Why Liberal Lefties Need to Support Liberal Conservatives

And, no, this is not an oxymoron.

Photo by Miltiadis Fragkidis on Unsplash

(Audio version here)

"Politically, the answer is to recalibrate a common/centre ground around the principles of liberal conservatism."

This comment was left by one of my readers. Recently, I have been focusing a great deal on how to address the illiberal anti-woke backlash against the Critical Social Justice (woke) Movement without triggering an anti-anti-woke backlash that reignites illiberal ‘wokeness.’ We are living in such reactive, irrational, hyper-partisan, narrative-driven times that each time the illiberal factions escalate the polarisation by reacting furiously to each other, the resulting narratives are less ethically consistent, less reasoned and less connected to reality. Is liberal conservatism the stance that would work best to reground us in reality and form a basis for principled consistency?

I think there is a strong argument that it is.

Is ‘Liberal Conservatism’ not an oxymoron?

Absolutely not. Liberalism - at root, the drive to maximise individual liberty - and conservatism - at root, the drive to conserve that which has served us well - form a serious and mature combination of well-developed political philosophies that work well together and are, indeed, deeply intertwined. Liberalism is the forward-looking political philosophy that seeks to reform and expand what is good to advance knowledge and make moral progress. Conservatism is the historically-focused political philosophy that to seeks to conserve valuable intellectual traditions and institutions which, in liberal democracies, include liberalism. Despite concept creep, especially in the United States, that sees liberalism and conservatism as opposed, at their core, the opposite of ‘liberal’ is ‘authoritarian’ and the opposite of ‘conservative’ is ‘revolutionary.’ Opposing revolutionary authoritarianism is, therefore, the defining feature of liberal conservatism which places it at odds with both the Critical Social Justice movement and hard-right populism.

Is this the stance that could best address the surge to the populist right and identitarian far-right born of anger that perfectly reasonable concerns about things like ineffective immigration policies and the impact of self-ID laws and policies getting shut down as racist and transphobic, without being authoritarian and restrictive in ways that will alienate people who care about the rights of minority groups and freedom-orientated liberals of all kinds? I think it might be.

I liked the word "recalibrate' too, because that indicates a recognition that this is not a simple goal that can be achieved with some naive attempt to sign everybody up to a single concept of the "common good." This has never worked in the entire history of humanity and authoritarian attempts at it (as just seen with the 'woke') have been catastrophic. Instead, envisioning a multifaceted effort to nudge the Overton Window into a place where liberal conservatism is at the centre of it but which allows for a significantly wider range of views (including my own) to cooperate with it and prevent it from stagnating and becoming blinkered could potentially be what triggers the smallest number of radical, revolutionary and reactionary responses. Deescalating extreme reactions and polarisation is precisely what is needed right now.

Conserving and progressing are not mutually exclusive.

I am a liberal leftist. Throughout my life, I have focused both on individual liberty and on socio-economic class. This does not neglect issues faced by demographic groups, because when a group is discriminated against or disadvantaged, it is either relegated to an underclass - as in Jim Crow policies and restrictions on women’s financial independence - or denied the liberty to pursue happiness in ways that harm nobody else - as in the criminalisation of homosexuality - or both. Leftists who operate in a liberal way have therefore sought to expand existing institutions and rights to be open to more people. Let women and working class men vote too. Enable people of all races and both sexes to access all educational and professional opportunities where they can succeed on their own merits. Give same-sex attracted people the same right to live, love and join in committed union that opposite-sex attracted people have. This universalist approach minimises the inherent potential of identity politics for divisiveness and tribalism by saying not “This group should have these rights because having them is in the interests of their group” but “Everybody should have these rights and currently this group does not, so let’s fix that.” This is also beneficial for knowing when to stop.

Libertarians, who are positioned on the right but may or may not be conservative, have always shared these goals due to their intense focus on individual liberty. They can be understood as representing the ‘purest’ form of liberalism. Liberal lefties differ from them and diverge from their ‘laissez-faire’ liberalism on the economic axis. This is due to our focus on class issues and positions that systems require some regulation to protect workers from exploitation and that a meritocracy can only function if those who do not rise to the top still have enough to live on. We will probably be arguing about this forever.

The main opposition liberal lefties have had to reforming systems to advance equality and make opportunities more universally accessible has historically come from conservatives. This is because that aim is progressive and the perpetual battle between progressives and conservatives is between the drive to change things in order to make them better and the drive to keep things the same on the grounds that they were established in that way for good reason. Nevertheless, it is a caricature of progressives to claim that they have no respect for established norms and institutions and of conservatives to claim that they are resolutely opposed to progress, especially when they are both liberal. Liberalism has always favoured reform via democratic processes over revolution and conservatism has likewise always been in favour of incremental reform following careful consideration.

Consequently, while progressives have led the charge to reform systems in ways that make them more just for the working class, women, and racial, religious and sexual minorities, conservatives have been open to this, albeit more cautiously and requiring more convincing every step of the way. Few conservatives would now take a stance in opposition to women voting or to women or people of racial minority being able to succeed on their own merits in all professions or wish to recriminalise homosexuality, and would consider those who do advocate for such things not to be conservative so much as reactionary. Progressively-minded liberals and conservatively-minded liberals therefore continue to exist in productive tension, and are often described as operating at different speeds.

This concept of speed, while simplistic, is valuable here. Different social phenomena and cultural moments require us to lean more on different schools of thought and moral intuitions to advance or to stabilise. Conservatism rooted in that careful consideration and opposition to radical and revolutionary aims, performs a steadying function that prevents people from throwing all the babies out with all the bathwaters when they seek to effect change. Liberalism is more expansive, open, individualistic and progress-orientated and this is immensely valuable and the key to the advance in knowledge and human rights that liberal democracies have produced. It ensures that we refresh the bathwater when it needs it!

The rise of the revolutionaries.

In our current moment, there is much fear, anxiety and polarisation and this is triggering radical fight or flight responses. This has lead influential elements on both the left and the right to stop caring about what is true and acting on carefully considered principles and instead become drawn to reductionist ideological narratives of good and evil and revolutionary goals and engage in backlash and counter backlash.

For many years, the shallow and reductionist narratives owned by identitarian elements on the left that came to be known as ‘woke’ have been the ones growing in cultural dominance and being deeply enshrined in institutions directly impacting the everyday experiences of people in all walks of life. These narratives expanded and escalated at an astonishingly fast rate with more and more beliefs and values that were considered perfectly ethical and reasonable by liberally-minded people - It is quite possible to reject racist ideas and morally good to do so. Physical differences exist between men and women and this requires sex-based rights. - becoming problematised and penalised harshly. This induced a culture of fear and also a growing anger and resentment. Liberals on the left, like me, have been engaged in trying to address this problem and move the left away from authoritarian identitarianism and restore principles that uphold individual liberty, focus on class issues and are strongly rooted in material reality. We were the best placed to address this problem on our own side as our own progressive principles made it harder to accuse us of being right-wing reactionaries who did not care about the wellbeing of women, racial and sexual minorities and the most socio-economically vulnerable. Of course, many of the woke did so anyway.

On the right, there has, of course, been strong opposition to the dominance of authoritarian wokeness and this has included the aforementioned libertarians, principled conservatives who uphold the liberal foundations of Western democracies, the illiberal populist right and the identitarian far-right. These are all different, both psychologically and in principles (although the woke left has tended to conflate them all as ‘far-right.)’ In reality, traditional conservatism and right-wing populism don’t have very much in common at all and conservatives have been arguing this strongly, particularly in the United States and in the run up to the last election.

Conservatism and populism

The distinction between conservatives with their focus on conserving customs, traditions and institutions and on caution, humility, restraint, dignity and personal responsibility and populists with their anti-establishment ethos and ‘anti’ stances more generally, their drive to evoke a constant state of crisis requiring revolutionary action, their ‘us and them’ mentality, black and white thinking and love of ‘strongman’ figures declared to represent ‘the people’ and admired for their rejection of caution, humility, restraint, dignity and personal responsibility is profound. While not all populisms are the same and good arguments have been made about distinctions between Trumpian populism and other forms that are more compatible with conservatism and between cultural and political forms of populism, the reality remains that populism, in practice, is typically anti-conservative. It is certainly anti-liberal.

Martin Bull, Director of the European Consortium of Political Research, puts it well when he says,

Ultimately, the leader makes the decision in a way that just isn't possible in traditional democracies… .In order to garner support, they're quicker than the establishment party to make offers, or to promise to change things… that on closer inspection may not turn out to be feasible. You might question how good that is for democracy.

We might, indeed.

If, as William F. Buckley put it, “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling “Stop!”, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it,” we would seem to be very much in need of ethical conservatives right now. More specifically, we need liberal conservatives who are fully aware that the intellectual traditions and institutions of liberalism, like democracy, due process and freedom of belief and speech, are what need conserving most urgently. We need their influence particularly upon the illiberal right who stand athwart history yelling “Burn it all down!” at a time when way too many people seem highly inclined to do precisely that.

Why should liberal lefties support liberal conservatives?

Of course, the liberal left can also criticise the illiberal right and we absolutely must, but we will necessarily be limited in our influence because the left always criticises the right and often for stances that right-wingers do not feel warrant criticism and are, in fact, proud of. Liberal conservatives are best placed, in principle at least, to address illiberal developments on the right and argue, from conservative principles and moral intuitions, for why conservatives should not feel proud of them. If we understand liberalism as, at root, the opposition to authoritarianism and conservatism to be, at root, the opposition to revolution and most people not to be authoritarian revolutionaries, the best people to address conservatives on this issue are conservatives.

I wrote “in principle, at least” because, of course, liberal lefties, like me, have been trying, for many years, to convince the mainstream ‘not illiberal’ left that revolutionary authoritarianism has been rising on the left in the form of the Critical Social Justice movement and needed addressing with transparent honesty and principle. This clearly was not effective and the failure of the left to curtail and marginalise illiberal, irrational and counterfactual ideas on its own side contributed hugely to the illiberal right-wing backlash that we are seeing now.

Why were liberal lefties unable to prevent the rise of the illiberal left? We simply did not have the support we needed to effect reform. Very many people on the left were wary of criticising the illiberal left for fear that they would be thought racist, sexist, homophobic etc. or because they feared that doing so would embolden genuine racist, sexist homophobes on the illiberal right. Many were afraid of being cancelled, publicly shamed or ostracised and so many people wrote to us or told us privately that they shared our concerns but did not feel able to say so publicly. I am sympathetic to their well-grounded fear, but, by remaining silent, they contributed to the false impression that way more people supported the Critical Social Justice movement than actually did and so further chilled left-wing criticism of the illiberal left.

Meanwhile, many on the right responded to liberal left critics of the illiberal left in one of two ways. Many exhibited glee at the left ‘eating itself’ and “I told you so’d” at liberal lefties, arguing that left-wing views are inherently authoritarian and revolutionary, thus disincentivizing ethical leftists from criticising their own side. Others were more appreciative and welcoming of leftists who criticised the left, but in ways that incentivised them to move their principles rightward and condemn ‘the left’ more broadly to retain that support at the same time as the ‘woke’ left was calling everyone who disagreed with them ‘right-wing.’ This left liberal leftist critics of wokeness who remained on the left unsupported and gave the impression that there was almost no left-wing critics of wokeness at all.

It is extremely likely that this pattern could repeat itself from the other side and the liberal conservatives best placed to mount an opposition to the illiberal right find themselves in a very lonely and besieged position from where it will be difficult to succeed. We are already seeing the signs of a right-wing ‘cancel culture’ involving purity spirals and public shaming for those who do not support the illiberal populist right in which they are accused of being ‘woke’ and supporting the illiberal left. So similar is this mentality and these tactics to those of the woke left that the term ‘woke right’ has been coined to describe it. Konstantin Kisin has written of the pushback he and others have faced in critiquing this element.

I am far from alone in foreseeing a battle for the soul of the right and it behoves liberals of all kinds to work together to ensure that the liberal conservatives win out over the identitarian populists. For many years now, the prominent question about our cultural philosophical underpinnings has been "Has liberalism died?" and we have seen the emergence of 'post-liberals' arguing that it has and, furthermore, that it is good that is has and advocating narrow and insular attitudes towards governing society. This has been highly influential on the growth of illiberal right-wing populism. However, we are now at a stage where the question "Has conservatism died?"is quite clearly arising and again, this is due to the rise of a revolutionary, yet narrow and insular populist ‘post-truth’ authoritarian right. It is in all our benefits that a healthy and principled conservative impulse exists in society.

At this point, the populist response would be to assert that I am making a tired old argument in defense of ‘the establishment’ but the populist concept of ‘establishment vs ‘the people’ is largely incoherent. Just as the Critical Social Justice movement declared itself to be fighting the establishment and ‘speaking truth to power’ when it was quite clear to everybody keeping their head down for fear of being cancelled that it was the establishment, the populist right is similarly keen to present itself as the voice of the disempowered people that could never be ‘the establishment.’ In reality, the establishment is whatever we establish as a governing force for society and we can establish that as liberal or illiberal. (It is particularly ludicrous when Donald Trump and Elon Musk rail against ‘the elites’ as though they are not, respectively, the leader of the most powerful country in the world and the richest man in it who also owns the social media platform which dominates political debate, and people condemn those like me as ‘elitists’ for criticising them from the alternative platforms we have been able to form outside mainstream media).

The pressure on principled conservatives as they try to restore a sense of what conservatism means to others on the right and why it requires coherence, respect for tradition and institutions, respect for the truth, careful considered thought, reason, humility, restraint, dignity and personal responsibility is likely to be intense. This will come from both the illiberal populist right who will call them ‘woke’ (as well as ‘retarded’ and ‘gay.’) and from the left who will revel in the right ‘eating itself’ and indulge in “I told you soism,” declaring that what we see now were always the defining features of the right. Both of these will incentivise conservatives to keep their heads down and maintain an appearance of solidarity with the populist right, even as they know that they betray the most fundamental principles of conservatism and of liberal democracy.

How can liberal lefties support liberal conservatives?

We, on the liberal left, can help to reduce some of that pressure by not enjoying the schism on the right and engaging in “I told you soism” and, instead, offering support to liberal conservatives as liberal conservatives. It will be tempting to make that support conditional on them moving their principles leftwards, but this would be to repeat the same mistake that saw liberal leftists classified as right-wing and also spurred the slide to the right of many former liberal leftists whom we needed to fix the left. We need liberal conservatives to stay where they are and fight for a principled conservatism that upholds the values underpinning liberal democracies and, in particular, the US constitution. We want to avoid a right-wing version of “I didn’t leave the left. The left left me” which amounts to an abandonment of the values needed to create principled and consistent political parties and engender productive political debate.

Instead, liberal lefties need to respect liberal conservatives as liberal conservatives who, in addition to our shared liberal principles, hold the values of traditional conservatism that we might otherwise disagree with, and keep that distinction clear. Disagreements about things like taxation, welfare provision, concepts of fairness, attitudes towards authority, the value of tradition for the sake of tradition, the importance of religion, positions on sex and sexuality, what is needed for cultural cohesion and the limits of personal responsibility between progressive liberals and conservative liberals remain and are important. We can continue to argue about them and those arguments between people who care both about individual liberty and what is true work so much better and are so much more productive than between the ideological narrative-spinning postmodern left and post-truth right. It is important that those distinctions do remain or we are prone to seeing things like free trade, due process and democratic processes become coded as ‘left-wing’ in the same way that freedom of speech, academic freedom and recognition of biological reality became coded as ‘right-wing’ when the illiberal left was violating them most strongly and objections were loudest from the right.

By respecting liberal conservatives as liberals, liberal leftists can work with them on conserving liberalism which is the higher order value that we fortunate heirs of liberal democracies often take for granted. It is what distinguishes our societies from the authoritarian regimes that dominate history and much of the world today and why those societies have produced such advances in knowledge and human rights. This is entirely compatible with more progressive goals. Without liberalism, the least powerful people whom left-wing policies have always sought to protect - the poor, women, members of minority groups - will be particularly vulnerable.

By respecting liberal conservatives as conservatives and not trying to incorporate them into the left, liberal leftists can assist in endeavoring to ensure that we have the strongest systems of checks and balances that liberal democracies need to be healthy and productive. We need principled, rational and evidence-based progressive and conservative forces in society and for civil and robust debate to be enabled between them. When one political movement gains overwhelming cultural dominance and is not effectively challenged by reasonable and ethical disagreement, it rapidly becomes authoritarian, detached from reality and utterly unhinged. We saw this with the rise of communist and fascist regimes in the last century at a devastating cost. We saw significant damage done by the unhindered cultural dominance of the Critical Social Justice movement whose authoritarianism, detachment from reality and proud rejection of reason I have been criticising for the last decade. The rising threat right now is precisely that mentality in the illiberal, populist right and the best people to address it are liberal conservatives.

This brings me back to the concept of ‘speed’ raised earlier in this piece. So much of the atmosphere of existential threat that is driving extreme and irrational ideologies has been produced by the speed at which they have escalated. The failure to curb the excesses of the Critical Social Justice movement enabled it to develop from some fairly daffy theories found in a few university departments that could safely be ignored by nearly everybody to something the average person had to have an understanding of and affirm to get or keep a job within 15 years. The rise of right-wing populism has been correspondingly fast going from complaints about ineffective immigration policies and inconsistent guidance on Covid-19 that could not be criticised to the mainstreaming of ethnonationalist views and the utter rejection of medical science. This, combined with manifestations of utterly cult-like behaviour on both sides, has caused significant and justifiable alarm among those who care about ethical consistency and what is true.

If we want to keep society liberal in our current climate of political emergency, I think we might have to be conservative in how we go about it. There does need to be a reckoning and a sorting of some kind, before we can move on meaningfully. The harm done by the Critical Social Justice movement needs to be acknowledged and a way forward found that does not involve burning everything down with no clear picture of what to replace it with. There are times when we need to break free of conservative caution and restraint to advance knowledge and make moral progress and there are times when we need to stop and take stock of where we are and how we got here, learn from mistakes and make a workable plan for moving on. We are decidedly in one of those latter times right now. We cannot keep replacing one irrational ideological narrative with another, veering from backlash to backlash and violently shoving the political pendulum back and forth, watching it take out innocent bystanders in its wake.

We need the pendulum to still and the people best placed to do that are surely liberal conservatives. They are not inclined to mistake the Critical Social Justice movement for something that will actually make society more just, but neither are they likely to mistake revolutionary, authoritarian populism for conservatism. This, I would suggest, places them in a good position to be in the centre of our Overton Window right now and keep that window in existence and moveable via robust debate for which the cultural dominance of totalising narratives does not allow. I, for one, will support liberal conservatives as they try to do this amidst much pushback from both left and right. I urge other liberal lefties to do the same.