in masked faces, expunge offending language, topple monuments, police safe spaces and occupy others are not liberals. Their impulsivity is rooted in the notion that progress comes through group not individual action and they define persons not as individuals, but by gender and ethnicity or by the visible ethnicity we know by the human construct of race. They seek social not individual transcendence. They are left-wing conservatives whose actions are, in part, an unintended consequence of what is known in recent decades as postmodern thinking. Stick with me. The overuse and misuse of that label is tedious, but its impact on the left must be explored to understand why moderation in political discourse has vanished.
At the turn of the 20th century and particularly after the debacle of the First World War profound critiques of modernity and the liberal belief in reason and historical progress developed. This cultural shift impacted all areas of human endeavor and produced riches in art, theatre, literature, science, philosophy and so on by deconstructing the way we contemplate existence. In the humanities, scholarly feminist, anti-racist, anti-colonialist critiques profoundly altered our culture, especially our patriarchal, geocentric and ethnocentric self perceptions. Because it challenged convention and took consciousness to new horizons, it, in common parlance, is described as radically liberal. It is not. In essence it is an outgrowth of the conservative outlook. Its most profound deconstructions are illiberal in that they demonstrate the limits to reason. Its pursuit of social justice, antipathy to capitalism, affinity for Marxist analysis, and propensity to collectively assign guilt for past ills flow from the conservative view. Its advocacy for various downtrodden “identities” places the group above the individual as an agent of progress. Its theoretical complexity challenges the reasoned certainty of liberalism and has led to shallow thinking that mistakes uncertainty for the absence of fact: all knowledge is culturally constructed, all morality is relative, all ethics situational. Taken to its literal extreme, in this frame of mind, there is no such thing as a fix-ed star.
Liberalism is not at the root of these ideas. That may be why bedrock liberal institutions such as universities, the press, and the courts have had such difficulty in managing the impact of the populist left. Its core intellectuals are social theorists: radical feminists, anti-racists and anti-imperialists who are left-leaning conservative thinkers. The movement, however, has been nourished by a pandering liberal elite; an oligarchy of professionals made up of professors, journalists and pop-culture icons who have watered down and diminished these scholarly insights into human consciousness. There but for fortune liberalism has tolerated and often nurtured the professional misery spinners who lecture gullible adolescents as to how they can either check their “white privilege” or lament their “person of colour” past. Guilt and woe, shame and despair are selectively meted out to demonize the “dominant” culture (often the one into which the professors or journalists were born and prosper) and uncritically celebrate all others. Some egos must be deflated so that others can be puffed up. This reduction of progress to a zero-sum game has tarnished the academic traditions that spawned the critique in the first place. Silent liberals, some well intentioned, some cowed, some self serving, killed with kindness.
It need not have been so. Science also transcended the certainty of its nineteenth century boundaries. Physics, for example, left the Newtonian world and entered realms that, to the layman, go from the physical to the metaphysical. These profound insights are reshaping applied science, but no scientist, however esoteric his or her work, would attempt to walk through a wall although knowing it is mostly empty space, nor would he or she use a bridge that had not been constructed using Newtonian physics. In science those on the frontiers see themselves as standing on the shoulders of giants. On the whole Science faculties have remained disciplined. They would never dismiss Galileo as just another dead white scientist nor would they attribute his human ingenuity to his ethnicity, gender or appearance.
Those who best think outside the box understand what is in the box: Einstein thoroughly grasped Newton. Picasso was rigorously trained to draw, Toni Morrison knows the literary canon and Simone de Beauvoir was well schooled in traditional philosophy. The revolutionary impact of such 20th century thinkers on our consciousness came as the result of disciplined thought.
In the humanities and especially in education faculties, this insightful peeling of the onion of human consciousness is often diminished by shallow application. It is as though we teach students calculus before they know arithmetic. Followers spout the mantras of so-called post-modernism without knowing its intellectual underpinnings or of its critiques. The minions who have taken up the call of left-wing conservative populism are not standing on anyone’s shoulders; they are ankle deep in a swirl of self-contradictory bombast that derides the classics as the work of “dead white men”, dismisses scholarly convention as a tool of the oppressor, sees rigor as unfair discrimination and feels unsafe in the presence of dissension. En garde when a school of thought becomes a movement. Conservative-populism of the left has leavened liberal-populism of the right and American politics is thus reduced to an argument between pseudo-intellectuals and anti-intellectuals.
Those now in the ascendency, derided in urbane gatherings as “conservative”, are angered by a challenge to their traditional liberal values. The American countryside, its “fly-over” towns and villages, is deeply imbued with the individualist liberal ideal. The most lowly wants government “by the people”, knows “my rights”, and admires those who “speak their mind”. It is this spirit that is at odds with more formally educated and culturally accepted conservative “progressive” views of the left.
They saw themselves as the upholders of their constitution, the first and the best, as activist judges offended their liberal instincts with decisions that, to them, usurped the popular will. Attempts to level playing fields for the historically disadvantaged through affirmative action galled self-made bootstrap-liberals. They bristled as free speech was encroached by the affectations of the college educated. Their plain speech was derided for its biases as they awkwardly tiptoed through the ever-changing taboos of political correctness. They chaffed each time they had to say, “Now don’t get me wrong”. As anti-authoritarians, they saw the populists of the left as besotted by authority and found it pretentious when they dotted their speech with “studies show”, “data confirms”, “research indicates” and “experts agree”. The skepticism of right-wing liberals flabbergasted their left-wing opponents who believed, as do conservatives across the spectrum, that the quality of speech is at least as important as the freedom of speech.
The claim that “nobody knows my sorrow” was maddening: no man could understand women’s oppression, no Euro-descended person could feel the pain of those enslaved (nor the referred pain of their descendants), no straight person could imagine the distress of the gay, the bisexual or the trans-gendered and those who were light skinned could neither recognize nor understand their own racism. Those said to have been privileged by birth, although victims of the largest economic dislocation in a generation, could not complain. Regardless of their level of misery, it paled, it was said, when compared to those, regardless of their current wealth or status, who stood at other “intersections” of oppression.
These teachings clashed with the liberal verities on which Americans are raised. They implied that individuals could not transcend their inherited biology nor their learned behavior, that is, their culture. They were, to the liberal populist, an affront to logic and reason or, in their parlance, to common sense. Their “lived experience” saw the liberal promise of progress withering in a society that, to them, increasingly rewarded lethargy and dependence.
They were accused of retreating to tribalism, but they saw the identity politics on the conservative populist-left as exalting it. The rugged individual had been replaced by the hyphenated-person. The word white became a pejorative. Boxed in by economic dislocation, scholarly ridicule, elite condescension and collective guilt, long smoldering bigotry was rekindled. Talking heads funded by Machiavellian oligarchs spewed anger and deceit while previously isolated kooks became dangerous voices amplified by social media. The communication revolution had produced an Orwellian moment that blurred physical and virtual realities. Verity was elusive; a juncture ripe for deception and self deception. Ordinary folk longed for the mythic figures of the imagined good old days. The desire for a straight shooter who would speak his or her mind, shoot from the hip, call a spade a spade and tell it like it is became a messianic yearning. Enter a virtual shape-shifter: brooding Bruce Wayne making swift judgement from his tower high above Gotham; evil Lex Luthor the world’s most brilliant business magnate; rotund Nero Wolfe sleuthing mysteries resolutely ensconced in his Five Star lodgings; brave Walter Mitty running fearlessly into a hail of bullets, but often, bewildered Chance Gardner accidentally on stage, muttering in tweets.
Next: 2. If right-wing populists are reactionary liberals and left-wing-populists are radical conservatives, who are the wise Tories?
