A Liberal Dose, March 25, 2021 "The Difference Between Liberal and Conservative"

 

“THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LIBERAL AND CONSERVATIVE”

Today I want to once more explore some political terms and put them in historical context. This time we’ll tackle liberal and conservative, and touch on progressive. As discussed in a previous column, “liberal” originally referred to the protection of individual liberties. By the twentieth century, though, it had come to be understood more in the sense of its other meaning, “generous” or “open-handed.” A government, like a person, that is liberal seeks to extend the benefits of government to as many people as possible. This is done by being an “activist government” that gets directly involved. That means spending money, and that means raising money to spend, which is done through taxes. Liberal has also come to mean tolerant, accepting of different cultures, and willing to accept new ideas and new ways of doing things.

Joe Biden’s stimulus was extremely liberal. Every Republican in Congress voted against it –even though the vast majority of their own supporters were for it –because they are conservative.

Conservatives, of course, conserve. They wish to conserve in a fiscal sense by calling for a government that spends less –though, in reality, for the past few decades conservative administrations have tended to spend more money than liberal ones. The difference is how and on whom they spend it. There tend to be fewer beneficiaries of that spending, and they tend to be corporations or extremely wealthy people. Conservatives also call for less taxation. When the economy takes a dramatic downturn, conservatives tend to want the government to spend less, and to lower taxes on the wealthy. They argue that if the people at the very top are taxed less, they will have more money to invest and grow their businesses, which will create jobs and raise everyone’s status eventually. A liberal government, meanwhile, tends to spend more during an economic downturn- on federal projects that create jobs, and by getting money into the hands of the poor and working class who will spend it for their needs and boost the economy by doing so. Countless studies have demonstrated that the conservative “trickle-down” theory does not work. When wealthy people get more money (via tax cuts), they tend not to go out and spend it but rather to hold on to it, which does no one (but them) any good.

Conservatives also tend to conserve, or protect, traditions and the status quo. If things have always been done a certain way, then that’s how they should continue to be done. This applies to traditional ideas about family, church, sexuality, culture, etc. I am reminded of the words of the great western novelist Elmer Kelton, who said, “I don’t write about good guys in white hats versus bad guys in black hats. but about two guys in gray hats, one trying to institute change and the other resisting it.” In such a story, depending on your point of view, either character could be the protagonist. In their own point of view, each one honestly believes he is the hero. This also sums up the liberal/conservative divide in America, though obviously it is more complex and layered. Nonetheless, it goes back to the balance between the individual and the community that has been a point of discussion since this country was founded.  

For over a century now, the Republicans have been the conservative party and the Democrats have been the liberal one. For most of that time, though, there was always a liberal wing of the Republican Party and a conservative wing of the Democratic Party. It was sort of like the the taijitu, or Yin-Yang symbol  –two oppositional forces created balance, in part due to the fact each one incorporated some elements of the other. Liberal Republicans started disappearing in the Reagan years, and by the 21^st century were pretty much gone. Instead of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats, today we have a handful of “moderates” in each party –who really aren’t that moderate, inasmuch as they vary only slightly, and only occasionally, from their party lines. If that has been true of politicians, it has become equally true of their voters.

Allow me to restate my earlier definition: liberals embrace change, conservatives resist change. They want things to stay as they are, or maybe even go back to how they used to be.

Among other things, this is demonstrated in how each group views the Constitution. Liberals are often “Loose constructionists” who say the Constitution is a living document that changes to meet the needs of the time. Many conservatives are “strict constructionists” who believe the Constitution says what it says, and nothing more –and that even what it says has to be examined in the light of what its framers understood in the 18^th century. Since I’m a liberal and this is my column, I’ll go ahead and put this out there- if the Constitution remained unchanged from the 1700s, women would not be able to vote, Native Americans would not be citizens, and there might still be slavery. I would add that, since the Constitution itself as originally written provided for amendments to be added, you can’t argue the framers never wanted it to be changed in any way.

I said earlier that Republicans have been the conservative party for over a century. But it wasn’t always that way. From the party’s formation in 1854 and for decades thereafter, it was the liberal party and Democrats were the conservatives. 1800s Republicans wanted to change the status quo: they wanted to expand civil rights, expand the role of government in protecting them, and end slavery. 1800s Democrats wanted the opposite of all those things. One thing that has mostly remained unchanged from the 1854 Republicans, though, is the idea baked into the party that if everyone is given an equal shot they have a chance –with hard work and a little luck –at success. I think that the big difference between the parties today on that point lies in determining what an equal shot looks like and how you guarantee is –and that’s how political parties should work. We agree on what is right and fair and each propose our plan on how to get there.

The Populist movement took hold in a big way in the 1880s. Farmers and workers joined forces to protest the “robber barons” of the Gilded Age, which led to the creation of a third party in the 1890s (the Progressive Party), which won several governorships and congressional seats. Among other things, they wanted to expand workers’ rights. By 1900, Democrats and Republicans alike started adopting Progressive policies and for about twenty years every politician was progressive to some extent. Some argue that when that situation ended after WWI, around 1920, is when Republicans and Democrats starting switching poles as to who was conservative. Certainly those poles were fully reversed by the 1960s. Eventually, liberals started calling themselves progressives because liberal had become a dirty word.

But here’s the thing. You can’t stop change, at best you can only slow it down. Things that are considered normal today were considered too liberal a generation or less ago.

I guess the real difference is between “Make America Great Again” and “Make America Greater Than Ever, Now.”

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

A Liberal Dose, March 11, 2021: "Republicanism, George Washington, and Cowboys"

 

Republicanism, George Washington, and Cowboys.

 

I’d like to talk this week about two concepts that may not mean exactly what you’d initially think: liberalism and republicanism. Now, I’m not talking about the 21^st century usage of these words –liberal as a synonym for progressive, or republican as the conservative political party –I’m talking about the 18^th century meanings, as used by the founding generations of our country and the framers of the Constitution. Sometimes people identify those earlier meanings with the terms “classical liberalism” and “small-r republicanism.”

The latter idea probably had the largest immediate impact on the establishment of our country. Strictly speaking, “republican” just means pertaining to a country whose form of government does not involve a monarch –but to George Washington, John Adams. Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and others, it meant far more to that. To them –following the example of the classical Roman statesman Cincinnatus –republicanism revolved around civic virtue, civic duty, and “promoting the general Welfare” or the common good. If that last phrase sounds familiar, it is found in the preamble to the Constitution (which many of you know, because Burl Johnson spent decades at WCHS making people memorize it).

Let me reiterate that. Republicanism stresses civic virtue, civic duty, and the general welfare/common good. In other words, a good republican citizen feels it is their solemn duty to serve the needs of their community, even when doing so is a sacrifice. Especially then. George Washington believed this –and that’s how they were able to convince him to stand for president even though he really didn’t want to. He wanted to go back into retirement at Mount Vernon. But when enough people told him that he was the only one with enough respect and clout to hold the new country together, and that it would be in danger without him, he reluctantly gave in. It was even harder to convince him to run for a second term, and impossible to make him do a third. But he did serve those two terms, because he felt his duty to the greater good compelled him to do so.

Now let’s talk about liberalism. It comes from Latin/French root words meaning “freedom” (like liberty and liberate). One of the most common definitions of “liberal” is generous or open-handed, not stingy. In the classical sense, though, liberalism pertains to individual freedom. Scottish economist Adam Smith’s 1776 classic book Wealth of Nations is a perfect example of 18^th century liberalism- it called for the government to allow business a free hand in how the economy was run, as opposed to regulating it (which doesn’t sound liberal in the modern sense). Smith believed that if everyone in the economy is each looking out for their own profit, it will “raise all boats” by providing checks and balances and thereby benefiting everybody. James Madison was influenced by Smith, and those ideas –applied to politics instead of finance –made it into his draft of the Constitution, with the three branches of government designed to hold each other in check.

As you probably know, the Founding Fathers were somewhat divided on the idea of a Constitution that created a federal government. Some, like Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams, feared it would make the central government too powerful. Others, like Washington in particular, believed a powerful central government was needed in order to get things done. One thing the Anti-federalists really didn’t like about the new Constitution: it barely even mentioned individual rights. As a compromise, the Bill of Rights –the first ten amendments –was added to take care of that issue.

Here is my point. From the very beginning, some of the Founding Fathers talked about the importance of a strong national government that is empowered to promote the general welfare and the greater common good, while others talked about the importance of individual freedom and the need to enshrine protections of it. Most of them agreed that we needed to strike a balance that would do both of those things.

There is nothing more American than arguing about that balance between the community and the individual. It has even become enmeshed in our national mythology. By the 1830s, with the Industrial Revolution in full swing and many Americans feeling like cogs in a machine, pop culture of the time began to romanticize the frontiersman as a symbol of ruggedness, individualism, and freedom. Within a few decades that imagery had been transferred to the American cowboy, and to a large degree still is. Think about all the westerns you have watched or read (and I have written a few, myself)… the cowboy is the lone hero who solves his own (and everybody else’s) problems with direct action (“I have to do this alone, this is my problem!”). But even then, there are two conflicting messages in the story. The cowboy isn’t really doing anything for HIMSELF, he is doing it for the good of others. And even in that mythic representation, the cowboy is only a “trailblazer” for a community to come in and grow, with schools, churches, etc. In real life, a working cowboy might occasionally be assigned to the line shack in winter and face some solitude, but for the most part he was a member of a group of cowboys who “rode for the brand” and were all-for-one, one-for-all.

Let me restate this: Arguing over where the balance is (or should be) between community and individual is an American exercise that dates back to the founding of our country.

But I’ll tell you something I think is NOT American: picking one of those two parts of the equation, community good or individual rights, and saying that is the ONLY thing that matters and the other thing is Un-American and treasonous. America is both of these things at once, and must always be so in order to stay true to the vision it was founded on. There are those –and this has been true for over a century but is especially true now –who say that any talk of the greater good whatsoever is socialism, communism, and treason. FDR’s political opponents called him a communist because of Social Security. People called LBJ a communist because of Medicaid and Medicare. Such people only believe in the rights of the individual –and usually, in my experience, only of individuals very much like themselves. We see it today in the large number of folks who refuse to even consider wearing a mask during a pandemic because of their own discomfort, or just due to the fact they were asked to do something for the public good. It can also be true on the other extreme. The Progressive record of Woodrow Wilson was deeply stained by his administration’s suppression of individual rights during WWI.

So… is America about the public good or the individual? Yes. For that matter, is America about a strong national government or the rights of states? Yes. It is fine to want one of these things not to be overshadowed by the other. But if someone tells you one of these things is patriotic and the other is treason, they lack a clear understanding of what America is. And, more importantly, of what it should be.