Conservatives And Progressivism

TWO CONSERVATIVE writers this past week addressed what I consider to be conservativism’s Big Problem: How to advance conservatives ideas in a progressive world.

In National Review Jonah Goldberg writes about how for the last century

conservatives have been fighting progressive assumptions about the role of the state, the nature of justice, and the relevance, if any, of the transcendent to public life. With few exceptions, this argument has been almost entirely on the opposition’s terms.

In other words, the language of the public square is the language of the progressives.

Goldberg is careful to define what he means by progressive. It does not just mean left-wing, but in a broader secular sense that: “Progressivism takes it as a given that mankind, not God, is the pilot of Spaceship Earth.”

A conservative, I think, would at least say that when it comes to the pilot of the world: We Don’t Know. Wew don’t know what our purpose is here on earth, so we cannot know if we are doing the right thing. Therefore we need the concept of God to provide us with a means of talking about ultimate ends, or what we should do in our time on earth.

In fact, of course, the progressives do have a God. They just don’t admit it. Janet Daley gets close to defining it when she writes about the problem that David Cameron is facing as he tries to make the Tory Party acceptable once more to the liberal, professional middle class in Britain.

The young (and the intellectually lively elderly) are constantly searching for ways to make sense of the world. The appeal of systems that provide inclusive accounts of the human condition, whether political, theological or sociological, is very great.

And these people want not only to make sense of the world but divine our human purpose within it. The educated middle class is attracted to progressivism because it seems to enunciate a purpose for life in the industrial age. It provides a way to move beyond pure selfishness and provides a framework of fairness in which the wealth of the fortunate can be shared out with the less fortunate.

What these educated people do not see, because of their “inadequate understanding of economics,” is that when the state is charged with this sharing out it ceases to be a moral act, but merely an act of political power. It is difficult for the educated middle class to see this because it is they who wield the political power in the welfare state, and it is difficult to experience themselves as mere power actors in the political power game. They think that they are above such things.

The welfare state is slowly demonstrating that sharing and caring run by the government is not sharing and caring at all. But meanwhile, Daley writes,

Conservatives must show that they understand the appeal of that vague dream of perfect fairness which motivates [the progressive impulse].

Because fairness moves beyond a material world of self-interest. It is a metaphysical notion. Fairness is what God wants, or history, or basic human decency wants, the basic human decency of an educated person in the professional middle class.

Conservatives generally think that the progressive world-view is a pretty small and cramped affair, utterly compromised by its self-obsession and self-indulgence.

But if we are to move America forward from progressivism we must master it, so that we can lift it up and set it aside. As Goldberg writes: “Similarly, conservatives must speak the language of progressivism in order to persuade progressives that they are wrong. The danger in this is that you can go native.” Instead of converting the progressives, conservatives could end up as progressives.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.