Everyone’s Tradition Sucks, Except Ours

It is entirely possible that I’m missing big pieces of this puzzle in pointing out what I’m about to point out, but if that’s the case then I’m only going to have those pieces handed to me by pointing it out. So in whatever way this thing unfolds, I can’t but feel like I’m winning in some regard.

Offering his mea culpa re: comments about Mickey Kaus’ liberal creds, Freddie writes,

I think these remain key points: first, that though there are all different kinds of reformist conservative movements, they almost universally share the assumption that conservatism is something to be proud of. Paleocons (like Daniel Larison), crunchy cons (like Rod Dreher), pomocons (like James Poulos),  groovy technocratic neo-Hamiltonians (like Reihan Salam)– all of them, to one degree or the other, are looking for major change in mainstream conservatism, and all of them have complaints about conservatism as its popularly understood. But they see themselves not as critics of conservatism as an entity or ideal but as critics of where conservatism has gone, what it has become.

That’s a fundamental difference. Reformist conservatives tend to say “we are the real keepers of the tradition.” Neoliberals, meanwhile, tend to define themselves by how distant they are from traditional American liberalism.

Indeed, that is the fundamental difference, and that Freddie desires for liberals to take the same approach to their ideology as conservatives is, in my mind, a bit of a fool’s errand. By their very nature, liberalism tends to be a forward looking worldview and conservatism tends to be a backwards looking worldview. That is not, of course, universally true in all cases and by saying that conservatism is “backwards looking” I’m not implying any kind of pejorative commentary. All that I’m saying is that it only makes sense that you will find a greater preponderance on the part of conservatives to define themselves as keepers of traditions because conservatives are, in terms of first principles, concerned with the understanding, valuing, and maintenance of tradition — its sewn into the DNA of the ideology, that’s a big part of what conseravtives do.

Liberals, on the other hand, tend to be challengers of tradition. Liberalism is in part born of the liberating impulse from tyranny of tradition and the ugly blind spots of ignorance that the thinking that is the ground from which those traditions sprang.

Modern conseravtives look to American history and primarily see the stability and moral certitude of the 1950′s as something that has been lost, the transference of generational meaning and value that runs through the vessel of the nuclear family unit that is under attack from casual attitudes to sex and marriage, and so on. Modern liberals ; however, look to the past and see the oppression that the struggle for civil rights sought to address, the normalcy of treating one’s wife as property, the shame and degradation of casting homosexuality as a mental illness, and so on. Which is not to say that liberals don’t see value and experience a certain kind of sentimentality  about history, but as an ideology  it seems clear that liberalism understands history as that from which we are to learn so its mistakes are not repeated. The goal, in that regard, is to keep moving forward, sweeping rhetorical mine fields for those potential mistakes, and defusing those social and cultural explosives so that as few people as possible  get hurt in our steady procession into the future, which is where salvation ultimately always lies.

In many senses, the two ideologies see fundamentally different worlds based on what are their fundamental differences. And so while I don’t happen to think that Freddie owes Mickey Kaus any apologies — questioning his liberal-ness might have been barking up the wrong tree by my lights, but exposing one another to rigorous and intensive argumentation is the very life’s blood of a healthy republic — he might want to ask himself if Kaus’ persistent needling is a perfect expression of the very tradition that Freddie sees Kaus demeaning. That expression will, of course, be very different from the traditional impulses of the conservatives that Freddie lists off for all the reasons I’ve just listed off and expecting them to be the same is perhaps to misunderstand the larger arc of each school of thought.

Of course, Freddie might be looking to go one step further down the meta-brick road and suggest that a real challenge to the tradition of liberalism would be to challenge liberals’ tendency to challenge their of history and traditions. The predisposition that perhaps Freddie is seeking to mount is a sort of post-modern liberal neo-traditionalist (try saying that five times fast), which is project I could be interested in poking around at the edges of. Even if that is the case, I just can’t find much sympathy in my heart for the visionary who looks around and laments that an ideology founded on the overrturning of tradition doesn’t have much respect for its own tradition. Wat would you expect to find? And let’s face it, the yeoman’s work of levy building to redirect ideological rivers tends to be the stuff of solitude — get used to it.

Finally, to Freddie’s contention that reformist liberals aren’t proud of liberalism itself, I have to delivery a blogospheric smack upside the head. Look around you brother, a man described as one of the most liberal senators in the country just won the presidency based on a message of change and that the conseravtive politics of past eight years needed to be tossed out on their ear. Registration in the Democratic Party soared over the presidential race and millions of voters, including millions of previously cynical and disenfranchised voters, turned out to proudly and loudly vote their candidate into office and held a multi-day party in the streets of the country in honour of his inauguration. Liberals hold both houses along with the White House and that President enjoys astounding approval ratings as the country plays Dorothy to an unprecedented economic hurricane.

Face it, Kaus is the exception right now, not the rule. And pressed, even Kaus would probably express deep feelings of pride in the opportunity with which liberalism is now faced — he just has a funny way of showing it.

Tagged as: Mickey Kaus, tradition