Carl T. Bogus is a professor of law at Roger Williams University and a “a dyed-in-the-wool liberal” by his own identification. He recently wrote Buckley: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism, which required him to read a pile of conservative books. And then, a few months ago (I’m late in finding this), he “interviewed” himself for the National Review Online.
His answers to his last three questions (“What is different between conservative and liberal literature?”, “Why the lack of symmetry?”, and “After having completed an extensive program of reading great conservative works, how can you still be a liberal?”) are illuminating. Here are his answers to the last two:
Conservatives have big appetites for ideology; liberals don’t. There are, of course, taxonomies of conservative schools of thought. People on the right classify themselves as libertarians, neoconservatives, social conservatives, traditional conservatives, and the like, and spill oceans of ink defining, debating, and further subdividing these schools of thought. There is no parallel taxonomy on the left. Maybe, in part, it is because a central tenet of liberalism is that ideology should be eschewed in favor of the supposedly enlightened, pragmatic approach of making ad hoc judgments about issues. But on this conservatives are more realistic. Ideology is inevitable; we all have an ideology, whether we are aware of it or not. First of all, ideology is about values, and we can’t decide how we wish to solve policy issues without having a firm grasp on the values we are seeking to advance. Second, the world is too complex for us to make informed judgments about all of the issues that confront us. We need a philosophy to serve as a north star. One way I’ve been enriched by reading the great works of conservatism is that I’ve come better to appreciate how central ideology is to thinking about matters of governance and public policy.
As Isaiah Berlin pointed out, what separates us at the most fundamental level may be our different conceptions of liberty. Conservatives value above all else what Berlin called the negative vision of liberty, namely, freedom from coercion. Liberals are more willing to balance that against the positive vision of liberty — that is, having a reasonable opportunity to realize one’s potential. The negative vision focuses conservatives on restricting the government’s ability to interfere in people’s lives. The positive vision leads liberals to believe that government has a role in guaranteeing baseline minimums in education, medical care, and healthy communities. Most of us probably accept both visions to some extent, but how we balance the two may be built into our DNA. It is not to be expected, therefore, that a liberal will be converted by reading the great works of conservatism, or vice versa. But there are rewards to be gained from doing so nonetheless. Often, we get a better understanding of what we believe by reading about a philosophy with which we have disagreements than by reading congenial literature. More important, reading its great works helps us better understand — and respect — the other side. That, at least, has been my experience.
And that’s a reasonable view. It also makes sense if you plug it into the stability-vs.-data framework: ideology offers far more stability than “pragmatic approach of making ad hoc judgments about issues.” And sorting through your positions to synthesize an “ideology” (the word seems fraught to me; “system,” maybe?) is certainly helpful—I agree with Bogus that liberals do a poor job of systematizing their views (which is why I suggested that many people in the Occupy movement are missing their own point).
But if you want to see why this bridge-both-sides view doesn’t help much “in the trenches,” with ordinary people, just read the comments on the piece. Few of them suggest a struggle to understand or explain. The popular conservatism apparent there (and almost everywhere else you find people who call themselves “conservative”) doesn’t strike me as very conservative at all—it’s not careful, it’s not thoughtful, and it’s mostly just anti-government. They’re missing the point of their own movement, too.
To put it another way, I don’t think the “great works” of either side make much difference to regular folks. They just don’t read them. Or, when they do, they don’t integrate them well—they just quote-mine (or meme-mine) them. Most of the “liberal” and “conservative” views that gain currency outside the offices and studies of their academic collectors and originators are bastardized and weaponized. They’re only useful for playing politics, not for running a society.
So, let me ‘splain. No, there’s too much. Let me sum up. Conservatives have lost their plot and liberals have never managed to write one down. And to make an even broader speculation, I think that’s almost completely due to the failure of post-Enlightenment secularists to replace the central organizing institution of the society whose church they destroyed. Conservatives have regressed into feral demagoguery because their mooring post has been removed and liberals are only loosely confederated in the vicinity of poorly thought-out good intentions because they’ve never managed to systematize a new organizing principle. As the MythBusters would say, “There’s your problem.”
