What is a Liberal?by Adam Kotsko In my last essay, I defined a conservative as one who makes it his goal to preserve current power relations. I proposed that for the conservative, the very success of those currently in power is proof of the fact that they deserve their power. I explained this in terms of the classic Puritan doctrine that prosperity is a positive sign of God's election. That connection might strike some as a stretch, but I think it accounts for the close connection between the modern American conservative movement and Christian fundamentalism. A different, secular model for understanding the mindset of conservatism is that of Darwinism. Natural selection, the survival of the fittest, is often a brutal process, but viewed from a certain perspective, those species who are left behind were a waste of time anyway. One hears this all the time in discussions of environmentalism: "If the spotted owl can't make it on its own, then why bother with it? If nature was allowed to follow its course in the first place, it probably would have died off long ago." Although blatant social Darwinism is a thing of the past, the basic idea that those human groups that have become dominant have ethical priority over those who are falling behind is still prevelant: "If those industrial workers can't adapt to the realities of global capitalism, then we will just have to leave them behind for the sake of the greatest good." Obviously these Darwinist sentiments above display a starkly one-sided view of the greatest good. Although market fundamentalists often invoke the pie-in-the-sky of the day when the market, finally freed from all inefficiencies and constraints, will lead mankind into a new gold age, the concrete people who receive the benefits of the "common good" are very small in number -- they are the ultra-rich. These people represent the next stage of human development. They are the universal, the most fully human, and the proper task of political action is to nurture these people so as to nurture the human race as a whole. This is the basic claim of the right wing. Against this contention that the "cream of the crop" represents what is universal and most worthy of political preservation, the left wing claims that it is rather the lowly, the weak, the crushed, that represent the truly human. They show the system for what it is -- an unjust attempt by a very few to gain the security of overwhelming power and wealth at the expense of the vast majority of humankind. The left sees it as an ethical imperative to side with these oppressed and marginalized people, even if they have been convinced by those in power that they are not oppressed and marginalized at all, but actually benefitting from the system. They seek every opportunity to help the poor and oppressed and shun any plan that claims that the best way to help the poor is first to help the rich (for instance, trickle-down economics). If none of this sounds familiar, that's because in America, contrary to popular opinion, there is no left wing. This brings us to our discussion of liberalism: conservatism behind a left-wing facade. An American liberal claims to be on the side of the oppressed and might even offer the oppressed some temporary relief on occasion, which is certainly more than a hardcore conservative is willing to do. For the most part, though, liberalism is little more than a way of easing one's troubled conscience. The liberal has a vast array of single-issue movements to choose from -- feminism, anti-racism, gay rights, environmentalism, animal rights, anti-globalization, etc., etc., etc. -- in order to convince himself that he is making some kind of difference, but unlike the various conservative "issues," these do not point to any kind of unified bottom line. Each offers its own way of patching up the system by convincing those who hold power to be a little bit nicer to the little guy, but all those protections are tenuous at best without a significant redistribution of power. The social changes liberalism proposes are all carefully calculated to ensure that genuine change does not take place. The debate over health care during the early years of the Clinton administration is a good example of this. Health care costs were escalating back then and continue to escalate. I have worked with health insurance enough in the last month or so to realize that insurance is definitely part of the problem. First, there is a bewildering number of companies, and then each company has any number of different plans. The administrative costs associated with all these different plans are enormous on every level of the health care system, and that is only compounded by the fact that health insurance companies are driven, like every other company, to create enormous profits and therefore enormous wealth and security for their owners. From the perspective of people who need health care, huge corporate profits (above and beyond those necessary to insulate the company from an occasional slump, etc.) do absolutely nothing but drive up costs of essential services. The fact that a handful of people are billionaires as a result of the way the current health care system is run does utterly nothing to make anyone (aside from those few people) any healthier -- in fact, probably quite the opposite. The solution, then, is to take responsibility for people's health away from a small group that is dedicated to nothing other than increasing its own wealth and prestige and hand it over to a different group that is concerned solely with increasing public health and is directly accountable to the public. In America, the only institution that is directly accountable in any meaningful sense to the public at large is the government. Thus, the government is the only option currently available if we want to guarantee the public health in an efficient and broadly beneficial way, especially if we want to guarantee the health of those who could never afford quality health care under the current corporate system. So what did the liberal Democrats propose? A nationalized health care program run by the same people who run the current corporate system, with "managed competition" and a variety of plans. That way they could say that they were standing up for the little guy, but in the end, they were just standing up for the same small group of ultra-powerful people that everyone always stands up for. The Clinton health care proposal amounted to nothing but an empty gesture. It could not have fit the knee-jerk right wing criticisms more perfectly. But in the wake of the Clinton health care proposal, all the liberals' hands are clean, aren't they? "We tried, but those darn right-wingers with their propaganda thwarted us again." Certainly, conservatives occasionally use half-truths to sell their ideas, but this shows that they actually want their plans to be carried out. For instance, Al Gore definitely had a fighting chance to take Florida, but he didn't want to resort to down-and-dirty tactics, while George Bush, utterly assured of the righteousness of his cause, felt completely comfortable doing whatever was necessary to claim the power he so richly deserved. Thus we can say that conservatives believe themselves to have a righteousness so great that nothing they do could change it, whereas liberals have a righteousness so fragile that they would ruin it by doing anything at all. At bottom, the liberals believe that the current system, no matter how unjust it is, no matter how many people it kills every day in the Third World, is the best we have. Global capitalism really is the end of history, and all we can do is apply our little band-aids and try to appeal to our corporate benefactors to keep from stomping so hard on the poor. Thus the rare Democrats who are willing to be politically effective (Bill Clinton) end up being conservatives for all practical purposes. In conclusion, in the American two-party system, we have the "choice" between (1) people who stand up for those in power and are proud of it and (2) people who stand up for those in power and occasionally throw scraps to the poor when they're absolutely sure that it won't make them look bad in some way. The solution, obviously, is to just give up and never vote -- which is exactly what everyone in power would love for you to do: "Just give up. You can't make a difference. Your vote doesn't count. You don't count. We count." But lest I leave you with too negative an attitude, I have a few proposals for how a genuinely left-wing political party could be effective:
Despite all the evidence to the contrary on this web site, I don't believe that people are all stupid and that everything is hopeless. I believe people want something better, but it's hard to know what to want when we are constantly told that everything is already perfect, so we had better just sit back and enjoy it whether we want to or not. |