When I was young, there was an old saying that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged. I suspect that the debates between liberals and conservatives are especially fierce precisely because they are generally based on genetics and random life experiences, not rational thought.
Along these lines, a Politico article by Rich Lowry caught my eye:
The intellectual fashion among populists and religious traditionalists has been to attempt to forge a post-liberty or “post-liberal” agenda to forge a deeper foundation for the new Republican Party. Instead of obsessing over freedom and rights, conservatives would look to government to protect the common good.
This project, though, has been rocked by its first real-life encounter with governments acting to protect, as they see it, the common good.
One of its architects, the editor of the religious journal First Things, R.R. Reno, has sounded like one of the libertarians he so scorns during the crisis. First, he complained he might get shamed if he were to host a dinner party during the height of the pandemic, although delaying a party would seem a small price to pay for someone so intensely committed to the common good.
More recently, he went on a tirade against wearing masks. Reno is apparently fine with a much stronger government, as long as it never issues public-health guidance not to his liking. Then, it’s to the barricades for liberty, damn it.
Ouch! Lowry and Reno are both conservatives, but I’m guessing they are not the best of friends.
PS: Tom Wolfe’s version is pretty close to the sentiments in this post:
If a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested.
READER COMMENTS
Steve
Jun 1 2020 at 4:56pm
I posted something similar to my Facebook page. Welcoming all of my new, non-mask-wearing lovers of liberty, and reminding them come November to vote for liberty in whatever form it may present itself, even if it doesn’t directly sway things towards their self-interest (e.g. I hate smoking but will not vote for a smoking ban, and did exactly that in the mid-2000s.).
Sadly, I know all of this love for liberty will evaporate by then, and we’ll be back to restricting freedoms based on whatever frankenstein of a world view the two predominant parties have cobbled together…
Scott Sumner
Jun 1 2020 at 5:15pm
I’m a lover of liberty who opposes smoking bans. But I freely choose to wear a mask when shopping, and advocated masks back when the experts opposed them, so I guess I’m not welcome.
Steve
Jun 1 2020 at 6:06pm
In case I wasn’t clear – I support wearing masks as a reasonable, low-cost intervention (I went to my gym for the first time today and I was the only person other than the employees who kept my mask on…) and maybe as a wishy-washy “small l” libertarian don’t particularly care if I am told I have to wear one.
I was merely pointing out that there seems to be this large crowd of people out there chanting “FREEDOM” when what they actually mean is “this particular government decree (wearing masks/closing businesses) negatively affects me so I am against it”.
Was hoping to convey to that crowd that they should think about liberty in a more global sense, rather than just how it personally affects them.
Scott Sumner
Jun 1 2020 at 10:47pm
OK, I guess I read that too quickly.
derek
Jun 2 2020 at 12:37pm
I’m not 100% sure that smoking bans are properly thought of as government policy. I think of them as a decision made by local service industry coalitions, not just staff trying to avoid secondhand smoke but also establishment owners wanting to maximize profits. I was in the bar-attending phase of my life as smoking bans began to be rolled out, and I will tell you that I patronized bars far more frequently once smoking bans were rolled out; the awfulness of coming home smelling like “bar” disappeared. Today, I would never consider going to an indoor bar, restaurant, or other venue that allowed smoking, and it would be financial suicide for most establishments to allow indoor smoking, even for many places catering to smoking-heavy populations.
Personally, I am good with mask mandates and smoking bans, as I think that secondhand smoke is a valid health concern for staff; this isn’t an “I’m only hurting myself” issue like sugary soda. Mask mandates make a lot of sense for indoor areas, and I am very willing to make that trade for reopening to progress.
When I criticize, it is usually less “rights can never be infringed” or “the social safety net can never let anyone slip through”, and usually more “this specific policy is badly thought out or badly executed”.
Scott Sumner
Jun 2 2020 at 1:51pm
The Coase theorem says that isn’t really a role for government in regulating second hand smoke. Private firms already have an incentive to adopt the optimal policy.
Matthias Görgens
Jun 6 2020 at 10:52am
Scott, Coase doesn’t tell you much about transaction costs, though.
It’s somewhat interesting that most bars used to allow smoking, then the bans came, and now going back would be nigh unthinkable.
That doesn’t gel well with a simple market explanation, and Coase theorem makes it only weirder.
I suspect the government policy shaped preferences in some way over time?
Similar to how the heavy suppression of religion in East Germany and many other Eastern Block countries apparently lead to less demand for religion.
Or perhaps there are network effects involved in both cases?
(Though what’s the network effect for smoking in bars?)
Mark Z
Jun 7 2020 at 3:00am
Matthias, Robert Frank has argued that, whether due to government government policy or changing social norms, that there was a large scale change in preferences (basically, whether one smokes is determined largely by peer pressure, so a decrease in smoking rates can become a ‘virtuous cycle’). So the more you suppress smoking, the more the preference for smoking disappears, which might explain the shift. Frank also argues that ‘peer-pressure induced’ preferences are can be regarded as irrational and thus only smokers whose smoking is highly invariant to whether people around them smoke are really ‘rational smokers,’ and thus we should tax smoking due to the behavioral externality of inducing others to smoke despite their ‘true’ (peer-pressure invariant) preferences. (though I was impressed by his analysis, I’m skeptical of his normative conclusions).
Thomas Hutcheson
Jun 2 2020 at 8:46am
I do not think you should necessarily welcome your non-mask-wearing friends. Should your friends (or you) be so sure that they are not asymptomatic carriers of Covid-19 as not to undertake the small inconvenience of wearing a mask to reduce the risk that they will inadvertently infect someone else? And even if your friends are very sure, shouldn’t they wear a mask anyway because the people they encounter cannot be sure that your friends cannot infect them?
Steve
Jun 2 2020 at 10:25am
It seems clear I didn’t explain this well enough…sorry 🙂
I meant welcoming my non-mask-wearing friends to the ‘I love liberty!’ fan club. Not literally inviting them over to my house because I don’t care about COVID. Making a point that they are talking like libertarians, but I know deep down they are only acting this way because it negatively affects them, not because they actually care about liberty and freedom in a larger sense.
Thomas Hutcheson
Jun 4 2020 at 3:05pm
I meant that not wearing a mask shoes nothing about Libertarian principles. A mask is to protect other people, not the wearer. A willingness to do harm to others is not a Libertarian value as I understand it.
Mark Z
Jun 1 2020 at 7:27pm
I read a lot of big name communitarians’ writing when I was in college (including articles in First Things) and their affection for government or for ‘community’ almost always seems to be for those things as the communitarian would design them if he were king, rather than as they are in the real world. Reno is experiencing a collision between the state as he would design it and the state as it is. That realization, that one’s ideal state or society is unachievable (not least because not everyone shares even the ideal) should really incline one away from state perfectionism in practice. And especially when you’re increasingly an embattled minority – like culturally conservative Catholics like Reno – classical liberal ideas like pluralism and limited government should be all the more appealing.
Roger McKinney
Jun 1 2020 at 8:07pm
“Conservatives are liberals mugged by reality” rings with truth because most young people are socialists so most conservatives were once socialist. Few conservatives convert to socialism and few get arrested. The real source and power of socialism is envy.
Mark
Jun 1 2020 at 11:16pm
Actually, I was in some conservative groups in college and I’d say at least a quarter of the people in those groups now identify as liberal or at least not-conservative. And most of the people who were liberal in college are even more liberal now. Reality has mugged young people in a number of ways that make them more liberal. I’d say the number one way was student loans/job disappointment. The number two way was seeing how mean-spirited and/or conspiratorial a lot of the conservative movement has become and just not wanting to be part of that. And the number three way was the number of people who had friendships or relationships with non-whites and learned about their racial problems, or with foreigners and spent years with their relationship in immigration limbo.
Mark Z
Jun 2 2020 at 1:05am
“most young people are socialists so most conservatives were once socialist.”
This doesn’t follow. If we grant that most young people are at least somewhat sympathetic to socialism – which may be sort of true if we believe some opinion polls, it may be around 50-60% or so – the future conservatives are mostly the remaining 40-50% who aren’t sympathetic to socialism even in college. Most people do tend to become somewhat more conservative once they start to make more money, pay more taxes, have kids, move to the suburbs, etc. but I’d guess the fraction of socialists who ever become conservative (or libertarian) or the fraction of conservatives who were once socialist is pretty negligible. I’d also expect even this trend to diminish as political self-sorting intensifies (e.g., as young progressives increasingly move to gentrified urban neighborhoods that are generally as left-wing as a college campus rather than to the comparatively conservative suburbs)
Thomas B
Jun 2 2020 at 12:17pm
Mark Z,
“I’d guess the fraction of socialists who ever become conservative (or libertarian)… is pretty negligible”
My observation has been that I’ve known quite a few people who’ve hung onto the identity long after they had abandoned the practice – especially, in my view, because they adopted the identity in the first place because it seemed like a “caring” one. A college friend, a dedicated progressive, got a much better job offer than he had ever expected to get on graduation, and I watched his face fall suddenly as a thought occurred to him. The next sentence out of his mouth: “what can you tell me about tax shields?” Another college kid, who wore tie-tye and no shoes and who condemned America as a capitalist wasteland, is today a retired hedge fund investor, and I’ve heard him quite bitterly condemn government interference in markets. An older relative, a lifelong member of the socialist party, has adopted very different language since his son started his own business. Another older relative, a lifelong union activist, now on the board of a not-for-profit, has also adopted some very different language as a result of that experience. Would any of them say they are “conservatives” or “libertarians”? Probably not. But their youthful – and even middle-aged – views were changed by contact with reality.
And I’ve also seen anarcho-capitalists become moderates.
So maybe it’s simply that people with simplistic views about political structures have a tendency to develop more complex views over time?
TMC
Jun 2 2020 at 12:36pm
Quite right, maybe it should be a conservative is a liberal who has learned from experience.
Mark Z
Jun 3 2020 at 4:51am
I don’t doubt many, maybe even most socialists become more moderate as they get older, I just doubt many undergo a conscious, full-scale conversion. Moreover, in my experience a typical bourgeois socialist (some of the ones I’ve known at least) has no compunction about minimizing his taxes and maximizing his income. I don’t think they even view it as particularly hypocritical to get as much as one can out of capitalism even as one desires its downfall. In fact most of the socialists I’ve met have had pretty good jobs at private companies they don’t think should exist. Just as my affection for free markets would not discourage me from taking a rent controlled apartment if I can get one.
Thomas Hutcheson
Jun 2 2020 at 8:52am
Few people 0f any belief system convert to Socialism. If the appeal of Socialism were envy it would not be practically nonexistent.
Phil H
Jun 2 2020 at 10:01pm
For me, this is where the mainstream right-wing political parties are falling down. Because the point of a representative democracy is that the people who do the governing have to have some ability to think themselves into the shoes of other people. Conservatives seem to have this chronic inability to do that. They were mugged once, therefore they are conservatives. They get arrested, therefore they become liberal. It’s all very me-centric – the theme is that a conservative can’t “get” an ideology unless it comes directly out of their own personal experience.
The point of political parties is to balance that out: put lots of conservatives in a room together, and some of them have been arrested, so they should make the conservative party more liberal. Some of them will have gay family members, so they’ll make the party less bigoted. Some of them will be women, so the party as a whole can be something other than neanderthal in its sexual politics, even if many individual members remain unreconstructed. Some will come from a business background; some from law enforcement. The market vs authoritarian impulses should come to some kind of balance.
My observation is that this mechanism seems to have broken down a bit in the Republicans and the Conservatives. The leaders they elect are idiots or chinless wonders; the policies they adopt no longer seem to be able to take into consideration even the different experiences of conservatives, let alone the other half of the country.
Anonymous
Jun 3 2020 at 1:35pm
If I recall, there have been some studies that showed right-wingers generally had a much better understanding of the points of view of their ideological opponents than left-wingers.
Mark Z
Jun 3 2020 at 5:55pm
What you’re describing is a characteristic of human beings in general, not a peculiarity of any political ideology. Most people tend to reason from personal experience. Many people would unfortunately probably have to, for example, own a small business to realize they shouldn’t rationalize rioting or looting.
I get that everyone believes that people on their side of the spectrum are more empathetic than those on the other side. But it seems pointless to assert in any case, since obviously no one who isn’t already on one’s side will ever agree with the claim, otherwise they wouldn’t be on the side they’re on.
Phil H
Jun 3 2020 at 8:24pm
Of course that’s right, and I assume that I am guilty of some selective blindness on this issue.
However, on an institutional level, look at the thing that the right loves to criticise the left for these days: wokeness. Wokeness is a whole ideology, a whole way of thinking, based precisely around trying to understand and react to the pain of people who aren’t like me. It’s men trying to be feminists, white people trying to be antiracist, straight people trying to be allies.
Of course, this can lead to some ridiculous moments, as you’ve no doubt observed! But the point is that it’s a conscious, social, and to some extent institutionalised attempt to be empathetic.
I agree with you that self-centeredness is a universal human characteristic. On the left, we’ve got a (flawed but powerful) way of working around its limitations. I don’t see what the right is doing; in fact the right seems to be retreating more strongly into a divisive form of identity politics. This seems to me to be an important difference between the two wings.
Mark Z
Jun 3 2020 at 10:25pm
“But the point is that it’s a conscious, social, and to some extent institutionalised attempt to be empathetic.”
I don’t doubt that that’s the ‘woke’ definition of ‘wokeness’, but its critics see it as a new form of collectivism which merely inverts traditional forms of bigotry and is similarly selective in its assessment of worthiness of empathy. I don’t think that’s a dispute we can resolve though, since everyone tends to view the excesses of his own camp as incidental, isolated, perhaps well-intentioned mistakes, and the excesses of his enemy’s camp as ‘the mask slipping’ reflecting their very essence. Two sides will never agree on who or what is the appropriate synecdoche for each other’s ideologies. My opinion, of course, is that left as much as the right has been retreating heavily into identity politics in the last decade, so I can’t say I agree that it’s been a very powerful tool in maintaining empathy. I’m not sure it’s really selfishness that concerns me most; I’m pretty convinced of Bryan Caplan’s model of political behavior as being largely about group-based identity and perceived group-interests, and I don’t think anyone has a powerful tool yet for dealing with the natural tendency of people to form in-groups and define themselves in terms of their opposition to out-groups.
Phil H
Jun 9 2020 at 10:25pm
“I don’t think anyone has a powerful tool yet for dealing with the natural tendency of people to form in-groups”
Indeed, let us hope and pray that they never do, because that would be the end of families, companies, clubs, and really all the institutions that make society work.
nobody.really
Jun 3 2020 at 10:06am
From March-May, 2020, First Things published an exchange between its senior editor Matthew Schmitz and law prof Douglas Laycock about whether the 1st Amendment’s Free Exercise clause defends “the right to be wrong.”
Schmitz seems to argue that the 1st Amendment merely defends the right to be RIGHT–where “right” means the right to embrace the kind of religion that Schmitz approves of. That is, Schmitz argues that any effort to enforce the 1st Amendment must face limits, and that those limits must reflect someone’s values, so it is inevitable that the 1st Amendment will be enforced in a biased fashion. He asks, in effect, why should Christian’s not embrace this inevitable fact and demand that the bias favor themselves?
You won’t be surprised to learn that Prof. Laycock expressed a different point of view. He argues that we should implement the Free Exercise clause in accordance with content-neutral principles, imposing substantial burdens only to the extent necessary to achieve a compelling government interest. Questions about the “truth” of someone’s faith, or whether we approve of it, should not really enter into the discussion.
A famous Supreme Court dissent argued that the 1st Amendment defends not merely freedom for the thought we like, but freedom for the thought we hate. Likewise, in my First Things comments (before I was banned), I regularly argued that religious freedom necessarily entails freedom for the religion we hate. If you haven’t wrestled with that fact, then you haven’t wrestled with freedom of religion.
Mark Z
Jun 3 2020 at 6:04pm
This sentiment is really odd for the First Things crowd. Conservative Catholics are not a growing demographic, their prospects for taking over the country grow dimmer by the year, and they become more and more of an embattled minority. When that happens to you, the only rational thing to do is become more libertarian and embrace freedom of religion. It makes zero sense for a religious minority to be a theocrat. It’s a strange development because it seems to be that historically, pragmatism has actually held some sway, and embattled religious minorities have been more in favor of religious tolerance, at least at the margin (e.g., Huguenots in France, Catholics in England, Jews in Europe in general). If I were in Opus Dei, I’d be trading in de Maistre of Rothbard these days.
nobody.really
Jun 4 2020 at 3:30pm
The fate of First Things saddens me. Under its first editor, it was an intellectual magazine that struggled with issues of faith. Under editor R.R. Reno, it has become a faith magazine that feigns concern for the intellect. Especially in comments, statements of dogma seem to predominate over statements of reason. Which I find curious given that Reno, a conservative Catholic, has declined to raise his kids in the faith. That suggests that Reno should appreciate the need for nuance in religious matters–yet the magazine rarely does so.
I have to wonder that Reno hasn’t observed the success of Fox News and Donald Trump, and concluded that the best way to promote magazine sales to those interested in religion is via tribalism. Self-pity and persecution complexes seem to be its bread and butter.
For example, the magazine has been a big forum for “the Benedict Option.” Confronted with the idea that religious people might have to surrender their accustomed prerogatives and live under the same rules as everyone else, the Benedict Option suggests that they might retreat into enclaves rather than endure the burdens of pluralism. As you might imagine, members of various religious minorities have had a good, long chuckle at this conspicuous display of clueless privilege.
Last year the magazine was the forum for objecting to “David Frenchism”–that is, the idea that we should embrace democratic and civic norms even when they don’t lead to the outcomes we favor. If courts uphold same-sex marriage, then why respect the rule of law? Etc.
This year Reno opted to downplay the risks of COVID-19, attacking both policies designed designed to limit its spread, and churches that comply with the policies. After he tweeted “Masks = enforced cowardice,” Twitter deleted his profile.
And these are merely some of the changes that arose since the time they banned me. So much for a journal of the mind.
Thomas Hutcheson
Jun 4 2020 at 4:17pm
My understanding is that there is not a tight link between political preference economic self interest. The strongest opponents of immigration are not recent immigrants who have something to lose from people whose labor is a close substitute for theirs. Midwestern soy farmers support the trade war with China. Lots of rich people support higher personal income taxes.
Mark Z
Jun 5 2020 at 1:25am
Yeah I think you’re right. A modified version of the parable maybe is that someone who is the victim of a crime (or knows lots of people who were) will see crime as a more important issue for society, while someone who’s been arrested views criminal justice reform as a more important issue, not for selfish reasons, but because one may be more interested in saving others from going through things one has experienced or seen people experience than from things they haven’t experienced. Like people donating money to study diseases that killed their loved ones. Obviously not a selfish preference, but still one motivated by personal experience.
nobody.really
Jun 5 2020 at 1:33pm
Somewhat related: Many states bar former convicts from voting. I’d always thought that people who were in the custody of state-sponsored institutions–convicts, soldiers, students, people in public housing or residential mental health facilities–should be the FIRST people to get voting rights, since they experience the most direct consequences of government.
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