It has never been easy to be a conservative in “polite” society, but these days it seems to be getting harder. We live in an age when opposition to liberalism is increasingly deemed illegitimate.
A lot of that starts at the apex of the political pyramid—with President Barack Obama. Back in 2008, he promised to be a post-partisan healer, but as we all know, things have not turned out that way. Conservatives continued to oppose liberalism, despite the president’s confidence that his winsome personality would bridge this century-old divide. In response, many liberals, beginning with Obama himself, judged that the Republican party has shifted radically to the right. The adverb there is important. Radicalism has a long history of illegitimacy in our politics, so the accusation is a serious charge indeed.
The evidence for it is quite thin: Republicans opposing an $800 billion, inefficient, deficit-financed “stimulus” package, a massive new health entitlement/regulatory regime not remotely paid for, and the enshrinement of “too big to fail” in financial regulatory law. It is hard to imagine Dwight Eisenhower going for any of this, and these days he is remembered as the paragon of Republican sensibility (liberals were much less charitable toward him when he was actually in charge).
Then consider climate change. After decades of overwrought jeremiads about an impending environmental apocalypse, liberals now push cap and trade as a solution to the problem of global warming. When conservatives blanch—pointing out that the world hasn’t gotten nearly as warm as the alarmists predicted, that a domestic cap and trade program might do little to solve what is supposed to be a global crisis, and that it is a substantial expansion of the traditional scope of government—they are accused of being “antiscience.” These days, that charge is even worse than radicalism.
Finally, consider gay marriage. Less than a decade ago, a majority of the country opposed it. After a highly effective campaign, advocates persuaded a critical mass of Americans to change their minds. While opponents of gay marriage find this disconcerting, it is nevertheless how politics is supposed to operate: Two sides make their claims, the public adjudicates, and policy changes accordingly. The trouble is with the next step. Liberals now aver that the only reason some still oppose gay marriage is bigotry toward homosexuals. This despite the fact that, not very long ago, many liberals themselves held the same “bigoted” views. Again, being a bigot in this country leaves you in the same place as being radical or antiscience—on the outside, looking in.
Taken together, this suggests a pattern to mobilize bias against conservatives. The idea is to cast conservative ideas and opinions as illegitimate a priori, not even worth the time or consideration of a thoughtful person. The assault comes from so many directions simultaneously that one can’t help but feel that the point is to castigate conservatism itself as a function of radicalism, superstition, and bigotry.
This is an unhealthy development for the body politic. Today, we take for granted that principled, robust opposition is the backbone of a well-functioning republic. Yet this is a relatively recent conception in the Western political tradition. It is still a fragile view that must be actively defended against the impulse to squash opposition to one’s own firmly held beliefs.
As recently as the 1700s, political parties were viewed with suspicion, for fear that they would smash society into pieces. In Britain, for instance, the persistent worry was that partisanship would devolve into another struggle between Catholics and Protestants, which had already nearly rent the country in two. Even in the early days of our own republic, party politics was considered inherently shabby. Political scientist Richard Hofstadter once called ours a “Constitution against parties”; it divides power so widely that it is virtually impossible for a party to acquire all of it.
Even our earliest party system was unlike what we have today. We’re told of the “Democratic-Republican” party founded by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, but this is largely a neologism. They thought of themselves as Republicans, which back then was a very powerful term. They conceived of themselves as the party of the whole people, defending the republican tradition against a quasi-monarchical, Federalist cabal. The Republican party, under this view, was a temporary expedient. This helps explain why Jefferson as president took a moderate approach to the Federalists; he believed most of them could be folded into his national coalition. Later on, presidents Madison and James Monroe were lax party managers, as partisan organization, for them, was not to be a permanent feature of American government.
One reason the Framers were hesitant to embrace partisanship was the forceful implication of early modern thought. This was only a century after Isaac Newton’s Principia, and many believed that reason could elucidate the proper principles of republican government just as it had discovered the laws of physics. We get a taste of that in the Declaration of Independence, where the liberty and equality of man are held to be “self-evident.” The Jeffersonian Republicans thought that the rightness of their party program was similarly self-evident, and that Federalism was based on a combination of patronage and an indefensible prejudice for monarchism.
In our country, the battle between the Whigs and the Democrats was really the first instance of party competition as we know it today. It did not begin in earnest until the 1830s, almost a half-century after the Declaration. These were two coalitions formed on competing principles and in it for the long haul. In this way, they harked back to Edmund Burke, the first great apologist for modern partisanship.
In Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), Burke defined a party as “a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.” There is a subtle, yet enormously influential concept embedded in this characterization. Parties, in Burke’s view, are formed on particular conceptions of the national interest. Contrary to many of his contemporaries, Burke explicitly disclaimed the capacity of abstract reason to delineate universal moral or political principles. From this vantage point, competition among opposing principles is essential to good government. The alternative is shutting down debate, which leads inevitably to corruption. As Burke put it, “Such a generous contention for power, on such manly and honourable maxims, will easily be distinguished from the mean and interested struggle for place and emolument.”
Burke’s views have become commonplace among contemporary democratic theorists. As American political scientist E. E. Schattschneider wrote in the mid-20th century, “the political parties created democracy and . . . modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of the parties. As a matter of fact, the condition of the parties is the best possible evidence of the nature of any regime.” Implicitly, Schattschneider was endorsing Burke’s view of parties.
This casts the left’s efforts to mobilize bias against conservatives in a very unfavorable light. Early modern republicans might have thought that good government depends on proper reasoning from first principles, but today we know better. It depends on an open, robust combat between groups with different, irreconcilable views of the national interest.
That does not mean we can disagree willy-nilly, of course; we all must accept the basic rules of the game. It is impermissible, for instance, to suppose that a recently elected government has the authority to suspend all subsequent elections. But the left is looking to impose restrictions that would significantly constrain disagreement. Opposition to unprecedented deficit spending, traditional Christian views on marriage, and suspicion of a massive new regulatory/redistributive energy regime—a healthy republic should not cast such opinions as illegitimate. That is not to say they should be accepted; just that those who hold them should be welcome in the debate, free to make their case as best they can.
It is often said that contemporary liberalism has become postmodern. One might say that the party system is postmodern, too. It is premised on the idea that reason alone cannot delineate the proper role and function of government. Different people will inevitably hold different views, so ultimately good government depends on principled opposition to big, competing ideas. Thus, liberals who dismiss their conservative opponents as superstitious bigots should be a little bit more . . . liberal.
Jay Cost is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard and the author of A Republic No More: Big Government and the Rise of American Political Corruption.
