It’s popular nowadays to say the old labels “liberal” and “conservative” don’t accurately describe the views of most people, and I would agree. People in their 30s and 40s seem inclined to be “conservative on economic issues and liberal on social issues,” while much of the Generation X crowd seems to be “liberal on economic issues and conservative on social issues.”
The political debate doesn’t need a new vocabulary so much as it needs a better understanding of the coalitions that defined the liberal and conservative movements in the past and continue to do so today. A look at the history of the movements quickly reveals the key role played by egalitarians: those who place human equality at the center of their political philosophy.
Libertarians and Egalitarians
Before 1900, egalitarians often joined libertarians–people who believe freedom, rather than equality, is the highest political virtue–to oppose abuses by government. Both groups regarded government as a tool used first by tyrants, then by the tyrants’ privileged court members, to oppress everyone else. The history of freedom as well as equality, to paraphrase Woodrow Wilson, is the history of limitations on the power of government.
At the time of the founding of the U.S., egalitarians and libertarians understood equality to mean the Rule of Law, private property, free trade, and free thinking. They fought shoulder to shoulder against advocates of privilege and entitlements. The words of the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” eloquently communicated their common ground.
The alliance between egalitarians and libertarians led to the founding of the U.S. and launched a 150-year era of unprecedented economic growth and prosperity. Its political agenda consisted largely of free markets, private property rights, and limited government.
The original egalitarian-libertarian alliance began to unravel during the Progressive Era, roughly 1900 to 1920, the result of rising anti-corporate sentiments and faith in government reform efforts. It ended during the Great Depression. Massive unemployment and depressed prices fueled among egalitarians a great distrust of capitalism: If men are equal, they reasoned, only an unjust or broken economic system could produce such unequal conditions.
A new alliance between egalitarians and statists–those who believe the factors of production ought to be centrally controlled–was born. Its agenda is what we now call liberalism or socialism.
The Conservative Movement
Today’s conservative movement arose as libertarians, abandoned by the egalitarians, forged a new alliance with elitists–leaders of the business community, persons with inherited wealth, and intellectuals such as Leo Strauss who believed, with the major figures of classical political philosophy, that the goal of political order is virtue, and that a virtuous society is incompatible with pure democracy.
It was an awkward partnership from the start. The elitists would be an embarrassing ally for the libertarians, since racial and religious discrimination came easy to the elite. But the embarrassment went both ways. The libertarians’ embrace of cultural relativism and nonconformity, sometimes lived out in alternative lifestyles, offended conservative sensibilities.
The difficult task of wooing egalitarians back into a limited government alliance fell to economists, who were quick to notice the failure of socialism in the real world. Friedrich Hayek devoted a lifetime to demonstrating that markets–blind to status, radically decentralized, and hence not subject to control by elites–are more likely to achieve egalitarian ideals than are governments.
Shifting Alliances
After World War II, statists in the liberal camp, having succeeded in massively expanding the size of the state and naming themselves to leadership positions in it, became the new elite. Soon they were as likely to be disengaged from the values and life experiences of the typical voter as the conservative elite they defeated. Egalitarians noticed, and started joining libertarians in a new conservative alliance.
Meanwhile, libertarians and elitists fought, made up, and fought again. Disagreement over Ayn Rand’s political philosophy caused some libertarians to leave or be kicked out of the alliance. Writers such as Frank S. Meyer and William F. Buckley Jr. wooed them back. Richard Nixon’s embrace of price controls and income redistribution in the early 1970s drove many libertarians out of the conservative coalition, even to create their own political party. Ronald Reagan’s rhetoric and the people around him brought many of them, and a younger generation of libertarians, back into the conservative fold.
From Reagan to Clinton
Though he inherited a winning alliance from Reagan, George Bush was unable to keep it intact. Unlike Reagan, Bush was readily identified as (and endlessly shamed on “Saturday Night Live” for being) an Ivy-League elitist. Many egalitarians in 1992 lent their support to the new Reform Party, making possible the election of a liberal President, Bill Clinton.
The Reform Party confuses many political commentators, who think it lacks a coherent platform and therefore a constituency. In fact, a commitment to egalitarian ideals, and especially to opposing status and privilege, is the unifying principle of the Reform Party. That consistency tends to be invisible to those of who see only the choice between liberalism and conservativism, or statism and libertarianism. This is why Pat Buchanan’s takeover of the Reform Party was not only opportunism: The “Buchanan Brigades” have clear title to being the neglected egalitarian wing of the conservative movement.
Pundits also seem to misunderstand Bill Clinton, whose record seems erratic when viewed through a conservative-liberal prism, but remarkably consistent if viewed as a campaign by a statist to win favor among egalitarian voters. This attention to egalitarians ensured his reelection in 1996, with the Reform Party attracting fewer than half the votes it did four years earlier. In 2000, Clinton is giving Al Gore a coalition able to win a national election a third time, just as Reagan did for George Bush twelve years earlier.
The 2000 Election
This year, Republicans nominated a candidate with egalitarian appeal at a convention showcasing the party’s new-found inclusive attitudes toward blacks, women, and other groups the elitists have offended in the past. The Democrats, by contrast, held a convention dominated by statist, not egalitarian, themes. Their Presidential candidate epitomizes liberal elitism, even to the point of being raised in a Washington DC luxury hotel.
The Republican candidate’s campaign blends elitist, libertarian, and egalitarian themes under the umbrella of “compassionate conservatism.” Each theme appears in the opening lines of the following text, taken from a Bush-Cheney campaign brochure: “I’m running for President because I believe our prosperity must have a purpose–to leave no one out. I believe government’s role is to create an environment where entrepreneurs and families can flourish and reach their dreams.”
Will the three groups to which this message is intended to appeal work together again in harmony, like a three-legged stool? Or will the attempted alliance resemble an entrant in a three-legged race, the kind one sometimes sees at family picnics, where two people stumble and flail about and eventually fall on their faces?
Which image is closer to the truth will decide who wins the national election in 2000.
