Brandis: unique identities, individual ends

It's uncommon for members of the right-liberal parties to set out their beliefs in a systematic way. Back in 1984, George Brandis did just this (I am assuming he is now Senator George Brandis of the Australian Liberal Party).

So what did George Brandis set out as his beliefs?

a) The liberal theory of society

To the liberal, the most fundamental characteristic of any society is that it is a coming together of a number of individual persons, each of whom has a unique identity, unique needs and aspirations, the individuality of each of whom is equally important. The pursuit of individual ends, subject to the agreed mutual constraints necessary to social existence, is the dynamic force of human progress.

This view of a society of free and autonomous individuals distinguishes in two essential respects Liberal social theory from the approaches of its most important contemporary rivals, conservatism and socialism.     

Traditionalists strongly disagree with this view of human society. We would not use the word "unique" when describing identities and aspirations. The reality is more complex than this: some aspects of our identity and aspirations are uniquely individual, but others are shared and communal.

Is it really unique for instance that I have a male identity? Is it unique that I identify with my ethnic tradition? Is it unique that I aspired as a young man to find an attractive woman to love and with whom I could form a family?

Some aspects of our identity and aspirations, far from being uniquely individual, are part of an eternal human condition. Does that mean that it is all dull conformity? No, because these identities and aspirations are refracted differently within each human personality.

It is important to get this right, because if you take the liberal view that there are only uniquely individual identities and aspirations, then you end up with the liberal idea of society as being a whole lot of atomised individuals each pursuing ends that can only possibly be known to them.

What you lose is a sense of the larger social entities which help form individual identity, to which individuals feel a sense of belonging and attachment, and which provide the social context (the framework) for the lives of individuals (i.e. for expressing our nature as men and women).

It is terribly mistaken, in the traditionalist view, to base a theory of society on "the pursuit of individual ends." Let's say that we have a masculine identity and it is a part of this identity to play an effective role as a husband and father and also to uphold the larger communal tradition we belong to. Our "individual ends" cannot then be separated from a number of "social ends" relating to family and community. Our social ends and our individual ends blend together.

That possibly helps to explain why it doesn't feel free to be limited to individual ends. If we are limited in this way, we can't fully pursue some of the more significant ends in life, so part of our personality feels bottled up or stifled.

There's much more to comment on in George Brandis's essay, but I don't like to make these more theoretical posts too long, so I'll resume discussion in a future post.

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Out of the Antiworld: right and left

For most of the 1900s, political debate in the Anglosphere countries was limited to arguments between right and left liberals.

James Kalb has described the differing outlooks of right and left liberals in his recent essay Out of the Antiworld. He argues that both kinds of liberals want to make individual preference the supreme good in society. Right-liberals tend to be those who like action and who therefore see the satisfaction of individual preference in terms of "the unlimited pursuit of career, power and money in a sort of competitive free-for-all". This right-liberal "party of action" focuses on "markets, entrepreneurs and minimal regulation."

The left-liberals want to maximise individual preference differently. This party consists of:

experts, officials, and explainers, who are enormously influential in a complex, bureaucratic, technological, and media-ridden society like our own. Such people are less interested in action and acquisition than in the creation of a scheme of total control through exact knowledge. The ideal they strive for is a sort of EU writ large, a universal system of social management run by expert functionaries that secures and fine-tunes maximum equal preference satisfaction for everyone everywhere. Such a system requires uniformity, centralization, and strict limits on disturbing factors like enterprise and competition.

In 1965 the Federal President of the Australian Liberal Party (our right-liberal party), Philip McBride, made this comment:

...We are not to be held back, nor do we want to see Australia held back, by the belief that our national destiny is to be found in a bureaucratic State where theorists are paramount

You can see that in 1965 right-liberals were focused on the debate with left-liberals, not with traditionalists. McBride saw his opposition as being the left-liberal party of "experts, officials and explainers".

But if the debate is limited to an argument between right and left liberals can we really be surprised if society drifts ever further in a liberal direction? James Kalb has made an excellent contribution with his essay to opening up debate, by criticising liberalism as an "operating system" rather than just opposing this or that liberal policy.

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Margaret Thatcher 2

I know that those who admire Margaret Thatcher (and there were qualities to admire) may not like me pointing such matters out, but she did not see herself as a traditionalist conservative.

She said of herself that:

The kind of Conservatism which he [Keith Joseph] and I — though coming from very different backgrounds — favoured would be best described as "liberal", in the old-fashioned sense. And I mean the liberalism of Mr Gladstone not of the latter day collectivists.
 

Thatcher also referred to herself as a libertarian, albeit one who thought a state was need to uphold law and order:

The first task of the State is to defend its citizens against attack from within and without. It is in this sense that the libertarian insists that government must be strong.
 

When you look at the politics of the day you get a sense that it was not even that traditionalist conservatism was explicitly rejected, it just wasn't what was being contested. What was being contested was a vision of society being ordered around a constantly expanding welfare state versus a vision of society ordered around freely enterprising individuals and a limited state directed at law and order.

If that's where the debate stays, then we've failed. We've got to open up new debates in which traditionalist values are not kept in the background but become a focal point.

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Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher passed away yesterday. She was a major figure on the right and so it's worthwhile to look back at her politics.

In 1981, whilst British PM, Thatcher visited Melbourne and gave a speech outlining her political beliefs. It is a striking statement not of conservatism but of right liberalism.

What is right liberalism? Like all forms of liberalism, it is a belief that the highest good is an individual freedom, understood to mean a freedom of the individual to be autonomous: to be unimpeded in choosing, subject to the condition that these choices don't hinder the autonomy of other individuals.

The assumption here is that there aren't goods that a community might value and seek to uphold (apart from liberalism itself). Instead, the focus is on the things we can choose as individuals, usually involving career, consumer choice or, perhaps, lifestyle choice. (So liberalism, for all its talk of choice, involves placing a major limitation on the type of choice that is available to people.)

By taking away the level of existence above that of the individual, liberalism also tends to assume that individuals are interchangeable. If we are seen as rights-bearing, choice-making individuals, then the woman in Peru is interchangeable with the man in Japan. There are no particularities of identity or relationship or essence that fundamentally matter anymore.

But how do you order a society made up of radically autonomous individuals? This is where right-liberalism departs a little from left-liberalism. First, it has been common for right-liberalism to more greatly emphasise the rule of law and personal responsibility as means to order a society. Second, right-liberals have been more sceptical of the role of the bureaucratic state in socially engineering society: they have generally stood for a lower-taxing, smaller state. Third, right-liberals have placed much emphasis on the role of the free market in ordering society. The free market is not only seen as an aspect of personal liberty, but it is thought to create prosperity and progress. For these reasons, right-liberals often see the free market not just as an economic system but as a moral one.

If you read Margaret Thatcher's Melbourne speech it's not difficult to recognise her commitment to a right-liberal philosophy. It's evident, for instance, in her praise of the former Australian PM, Sir Robert Menzies:

When he founded the Liberal Party he said "we were determined to be a progressive party, willing to make experiments, in no sense reactionary but believing in the individual, his rights and his enterprise".

...He saw the Commonwealth as a vehicle for spreading and defending the ideals for which the English speaking peoples stand: democracy, the liberty and responsibility of the individual, the rule of law—in a word, the ideals of freedom.
 

Then there is her placing of individual choice as the primary good:

What sets man above the rest of the living world is his sanctity as a human being, with the ability and the right to choose...

...Where freedom to exercise personal choice exists, I seek to expand it; where it is under attack, I shall defend it; where it does not exist, I shall try to create it.
 

Thatcher then goes on to defend the rule of law as a means of ordering society:

We live in families, neighbourhoods and communities, whose members need rules to enable them to live together harmoniously. These rules or laws must be just, must be backed by authority and administered impartially.

...Order, in a free society, means the ability of ordinary men and women to go about their business and their leisure pursuits in freedom and without fear, so long as what they do does not harm or damage others. The first task of the State is to defend its citizens against attack from within and without. It is in this sense that the libertarian insists that government must be strong. Strong to uphold the rule of law. Strong to maintain order. Strong to protect freedom...Government must secure the conditions for freedom to prevail. That is its task. People must live their own lives within these laws.
 

Then there is her commitment to the free market:

The right to choose. The rule of law. We need even more than these to promote and protect liberty. It is not by chance that every free society is fundamentally a capitalist society. For without economic liberty, political liberty will soon die. The converse is not true. Not all capitalist societies are free. Capitalism or free enterprise is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of liberty. I have already described two of the other essential ingredients—the right and responsibility to choose and the rule of law.
 

There's one final issue to be discussed, namely that of the nation state. This is one area where Thatcher was "conservative" in the sense of wanting to move more slowly than other liberals of her era. She said in her Melbourne speech:

I believe that, despite our growing inter-dependence, the day of the nation state is not over; that such states still have their contribution to make to the development of the human story.
 

The background to this is as follows. Nations were originally thought of as a large community of people united by a common ethnicity (history, language, race, culture, religion etc.). Liberals rejected this traditional nationalism and put in its place a civic one. The civic nation was supposed to be united by a shared commitment to liberal values and institutions.

But within the space of just a few decades many liberals were giving up even on a civic nation, which they considered still too exclusive and discriminatory (or else too small a unit to pursue power globally). In Australia, for instance, Paul Keating expressed his commitment to post-nationalism, as later on did Kevin Rudd.

Margaret Thatcher was not a nationalist in the traditional sense, but she did still believe in the civic nation state. This led to her political demise; other members of her party wanted to move toward closer European Union integration whilst she did not and so she was deposed as PM.

But she was proven correct in her warnings about monetary union and building a European superstate. In a 1993 memoir she recalled some of the arguments she made against monetary union:

We had arguments which might persuade both the Germans...and the poorer countries, who must be told that they will not be bailed out of the consequences of a single currency, which would therefore devastate their inefficient economies.

Well, we've now seen the German taxpayers having to bail out those countries.

Margaret Thatcher was an intelligent, strong-willed and principled politician, but her principles were right-liberal rather than traditionalist ones.

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An inadequate formula for the right?

I haven't read much by Kenneth Minogue so please don't take what follows as a general criticism of his writings. It's a criticism of this particular passage:

My concern with democracy is highly specific. It begins in observing the remarkable fact that, while democracy means a government accountable to the electorate, our rulers now make us accountable to them. Most Western governments hate me smoking, or eating the wrong kind of food, or hunting foxes, or drinking too much, and these are merely the surface disapprovals, the ones that provoke legislation or public campaigns. We also borrow too much money for our personal pleasures, and many of us are very bad parents. Ministers of state have been known to instruct us in elementary matters, such as the importance of reading stories to our children. Again, many of us have unsound views about people of other races, cultures, or religions, and the distribution of our friends does not always correspond, as governments think that it ought, to the cultural diversity of our society. We must face up to the grim fact that the rulers we elect are losing patience with us.

No philosopher can contemplate this interesting situation without beginning to reflect on what it can mean. The gap between political realities and their public face is so great that the term “paradox” tends to crop up from sentence to sentence. Our rulers are theoretically “our” representatives, but they are busy turning us into the instruments of the projects they keep dreaming up. The business of governments, one might think, is to supply the framework of law within which we may pursue happiness on our own account. Instead, we are constantly being summoned to reform ourselves. Debt, intemperance, and incompetence in rearing our children are no doubt regrettable, but they are vices, and left alone, they will soon lead to the pain that corrects. Life is a better teacher of virtue than politicians, and most sensible governments in the past left moral faults to the churches. But democratic citizenship in the twenty-first century means receiving a stream of improving “messages” from politicians. Some may forgive these intrusions because they are so well intentioned. Who would defend prejudice, debt, or excessive drinking? The point, however, is that our rulers have no business telling us how to live. They are tiresome enough in their exercise of authority—they are intolerable when they mount the pulpit. Nor should we be in any doubt that nationalizing the moral life is the first step towards totalitarianism.
 

I don't think that's a place for the right to take a stand. It's true that nearly all of the right, including traditionalists like myself, want a smaller and less intrusive government. So on that point we find agreement.

But Minogue seems to be sailing close to something like a classical liberalism in the sentence that I bolded. It's an image of a society in which the government merely sets a framework of laws within which individuals then pursue happiness as they see fit.

What's wrong with that? I think it's a political orientation that is doomed to failure, for three reasons.

First, we humans are moral creatures. We wish to think that we are not just acting selfishly for our own happiness, but that we are acting rightly and upholding the good. After all, if it were just a case of my own individual happiness I could easily justify adultery, or neglecting my children, or any number of dishonesties.

So there are two problems with the idea that government should stay out of our lives so that we may "pursue happiness on our own account." First, it's likely to lead to a self-serving hedonism (which is unlikely to be entirely corrected by life as a teacher of virtue). Second, and just as importantly, it will fail to connect to the normal and healthy orientation that people have to what is right and good.

The left has been very successful in connecting to this orientation. The left has been superbly talented in taking people on an emotional journey centred on moral ideals of justice, equality and freedom. They have won conscientious people this way, in fact they have even managed to shift the moral imaginations of many serious Christians away from Christianity and toward liberalism.

A successful right-wing politics cannot abandon the field of moral idealism to the left and expect to prosper. We too should be asserting an understanding of justice and of public virtue (such as loyalty or piety or prudence etc). Unless we do this we allow the left to triumph unopposed.

Second, we humans are social creatures. This means that we are strongly influenced by the culture surrounding us and by the institutions of society. Realistically only a minority of people are able to act against the stream of society.

The left understands this and so has made a big push to influence the larger culture of society and to control the leading institutions of society. They've been highly successful in their aims; for instance, the schools and the universities are now probably 90% incubators of a leftist world view.

A successful right needs to be equally determined to hold on wherever it can to institutions and to influence over the culture of a society. If that means tenaciously rebuilding influence at the local level, then so be it. But the idea of just having people acting individually is no match for a left which understands the influence of culture and institutions; again, it leaves the left unopposed in a critical area of politics.

Third, it is misconceived to think of people acting only at an individual level to secure their happiness. Much of what is important to us requires a social setting that has to be defended at a public level. For instance, if we want to form a family successfully, then we need a culture of family life to be defended at a public level. Similarly, if our identity and our sense of belonging depends on the maintenance of a communal tradition, then we need that tradition to be defended at a public level.

It's no use having a view of life which focuses only on the things that people do individually for their own happiness. If you limit yourself to this, then what really have you got left to complain about? In practice, you're likely to be left complaining about the state interfering with your right to gamble, or smoke, or drink, or drive fast. In other words, you'll be left to complain about the existence of a nanny state - but you won't have the political vocabulary to take on the really big issues effectively. You won't be able to challenge the left when it comes to the larger social settings which make a full and complete human life possible.

For all these reasons, an effective right cannot limit itself to the idea of a neutral state maintaining social order whilst individuals go off and do their own thing. It leaves out too much and misunderstands the real driving forces of both the individual and society. It abandons critical areas of politics to the left.

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So how do our politicians deal with national identity?

It's Australia Day. On the positive side, that means a lot of family get togethers around a BBQ. On the negative side, the papers are full of liberal politicians busily redefining Australia's national identity.

The Financial Review has offered us two politicians: Malcolm Turnbull and Kevin Rudd. In the interests of brevity I'll deal with Turnbull in this post and Rudd in the next one.

Malcolm Turnbull is on the left-wing of the Liberal Party, which is our right-liberal party. There are no surprises in his reflections on Australia's identity. He argues that Australia is special because it has a civic identity rather than a traditional ethnic one:

...unlike most other countries (the US being a notable exception), we do not regard national identity by reference to a common race, ethnicity, religion or cultural background.

Our national identity is defined by a common commitment to Australian civic values of democracy, the rule of law, respect for the rights of individual men and women, a healthy scepticism for authority and a deep intuitive sense of a fair go.
 

But what of the problems with a civic identity, in which it is a common commitment to liberal political institutions and values which is supposed to unite us?

One problem is that identity becomes indistinct. If being Australian means being committed to democracy and the rights of individual men and women, then how is that different to what it means to be American or Canadian or English or Swedish?

Turnbull tries to solve this issue in two ways. First, he pretends that the European nations still hold to a traditional ethnic nationalism and that Australia and the U.S. are somehow exceptional in being civic nations.

But that's Turnbull just making things up. All of the Western nations define themselves explicitly now in terms of a civic, rather than an ethnic, nationalism: the UK, Canada, New Zealand, France, Sweden - the list goes on.

Second, Turnbull admits that the components of a civic nationalism are the same everywhere, but he thinks that there are other distinguishing aspects of society that define us:

There is no individual component in our civic values unique to Australia. But the combination is distinctly Australian – for example, we are much less deferential than the British, more caring, with a stronger safety net than the Americans.
 

But that is an exceptionally thin foundation for a national identity. It's like Canadians thinking they're different because they have a national health insurance scheme. What if the Australian and American safety nets become more alike? Does that then mean we've lost our national identity?

The rest of Turnbull's column is, as you would expect from a right liberal, focused on the ideal of individuals being self-made in the market and the need for freedom from state regulation of the economy. (Right-liberals believe that you can regulate society best through the market rather than through state bureaucracy.)

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Getting Girls wrong

National Review Online is supposed to represent the conservative opposition in the U.S. But I hardly ever read it and when I do visit I'm inevitably disappointed.

I had a look at it this morning and read a review by Betsy Woodruff of a new HBO TV series called Girls. Betsy doesn't mince words when reviewing the show:

it’s impossible to tell whether Girls is reflecting or shaping culture. But given how popular the show is and how much scrutiny it has drawn, it’s worth speculating as to which is the case. And for the sake of Western civilization, let’s hope it’s the former. That’s because if Dunham’s vision is prophetic — if it’s helping to forward a larger cultural shift, rather than just depicting a self-contained subgroup — then I think it’s safe to say it’s all over for us.

So there's something in the show that is simply incompatible with civilisation - it's that bad. But what?

At first it seems as if Betsy is going to make a conservative criticism of the show. She notes that the characters are uninterested in morality and devoid of responsibility. And the characters really are living morally bleak lives. In an early episode one of the characters finds out she is pregnant, her friends gather at the abortion clinic but she misses the appointment because she's hooking up with a man at a bar. In another scene from the show the lead character is told she has HPV but a friend reassures her by noting that "all adventurous women have HPV".

But it turns out that Betsy is quite happy with the modern girl lifestyle. What worries her is not what the girls are doing but that they're not proud enough to finance it for themselves. It's that right-liberal versus left-liberal argument again. Both accept that the goal is to be an autonomous agent. For right-liberals like Betsy this means being self-reliant and not depending on the state. For left-liberals it means the state empowering people to live autonomously. Betsy seems to believe that civilisation depends on people taking the right-liberal option and financing their own abortions and contraception rather than expecting the government to subsidise the cost.

Let me give some examples, starting with the worst of the lot. Here is Betsy criticising Girls by comparing its "new vision of women" unfavourably with the vision pursued by second wave feminists:

Second-wave feminists lionized the independent woman who paid her own rent and busted through glass ceilings and ran for Congress. Being totally self-sufficient was the goal. The idea was that women didn’t need men, whether those men were their fathers or husbands or boyfriends or presidents. By contrast, Dunham’s new vision of women as lady parts with ballots is infantilizing and regressive.

What does that paragraph tell you about National Review Online? To me that's a radically liberal view of the world. The aim is to be totally self-sufficient (autonomous) even to the point of not needing fathers or husbands or boyfriends. Betsy thinks that this is an adult and progressive approach to life, because it makes women self-reliant and independent. A left-liberal would simply reply that if justice means women not needing men, then the state can promote justice by increasing the number of women not needing men. Otherwise some privileged women will live a fully human life (independent of men) and others will miss out - an offence against human equality.

And here is Betsy complaining that Girls is not feminist enough:

You’d think the feminist elevation of agency would result in women who take pride in being responsible for their own bodies. You’d hope that telling women that they can do whatever they want would imply that they’re responsible for what they do. You’d think serious feminists would argue that true empowerment is something you lay claim to, not something the federal government dispenses in all its benevolence. But for Dunham, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Again, there is no in principle disagreement with the philosophy of modernity here. Betsy is just upset with the idea that the left wants women to rely on the state in pursuit of their modern girl lifestyles. If they paid for it themselves, she'd be happy with it.

She makes the same criticism here:

In fact, for all practical purposes, the patriarchy no longer decides whom American women can sleep with and when. That’s great. But if you don’t want men in Washington telling you how to use your sexuality, you shouldn’t expect them to subsidize it. But Dunham seems to actually believe they should. Dunham makes tons of money, and I’m quite confident she can afford to pay for her own birth control. But she doesn’t seem to take pride in that...

Again, she has no problems with the decline of traditional morality - she thinks it's "great" that women can be promiscuous and can use their sexuality for whatever purpose they want. Betsy seems to be unconscious of the possibility that not all choices are the same when it comes to sexuality: that some choices might be elevating and others degrading; that some choices might prioritise love and a commitment to family whilst others might impair the ability to pair bond; and that some choices present risks to health and well-being.

The show itself is possibly a little wiser than Betsy in this regard. Girls does at least portray the more negative consequences of the sexual revolution. It doesn't pretend that if only people paid for their own contraception all would be well.

The thing is, I don't think we need to fear Girls. The lifestyle depicted in the show is so far gone that anyone who adopts it is simply lost to us. Girls portrays left-liberalism in such deep decay that it presents us with the opportunity to demonstrate something much better.

Which is why I fear Betsy a lot more. We are not showing the better alternative if the most right-wing criticism we permit ourselves is to complain about people not self-funding their modernist lifestyles. The opposition to left-liberal decay is, at the moment, a sham and that is what is really holding back a necessary response to it.

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I did it from my own resources?

Here's another angle for looking at the differences between right and left liberals.

The right liberal parties tend to attract people who get psychological satisfaction from having competed in the market, earned their own money and raised their own family. These people can say "I did it from my own resources, through my talents and hard work. I can therefore count myself a success."

And so the right liberal parties tend to attract successful independent tradesmen, those working in private industry, small business operators, the married and so on.

The left liberal parties are more oriented to those people looking to state welfare as a guarantee of well-being, such as students, single women and pensioners. They also cater for those who use collective power to advance their interests (unionists) and who are therefore less likely to have that right liberal "I did it myself" mindset. The left liberal parties also appeal to minority groups by telling them that members of the majority group are not successful because of hard work and talent but because of institutional privilege and by promising the use of state power to transfer wealth and status to minority groups.

These differences are seen most starkly in the U.S., as in many other places in the West the right-liberal parties have adopted much of the left liberal point of view (someone like Thatcher stands out as an exception).

Obama is clearly on the left of the spectrum. During the recent election he used the "Julia" ad campaign, showing a woman who uses state welfare for support during the course of her life, and he was also criticised on the right for a speech in which he emphasised that people don't succeed through their own efforts and resources:

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business—you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.

So where do traditionalists stand in all of this? It would be easy for traditionalists to say "Well, we support the right liberal view, in which we think ourselves a success by working hard to earn our own money and raise a family. We reject the left liberal view that white men succeed through institutional privilege (racism and sexism)".

But leaving it at that would be a big mistake. The framework I described above excludes a traditionalist understanding of life. Once we accept the framework as it stands we lose. Our task is to take as many people as we can outside the existing political format.

For instance, where does the current format leave the issue of nation and ethny? The debate is between those who want to do it on their own and those who see whiteness as a form of privilege. So the right wing mentality tends to reject a concept of "white pride" on the grounds that we can't take credit for things we don't achieve ourselves as individuals, whereas the left rejects it as a defence of supremacy.

There is no place within the current format for the idea that a member of the majority might have a positive identification with an ethnic tradition of their own and feel a sense of duty to contribute positively to that tradition.

How would we create a place for such an understanding? We need to extend the idea of what a successful life means. It can include "I worked hard from my own resources to earn a living and support a family". But it should be much more than this.

What matters too is how richly we experience life. And this requires that we avoid being shut in to our own sense of self and losing our responsiveness to the outside world. If we manage to retain a sensitive response, then our individuality is substantially enhanced.

For instance, we might work hard as men and manage to support our families and that is certainly an achievement. But if as well we retain the responsiveness we have as men to our wives, and the paternal love we feel for our children, then we don't lose in individuality but we have a stronger sense of who we are as men and as fathers.

And it's the same when it comes to ethny and nation. If we have a sense of the larger existence of the ethnic tradition we belong to; if we recognise the good that the existence of this tradition represents; if we feel connected to past and future generations; if we feel a pride in the positive achievements of our forebears; if we accept the loyalties and the duties that naturally flow from membership of a tradition; and if we feel rooted within a place and a community associated with our tradition - then our individuality, our sense of who we are as an individual, is immeasurably enhanced.

I do often feel a pride in my Anglo-Australian forebears. Just this morning I stopped off at a suburban park with my family. I hadn't been there before and I was impressed with the care taken to create such a place. The gardens were made generations ago, so obviously I personally had nothing to do with their existence. But even so I felt a pride in my forebears for building so well.

We have to avoid, as the poet Sir Walter Scott put it, being "concentrated all in self". If we are limited to the satisfaction of being self-supported through our own resources, then we risk losing the kind of responsiveness I described and with it important aspects of self and identity.

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Goldberg's modernity

In a recent post I tried to draw out the ideas of the liberal right. My argument was that the starting point for the liberal right is the idea that the highest good is a freedom to be self-made.

If that's your starting point then other things follow. If, for instance, your focus is on the self-made individual, then you won't like the idea of people acting as part of an ethnic group. That will make it seem as if the individual is being defined by membership of a tribe or collective rather than being self-made.

And so the right-liberal attitude to ethnicity is mostly a hostile one. Some right liberals can handle a personal, sentimental attachment to an ethnic identity, but a public or collective expression of it is usually ruled out of bounds.

Jonah Goldberg is the editor of the American publication National Review. He wrote a column for the magazine in September in which the right-liberal hostility to an ethnic identity is unmistakeable.

His argument is that in the pre-modern age, tribalism was necessary for survival, so much so that it is in our genes. But once humans arrived at modernity, the story changes radically:

...the story of modernity is the story of how we moved away from traditional, non-voluntary forms of tribalism based on familial, ethnic, or even nationalistic lines and toward voluntary forms of tribalism.

There's liberalism in a nutshell for you. Goldberg still permits the idea of associations, but they have to be based on self-determined connections between people rather than predetermined ones. In the right-liberal terminology, "voluntary" forms of association are the only permissible ones, but the term voluntary doesn't mean ones that we agree to, it means ones that we are not born into. We are born into a family tradition, an ethnic one, and usually a national one - therefore, those are out. But being a member of a sports club, or a local progress association, a service group or a business association - those are permissible.

Goldberg is enough of an intellectual to force these principles to extreme ends. He goes on to claim the following:

The American founding was revolutionary in its embrace of the universality of human rights (even as it fell so short of its own ideals with the institution of slavery). Since then, the West has fought several civil wars to break away from various tribal ideologies, including not just monarchism and imperialism but also Nazism (racial tribalism), Communism (economic tribalism), and fascism (national tribalism).

He is so set against the idea of a "tribe" that he connects nationalism with fascism and he sees the whole arc of Western progress as a war against tribalism.

Should we really be surprised, then, if right-liberals haven't stepped forward in defence of ordinary national and ethnic traditions? How could they possibly do this, if they have such a negative way of understanding these traditions?

Goldberg continues:

In fits and starts, we’ve moved toward ever greater voluntarism, which is a fancy way of saying we’ve moved toward greater individual liberty. According to the American creed, no one, and no thing, is the boss of me unless I agree to it. To a certain extent, that’s even true — at least in theory — about the government, which is a representative institution created solely by and for the people, who are sovereign.

In this he is deeply mistaken. Goldberg's voluntarism does not make me free. If predetermined qualities are ruled out, that means that I cannot be free as a man, nor as a member of a family, nor as a member of an ethny, nor as a member of a nation. I cannot be free in ways that matter. I cannot be free in ways that constitute who I am. And this makes me significantly unfree.

Not to worry, argues Goldberg. In a right-liberal society there are still voluntary associations to belong to:

Bowling leagues, football franchises, high-school rivalries, motorcycle clubs, Goth clubs: You name it, these free associations — what Edmund Burke called the “little platoons” — satisfy our innate desire to belong to “something larger than ourselves,” as so many politicians like to say.

Not sure Edmund Burke really had Goth clubs in mind when he wrote of little platoons. But I do agree with Goldberg that the disallowing of traditional forms of association in a liberal society has led to a greater emphasis on being a sports fan or part of a youth subculture. But it's an aspect of decline, not of progress. Being a Brony or a Juggalo is no substitute for the larger, traditional communal identities.

Goldberg makes one other interesting comment. He admits that right-liberals (whom he labels conservatives) and left-liberals (whom he labels liberals) are really part of the same family:

whatever our differences with American liberals may be, conservatives understand that our argument with them is still within the family. The fighting is intense, but we’re all trying to figure out what it means to live in this country bequeathed to us by the American Revolution and the Enlightenment.

He is being honest here. He recognises that left and right (i.e. the liberal left and right) share the same underlying commitments, regardless of how intense the debate between them might be. He would side with the left against a serious traditionalism.

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Second vision: the liberal left

I began this series by arguing that the liberal right and left have a similar starting point, but that this is drawn out in two different directions.

The starting point is the idea that the highest good is a freedom to be self-made. Right-liberals take this in one logical direction: they argue that if we are to be self-made then we should be self-reliant rather than dependent on the state.

Left-liberals take the same path as the liberal right for quite some distance. They too believe that the highest good is a freedom to be self-made. What does it mean to be self-made? Most mainstream left-liberals believe that we have made it when we succeed in the public sphere, for instance through academic and career success and the status, money and power that comes with this.

This view of what it means to be self-made overlaps with that of the liberal right. The liberal right believes that we become self-made through the market; the liberal left agrees that career success is a major part of "making it".

What are the impediments to being self-made? Possible impediments include those things that we don't make for ourselves, such as our race or our sex . For right-liberals, people who believe that such things matter in a public setting are "bigots" who are "prejudiced". In comparison those who are "enlightened" will be blind or impartial to race or sex in a public setting.

And here begins the divergence. The liberal left does not believe that relying on "morally enlightened" individuals acting through the market and within the institutions of a civil society will remove impediments to people being self-made. The liberal left believes that this will continue to allow impediments such as race and sex to matter, i.e. that there will continue to be inequality and therefore social injustice.

The argument of the liberal left is that society was created to privilege some groups (i.e. white males) at the expense of others. So the problem is a systemic one rather than a matter of individual bigotry or prejudice. It doesn't matter if a white male is an enlightened progressive, he still occupies a privileged place within the system. It is whiteness and patriarchy, and a systemic racism and sexism, which have to be overcome through a radical, if gradual, transformation of society.

And what are the agencies for such a transformation? First and foremost the state. Second, social movements of the oppressed, such as women or minority groups.

Which brings us to a series of contrasts between left and right liberalism, despite the similar starting point.

i) The right has a more positive view of civil society. Right liberals don't want individuals to be dependent on the state. So they look instead to a social structure built around civil society (but the emphasis is usually on voluntary associations rather than natural ones). In contrast, the left is more likely to see the institutions of civil society as being manifestations of the patriarchal or racist system designed to privilege some over others. For the left, the ideal is more commonly the individual being guarded in his rights, and supported in his lifestyle choices, by the liberal state.

So the contrast is "individual & civil society" versus "individual & state".

ii) The right is more likely to think that society can be best regulated by the actions of a free market. Millions of individuals will compete in the market and the result will be to the larger benefit and progress of society. The left though has tended to see this as producing an unacceptable level of inequality and has looked instead to the neutral expertise of a state bureaucracy to regulate society. In 1928, the English Fabian Beatrice Webb explained this preference as follows:

What bound us together was our common faith in a deliberately organised society – our belief in the application of science to human relations, with a view of betterment...we held by the common people, served by an elite of unassuming experts

The contrast here is "society regulated primarily by the market" versus "society regulated primarily by state experts".

iii) The right has focused to a greater extent on equality of opportunity, the left on equality of outcome. This has come up in the news recently, with claims that the Democratic administration of Barack Obama is going to sue companies or schools for race bias, even if the rules of those institutions are applied equally to the races. If the rules are thought to have "disparate impact" (a greater effect on some races than others) then the charge of racism will still apply. This might include, for instance, a bank which has certain lending rules, which leads to some races getting loans at a higher rate than others:

Under this broad interpretation of civil-rights law, virtually any organization can be held liable for race bias if it maintains a policy that negatively impacts one racial group more than another — even if it has no racist motive and applies the policy evenly across all groups.

iv) The right wants the public actions of individuals to be colour blind, i.e. people are not to act as members of "tribes" or "collectives" (but a private, sentimental attachment to an identity is more acceptable). But the left wants people to actively see race or sex so that institutional privilege isn't hidden and is confronted. Furthermore, the left views public, organised, political action by women or minorities as liberation movements which can be harnessed to deconstruct white male domination of society and so the left is more open to identity politics. Also, given that the left locates racism within whiteness, this then means that other traditions get a pass and can be viewed more favourably as colourful expressions of culture rather than as means of domination and oppression.

So the contrast is that the right is more hostile to the role of collectives or tribalism in the public sphere, whereas the left runs with a kind of identity politics.

All of the above forms the ordinary political discourse of Western countries. It can be difficult to see a way through it, as politics is framed so tightly around it. Many people react by getting defensive ("I'm not sexist") or they join the political drift in which those who want to be supported as individuals by the state and those who believe that the left identifies with them as women or ethnic minorities go for the left-liberal party, whereas those who see themselves as part of a stable family unit or who believe that they are targeted by the left-liberal party as men or as whites go for the right-liberal party.

But that leaves things as is. The challenge is to move beyond the confines of a liberal politics, whether of the left or right variety.

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First vision: the liberal right

It's important that we try to get to as clear an understanding of the political culture of the left and right as we can. Clarity is one thing we are in a position to achieve right now.

The way I see it both the left and the right have the same starting point, but have drawn out this starting point differently, creating distinct political cultures.

The starting point, roughly, is that the highest good is a freedom to be self-made.

On the liberal right, that has been interpreted as meaning that people should be self-reliant rather than dependent on the state, and that individuals are largely self-made in the market. If you want individuals to be self-made, then forming an identity or acting as part of an inherited ethnic group will seem too collectivist: the right liberal ideal is that you leave your ethnicity at the door (or that you hold it as a private good, like a personal taste, that is not asserted publicly).

A final aspect of a right-liberal culture is that it privileges immigrants over natives. It is immigrants who do the most to be self-made, by undertaking a journey (sometimes a risky journey) to seek economic opportunities in another country. Here's another quote from Ronald Reagan, this time form his inauguration speech:

I ask you to trust that American spirit which knows no ethnic, religious, social, political, regional or economic boundaries; the spirit that burned with zeal in the hearts of millions of immigrants from every corner of the earth who came here in search of freedom.

And at the end of this speech:

Can we doubt that only a Divine Providence placed this land, this island of freedom, here as a refuge for all those people in the world who yearn to breathe free? Jews and Christians enduring persecution behind the Iron Curtain; the boat people of Southeast Asia, Cuba, and of Haiti; the victims of drought and famine in Africa, the freedom fighters of Afghanistan, and our own countrymen held in savage captivity.

It is assumed by right-liberals that these people who immigrate want to be self-made and self-reliant individuals in the market too - that it is the freedom to be these things that is being sought.

So it's a shock to a right-liberal culture if, instead, immigrants act as a bloc along ethnic lines and if they are dependent on state welfare.

That's the background to a recent column on immigration by Ann Coulter. Coulter wants to increase immigration controls, but for particular reasons. She points out that Hispanic immigrants are much more likely to be dependent on state welfare:

Immigrant households with the highest rate of government assistance are from the Dominican Republic (82 percent), Mexico and Guatemala (tied at 75 percent), based on the latest available data from 2009. Immigrant households least likely to be on any welfare program are from the United Kingdom (7 percent).

She argues that taking a tougher stance on illegal immigration won't alienate the best Hispanics from the Republican Party because the best Hispanics came to America for "freedom and opportunity" (i.e. to give up being Hispanics in order to be self-made in the market):

The truth is, a tough stance on illegal immigration can only help Romney, not only with the vast majority of Americans, but with any Latino voters who would ever possibly consider voting Republican in the first place.

As Romney said in one of the early debates, Republicans appeal to Latinos "by telling them what they know in their heart, which is they or their ancestors did not come here for a handout. If they came here for a handout, they'd be voting for Democrats. They came here for opportunity and freedom. And that's what we represent."

Coulter then notes that a larger than expected number of Hispanics supported several measures against illegal immigration:

These are our Latinos -- the ones, as Romney said, who came here for opportunity and freedom. Any race-mongering, welfare-collecting, ethnic-identity rabble-rousers are voting for the Democrat.

In the right-liberal world, having an ethnic identity is as much of a blot as collecting welfare. But that then means that the mainstream of America is also not allowed to identify itself as a distinct people with an ethnic identity. And if the mainstream has no identity of its own to preserve, then there's much less reason to be opposed to an open borders philosophy of "the more the merrier".

To recap: right-liberalism begins with the assumption that being self-made is what matters. Therefore, when the liberal right talks about freedom and opportunity it has a specific meaning, namely the freedom and opportunity to be self-made, particularly in the market. Similarly, when the liberal right invokes patriotism, it is not understood in traditional terms, as loyalty to a larger group of people you naturally identify with on the basis of a shared ancestry, history, language and culture. Patriotism means something else: a commitment to a particular kind of society based on the freedom and opportunity to be self-made.

Right-liberalism is not traditionalism. It can have a conservative tinge at times, as it is permitted within a right-liberal culture to invoke patriotism (albeit of the limited kind described above); as a belief in a self-reliant individualism can lead to an emphasis on personal responsibility; and as the desire for a limited state can encourage a belief in the supportive role of family as an alternative (though even here there are difficulties: if the higher good is to be self-made in the market, then what is the basis of a woman's commitment to family life?)

In Australia right-liberalism hasn't really held its ground as a rank-and-file culture. Perhaps the closest we get are the progress associations and service clubs in regional towns. In general, right liberalism exists more as a political current within the Liberal Party, the Murdoch press and certain university departments.

But in the U.S. right liberalism seems to have deeper roots within society. This means that traditionalists in America need to be particularly adept at identifying right liberalism and understanding its limitations.

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Frum's solution

I wrote a post recently criticising the nearly defunct Newsweek magazine. If you thought I'd been too harsh look at the most recent cover of the magazine:

Newsweek GOP: You're old, You're white, You're history!
 

As you can see the top headline reads "GOP: You're old, You're white, You're history". (hat tip: Ideologee)

The magazine seems to expect that its readers are on board with the passing of white America, so that it can be talked about openly and breezily as an acceptable development in American society. The historic, founding people of the U.S. don't seem to count for much in the minds of Newsweek liberals.

The headline advertises a piece by David Frum which attempts to point a way forward for the Republicans. The article has some interesting observations such as this:

The central divide in American politics is the same as the divide in almost every advanced democracy on earth: between one party more committed to private enterprise and another party more supportive of the public sector. These parties may be called Conservative and Labour, Christian Democrat and Social Democrat, Gaullist and Socialist.

I've argued something similar: that both left and right share the same underlying liberal philosophy, but that the right prefers society to be regulated by the market, whereas the left wants society to be regulated by the neutral expertise of a state bureaucracy.

So what is Frum's solution for the Republicans? He's not exactly a straight talker. He speaks, for instance, of the need for the GOP to become "economically inclusive". Which is code for what? Reading between the lines, he seems to want the GOP to appeal more to those lower down the economic scale. But how? He doesn't spell it out.

He also wants the GOP to become "culturally modern". But again he doesn't spell out what this means in practice.

Finally there's a lot of rhetoric about being future oriented. There's no clear indication, though, of what that means apart from being committed to technology.

The impression you get is that Frum doesn't believe in much at all. His message seems to be that a successful political party will look at whatever is happening in society and embrace it as the future.

I don't think that's how the left works. The left has an agenda and then changes society in line with that agenda. In fact, the left has a concept of what is just and then leads a moral crusade to impose this concept of justice on society.

According to Frum, the right should not attempt to lead in this way, but should instead jump to the front of whatever cultural and social trends are happening in society - trends which the left will have initiated decades previously.

That is a deeply unappealing strategy if you oppose the larger liberal trends in society. But Frum has already explained that there's not much of an ideological difference between left and right anyway - his party just has more of an emphasis on the free market.

So perhaps Frum is relaxed with the left doing the "social work" of moving society along in a liberal direction, whilst the right just goes along with it whilst keeping sufficiently up to date to have a good chance of winning office.

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What went wrong?

The American right has suffered an historic defeat. It's important to try to understand the reasons why.

Perhaps the place to begin is to recognise the reasons why the current right-wing culture appeals to many Americans. It is a culture which emphasises self-reliance, industry, limited government and appeals to God and to patriotism. It has a long pedigree within American history.

It is set against a left-wing culture which, in contrast, wishes to tax the productive in order to expand a provider state and which regards the American tradition more negatively as being a history of oppression and injustice.

Given that polarisation you can understand why it's difficult to shift rank and file conservatives from the way right-wing politics is currently understood. There seems to be a good side and a bad side, and so the rank and file will cling to their allegiance to the good side.

But here we are in 2012 and the right has been defeated not just in terms of finances or candidates but demographically. The left-wing constituency has grown to the point that the right is facing a difficult challenge to win elections. So it's time for some soul searching.

The problem it seems to me is this: the underlying philosophy of the right is still a liberal one. It assumes that the good is in the freedom to be self-made, particularly in the market, rather than in the experience of higher goods that we ourselves do not make.

If you believe that the good is in your freedom as an individual to be self-made, then who will you most admire? Perhaps those who succeed in a profession or those who seek opportunities to improve their life circumstances through immigration.

Ronald Reagan is a significant figure on the American right. In my last post I quoted part of his farewell speech in which he said:

I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it and see it still...

It's not just some quirk of Ronald Reagan that he chose to say this. It expresses key parts of a right-liberal philosophy: the free market, an identification with those who immigrate to make themselves, an invocation of God, a positive view of society.

What the Reagan quote demonstrates is that the response to the Republican electoral defeat shouldn't be to get to a purer form of a right-liberal philosophy. A pure right-liberalism leads to open borders, which then shifts society decisively to the left.

The change has to be in the understanding of what matters. It is not just being self-made which matters. There is a good too in carrying through virtuously with what we were made to be: husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, and members of traditional communities connected by ties of history, kinship, language and culture.

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The Republican loss

Obama's win in the U.S. election demonstrates a problem with the model of right-liberal (Republican) versus left-liberal (Democrat) politics.

The problem goes like this. The Democrats have the support of ethnic minorities and those who feel dependent on the state. Given the continuing mass immigration into America, and the growth of welfare dependency, this provides a growing electoral base for the left-liberal party.

The Republicans have to rely on a white/employed/married base. You might think, therefore, that the Republicans would not want to undermine this base through large-scale immigration. But right-liberals generally have an ideological commitment to immigration. They tend to see it favourably in terms of the workings of the market and as an aspect of "freedom" (of the actions of self-made individuals).

This right-liberal approval of large-scale immigration is apparent in the farewell address of Ronald Reagan:

...I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it and see it still...

Everybody getting their chance in the market to become 'self-made' is the aim. (What makes Reagan sound patriotic here is that he puts the vision in positive terms, whereas someone on the left might talk about guilt and oppression.)

But this idea of America being "open to anyone" makes the task of winning elections for the right-liberal party more difficult with each passing year. For a time the right-liberals can mobilise the white/married/employed/conservative voting base, but eventually that base will shrink as a proportion of voters and prove inadequate. The Reagan vision of a shining city is not viable in the long-term for a right-liberal party.

Those on the left are aware of the shifting ground. For instance, back in May an article published by the Brookings Institute declared confidently that minorities would decide the 2012 election:

Obama and the Democrats believe demography is on their side. Census 2010 made abundantly clear that racial and ethnic minorities, especially Hispanics, are dominating national growth and will for decades to come. The Democratic agenda— favoring broader federal support for medical care, housing, and education seems designed to curry the favor of these groups, which played a huge role in tipping the balance in his favor in several key swing states.

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A Newsweek low point

In 2006 Newsweek magazine ran an issue with the front cover headline "Is your baby racist?"

The cover story was an argument in favour of the left-liberal, rather than the right-liberal, attitude to race/ethnicity.

Right-liberals believe that you can make race not matter by being blind to it (colour blind). But left-liberals think that if you don't see race it will continue to matter, i.e. there will still be racial disparities. Therefore, left-liberals want people to see race and to intervene to treat the races differently.

There are left-liberals who think that whiteness was constructed to create an unearned privilege and to oppress the non-white other. Therefore, they believe that white societies must be deconstructed and that an assertion of white identity is a defence of "supremacy". Non-white identities, on the other hand, are regarded more positively as means of resistance to injustice or as expressions of culture.

And so the Newsweek article opened with an account of an experiment in which white parents showed their children multicultural books or videos. All of the parents supported multiculturalism, but some of them dropped out of the experiment when they realised they would have to point out the existence of race to their children:

At this point, something interesting happened. Five families in the last group abruptly quit the study. Two directly told Vittrup, "We don't want to have these conversations with our child. We don't want to point out skin color."

These were presumably the right-liberal parents who believe that race can and should be made not to matter by being blind to it.

The Newsweek writers, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, hold these parents to be wrong on the basis of research showing that very young children if left to their own devices won't become race blind but are likely to notice race and to identify with their own race. Furthermore, putting children in diverse environments is only likely to raise this awareness of race.

And so what the Newsweek writers wants parents to do is to speak openly about race to their very young children (the critical period being from 6 months to first grade).

But this is where the story gets particularly nasty. The racial message that Newsweek wants white infants to get is not a neutral one; the idea is to demoralise young white children through guilt:

Bigler ran a study in which children read brief biographies of famous African-Americans. For instance, in a biography of Jackie Robinson, they read that he was the first African-American in the major leagues. But only half read about how he'd previously been relegated to the Negro Leagues, and how he suffered taunts from white fans. Those facts—in five brief sentences were omitted in the version given to the other children.

After the two-week history class, the children were surveyed on their racial attitudes. White children who got the full story about historical discrimination had significantly better attitudes toward blacks than those who got the neutered version. Explicitness works. "It also made them feel some guilt," Bigler adds. "It knocked down their glorified view of white people."

And what about non-white children? Instead of guilt, the emphasis is on instilling in them a sense of ethnic pride:

Preparation for bias is not, however, the only way minorities talk to their children about race. The other broad category of conversation, in Harris-Britt's analysis, is ethnic pride. From a very young age, minority children are coached to be proud of their ethnic history. She found that this was exceedingly good for children's self-confidence; in one study, black children who'd heard messages of ethnic pride were more engaged in school and more likely to attribute their success to their effort and ability.

So Newsweek wants white children to be knocked down in their sense of identity, but non-white children to be raised up. How could that possibly be justified? The Newsweek writers have a go at it with this argument:

That leads to the question that everyone wonders but rarely dares to ask. If "black pride" is good for African-American children, where does that leave white children? It's horrifying to imagine kids being "proud to be white." Yet many scholars argue that's exactly what children's brains are already computing. Just as minority children are aware that they belong to an ethnic group with less status and wealth, most white children naturally decipher that they belong to the race that has more power, wealth, and control in society; this provides security, if not confidence. So a pride message would not just be abhorrent—it'd be redundant.

The Newsweek writers assume that their mostly white readers will agree that "It's horrifying to imagine kids being 'proud to be white'". Horrifying? Really?

If a positive identity is "exceedingly good for children's self-confidence" then why should white children miss out? According to Newsweek it's because white children belong to "the race that has more power, wealth and control in society" and therefore white children have security and confidence and ethnic pride is "redundant".

That's wrong for several reasons. First, the race that does disproportionately well in the U.S. are Asians; they do best per capita in education, in professional employment and in family stability. Whites come next and then blacks. But when it comes to self-confidence, studies show that blacks have the highest level of self-esteem, then whites, and Asians come last. So you don't get self-confidence by belonging to a race which does well educationally or professionally.

And, anyway, the value of identity is not limited to its effect on self-confidence. It is a good that is basic to human life. We don't, for instance, say "it's horrifying to imagine white people marrying and having children because that is good for their self-esteem and they already have too much of that compared to others". Instead, we hope that white people, just like others, will get to enjoy the love and fulfilment that comes with a successful marriage and parenthood, goods that can be realised in life despite differing levels of wealth or status.

And it's much the same when it comes to identity. Whether we are wealthy or not, self-confident or not, does not make identity "redundant". It remains significant in our lives regardless.

White parents should neither be denying race nor attempting to instil racial guilt in their children. To do either is to neglect one part of a parent's loving care for a child. White children, just like any others, should be raised to positively identify with their own ancestry and tradition. If this increases their self-confidence in life, that should be welcomed; it is unjust to think that a child should be deliberately deprived of either identity or self-confidence in order to further a plan of racial levelling.

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The Newsweek story - some background

I was pleased to hear of the recent demise of Newsweek as a print magazine.

Newsweek was very much liberal in its politics, as is illustrated by a story it ran in 2006 on the topic of race/ethnicity.

The story was a left-liberal criticism of the right-liberal attitude to race.

The right-liberal attitude to race is easy enough to spell out. Liberals want individuals to be self-determining. Therefore, they believe that predetermined qualities like race shouldn't matter.

Right-liberals hold to this consistently. They believe in a colour blind society in which the only thing that matters is who we are as individuals. In Australia this right-liberal position is a minority view, though it has an influential supporter in columnist Andrew Bolt. Bolt has written of how he once attempted to identify with his family's Dutch heritage but that,

Later I realised how affected that was, and how I was borrowing a group identity rather than asserting my own. Andrew Bolt's.

So I chose to refer to myself as Australian again, as one of the many who join in making this shared land our common home.

Yet even now I fret about how even nationality can divide us.

To be frank, I consider myself first of all an individual, and wish we could all deal with each other like that. No ethnicity. No nationality. No race. Certainly no divide that's a mere accident of birth.

Traditionalists like myself reject this attitude because it means that we only identify with ourselves - a tremendously individualistic if not narcissistic position to take and one that denies a love of a larger tradition that we belong to.

But left-liberals are also dissatisfied with the right-liberal view. Left-liberals believe that if we are colour blind that race distinctions, in particular racial inequalities, will remain in existence. Therefore, to make race not matter (i.e. equal outcomes) it is necessary to "see" race rather than be blind to it, in order to deliberately intervene to bring down the better performing race (the "privileged" race) in favour of the underperforming one (the "oppressed" race).

Why do left-liberals believe that racial inequalities will continue if a society is colour blind? That's a really interesting question, because if we really are all equal in the sense of being on average the same, then a colour blind society should produce equal outcomes over time.

There are several possible answers to the question. The official one is that left-liberals believe that "whiteness" itself is an artificial social construct invented to justify the systematic oppression of the non-white other. Therefore, anyone who supports a white identity is assumed to be a defender of "white supremacy" (since left-liberals believe that whiteness has the purpose of creating a privilege over others). It means too that the achievement of equality depends on the deconstruction of a white society.

So for left-liberals being colour blind in a white society won't create equal outcomes, even if we are all born the same. The white society itself has to go.

The left-liberal view is therefore more complicated than the right-liberal one. The aim remains that of making race not matter, but to achieve this one has to "see" race and treat races differently. And because whiteness is thought to be the origin of racism, discrimination and inequality, then a white identity is morally tainted, whereas other identities are more positively associated with the struggle for justice, or else are simply regarded as expressions of culture.

The right-liberal view is strongest in the U.S., but in most of the West the left-liberal view has triumphed. And perhaps one reason for its victory is that a colour blind society hasn't led to race not mattering. On a range of indicators some races do better than others. This strengthens the hand of those who believe in direct intervention to force equal outcomes.

That's a lot of theoretical background, but I think it explains the Newsweek story, which I'll cover in my next post.

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Why does Andrew Bolt admire Lady Gaga?

I should begin by making clear that there are things I admire about Australian columnist Andrew Bolt. He doesn't follow along timidly with political class opinions, but is willing to go out on a limb on a range of issues. In doing so he has helped to shake up the left-liberal orthodoxy in this country.

But it has to be said that he is nonetheless a liberal in his politics. What matters for him is that we self-determine our own individual identity. Therefore, he believes that it's wrong for people to have predetermined national or ethnic identities.

I've given examples of Bolt arguing for this previously. For instance, Bolt once criticised a group of Aborigines who wanted an historic artefact returned to them on the basis that the Aborigines were forgetting:

The humanist idea that we are all individuals, free to make our own identities as equal members of the human race.

Bolt has also related the story of how he once, as a Dutch migrant to Australia, attempted to identify with his Dutch heritage:

Later I realised how affected that was, and how I was borrowing a group identity rather than asserting my own. Andrew Bolt's.

So I chose to refer to myself as Australian again, as one of the many who join in making this shared land our common home.

Yet even now I fret about how even nationality can divide us.

To be frank, I consider myself first of all an individual, and wish we could all deal with each other like that. No ethnicity. No nationality. No race. Certainly no divide that's a mere accident of birth.

That is a radically liberal, rather than a conservative, position to take. He is only allowed to identify with himself rather than with a communal tradition. It is his own self-determined, individual identity that is allowed to matter, rather than a predetermined one that is treated negatively as "a mere accident of birth".

One of the problems with taking this liberal view, that what matters is that we are autonomously self-determined, is that a whole raft of other positions logically follow on.

Bolt himself this week provided a small example of this. He has expressed his admiration for Lady Gaga on this basis:

Lady Gaga’s music is irrelevant. Her real art is in reinventing her identity, and for that alone I like her.

As a boy I moved from town to country to town, and learned how powerfully liberating it could be to define afresh who you were.

Gaga has demonstrated this possibility to millions.

There’s her personal story – of going from a bullied loner at school to the brash superstar.

And there’s her professional guises – tramp to vamp to sophisticate, costumed from the barely there to the heavily lacquered.

With every change, let the critics complain, Lady Gaga would be who she pleased.

What matters to Bolt is not whether Lady Gaga is virtuous, but that she is adept at being a self-creating individual. Freedom, asserts Bolt, is an ongoing act of self-definition - and doing and being what you please.

Bolt is supposed to be the leader of conservative opinion in Australia. And yet what we've ended up with is the idea that we should admire those who do whatever they please in order to define their own individual self.

There's no sense here that people might be oriented in a stable way to an objective good, or that our deeper sense of identity is tied to things we don't invent but that are given to us (which then means that those who trangressively reinvent themselves over and over might be thought of as disconnected rather than as liberated).

One of Bolt's readers left this comment:

“As a boy I moved from town to country to town, and learned how powerfully liberating it could be to define afresh who you were.”

With all due respect, you’re not a true conservative, AB. I too moved from town to town as a child because of my father’s employment, but I always longed for the stability and rootedness that I saw others had, even more so now, 40 years later. Conservatism is rooted in the stability of place, family, community and religion, and it transcends the Right/Left paradigm, knowing that the modern Right can be as destructive of community as the Left can be. Read Russell Kirk or Wendell Berry. No, you’re not a conservative, you’re more a reactionary modernist. Anthony of Toowoomba

That's well-observed by Anthony of Toowoomba. And yet for all that Bolt still manages to be a voice in opposition to the main current of left-liberal thought in Australia.

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Liberal Rational Man versus Liberal Good Man

Here's another of those contradictions within liberalism.

When wearing his technocratic hat, liberal man likes to view the human person as being motivated by rational self-interest. And most frequently, especially among right-liberals, rational self-interest means the pursuit of money or career advancement in the market.

We saw this attitude in two of my recent articles, in which liberals envisaged their nations as being multicultural workplaces. The view of man that this assumes is the one I described above - that we are motivated as individuals to pursue a rational self-interest by seeking our best economic advantage at work.

But is this assumption justified? I don't think it is. I don't think that our work commitments are justified by rational self-interest. If I were following my own individual self-interest, then it would be irrational for me to spend 40 years working in an office from early morning to evening.

If men do commit to work it's mostly not out of self-interest, but from their larger commitments to family or country. They are motivated by particular loves which overrule individual self-interest.

That's one reason why I don't think the "nation as multicultural workplace" will succeed in the longer term - it is too dissolving of the particular commitments that motivate people to make sacrifices at work.

But if liberalism only offered the technocratic "rational self-interest" view of man, then its appeal would be more limited than it is. Liberalism also generates a different kind of view, one that commands us to identify with the other.

It seems to go like this. Liberals are pessimistic that there are objective moral standards that can be recognised by a society and they are fearful that a society which does recognise such moral standards will be authoritarian.

So liberals prefer not to recognise objective moral standards. But humans always have an idea of a moral good and of what represents a good person. So if the starting point is that there are no objective moral standards, and that we can only have our own personal, subjective moral views, then what matters is "non-interference" and "non-assertiveness". So the liberal moral goods become qualities like non-discrimination, respect, tolerance and accepting the other (which sets up a problem for liberals that over time there is a trend toward an intolerant enforcement of tolerance and a non-accepting enforcement of acceptance and an interfering enforcement of non-interference).

So if you want to prove you are a good person in a liberal society you do so by proving how much you identify with the other rather than with your own.

So there are two conflicting strands within liberalism: one strand assumes that we are Economic Man, motivated by a rational self-interest to pursue our profit in the market; the other strand assumes that the good person is the one who puts all self-identity aside to identify with the other.

What the two strands have in common is that both dissolve our particular loves and attachments - one wants us to transcend such particular attachments in favour of identifying with what is "other" to us; the other denies them in favour of a view of people as self-interested, individual actors in the market.

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What Economic Man misses

I've often argued that right-liberalism ends up viewing people primarily as actors in the market. If you see society as made up of millions of atomised individuals each pursuing their own desires, then you need to explain how all these competing wills are to be harmonised. The right-liberal solution is to believe that if people rationally pursue their own self-interest in the market they end up benefiting both themselves and the larger society.

And so you get right-liberals who view people primarily as rational economic agents, i.e. as Economic Man. And here's a particularly crude example (I think made by an "objectivist" - a follower of Ayn Rand). The comment was made in the context of a discussion of Islamic vs Western morality:

A rational man neither sacrifices himself to others or others to himself; he produces and trades in the free market. 

So there you go. If you want to be moral, just get involved as a trader or producer in the market.

I don't quite know how that speaks to all the fathers out there. They're making sacrifices for others. So are the mothers. A lot of the mothers aren't even producers or traders in the market. What then does that say about them  - are we supposed to regard them as irrational?

Right liberals no doubt once saw themselves as liberating individuals from ancient ties. But their political philosophy is highly restrictive in its own way. In restricts our moral vision, for instance, to rational self-interest in the market. It denies or excludes personal character, the duties we have toward family or our larger tradition, and ideals of manhood or womanhood.

It diminishes what man is.

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Kennett's dissolving liberalism

Jeff Kennett, a former Liberal Premier of Victoria, has weighed in on two very important issues. In doing so, he has revealed just how lightweight his liberalism is.

The first issue is that of delayed family formation. As I reported earlier this month, the Catholic Church in Victoria has warned women that in delaying family formation for too long their prospects for marriage diminish.

Jeff Kennett doesn't seem to get the argument. He writes:

TODAY, I call on the Catholic Church and the community to review its position on marriage.

The Catholic Church has suggested to women they should, in effect, lower their standards and marry the second or third-best male available.

Those pronouncements I found belittling to, and of, all women.

Kennett doesn't seem to have thought this through. The Church gave a statistic that there were only 86,000 single men in Australia earning over $60,000 in the prime 25 to 34 age bracket. Therefore, women shouldn't assume that by delaying family formation they were improving their prospects.

Kennett somehow seems to think that if a woman waits until she's 35 that she's going to get Mr Right. A few might, but the odds are against it. She'll just be competing with younger women for a relatively small pool of available men.

Then Kennett seems to contradict himself:

The sanctity of marriage has changed substantially in my lifetime. Vows given are so often quickly forgotten.

In many ways we have become a disposable society, where self is so often more important than the responsibilities we agree to enter into or take upon ourselves.

...That anyone or any institution should suggest we turn the clock back, that people should accept less than their ideal, represents an amazing failure of relevance.

But if Kennett is right that we have become a disposable society then why wouldn't we aim to turn the clock back? Do we really prove our relevance by accepting damaging social trends? And Kennett is foolish to suggest that people should never accept less than their ideal. What if our ideal is unrealistic? What if we get to age 30 and we've never come close to meeting our ideal? Isn't it then time to think about what we can and cannot compromise on?

And, anyway, a woman at age 25 is more likely to be able to attract something close to her ideal than a woman at age 35.

Kennett then tackles the issue of homosexual marriage. He is for it, but on the flimsiest of grounds:

As long as we all respect each other, and obey the laws of the country, surely that is all that matters.

If I want to live my life with Tom or Harold, surely that should be my right as much as it is if I want to live my life with Felicity or anyone else of the opposite sex.

And if I choose a partner and wish to marry, why should anyone be denied that comfort?

You get a sense of why the West has declined when you read comments like that. Under Kennett's principles you could justify just about anything.

For instance, Kennett earlier lamented the emergence of disposable relationships. But why should people uphold promises or commitments under Kennett's liberal principles? The people doing the disposing aren't breaking any laws and they might well continue to respect the people they leave behind. And such people could well argue, just as Kennett does, that life is short and that they have a right to choose who they wish to live with.

Similarly, the only thing stopping polygamy under Kennett's principles is that it's currently illegal. But a man could easily justify living together with a couple of de facto wives. He could argue that everyone in the marriage respected each other and that he should not be denied the comfort in life of two wives.

As I mentioned, Kennett was (is?) a member of the right-wing party here in Victoria. But his philosophy really is a liberal rather than a conservative one. And it is a dissolving liberalism. He believes that it is individual desires that define what is moral, rather than that desires should conform to a real moral good.

Where does that leave the importance of character? Of virtue? Of  a love for, and commitment to, our families and the larger communal tradition we belong to?

The great pity is that educated Westerners in the political class came to believe that nothing mattered except the desires that can exist or be realised at the level of an atomised individual. A lot was lost when this shift in thinking took place.

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