Leading conservative website National Review Online featured on its front page this week an interesting piece of artwork: a well-known portrait of John Locke. JLF’s namesake accompanied Kevin Williamson‘s article about contrasting views of liberalism.
For the Left, “liberalism” means a social and political program that evolved to address the perceived shortcomings and excesses of capitalism as practiced in the 19th and 20th centuries; for the Right, what we today call “liberalism” is in reality a reaction against liberalism, with such factors as laissez-faire economic policies, constitutional government, individual rights, property, etc., forming a unitary whole. Forrester writes of F. A. Hayek’s “willingness to belittle politics,” which is a very strange claim to make about a man who wrote a massive book on the organization of politics, covering every subject from constitutionalism to the role of labor unions to planning-and-zoning laws. Hayek, like the liberals who came before and after him, believed that the liberal economic order and the liberal political order are intrinsically linked. (Modern experiences ranging from Northern European welfare states to Singapore suggest that these linkages, while real, are less robust and operate in a less straightforward manner than Hayek assumed in The Road to Serfdom and elsewhere.) This is important to understand because the Left’s fundamental intellectual defect — at least in the critique of those liberals who are now obliged to call ourselves “conservatives” — is that it seeks to establish something very much like the arbitrary princely powers that Smith and Hayek warned against, and that Washington fought against. The Left believes that this power can be made benevolent not by the strengthening of democracy — that is not precisely right — but rather by making ever-greater portions of society subject to arbitrary princely powers when those powers enjoy the endorsement of a plebiscite, as though handing over Augustus’s powers to the tribune of the plebs would constrain the imperial tendency.
Whether we call what the Left believes “liberalism,” “progressivism,” or pumpkin pie, we must address that assumption.
This speaks to an ancient but fundamental disagreement over the nature of human beings and, consequently, over the nature of human society. Conservatives — those who seek to conserve the liberal national order formalized by the founding of the American republic — tend to be oriented toward process, toward a narrow reading not only of Constitution and statute but also of the meaning of rights (negative) and the role of the state (limited); in our view, rights are enjoyed by individuals rather than by collectives, even when those rights are exercised in aggregate.
