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48 Chapter 3 what “liberalism” and “Conservatism” mean Today To UndersTAnd whAT modern “liberalism” and “conservatism”—as these terms are now used—have become, we have to begin by recognizing a truth that most contemporary liberals and quite a few conservatives, too, will want to resist. By any measure, both liberalism and conservatism have moved considerably leftward on the political spectrum over the course of the past two centuries. What counts as liberalism today is in fact a hybrid of the older negative liberalism, now largely confined to the personal domain, and a moderated form of Western-style democratic socialism. And the various strains of contemporary conservatism are a mixture of classical liberalism brigaded with emanations of the older conservatism. Just as liberalism today is often torn between its classical liberal roots and its increasingly socialistic teleology, conservatism often seems to stand astride the same fault lines that, two centuries ago, separated the older conservatism from classical liberalism. How Liberalism and Conservatism Have Moved Leftward The leftward drift of liberalism and conservatism is evident even at relatively close range. Speaking of a time in his life when he had been a Democrat, Ronald Reagan insisted, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left me.” Of course, some of Reagan’s own positions had changed over time, but it’s fair to say that, by the 1960s, liberalism had become associated with a number of positions that would have struck liberals even a generation earlier as untenable, perhaps even irresponsible. Neoconservative Irving Kristol looked back on the 1960s and said that it was easy for a liberal to become a neoconservative then—“all you had to do was stand still.”1 Like many of his ilk, Kristol is a defender of the welfare state and of a constellation of positions that were central to the new liberalism of FDR.2 But now this is called “neoconservatism.” Those liberals who became conservative while standing still were increasingly exercised by two things—the extension of the New Deal’s “big government” philosophy to an ever-expanding number of areas of everyday life, and the influence of the values of the New Left on the liberalism of the 1960s and 1970s. With William F. Buckley’s conservatives, an increasing number of erstwhile liberals found themselves wanting to “stand athwart history, yelling Stop!” Liberals have successfully redefined liberalism’s central concepts and values so that liberalism today in many ways stands for positions almost diametrically What “Liberalism” and “Conservatism” Mean Today 49 opposed to the positions of liberals a century and a half ago. Ask liberals today whether they favor a limited state or a state that takes an active role in ordering the myriad forms of social and economic relations among individuals, and they will reflexively defend a large measure of state intervention. Query whether they favor the protection of property and contract rights and a laissez-faire approach to economic relations, and they will reject each of these out of hand as anachronistic ideals. Inquire further whether they are opposed, as Tocqueville, Mill, and Acton were opposed , to paternalistic laws that make the state the final arbiter of the best interests of the individual in a broad range of matters, and they will answer that they are liberals and not libertarians. As H. W. Brands, a defender of modern liberalism, puts it in The Strange Death of American Liberalism, liberals today “define themselves as defenders of the downtrodden against the rich and powerful, as upholders of equality in the face of inequality, as apostles of compassion and tolerance in a world distressingly devoid of both.” Reflecting the liberal’s reliance on government to achieve greater equality, he adds: “whatever else it entails, liberalism is premised on a prevailing confidence in the ability of government—preeminently the federal government—to accomplish substantial good on behalf of the American people.”3 Contemporary liberals and their fellow travelers use a variety of rhetorical devices to camouflage the larger leftward trajectory of our political history. One tactic is to describe policies and positions by labels that are one or two positions to the right of what they actually represent—calling socialist policies “liberal” and conservative positions “fascist.” The late postmodernist Richard Rorty used the “f” word liberally, concluding that “our country is not so much in danger of slipping into fascism as it is a country which has always been quasi-fascist.”4 Another tactic is to link an unwillingness to continue in the...

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