Dear H,
Ayn Rand once said that in a totalitarian society like Soviet Russia, one kind of man that didn't exist was the businessman. I would add that there also aren't many liberals. There are on the other hand plenty of conservatives.
We Americans like to think of conservatives as gun-toting, family-oriented religious capitalists, but this label itself is made in the USA — especially when we think “traveling” means going to Cancun for spring break, and we don’t read books from other cultures or eras. In fact, whatever we think about how conservatives should think, the conservatives are the most diverse party in the whole world.
For instance, in Britain, conservatives might believe in aristocracy — a class system. In India they might believe in the caste system. In Soviet Russia they might have believed in (and failed at) the abolishment of classes. Each nation has its own flavor and gist of conservative, and you can put them in the same room and they’ll all disagree wildly — except on one thing, and that’s that they don’t want to act like the other nations.
In addition to this, a real conservative knows that to switch governments like musical chairs, English for American, would be a total disaster for both parties — no matter how smoothly things are going in either of them. A conservative believes in and recognizes ethnicity — that is, a particular kind of people, complete with manners and outlook and traditions — first. He believes society grows organically over eons and we grow into society. He’s thus a man of prejudice. And that’s okay. Because to a strong degree he’s right.
Liberals are built a little different. By “a liberal" I don’t mean that you have green hair and hate borders and think Lizzo is oppressed. That would be our current definition of leftist. By liberal I mean you like hearing about how the Scandis do hospitals and the Saudis do hospitality. In short you like new ideas from all kinds of places; and, even more than this, you like to hear a good argument about them.
John Stuart Mill explained liberalism in the best way possible in On Liberty:
If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.[...]
The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.*
Liberalism doesn't mean you think all arguers are equally right. It doesn’t mean you think all ideas are equally safe, or smart, or worthy of respect. It means that you think other people should say them so that we can fight about them and — who knows? — maybe we can find better ideas. And this means that given the right circumstances, you might trade out your traditional ones.
This of course requires diversity, on some level, and for the ability of minorities (religious and political and ethnic) to frankly speak their minds. No country has ever done this perfectly (nor would we want them to, as this would require a hamstringing of the majority), but liberals at least give it a good shot. And I think they ought to, to some degree. This kind of free-dealing with one another, even when it's offensive, is responsible not just for the best governments (read: The Federalist Papers), but for our best music and movies and poetry and literature. Thus Sparta had the best armies. But Athens the fruity liberal had the best art.
Spiritually, the liberal and the conservative differ on how open they are to change. They also differ on how offended they are when they hear a new idea. Liberals today are accused of being self-loathing limp-wristed fit-throwing vegans — but this is a mischaracterisation. A true liberal doesn't fit well within boxes or narratives; and, in fact, he tends to poke holes in them. A liberal is the still, small voice that questions whether Big Pharma is lying to and raping the public. Liberals are pointing out whether the FDA is funded by the people they're supposed to be policing. A liberal asks — at great personal danger — whether the cop who killed George Floyd (and went to prison for it) was just following what his bosses told him. And a liberal gets angry when Facebook and Twitter wouldn’t let anybody talk about it. We like to call Democrats “liberals,” but I’ve just listed people like Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, Russell Brand, RFK Jr, and Donald Trump — people who are risking their lives to shake up an evil, corrupted system. And if the Republican Party is winning at all, it’s because of these people — the liberals at heart.
This is why there are conservatives in North Korea but no liberals. A spiritual liberal is always looking for truth, and the people in charge are always trying to hide it***. Both a slave society and a free society are a game of cat and mouse. But in a slave society, the mouse is the liberal — and he’s almost always eventually caught. In a free society, the mouse is the President. And there we wish the cats luck.
E.B. White has a beautiful passage in his Writings from the New Yorker, which every American should read,
The value of the liberal in the republic is not that he is logical but that he is inquisitive. [...]
The liberal holds that he is true to the republic when he is true to himself. (It may not be as cozy an attitude as it sounds.) He greets with enthusiasm the fact of the journey, as a dog greets a man’s invitation to take a walk. And he acts in the dog’s way, too, swinging wide, racing ahead, doubling back, covering many miles of territory that the man never traverses, all in the spirit of inquiry and the zest for truth. He leaves a crazy trail, but he ranges far beyond the genteel old party he walks with and he is usually in a better position to discover a skunk. The dog often influences the course the man takes, on his long walk; for sometimes a dog runs into something in nature so arresting that not even a man can quite ignore it, and the man deviates—a clear victim of the liberal intent in his dumb companion. When the two of them get home and flop down, it is the liberal—the wide-ranging dog—who is covered with bur-docks and with information of a special sort on out-of-the-way places. Often ineffective in direct political action, he is the opposite of the professional revolutionary, for, unlike the latter, he never feels he knows where the truth lies, but is full of rich memories of places he has glimpsed it in.
We have been making fun of liberals for too long, mostly because people who aren’t liberals stole the label — which used to be a compliment — and put it on people who didn’t deserve it. I think it’s time to call them out on it.
Yours,
-J
P.S. An obvious question might be asked here. Can’t conservatives and liberals be the same thing? I think we're all mixes of both; but what if, for instance, liberalism is the tradition — like conservatives defending freedom of speech as a matter of heritage?
I would answer that this can in fact happen, but that a man can defend liberalism out of pure conservatism without having an ounce of the inquisitive liberal spirit in him — just like a man can go to church and defend the church's role in society without ever having experienced the love of God. A liberal is liberal in outlook more than anything else; maybe more accurately in attitude. A conservative is too — and sometimes the thing he holds as his heritage is liberals.
*Aside from being a great skunk-finder, a true liberal (in the spiritual sense) is also the best learner. Why? As John Stuart Mill put it,
In the case of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen to all that could be said against him; to profit by as much of it as was just, and expound to himself, and upon occasion to others, the fallacy of what was fallacious. Because he has felt, that the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner. The steady habit of correcting and completing his own opinion by collating it with those of others, so far from causing doubt and hesitation in carrying it into practice, is the only stable foundation for a just reliance on it: for, being cognisant of all that can, at least obviously, be said against him, and having taken up his position against all gainsayers—knowing that he has sought for objections and difficulties, instead of avoiding them, and has shut out no light which can be thrown upon the subject from any quarter—he has a right to think his judgment better than that of any person, or any multitude, who have not gone through a similar process.
All true, of course, and thus the aim of every true education should be to turn you into a liberal — to break you out of your provincial shell and show you there are other ways, and get you used to hearing them, and to sifting through them. And beyond this a really active mind should enjoy it.
But the spirit of liberalism is impossible to enforce politically. Where liberals go wrong is that (as Chesterton put it) the whole point of having an open mind is to close it. The end result of developing your judgment is to pass judgments and act on them. Thus all intellectual formation is a trowel in one hand and a sword in the other. We learn things and build systems and then fight off anybody who tries to ruin them.
Thus no society is a safe place for everybody to speak up. We can be degrees of liberal, but to embrace it entirely isn’t to be free — it’s to commit suicide, and to invite anybody else with enough balls to just squat in your home, and boss around your family.
**The patron saints of liberalism are Montaigne and Voltaire. The patron saint of political conservatism is Edmund Burke. There is no patron saint of neoconservatism, because the person who came up with neoconservatism is the Devil.
The great benefit of conservatism is that it recognizes each person and country as an organism — with its own political climate, manners, attitudes, and possibilities. The great benefit of liberalism is that it seeks out the best of other countries and it tries to bring them home — not as a whole system, but piecemeal, as a matter of art and taste. So-called "neoconservatism” is a flat-out reversal of both of these principles. The neoconservative doesn't respect that other countries are unique. And instead of asking what’s good for us, it dictates, at the nose of a bomb, what’s good for others. It sends liberal democracy to Afghanistan at maximum carnage and crippling expense, and doesn’t just ruin Afghanistan — in the end it bankrupts liberal democracy at home.
It isn’t “new” and it isn’t “conservative.” It’s the dumbest kind of imperialism. The old Romans knew what they really wanted, and it was possible: to conquer the world and make it a safe place for Rome. The neocon wants to make the rest of the world like the US — and ignores that in order to do this, we’d have to act like an absolute dictatorship, complete with gay parades and wiretapping and torture. As such we don’t wish them good luck: we wish them to a war crime tribunal.
***As George Orwell put it, news is what somebody does not want you to print. All the rest is public relations.