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I don't know when I first thought it, but as soon as I did, it became deeply etched in mind: "Obama thinks that conservatives are just liberals with a different set of ideas." For me, this captured one of his fundamental misapprehensions-though one that is surely broadly shared among establishment liberals, neo-liberals and the like. This is such a typically narrowminded thing for a liberal to think-all the while thinking he's being broadminded--quite unlike the DFHs such as you and me.
But as a whole liberals and conservatives don't just differ in their ideas-as Obama himself well knows in a different compartment of his brain. They differ in attitudes, in sensibilities, in ways of thinking about ideas, as well as in larger life purposes. The origins of modern conservatism lie in the European landed aristocracy, descended from a predatory warrior class. Although tens of millions of self-identified conservatives today are culturally, historically, and/or genetically far removed from those origins, there is nonetheless a continuity in the kinds of life activities that such a culture breeds.
Similarly, the origins of modern liberalism lie in the European urban middle class-the burghers, or bourgeoisie, who inhabited a very different life-world, with some very different kinds of activity, much of which centers around the finding of facts, and all manner of intellectual pursuits that flow from or depend on factual knowledge. This includes all manner of occupations dating back centuries, even millennia-from artisans to shopkeepers, traders, lawyers, bankers, doctors and teachers-as well as occupations that scarcely existed as such more than two to five generations ago, such as scientists, technicians, engineers, etc.
From the conservative aristocracy's point of view, all such occupations are inherently servile: the aristocracy rules, it exists to rule, and all the factually-oriented occupations exist solely to serve the ruling aristocracy.
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Such are the deep historical roots behind the famous "reality-based community" interchange related by Ron Suskind in his October 17, 2004 NY Times magazine article, "Without a Doubt". The exchange is well worth quoting in its larger context, particularly given the newly-evident salience of the torture/Iraq War justification connection:
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Who besides guys like me are part of the reality-based community? Many of the other elected officials in Washington, it would seem. A group of Democratic and Republican members of Congress were called in to discuss Iraq sometime before the October 2002 vote authorizing Bush to move forward. A Republican senator recently told Time Magazine that the president walked in and said: "Look, I want your vote. I'm not going to debate it with you." When one of the senators began to ask a question, Bush snapped, "Look, I'm not going to debate it with you."
Torture as an epistemic method, anyone?
Suskind continues:
The 9/11 commission did not directly address the question of whether Bush exerted influence over the intelligence community about the existence of weapons of mass destruction. That question will be investigated after the election, but if no tangible evidence of undue pressure is found, few officials or alumni of the administration whom I spoke to are likely to be surprised. "If you operate in a certain way -- by saying this is how I want to justify what I've already decided to do, and I don't care how you pull it off -- you guarantee that you'll get faulty, one-sided information," Paul O'Neill, who was asked to resign his post of treasury secretary in December 2002, said when we had dinner a few weeks ago. "You don't have to issue an edict, or twist arms, or be overt."
O'Neill's reflection says it all: Any hereditary aristocrat would know this intuitively-it's part of the very foundation of their being: You let the help know what you want, with a glance, or a look, or a shrug, and they bring it to you. The best help doesn't even need you to hint. In fact, the very best help-such as Karl Rove-will actually figure it out for you, so you don't even have to think of it yourself. It's only the servile reality-based liberals who spell things out to one another in such detail that it's relatively easy to see when someone's pressuring someone else, directly manipulating intelligence, or simply outright lying. And because the stupid narrow-minded liberals expect the conservative aristocrats to do things the very same way, the aristocrats can run circles around the reality-based liberals and the liberals won't even see what's happening.
Thus, while Suskind stepped back from that original interchange, and grasped a larger significance for it at that time, we can continue the thread of his reflection, both farther back in time to the pre-Enlightenment era, when conservative aristocracies were far more dominant, almost without question-as I have cursorily done above-and forward to the present moment, when we must ask ourselves about the various forms of blindness to what's going on, and the various costs involved in Obama's naïve disregard for the profound differences between liberal and conservative traditions.
There are, in fact, multiple levels in which the same basic logic plays out: The taken-for-granted reality-based liberal/Enlightenment approach is responded to by the conservative/feudal/aristocracy as either a threat (if it could conceivably damage them) or a sign of weakness (if it lets them off the hook). The central reality-based concerns with procedural fairness, consistency, and avoidance of bias are literally invisible to the conservative mindset, except as some kind of joke-or trick.
Just yesterday, I came across a passage in Rick Perlstein's review of Eric Alterman's What Liberal Media? that makes pretty much the same point about the difference between liberalism and conservatism, from a different context (emphasis added):
Why do the conservative media fight politics as a life-and-death struggle whereas an avowed leftist like me can look at an old tradition like National Review's publishing liberals and conservatives side by side and think it's kind of nifty? That contrast, between conservative bunkerism and liberal openness, speaks to the very structural heart of the difference between conservatives and liberals. We Americans love to cite the "political spectrum" as the best way to classify ideologies. The metaphor is incorrect: it implies symmetry. But left and right today are not opposites. They are different species. It has to do with core principles.
To put it abstractly, the right always has in mind a prescriptive vision of its ideal future world - a normative vision. Unlike the left (at least since Karl Marx neglected to include an actual description of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" within the 2,500 pages of Das Kapital), conservatives have always known what the world would look like after their revolution: hearth, home, church, a businessman's republic. The dominant strain of the American left, on the other hand, certainly since the decline of the socialist left, fetishizes fairness, openness, and diversity. (Liberals have no problem with home, hearth, and church in themselves; they just see them as one viable life-style option among many.) If the stakes for liberals are fair procedures, the stakes for conservatives are last things: either humanity trends toward Grace, or it hurtles toward Armageddon.
This is why conservatives spy left-wing authoritarians everywhere. Seeing the world in terms of norms and presuming others do the same, they easily mistake a liberal tolerance for diverse options, even unconventional options, as an endorsement of the unconventional options. The presence of gay people on TV, for example, looks like a recommendation of homosexuality. That break in the natural order tempts chaos; chaos invites panic. Which is why conservatives fight by any means necessary to make the world look the way they insist it must look, while liberals are busy playing fair. And which is why it is now more accurate to say, as Eric Alterman, The Nation columnist and MSNBC.com blogger, does, that even as it "so perfectly contradicts conventional wisdom . . . the bias of the American media is more conservative than liberal." They fight the media war ruthlessly, and they are winning.
I actually disagree somewhat with Perlstein, as I think it's clear that there's more than fair procedures to liberalism. Lakoff cites nurturance and empathy as central. Some basic floor of substantive equality is also involved, preventing anyone from falling into absolute destitution. Still, it's equally clear that fair procedures play a central role, and that conservatives consistently fail to understand this. Furthermore, "fairness, openness, and diversity" certainly qualify as norms in their own right, so the more one looks at the two traditions, the more one understands how the spectrum model makes sense to people. Perlstein's central thrust is surely right, but in the world of workaday politics, the sharp differences get blurred, which is generally much to the benefit of conservatives, as their core intolerance-now so visibly on display with the tea-parties and such-really doesn't sell that well with the majority of Americans.
As a further example of blurring, the vast majority of self-described conservatives embrace a wide range of rights that come directly out of the liberal tradition-even though their embrace often breaks down when it comes in conflict with their core beliefs. The sharp differences are particularly visible with the activist core, especially the high-level architects, but among the great mass of everyday people, there's a great deal of such blurring, and that's where genuine cross-ideological progress can be made. Unfortunately, Obama looks to the political leadership as the ones to negotiate with, and they are where the differences are particularly sharp. So all the caveats I might have with Perlstein's description go by the boards, when it comes to how Obama mistakes the nature of the ideological terrain.
In fact, there are two levels to Obama's confusion about the possibility of high-level cross-ideological progress:
(1) Obama expects the general possibility of good-faith rational negotiations, producing consensus between liberals and conservatives "of good will." He mistakes the reality of specific cooperative achievements-of the sort that even flaming liberals like Ted Kennedy and Paul Wellstone managed to achieve-for a viable paradigm applicable across the boards.
He fails to recognize that such specific achievements only appear as potentially paradigmatic on the liberal/procedural side of the ledger, and only there among those, such as himself, who are blind to the topography of the conservative value space. In reality, such cross-ideological agreements are not possible in general, but are only specifically possible because they do not intrude into the realm of core normative principles on the conservative side.
(2) Having failed to make these crucial distinctions, Obama consequently sets himself up for a second level of confusions. This level consists of abandoning the liberal/procedural framework for achieving cross-ideological consensus, and accepting instead elements-from micro- to macro- of the conservative characterization of potential consensus (such as letting torturers off the hook as simple fairness.) This effort is doomed to failure, as I will describe in a followup post.
Before proceeding to that post, however, I must first discuss another sort of background material on liberal/conservative differences, that which comes from the study of values and cognitive processes as summarized by Robert Altemeyer in his online book, The Authoritarians. |
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