Bill's Notes

Here's an article in which Thomas Sowell does a better job of articulating the competing visions that liberalism and conservatism represent:

Then there is Thomas Sowell, the economist and political philosopher. He prefers an older way of looking at American politics--a much older way. In his classic 1987 work, A Conflict of Visions, Sowell identifies two competing worldviews, or visions, that have underlain the Western political tradition for centuries.

Sowell calls one worldview the "constrained vision." It sees human nature as flawed or fallen, seeking to make the best of the possibilities that exist within that constraint. The competing worldview, which Sowell terms the "unconstrained vision," instead sees human nature as capable of continual improvement.

You can trace the constrained vision back to Aristotle; the unconstrained vision to Plato. But the neatest illustration of the two visions occurred during the great upheavals of the 18th century, the American and French revolutions.

The American Revolution embodied the constrained vision. "In the United States," Sowell says, "it was assumed from the outset that what you needed to do above all was minimize [the damage that could be done by] the flaws in human nature." The founders did so by composing a constitution of checks and balances. More than two centuries later, their work remains in place.

The French Revolution, by contrast, embodied the unconstrained vision. "In France," Sowell says, "the idea was that if you put the right people in charge--if you had a political Messiah--then problems would just go away." The result? The Terror, Napoleon and so many decades of instability that France finally sorted itself out only when Charles de Gaulle declared the Fifth Republic.

What role have the two visions played in the campaign? Sen. John McCain, who is trailing, has by and large embraced the constrained vision; Sen. Barack Obama, who is leading, the unconstrained vision. Asked if Obama represents the purest expression of the unconstrained vision since Franklin Roosevelt, Sowell, himself an African-American, replies: "No. Since the beginning of American politics. This man [Obama] has been a left ideologue for 20 years."

Sowell, whom the playwright David Mamet recently called "our greatest contemporary philosopher," talked in some detail this week about what Obama's unconstrained vision could mean for the country.

It ends with this sobering thought:

"There is such a thing as a point of no return," he says. If Obama wins the White House and Democrats expand their majorities in the House and Senate, they will intervene in the economy and redistribute wealth. Yet their economic policies "will pale by comparison to what they will do in permitting countries to acquire nuclear weapons and turn them over to terrorists. Once that happens, we're at the point of no return. The next generation will live under that threat as far out as the eye can see."

"The unconstrained vision is really an elitist vision," Sowell explains. "This man [Obama] really does believe that he can change the world. And people like that are infinitely more dangerous than mere crooked politicians."

Harry has a post here in which he describes what he means by Republican, Democrat, Liberal and Conservative.

I welcome this kind of post because it cuts through a lot of clutter and lets us focus on what we mean when we say one thing or the other. It's important to understand what your definition of something is.

Before I define my terms, I would like to add that these terms are in flux, and especially in flux right now. For example, if you'd asked me 20 years ago, you'd have gotten definitions something along the lines of:

Democrats want more state intervention in markets, less state intervention in individuals' personal lives.

Republicans want more intervention in personal lives, less intervention in markets.

I later discovered this was hopelessly naive.

If you asked me eight years ago, I might have said:

Democrats are people who want to expand state power over markets, and want to impose a certain liberal worldview over people's persona lives. These issues include abortion, global warming, death penalty, embryonic stem cell research, slavery reparations, welfare statism, identity politics, speech codes, and homosexuality as a civil rights issue, and a certain anti-religious sentiment.

Republicans still want less state power over markets, and now want to prevent that liberal worldview and its agenda from being imposed over their personal lives.

The relevant difference I might have said at the time is Democrats are more concerned with fairness than freedom, and Republicans are more concerned with freedom than fairness. And I would add the caveat that there is a big range of opinions between how anyone handles these tradeoffs between freedom and fairness. (For example, it's not fair that some people have more talent than others, and neither party, that I know of, would seriously suggest a Harrison Bergeron scenario for those in the NFL.) It's a question of where in arange of points you put your marker on a fairness-freedom line graph: Democrats range from "absolute fairness" to "um, that ain't right" and Republicans go from "um, that ain't right" to "every man for himself. screw you."

So, now where are the definitions? I feel less comfortable defining either party right at this moment. A unified Republican government from 2000 to 2006 brought us the No Child Left Behind Act, possibly the greatest federal intervention in state- and local-controlled education in decades, and Sarbanes-Oxley, without a doubt the greatest federal intervention in business and markets since the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Both were statism as its worst: SOX was an onerous regulatory environment didn't do one thing to prevent the current economic crisis, and No Child Moves Ahead did little if anything to improve education.

Hundreds of million dollars and pixels later, and I feel less comfortable defining either party than ever. For example, many of these Democrats who have taken Republican seats have often done so taking positions far to the right of the national democratic party. Some are far more moderate on abortion and guns, for example. Right now things are in flux. And I also think a lot of people are making decisions based on about as much rationale as rooting for the Yankees or the Dodgers. That is, you root for the Yankees because you root for the Yankees; you hate the Yankees because you've always hated the Yankees.

The problem, for me, is cutting through the propaganda and understanding what do the parties truly mean? Anyway, all that caveat-ing aside, I'd say:

Democrats are a coalition of people who:
(1) are not happy with the Republicans' performance and feel strongly enough to vote for a Democrat
(2) people who support most or all of the left-liberal agenda, that is, people who support my Year 2k definition of Democrats, and
(3) a coalition of class- and ethnic-based groups who are largely paid or expect to be paid for their support of the Democratic Party.

Republicans are a coalition of people who:
(2) are not happy with the Republicans' performance and either do not feel strongly enough to vote for a Democrat, or who think the Democrats will be far worse
(2) people who oppose having most or all of the left-liberal agenda imposed on them, and
(3) a coalition of folks who support the Republicans' positive agenda, which include libertarians, conservatives, and chamber-of-commerce types.

Liberal and conservative I have less trouble with: I don't think the definitions have changed as much:

Conservatives believe human nature has no history — that is, there are eternal truths we can learn from — and any governmental or social system that ignores these eternal truths and ignores fundamental human nature will fail or make things far far worse. They tend to be more concerned with virtue than law and power. Adam and Eve have been expelled from Eden, and the promises of paradise reclaimed are for the next life.

Liberals believe in human progress — that is, they believe that human nature has a history, and that people can progress and become better humans than they have been so far, if we could just come up with the right governmental and social order, and if those evil conservatives just got out of the way of progress. They tend to be more concerned with law and power than virtue, which they call "values," and tend to deride as relavistic or culturally and temporally specific.

Some further comments:

* Conservatives admit to technological progress. But they don't agree that humans are fundamentally different than they have been. The only way to make people better is to inculcate virtue, one person at a time, through classical education and/or Judaeo-Christian conversion (though there are conservative pagans and non-believers who nonetheless believe in classical values).

* Conservatives, who hold the more pessimistic worldview, tend to be happier individuals. They don't hold out hope for paradise in this world, and hope to make a place as pilgrims on to another world. They think perhaps with faith, education and technological progress that perhaps we can make things fairly decent, at least for a while, especially within their families and local communities, until the next perversity of human nature comes along and challenges that.

* Liberals, who hold the seemingly more optimistic worldview, tend to less happy, easy to anger and frequently frustrated, because they believe that things could be so much better if only ... Some hope for either a perfect or really quite good social order that correctly balances fairness and freedom, and they often chafe more than conservatives against human limitations.

* Some liberals and libertarians hold out hope for a technological utopia -- but conservatives would point out that human beings are never satisfied, they will always want to be more, know more, have more, possess more power, and feel more pleasure ... and there's nothing short of religion that will quell those desires. In a technological utopia, you'll end up with a lot of addiction, unless it becomes enormously religious. Although some technological utopians might argue that we can design all that infinite-want crap out of the brain ... at which point we'd cease to be human, because we would no longer have choice.

Has this always happened? I don't recall it ever happening before ... I mean, absentee ballots, yes. But I thought constitutionally the election was held on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November.

The future. I can't tell if Obama's gonna screw the Left or screw the rest of us.

Golly -- the Tampa Bay Rays got the devil out of their name and win the pennant! Congrats to the team and their fans!

Now, go Phillies. Beat up on them Rays.