Politics, Part One
Well, a title like Politics is far more likely to scare people away than invite them to read, but politics has been on my mind lately and I wanted to do a bit of a brain dump while I’m thinking about this stuff.
I’m a Canadian but I like watching CNN and Fox, and these days, talk is mostly about the US primaries. Looks like John McCain is going to be the Republican candidate and either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic candidate. The race between the latter two is too close to call at this point.
What does mean? I’m not here to provide in-depth analysis of the candidates, but let’s look at the system.
In Canada, the major parties on two sides of the political spectrum are the Liberal and the Conservative party, and I think those are better names than Republican and Democratic when talking about ideologies, so I’m going to use those terms, but without the capitalization so you know I’m not talking about specific parties. So we’ve got the liberals, and we’ve got the conservatives.
Wikipedia is a great forge for things like definitions of loaded terms, so let’s compare the two there:
Liberalism refers to a broad array of related ideas and theories of government that consider individual liberty to be the most important political goal.
And…
Conservatism is a term used to describe political philosophies that favor tradition and gradual change, where tradition refers to religious, cultural, or nationally defined beliefs and customs.
These aren’t much help, but they do set a bit of a tone; in my opinion, the tone only really covers social issues, not necessarily foreign policy issues, for example. There’s also the progressive conservative, which is a term used in parties in a number of countries to basically mean conservative, but not quite as conservative.
Trying to distill something as complex as the set of beliefs and policies and strategies that make up the platform of a political party into a one or two word description is just not possible, so it’s important to distinguish ideals from the Democratic brand of liberalism and the Republican brand of conservatism.
When I was growing up, I heard the words “liberal” and “conservative” for the parties in Canada, and I came to my own conclusions about what these parties stood for based on what those words evoked. I never paid too much attention to politics, but one day I noticed the Conservatives didn’t seem all that conservative and when it came to spending money, the Liberals didn’t seem quite as liberal as the conservatives.
And now we’ve got the current US government, an allegedly conservative government, spending money like there’s no tomorrow. Whether you agree with this particular fiscal policy or not, I don’t think it’s very conservative.
But Bush did cut taxes, and both Hillary and Barack (why are they so often referred to as “Hillary and Obama”?) are promising to take away those tax cuts. So maybe those terms do still apply but only to the idea of personal income tax.
So in the US there are two brands of politics. Democratic and Conservative. The aspect of politics that has been on my mind lately, though, is how partisan the US has become. People are either strongly Democratic or strongly Conservative; it’s rare in my experience talking with Americans that people are ambivalent (which, on the other hand, is the norm for many Canadians).
It’s interesting to compare political parties and religious denominations.
Both of these things represent a vast array of beliefs on various issues. If you “become” a Pentecostal or a Baptist, there are particular stances on various aspects of theology that you’re basically expected to believe if you’re going to stand under that label.
The same seems to be true of the political parties. If you want to be a Republican then you must be in favour of both the tax cuts, and the war on Iraq. If you declare yourself a Democrat then you must favour both increased taxes and withdrawl from Iraq.
With religion, it’s presumed that the leader of your church or denomination is doing the Lord’s work, and if he preaches on one particular side of a denominational divide then you’re expected to believe it unquestioningly. But hey kids, political parties don’t have divine leaders.
There are some instances where it makes sense to inherit the beliefs of the party. Chances are they’re fairly well researched and are more reasoned than what you’ll come up with on your own. But still, when there are experts on both sides of an issue, it means that there likely isn’t a right answer. Is the right answer for you going to mesh with what your party decides? What if it doesn’t?
I believe the political process needs more granularity. I don’t want to be a Democrat or a Republican. I have my own stances on many issues, and neither of the mainstream brands fits my particular beliefs. And I’m not willing to change them just to fit the archetype.
To be continued.
February 15th, 2008 at 11:11 am
Steve, I think one important distinction that you need to make is between classical liberalism and the modern-day liberalism of many “Liberal” parties. The definition you’ve given of “Liberalism” defines classic liberalism. I would define most modern day Liberal parties as being more socialist that classically liberal. For example, parties that want universal, government funded health care, or childcare generally aren’t much about individual freedom. Parties that favour hate-speech legislation are generally not all that into individual liberty as the highest goal. Parties who believe that government does a better job at running the ecomony/the mail system/gas stations/liquor stores/pick your poison, are not classically liberal.
Note that I’m not really thinking of any political party in particular (although obviously, this philosophy describes some parties better than others.) I’m just describing certain popular initiatives that politicians and their parties back that aren’t very liberal at all.
I think that in times past, Liberal parties attracted a number of classical liberals, especially classical liberals that cared about freedom of religion, freedom to have an abortion and other “social” freedom issues. Also Liberal parties tended to be more reactionary and willing to try new things and leave behind “the old ways”. This is sort of in opposition to “Conservatives” which tend to believe in the “tried and trusted” ways of doing things (as your definition above states.) It seems to me that for a long time the Liberal parties we know today were actually quite classically liberal.
However, I don’t think that this is the case anymore. I think that most modern Liberal parties have really become Socialist parties. And Socialism is antithetical to classical liberalism. Socialist believe that the collective is more important than the individual. Therefore, it’s OK to take things (i.e. money) away from individuals in order to enhance the well-being of the collective.
In my reading, I’ve seen that many classical liberals have abandoned the Liberal parties and have either moved into the Libertarian camp (the hard-core classic liberal’s party) or, moved to the Conservative parties.
I view myself as a classical liberal, and at the moment, Conservative philosophies tend to align more with my beliefs. Conservative parties tend to have economic and defense policies that mesh more with my worldview. However, there are definite points of tension in the alliance of classical liberals and Conservatives: you could really see the lines drawn during the Terry Shiavo episode. Traditional social Conservatives (which is what many people think of when they think ‘Conservative’) were strongly in favour of using the heavy hand of the state to intervene and “do the right thing” in the Shiavo case. SoCons wanted the state to intervene heavily into the whole affair (special laws, emergency powers, etc.) Classical liberals were appalled at this: individual freedom means the freedom to choose to die. In this case, most classical liberals were satisfied with the court opinions that Shiavo’s husband was her guardian and it was his call as such to determine what would happen to her. (After all, my husband knows me better than some federal politican grandstanding about the sanctity of life; I would prefer that he make decisions on my behalf than some stranger if I’m incapacitated.)
I have more to say, but I’ll close with this: in the end, I think the success of any political party depends on brining many factions together on some point that they all agree on (i.e. smaller government, less taxes, more economic freedom) and then negotiating compromises (or even not addressing at all) the more contentious issues (i.e. legalizing pot, changing abortion laws, etc.) I think succeeding at this means that you have to be free to disagree and be able to do it in a civilised manner. I think that the current political atmosphere (and this speaks a bit to your point about polarization of politics) really discourages this type of interaction: you’re either for us or against us! There’s no middle ground! If you even think one thing Bush ever did was good, you can’t join our club! If you believe that Clinton wasn’t a fountain of immorality and evil, you can’t join our club! It’s stupid and counter-productive. The loudest voices take over and then disagreeing with them can get you excommunicated. I don’t know how to fix this problem, but I think it’s one that free societies should really be looking at closely.