In this era of the 24-hour news cycle, it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture—especially when it comes to politics. With that in mind, it’s worth taking a step back to consider the question, is conservatism on the rise?
In some respects it appears to be, especially given the popularity of Donald Trump and Ben Carson. One might argue, in fact, that it has been on the rise for several decades. Today’s Republican party, after all, leans so far to the right that it makes Republicans of the mid-20th century look liberal by comparison. And it may very well be that a year from now we will have a Republican president-elect.
But in the grand scheme of things that won’t really matter. If a reading of American history tells us anything it is that liberalism always prevails in the long run. Before I go on, I suppose it would be useful to take a look at the definition of liberalism. According to The Oxford English Dictionary, “liberal” means, among other things, “open-minded;…open to new ideas;… favorable to or respectful of individual rights and freedoms… favoring gradual political and social reform that tends toward individual freedom and democracy.”
In other words, when Thomas Jefferson wrote that “all men are created equal,” he was declaring that this nation, should it succeed, would be founded on liberalism. None of this would have mattered, of course, if the colonists hadn’t won the war for independence from England’s monarchy. And victory was by no means a sure thing. Among other problems was a sizable conservative contingent in the colonies—the Tories—that opposed the idea of revolution. Thankfully, liberalism prevailed.
This didn’t put an end to conservative thinking, of course—even among some of the Founding Fathers who had embraced the fundamentally liberal principles of the Declaration. The preservation of slavery, needless to say—and opposition to universal suffrage—continued for a very long time thereafter.
So did illiberal prejudices of various kinds—prejudices that were deeply rooted in the American fabric.
Ben Franklin is a case in point. In many respects he became a classical liberal. But on at least one occasion—two decades before the War for Independence—he revealed a strong conservative streak when speaking disparagingly about German immigrants.
“Few of their children in the country learn English,” he wrote in 1753. “The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages … Unless the stream of their importation could be turned they will soon so outnumber us that all the advantages we have will not be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious.”
Franklin’s fears were widely shared. A prominent minister of the time, sounding remarkably like Donald Trump when he speaks of Mexicans, warned that Germans would flood the nation with “unprecedented wickedness and crimes.”
Needless to say, these fears were absurd—fears being the operative word, because that is in essence the very fuel of conservative thinking: Fear of change.
Nowhere was this more glaring than in the conservative arguments in defense of slavery—the notion that it was sanctioned by the Bible and was a “positive good,” as John C. Calhoun put it in 1837.
With the Emancipation Proclamation and the ratification of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, liberalism prevailed once again. And yet, conservatism remained a potent force. Due to conservative attitudes, African-Americans suffered for another century under humiliating and often brutal Jim Crow laws—until, of course, liberalism prevailed with the Civil Rights Movement.
The liberal thinking of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, meanwhile, had sustained the country through the Depression—and had given birth to Social Security, a program based on Roosevelt’s belief that all Americans should be free not only to do certain things, but from certain things: in particular, want and fear. Since then, Social Security has saved countless millions of Americans from living out their later years in dire poverty.
During the first half of the 20th century the liberalism of the labor movement prevailed as well, putting an end to child labor, securing safer working conditions in factories, establishing the minimum wage and implementing the 8-hour day: all things that we now take for granted.
Liberalism prevailed yet again in the 1970s, with the victories of the environmental movement. Yes, I know—it was Richard Nixon who was in part responsible for this, with the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. That is why I’m using the term “liberalism” rather than “liberals.” Nixon was staunchly conservative in many respects, but it seems to me to be self-evident that the creation of the EPA was a liberal act. And it was an act that worked. When I was coming of age in New York in the 1970s, the great Hudson River was virtually an open sewer. Today, thanks to the environmental movement, it is relatively clean.
The triumph of the women’s movement is yet another example. In spite of conservative opposition, women had won the right to vote—and half a century later, with Roe v. Wade, the right to the sanctity of their own bodies.
All of which takes us to our own times. In recent years, liberalism has prevailed as states around the country have recognized that laws against gay marriage are fundamentally at odds with our nation’s founding principles. Conservative resistance to this movement remains widespread. But given the overwhelming support for gay rights among today’s 20-somethings, it’s only a matter of time before this becomes a non-issue.
In light of all this, it’s clear that today’s conservative movement is fighting a whole range of lost causes. Liberalism, I feel confident in asserting, will prevail in the fight for humane immigration policies, the separation of church and state, equal rights for every citizen, national health care, and protection of our lands and waterways.
Conservative opposition to these things rests on the argument that big-government programs and regulations are at odds with the concept of individual liberty. But that is a simplistic view. Again and again we have learned through history that unfettered competition and lack of government regulation lead not to the fulfillment of the American Dream for all but to abuses and oppression by the power elite at the expense of the masses.
Not that all government programs are good. It’s a matter of trial and error. The liberal thinking that led to the construction of prison-like housing projects in the 1950s and ‘60s, for example, was severely flawed. But it was flawed in matters of detail, not in its fundamental principle that the government needs to intercede on behalf of the poor and powerless.
Liberalism tells us, in other words, that we need regulations not only to keep the power elite in check but to check our most primal instincts: notably, prejudice—a human trait that is as natural as they come but must not be allowed to shape public policy. Thus, the necessity of laws dealing with equal rights and opportunity.
The clash between liberalism and conservatism will continue. And I’m not suggesting that conservatism is entirely a bad thing. I think of it as analogous to the brakes on a car, which are sometimes necessary to prevent us from moving too quickly. But we need to move forward, nevertheless—and history tells us that we will continue to do so in an ongoing effort to bring to fruition the liberal essence of the American Idea.
