Ideas vs. labels

"I don't really care very much what I'm called. I'm much more interested in having people thinking about the ideas, rather than the person." -- Milton Friedman, 2002.

From a Seattle reader of "Crunchy Cons":

I've recently come across your "Crunchy Con Manifesto." It was with great interest that I read your nine tenets, and I shared them with my friends and acquaintances who are as interested in the intersection of politics, culture and faith as I am.

I should let you know here that I consider myself, for the lack of a better political label, a liberal. As a religious person, I have problems with the left's dismissal of religion, but overall I find the current trend of american conservative to be so authoratarian and oppressive of personal freedoms and so materialistic that I figure better the devil you know than the one who scares the dickens out of you.

When I read your manifesto (three days ago), shortly after the elections, all I could think of was a sense of relief- your book was written a year ago, I believe, but it fell into my awareness at a time when my deep personal fear was (and remains) that as Americans we have been so fractured and polarized by the past six (or possibly even ten) years, that we will be unable to reverse course. Bitter infighting and power struggles within the united states scares me deeply, as I think it should scare anyone who calls the US it's home. Whether from patriotism or sheer pragmatism, it seems a truly frightening thing to imagine years of bitterness and mistrust of each other.

These thoughts being on my mind, I read your manifesto feeling a tremendous sense of interest. As you yourself must know, much of what you've written (in the manifesto, I haven't had a chance to read your book, it's on the slate for this Sunday evening) could have been the bullet points in any number of leftist manifestos. In fact, when I posted a link to your article in my on line blog, several of my friends assumed it had been written by a friend of ours (a loud and vocal liberal). And clearly, you are not seeking to switch your identity. You view these things as being in keeping with the conservative ideology or value system that is (from your articles that I've read in the National Review) very serious and important to you.

When I mentioned to my friends that you were writing as a conservative who plans on staying conservative, my friends responses also intrigued me. There was a sense that you are trying to co-opt liberal ideas for your own uses. Or frustration- why not just call yourself liberal?

For myself, I do not have those questions of frustrations. It seems apparent to me in the very manifesto that you are relying on axioms that are conservative, rather than liberal, by nature. Your apeals to tradition and faith are in keeping with conservative values as I understand them. And we all get very deeply married to our titles and the tribe we identify with. There is much about conservative values that appeal to me and that I live out, but I will probaby always have sticking points that are non negotioable that put me in the liberal camp.

Ultimately, it seems to me (and here I am wondering about whether or not you agree), the label is less important than the values and ideas that you espouse.

[snip]

In my circle, the word "conservative" is a perjorative, and the other day a friend and I who were in the middle of a heated discussion called me a "republican"- it was meant to be a cutting insult. My family, who lives in the very conservative area of Western NY between Buffalo and Rochester, are very quick to assert that they are not liberal when they discuss the plight of the poor or the problems they see in rampant business interests being unregulated. It seems that these words contain such huge psychic darkness to us that it is difficult to get beyond their shadows, at this point, to find common ground.

But the world is not that big, and it seems to be shrinking, rather than expanding. We don't have that many places to escape to. It seems to me that anything that can allow us to work together on some shared issues is valuable. ...It seems to me there is much in your manifesto that could be common, shared ground between liberals and conservatives. How open are you to thsi being used that way? Do you feel that it is important that liberals come to your brand of conservatism (get into the fold, so to speak) before you would work with them on issues of common ground?

I find this kind of thing encouraging. Of course there are areas of common interest on which conservatives and liberals ("conservatives" and "liberals") can and should work together. The trick is un-learning mistrusting and despising each other categorically. Sometimes when I check in on Daily Kos, I am taken aback by how intoxicated people are with hatred of their political opponents. You see the same thing on some right-wing comboxes. Prior to the election, a friend of mine was writing things that were simply deranged with malice toward Democrats. You do wonder where this stuff ends up.

The conservative historian John Lukacs has some worthwhile thoughts in his most recent book "Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred." He talks here about how learning to hate without guilt is a political strength:

As early as 1921 in one of his speeches [Hitler] announced: "There is only defiance and hate, hate and again hate!" And: "The lesson of life is to hate and to be hard." This impressed Goebbels whwen he met Hitler in 1926. Hitler kept telling him how he, Hitler, "had learned to hate." "His most beautiful phrase," Goebbels wrote in his diary, "yesterday: 'God has graced our struggle abundantly. God's most beautiful gift beswoted on us the hate of our enemies, whom we in turn hate from the bottom of our hearts.'" That was for him, and for many others, an element of strength.

Of course the concept of "hate" is much abused in our political discourse; when someone accuses a critic of "hate," more often than not it's a lame attempt to shut down an argument the respondent would prefer not to be having. Still, it's worth considering Lukacs's contention in the book that the Left is motivated primarily by fear (of what those awful Rightists plan to do, reflecting "anxiety and fear about the potential mass appeal of populist nationalism in the age of popular sovereignty") and the Right primarily motivated by hate (of Leftists). Lukacs's book is eccentric, and I don't see that his distinction between fear and hatred carries with it a significant difference in the contemporary American political context. What is more important, I think, is his observation here:

"What is relevant here is that those who hate often believe that, apart from or beyond justice, they pssess certain truths about their enemies, important and decisive truths underlying the characters of the latter."

That's the thing we have to all push back against, because our age pushes so hard in the other direction. Our media encourage us to think of our opponents as the Enemy, and (necessarily) the Other. I am often at a loss to read and listen to liberal polemics about conservatives, especially religious conservatives, because they sound like malicious cartoons, and have little to do with actual people. I'm quite sure that liberals would feel the same way hearing many conservatives talk about them. If you read my book, you'll see that I grounded the ideas in the manifesto in conservative thought and history. I'm glad her friends, though, heard the ideas first without having them framed as conservative. They let down their guard and considered the ideas as ideas. For conservative audiences, framing these ideas as conservative -- that is, showing how they are rooted in traditionalist conservatism -- is perhaps a way of having them drop their guard, and consider their validity as ideas.

Maybe the way to begin to find common ground is to start considering ideas as ideas, instead of trying to pigeonhole them into labels that don't work well anymore. Maybe the way to begin to find common ground is to start considering people as people. If the ideas are bad, or the people are bad, then reject them. But let's think first, not just emote, or react. Why not?