Comments on: What’s in a Name?

By: philosopher

philosopher — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 03:48:54 +0000

Ditto to what Karl said (except I disagree about “moderate”, but whatever).

By: Karl

Karl — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 18:31:07 +0000

Greg, the problem with everything that you have said for the last two posts is that there is no broad agreement between conservatives, either on particular issues or on a basic philosophy. The difference between liberals and conservatives that you seemed so excited about in your July 31 comment is a difference that does not exist.
Liberals can re-brand, and they do this when large numbers of them reject the liberal label and call themselves progressives. They did the same thing in the 1990s, when many of them called themselves “moderates.” It is not a centralized decision, but it can still happen. Do you really think it is different for conservatives? Do you believe that there is an “identifiable corporate form” to conservatism? There is no council, or Supreme Conservative #1, over here, who tells us whether and when we are going to change our name. We do have people who appear on television and put their opinion in print, but just like everyone else, we only agree with them if we choose to do so.

By: Gregory Travis

Gregory Travis — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 16:47:50 +0000

Authoritarianism comes into play because of the implicit assumption that “liberals,” like conservatives, can be expected to self-organize under an authoritarian hierarchy.
I.e. that “liberal” nature is such that “liberals” will seek out an authoritarian leader figure, or body of individuals composing such a figure. And that they will look to that figure for, for lack of a better phrase, “marching orders.”
Because it is only if you have a population receptive to marching orders that one could expect democrats/liberals to act as a corpus with regard to “rebranding.” That there is an identifiable corporate form to “liberalism” with members self-identifying as members of that corporate body.
Which is, as I said originally, antithetical to liberal thought. Liberals, by definition, don’t rally beneath any given flag, don’t accept a premise on faith, etc. Those are traits of the authoritarian right and do not map to the liberal left and are therefore inapplicable and unhelpful in understanding the motivations and agendas of those on the left.
Hillary Clinton, the individual, may be trying to shift her image from “liberal” to “progressive” (whatever those terms may mean) but she does not, she cannot, speak for the body of liberalism in the same way that, say, Ronald Reagan was able to speak for the body of conservatism.
Because liberalism, by definition, eschews having a “body.”

By: Zach Wendling

Zach Wendling — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 13:01:22 +0000

Nick, I don’t think that’s nasty at all. In fact, it’s pretty accurate.

By: Nick

Nick — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 12:51:39 +0000

The key insight here is that conservatives and libertarians are concerned about intellectual legacies and the historic threads of their ideologies...Liberalism, or progressivism, will always be more about advancing convenient policies, rather than hammering down a coherent genealogy of political thought.

I suppose if we wanted to be nasty, we could refocus that observation and say that conservatives, like decaying aristocrats, are concerned about defining their worth by their proper geneology and the achievements of their ancestors. Liberals, like bourgeois merchants, are more concerned about where they are going.

By: philosopher

philosopher — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 00:29:48 +0000

Zach: I’d be curious to know what you think are some of the prime exemplars of the relevant punditry factions. Though I think your claim as stated is wrong, I bet there’s some other claim in its neighborhood that is on to something.
Greg: Eh, I don’t see where “authoritarianism” has anything to do with anything here; and I’d say that conservatism today is beset by a plethora of different (and, increasingly, mutually inconsistent) flavors, which is why there is so much beard-stroking about just what conservatism _is_.

By: Gregory Travis

Gregory Travis — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 19:30:41 +0000

This is a typical mistake made by the authoritarian right: that because they are authoritarian, so must be everyone else.
Of course that flies right in the face of what liberalism is, which is namely the position that a particular point of view, a particular ideology, a particular tenet could very well be wrong, even if it’s being held by members of one’s own tribe.
“Liberals” or “progressives” can’t engage in “rebranding” because there is no consensus, no single-mindedness, among liberals or progressives. We don’t like each other just as much as we don’t like you. We don’t march to the same space ghost, we don’t all pray at the same market altar, we mostly go through life disagreeing with each other.
Again, because that’s what liberalism is. It’s iconoclasm, it’s anti-orthodoxy, it’s anti-authority, it’s open-minded.
It’s liberal.

By: Zach Wendling

Zach Wendling — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 18:10:02 +0000

I think you're stretching things quite a bit to call O'Reilly either conservative or middle-brow. And yes, Yglesias has mentioned Rawls recently, but that seems more the exception than the rule. I'll still cop to a skewed sample, though.

By: philosopher

philosopher — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 18:02:38 +0000

But it’s not like you hear conservative pundits talk about, say, Locke or Burke or Kirk that often, either. (I doubt Bill O’Reilly knows the first damn thing about any of them, for example.) And certainly some liberal bloggers, like Yglesias or Delong or Healy, talk philosophy and theory with some frequency. I think you’ve probably got a skewed sample of some sort.

By: Zach Wendling

Zach Wendling — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 17:31:17 +0000

I have to disagree with phil, for I would refer more specifically to a middle-brow sort of ideologue. Based upon my experience, conservative pundits cite their intellectual forefathers fairly often, and compare policies within the context of their movement history far more often than liberals. I mean, when is the last time you saw a liberal pundit talk about Rawls or Mills? This happens very rarely. Or maybe I’m reading an unrepresentative sample.