The Conservative Misunderstanding of Liberty

Why libertarians should be democratic socialists

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues in The Righteous Mind that liberals and conservatives form different tribes because their values are different. Haidt and some fellow psychologists identify five fundamental values a person can have, and it turns out, they say, that liberals have a narrow set of primary concerns whereas conservative values are more well-rounded.

The psychologists call this “moral foundations theory,” and the five fundamental values are: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity as opposed to harm, cheating, betrayal, subversion, and degradation. The political application of this is that liberals focus on care and fairness, while conservatives are more broadly but moderately committed to all these values.

Haidt’s book, however, complicated matters, because he found he had to channel the American conservatives’ number one complaint with moral foundations theory, namely that it left out the value of liberty. So Haidt added liberty (the opposite of oppression) to the spectrum, and Haidt notes that libertarians are not so broadly based in their moral foundations but focus almost exclusively on liberty.

Haidt’s actual agenda had apparently been to soften the American discourse, on centrist grounds, to point out, against any deference to the Enlightenment aim towards progress, that conservatives have a moral foundation too, indeed supposedly a more balanced one than that of socialists and progressives. The libertarian’s criticism of that analysis must have come, then, as a rude awakening.

But there’s a second rude awakening in store for centrists like Haidt, an awakening into hyperreality as it were, when we look more closely at the conservative’s alleged reverence for liberty.

Liberty, Autonomy, and Personal Integrity

Notice what follows from the classic liberal’s concept of liberty. A person deserves the liberty to pursue happiness in a way that an animal doesn’t, because a person is free from at least some biological impositions, from evolutionary instincts, genetic impulses and the like, and the main source of that freedom is reason. We’re able to control our behaviour because reason enables us to oversee our options and to think through them.

The Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant pointed out how important personal integrity is to our autonomy. Our reason “legislates” our behaviour, he said; we have the responsibility as rational freethinkers to understand the laws we should live by and to will our obedience to them. That’s our moral duty, according to Kant.

When our choices become incoherent or hypocritical, we no longer act as people at all; our mind becomes disordered and we lose our autonomy. A disunited mind is one in which the left side doesn’t affirm or control what the right side is doing, as it were. With no central command at least with respect to our conscious thoughts and interests, there would be no personal self that unites the conduct; instead, there would be independent mental modules or faculties that operate willy-nilly or as dictated by stimuli.

If you value liberty, then, you value rational autonomy and if you prize that, you ought to champion intellectual integrity and to condemn hypocrisy.

The Incoherence of Libertarianism

Alas, American conservatives and libertarians are among the most egregious hypocrites ever to scheme on the face of the earth. American conservative culture is appallingly incoherent.

To see this, consider something else that should follow from the conservative’s supposed value of liberty: a premium on self-sufficiency.

You’d expect conservatives to be independent, because they’re supposed to be cognizant of their responsibility to maintain their freedom not just by holding a gun to the head of government, but by being internally vigilant against a breakdown in their mental order. Conservatives should be independent thinkers, which means they should understand the principles of critical thinking and seek to avoid fallacies, since fallacies divorce you from reality and would enslave you to some illusion or fantasy.

To be sure, American libertarians make a show of being rational and self-reliant. The leading libertarian magazine is called “Reason,” and libertarians are infamous for insisting on the right to bear arms, even to the point of forming militias that train in the wilderness to prevent their democratic republic from sliding into tyranny. And libertarians are rabid individualists, meaning that they think everyone should be left to succeed or to fail on their merits; there should be no welfare state run on tax dollars, and the free market should dictate virtually every aspect of life.

Unfortunately, these poses are contradictory. The libertarian’s economic condemnation of the socialist benefits of mass cooperation via the social contract amount to social Darwinism. Once you make human life out to be a competitive struggle to sink or to swim, you’re implying there’s no such thing as morality in the first place; hence, liberty becomes something other than a moral foundation.

The reason social Darwinism is dubious is precisely because life for people isn’t exactly like life for animals, and that’s because of our capacity for rational self-reflection, which liberates us to create ourselves and a novel way of life. Thus, if you’re going around with the latest copy of Reason Magazine or boasting about how well you understand the illogic of communism, you have no business pretending that human life reduces to a Darwinian struggle for survival with no hope of salvation from that fate due to human ingenuity.

If the libertarian says that salvation can arrive only from private actors, from corporations, charities, and the like, but not from government taxation, she’ll have to explain why the former is rational, whereas agreeing to pool some of your money with the rest of society to address large-scale problems — including those created or left untouched by the free market — is somehow irrational. How could it be irrational to work together to solve problems that individuals can’t solve, by electing representatives to charge a reasonable amount for membership in the society, and to use those funds as the majority sees fit?

The Astounding Hypocrisy of Republicans

What really bothers the libertarian here is that she demands to have her way in uncompromising fashion, as opposed to taking turns in a democracy, allowing those who disagree with her to have their say now and again, when their candidates receive the most votes, and to mandate the use of taxes to deal with problems that concern them but which the libertarian may prefer to ignore.

In short, the libertarian doesn’t want to cooperate, because she thinks compromise amounts to coercion, to the opposite of freedom. This indicates a second level of conservative incoherence.

After all, notice what else should follow from the conservative’s distinctive values of ingroup loyalty, respect for authority, and disgust towards impurities, according to Haidt’s model. For one thing, you’d expect conservatives to be tough, rugged, and honourable, seeing weakness as revolting and dishonour as a violation of some sacred code or of loyalty to a treasured group.

Indeed, you might expect conservatives to be fair-minded, if only as a show of inner strength by way of avoiding the dastardliness of cheating, and to be patriotic, to put their country above their political tribe or party.

Here again we’re met with flagrant hypocrisy at every turn. While many American conservatives are rugged in the physical sense, including many of the soldiers who go off to war, that kind of strength is irrelevant to morality.

Again, if liberty is supposed to be a foundation of morality and not just part of a slogan to distract from how might makes right and from how social Darwinism conflicts with the emergence of personhood and thus with the creation of morality which transcends animality — if that’s all so, the conservative had better be concerned with inner strength, not just with shows of brute force.

Let’s face it, American religious conservatives lost their integrity as soon as they got into politics under Ronald Reagan and the televangelists, fearing the godless Soviet empire. They wedded themselves to economic libertarianism, to free market ideology, and thus to social Darwinism which makes nonsense of the Christian creed.

Of course, this is in addition to the basic conservative Christian hypocrisy, to the level that must be taken for granted because it’s been two millennia in the making: the mainstream traditions and institutions that sustain Christianity as an organized religion are antithetical to Jesus’s radical, antisocial perspective as dramatized in the gospels.

Jesus said his followers should love everyone unconditionally — not create the conditions for earthly happiness and security, but sacrifice our welfare in this lesser world, demonstrating our faith in God and in the greater reality of the afterlife. Only social outsiders can afford to follow suit, whereas Christian conservatives are first in line to rally around their church’s earthly power.

By the time we get to the abomination of Trumpism, the hypocrisy is so rampant that conservatives must hide from reality and wall themselves off in a wildly irrational cult of trolls to avoid the traumatic cognitive dissonance.

It’s become commonplace to observe that Trumpian Republicans have especially weak characters. They’ve been reduced to cheating to win in politics. They rely on the cockamamie Electoral College because they can no longer win a national plurality of votes; they gerrymander their districts to deal with the change in demographics and to avoid having to count votes from minorities who vote mostly for Democrats; and they resort to voter-suppression tactics for the same reasons, because Republican policies are unpopular in most of the country.

Donald Trump’s much ballyhooed garnering of 74,223,958 million votes in 2020 hardly shows that most Americans prefer Trumpian policies. Some of those voters supported Trump not because they approve of his performance but solely to stick it to the Democrats. In any case, there were around 239.2 million Americans eligible to vote in 2020, which means Trump got 32% support from the eligible voters.

The hypocrisy of pretending to be resilient and patriotic while cheating to get your way, because you’re afraid to admit you’re unpopular and to reflect on whether your worldview might be defective has reached surreal proportions under Donald Trump’s anti-presidency.

Far from refraining from cheating, Trump had the gall to accuse Democrats of stealing the 2020 election, losing time and again in his court challenges for lack of evidence. Far from having the courage to concede that he’s the opposite of patriotic and independent — his mental disorders prevent him from caring about anything other than himself, he’s beholden to foreign lenders and has a hankering for dictators, which is been nakedly un-American after WWII — Trump doubles down on the lies and accuses the liberals of the vices that are obviously integral to his identity.

This is why the comedian Bill Maher revels in calling “President” Trump the opposite of what Trump and his followers take him to be, namely a “whiny little bitch.” Trump’s slogan was “Make America Great,” but Trump turned the Republican Party into a cult of personality and spent four years dividing the country and exacerbating and capitalizing on Americans’ tribal instincts. As a result, many Republicans would rather live in Putin’s Russia than under a Democratic leader.

Under Trump, Republicans violated every American political norm, enabling Trump’s unprecedented scale of political corruption and his subversion of US democracy with his baseless allegations that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and going along with his treasonous submission to Vladimir Putin and with his war against the media, the intelligence agencies, and the spirit of the US constitution — and this is supposed to be the more patriotic of the two parties? How is it patriotic for an American to subvert the United States with every fiber of his being?

Are Trumpians especially rational or does their obsession with paranoid conspiracy theories, fake news, and what Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway called “alternative facts” reveal that, like George W. Bush and his Texan truthiness, they’ve left critical thinking far behind?

Is Trump self-reliant or rather like the sadist that can’t live without being adored by masochists? The answer is plain from Trump’s Mussolini-like performances at his myriad political rallies and from the neediness in his having had to make every national event exclusively about him, including the natural disasters that obviously affected everyone.

Republican Animality is Antithetical to Liberty

The Republican slogans, then, belie what’s glaringly obvious, which is that Republicans aren’t honourable, patriotic, self-reliant, or rational; therefore, they don’t value liberty.

The real essence of conservatism is and has always been just social Darwinism, that is, rank animalism, the insane, anti-humanistic urge to live like animals in a dressed-up dominance hierarchy (a theocracy, kingdom, or plutocracy), by surrendering the burdens of personhood, including the philosophical enlightenment that arrives with self-awareness and reflection, and the moral responsibilities of free individuals and societies.

If you value liberty, you’re a humanist. Therefore, you’re opposed to virtually all Republican policies.

Think it through with me: if you recognize liberty as the emergence of personhood from animality, of rational powers of self-determination (consciousness, self-awareness, intelligence, abstract thought, imagination, and so on), you’re immediately led to wonder how strange and precious liberty is, as a personal attribute.

Thus, you should want to preserve everyone’s potential to create themselves by their relatively free acts.

Thus, you should be your “brother’s keeper,” to return that biblical phrase to the psychological and philosophical context in which it belongs. To refrain from helping those who fail in the so-called libertarian’s savage or “free” market, whether by giving to charity, showing empathy, or approving of the government’s efforts to use taxes to correct for capitalism’s ravages of the planet is to demonstrate that you don’t know the first thing about liberty.

What a strange “libertarian,” this social Darwinian with the incoherent worldview that comes to nothing!

What an odd beast, this “religious conservative” that makes an idol out of the monstrous Trump and longs for a celestial dictatorship in the afterlife, while pretending to be the “real American,” the patriotic supporter of the Founders’ rational Enlightenment principles that entail atheism and the obsolescence of Christianity.

What a bizarre “Republican,” this American conservative who has to cheat at every turn in politics to avoid admitting that the extant version of his political party doesn’t deserve to hold office since it doesn’t actually represent the body of citizens or the commonwealth.

Can we therefore stop taking seriously at least American conservatism’s contributions to political philosophy?