Liberals, To Their Chagrin, Are Moral Afterall

Over on the Square at First Things, Richard John Neuhaus has a riff on this article by Jon A. Shields in the Wilson Quarterly. The gist of the article is that 40 years ago it was the left which sought the insertion of moral passion and a values-based frameworks into the political discourse. Now that conservatives have stolen that particular thunder, these same liberals and leftists have turned on the very approach to politics they once championed. Neuhaus sums it up thusly:

In the 1960s, the New Left appeared, calling for politics “vivified by controversy” over basic moral questions. Civic apathy must be countered by moral warfare, said Tom Hayden and other then-young Turks.

The McGovern Commission of 1968 restructured the Democrat party to give greater voice to minorities and others previously marginalized, especially feminists. By the early 1970s, Ralph Nader and a host of public-interest organizations were leading insurrections from the left. The odd thing, writes Shields, is that today it is the very same leftists who are leading the charge against the moralizing of politics for which they had called. Liberals, he says, are now “mounting a counterattack against their own revolution.”

“In a strange political turn, they have embraced what President Richard Nixon called ‘the silent majority’ as the source of their salvation from 1960s liberalism.” Shields cites E.J. Dionne, Sidney Verba, Kay Schlozman, Jacob Hacker—all lamenting the “culture wars” and the “polarization” of American politics. In What’s the Matter With Kansas? Thomas Franks complains that “unassuageable cultural grievances are elevated inexplicably over solid material ones, and basic economic self-interest is eclipsed by juicy myths of national authenticity and righteousness wronged.” Why can’t voters go back to politics-as-management and attend to the bread and butter issues the way they used to? Where did all this ideology and moral rhetoric come from? These lamenting liberals, says Shields, “have become the new conservatives.”

This may paint with too broad a brush. The moralization of politics, the damage that can be done by a two party split (particularly to the structure of government), and the “alienation” partisan warfare supposedly causes are all distinct phenomena getting mashed up here. Still, it strikes me that there’s a good deal of truth to this particular story.

When Thomas Franks deplores the red states’ lack of concern for economic injustice in favor of so-called values issues, what he’s really saying is that the economic matters are important and the social issues are not. Thus, to him, the conservative failure to recognize the distinction is evidence of the havoc being wreaked on the public discourse by ideological polarization. But this is itself a moral – and thus an ideological – judgment. Moral philosophy is not merely concerned with finding the correct answer to a particular question, but also determining whether the question has any moral dimension to begin with. It is on the latter matter as much as the former that Franks and other liberals find themselves in dispute with those on the political right. This is why, for example, homosexuality is termed a “wedge” issue. Liberals do not merely disagree with the conservative stance on homosexuality’s moral legitimacy; they are befuddled by it. It would be as if someone were to come up to them one day and start decrying the moral decay of a country in which people are allowed to brush their teeth before 4pm.

The question that interests me is whether liberals writ large realize that this is, in fact, what is going on. Given the rhetoric that Neuhaus and Shields site, it seems plausible to assume they do not. Befuddlement tends to bleed very easily into fear, which tends to bleed into dismissive rationalization. And thus is born the claim of the “silent majority,” the desire to place politics back in the hands of “experts” and the current push, in some liberal quarters, to expunge moral language (or even religion itself) from the public discourse.

Of course, non of these phenomena, which some liberals have been out to squelch as of late, are really the problem. The truth is that consistent and well-structured thought is (and maybe always has been) in short supply within American politics, and the various factions tend to swing between conceiving of politics as moral agitation and conceiving of it as value-neutral management depending on what they perceive as most convenient to their immediate circumstances. Neuhaus himself was entirely correct when he observed, of the conflict between left and right, that, “What we have in the political arena is not a division between the moral and the immoral but an ongoing contention between different moral visions addressing the political question—how ought we to order our life together?” It may be that the single greatest weakness of the modern left is its stalwart refusal to see itself in those terms.

~ by Jeff on February 16, 2008.