Ye Olde Soapbox

January 22, 2012, 11:45 PM

What the Left Gets Right

By THOMAS B. EDSALL

Today’s column is a counterpart to last week’s, in which some thoughtful liberals responded to the question, “What does the right get right?”

This time around, I asked a number of conservative analysts, writers and think-tank scholars the corresponding question, “What does the left get right?”

The praise voiced by liberals in the previous column for some key attributes of conservatism was surprisingly full-throated. The conservatives I spoke to over the past few days, on the other hand, carefully limited the scope of their tributes, even as they acknowledged the virtue of certain liberal values.

A few conservative concessions to liberalism’s strengths were made without qualification; others were begrudging. Nonetheless, in the conservative assessment, common themes emerge:

Liberals recognize the real problems facing the poor, the hardships resulting from economic globalization and the socially destructive force of increasing inequality.

Liberals do not dismiss or treat as ideologically motivated scientific findings, especially the sharpening scientific consensus that human beings contribute significantly to climate change.

Liberals stand with those most in need, and believe in the inclusion of such previously marginalized groups as blacks, Hispanics, women and gays.

As I sifted through the responses, it became clear that a widely shared view among contemporary conservatives is that liberals are all heart and no head, that their policies are misguided — thrown off track by an excessively emotional compassion that fails to recognize the likelihood of unintended consequences.

Conservatives, in this view, should take charge of policy making, leaving the left to contribute from the periphery by advocating for the needs of the poor and marginalized.

Peter Wehner, former deputy assistant to the president and director of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives under George W. Bush, is now a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. In reply to a query from The Times, he wrote:

I’m a conservative because I believe conservatism is a right and wise political philosophy, one that does the most to encourage human flourishing, while liberalism — at least modern-day, reactionary liberalism — is a wrong and unwise political philosophy that can impede human flourishing.

That said, what I do credit liberalism (and some liberals) for are certain sentiments and impulses that are admirable and important. They include solidarity with the poor; a clear-eyed view of the effects that globalization and modernization can have on some workers; a willingness to view economic matters through a moral prism; and a belief in the common good rather than merely the individual good.

While the actual policy proposals of the left “are in almost every instance misguided,” Wehner declared, “I do think that liberals are able to force certain issues into the national debate and, as a result, conservatives are forced to grapple with issues they might otherwise ignore.”

Wehner does not give his side a free pass, especially on the issue of science and global warming:

I credit liberals with drawing attention to anthropogenic [human-caused] global warming (AGW). In arguing that Earth’s temperature is warming, and human behavior has contributed to that warming, liberals are firmly on the side of science. Those on the right who insist that AGW is a ‘hoax’ are, I think, wrong, in a way that is harmful to conservatism.

Gerard Alexander, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and an associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia, similarly cited the role of liberals in identifying “problems that genuinely need to be addressed.”

Liberals suffer, Alexander argued, from:

an exaggerated sense of what is fixable. But without their prompting, conservatives might have been content to do very little or nothing about a series of shortcomings and failings that are amenable to at least being ameliorated, if not fixed. Prominent examples include segregation, some aspects of poverty and inequality and a number of environmental problems.

Andrew Ferguson, senior editor of the Weekly Standard, was more effusive in his praise. “American liberals are alert to important matters that American conservatives commonly shortchange,” Ferguson wrote. “Liberals agree with Samuel Johnson that a decent provision for the poor is the true test of a civilization.”

Ferguson did not stop there:

Liberals are sensitive to the unsettling potential of income disparities. They are attentive to the overreaching of the federal government through its national security apparatus. They are less likely to pretend that scientific questions – is the planet getting warmer, for example, and if so, why? – are really ideological questions. They understand that the legacies of two centuries of slavery and another of Jim Crow are still active and still debilitating. And they are more realistic about the limits of American military power than many conservatives.

Unlike many of his colleagues on the right, Ferguson did not append repeated qualifications to his comments except to note that “whether liberals respond wisely to the issues that they are alert to is another question which, in our spirit of transideological friendship, I won’t address.”

Perhaps in part because of his background in Britain, Patrick N. Allitt, Cahoon Family Professor of American History at Emory University and author of “The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History,” has a view of the virtues of liberalism that many others on the American right do not share. He stressed three areas where he joins liberals in parting company with the right:

First, they are justified in favoring a national health care system. Just as we regard it as reasonable in a wealthy society to offer everyone twelve years of education at government expense, in the belief that the society as a whole will benefit, so we should take steps to make sure everyone is reasonably healthy.

Second, liberals are right to favor gun control — in my view the more the better…. Conservatives ought to feel a sense of outrage that citizens can so easily kill one another.

Third, liberals understand that industrial societies are vulnerable to the business cycle and that, sometimes, large numbers of people become unemployed through no fault of their own. Although the operation of the free market will probably eventually create new employment opportunities, government alone has the resources to care for their welfare in the meantime. I think it’s a thoroughly conservative principle to believe that industrial societies should develop comprehensive welfare states.

One of the virtues of liberals, in the view of Craig Shirley, author of “Rendezvous With Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign That Changed America,” is that they correctly assess the failure of the Republican Party to live up to conservative principles.

“Liberals are right in thinking that the current G.O.P. is for all intents and purposes controlled by marauding consultants whose only interest is power and the access and money that comes with that power,” Shirley wrote. “What liberals get right is much of the intellectualism inside the G.O.P has been drained out over the past ten years.”

Peggy Noonan, a Wall Street Journal columnist and former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, and William Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, voiced affection for the liberalism of the past, but had little positive to say about contemporary liberalism.

“We can all agree it’s good to be on the side of those who need encouragement, yes? And I have very warm memories of thinking of the Democratic Party as representing that encouragement when I was a kid, and at its best the party still reflects some of that glow,” Noonan said.

Furthermore, she argued, “Liberals have been more welcoming – ‘Come in, join our club, join our movement.’ Conservatives have by nature and tradition been less summoning, less welcoming, as if they don’t know politics is a game of addition.” In the end, Noonan said, “Sympathy and warmth are two things liberalism got right in the 20th century. May they get them right in the 21st.”

Kristol believes that it is up to conservatives to carry forward the liberal banner:

Liberals used to get a lot more right than they do today, in my humble opinion. But today’s liberals can still be helpful in reminding conservatives that not everything that flies under the flag of capitalism should be praised or even defended, that Big Business can do as much damage as Big Labor and Big Finance almost as much as Big Government, and that American politics has to capture the spirit of Tom Paine as well as that of Edmund Burke. Above all, liberals can remind conservatives of the past achievements of liberalism — which it’s today up to conservatives, primarily, to defend.

Thinking over this two-week experiment in “transideological friendship,” as Andrew Ferguson put it, it was impossible not to notice that conservatives were more strategic in their replies, conceding compassion to the left but not political legitimacy. Liberals, in contrast, were less calculating and perhaps more intellectually honest, ceding substantial ground to their adversaries.

In the current environment, strategic calculation is arguably more likely to pay off. Newt Gingrich’s success on Saturday in the South Carolina primary suggests that pulling hard to the right can be a winning strategy — at least temporarily.

In Congress, intransigent Republican opposition to compromise last year successfully forced substantial concessions from Democrats and the Obama administration, justifying Speaker John Boehner’s Aug. 1, 2011 boast at the conclusion of negotiations on the debt ceiling, “I got 98 percent of what I wanted. I’m pretty happy.”

Both political parties are confronting the economics of scarcity and the inevitable austerity measures to come. Cities and states struggle to meet mounting pension obligations. States with balanced budget requirements are being forced to choose between non-trivial benefit cuts or tax hikes reaching beyond the wealthy into the middle class. The federal debt is on track to hit 109 percent of Gross Domestic Product by 2025 and 190 percent of G.D.P. by 2035, breaking historical records. These are not problems that will be resolved by tinkering around the edges of fiscal policy.

The new rules of policy-making will force either constituencies on the left or constituencies on the right to absorb major losses. Under these circumstances, the disposition of conservatives to see choices in zero-sum terms may prove the more clear-eyed approach.

 What the Left Gets Right – NYTimes.com.

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