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Susan Sontag on America
It is the genius of the United States, a profoundly conservative country in ways that Europeans find difficult to fathom, to have elaborated a form of conservative thinking that celebrates the new rather than the old.
That is from Susan Sontag's new At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches. This volume is not her best work, but it is still better than what almost anyone else comes up with.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on March 13, 2007 at 09:11 PM in Books, Political Science | Permalink
Comments
That's a great line, but doesn't it undermine its own premise? I've noticed for a long time now that my most "liberal" friends are the most change-averse in almost every area outside of gay marriage.
Posted by: Dan at Mar 14, 2007 9:49:31 AM
Is she confusing "conservative" with "libertarian?"
Posted by: Christopher Monnier at Mar 14, 2007 3:42:59 PM
The words "conservative" and "liberal" mean pretty much whatever the person using them want them to mean. Less so with "libertarian".
I had to work recently with a self-described "liberal" who I deemed to be a "leftard". He was so change-adverse he complained about the state revising a highway number, and giggled when I told him that was a conservative opinion.
Posted by: triticale at Mar 14, 2007 6:18:31 PM
The US is a "profoundly conservative country." What does that even mean?
Posted by: gab at Mar 15, 2007 2:21:16 PM
I suspect, gab, that it means that we are more religiously conservative (ie, higher incidence in the US of believing that evolution isn't real, or that the world is 6,000 years old) and more instinctively hostile to government efforts to change things than Western Europeans. Is that a fair assessment?
Posted by: Elvis Elvisberg at Mar 15, 2007 4:10:16 PM
Rather, I think Sontag means "profoundly conservative country" to reference the framework within which our politics has operated since 1787: the Constitution. That framework embodies the Old Whig viewpoint as rethought by Madison and his ilk out of the Scottish Enlightenment. Checks and balances is our shorthand for it. That the anti-Federalists slipped into the "new" system so easily and ran it so well suggests that the arguments were not about what church to belong to but with how to arrange the pews therein. [A Machine That Would Go of Itself : The Constitution in American Culture by Michael G. Kammen.] Within that secured commonly agreed upon framework, the energies that could produce the NEW were unlikely to get focused on political revolution. The last line might then be more accurately "that enables the celebration of the new". The one true political revolution that has occurred was occasioned by the defense of the truly old--slavery.
Posted by: Robert M. at Mar 15, 2007 4:55:35 PM
Conservatives can be very silly people sometimes. I don't know what liberals some of your posters have met, but the ones I've known have not been terribly resistant to new ideas unless of course we're talking about bad ideas such as invading Iraq, threatening to invade Iran, privatizing Social Security inadequately, etc.
Posted by: Stuart at Mar 15, 2007 5:14:17 PM
Sontag's comment is pithy and penetrating. The trouble is that the word conservative gets used in two sense.
There is being in favour of something that exists. In that sense, most folk are conservative about something. If you are broadly in favour of the existing arrangements of a society, then there is quite a lot you are conservative about.
The second way conservative gets used is to mean a political philosophy or sentiment. I cannot see how conservatism can be a consistent political philosophy without being either capricious (picking and choosing existing things to support) or amoral (supporting things regardless of the moral implications). So I agree with Brad DeLong's recent critique of conservatism, as well as Hayek's classic one.
The US is a liberal founding, so if one is in favour of the US constitutional order, one is, in sense number (1), a conservative. Despite holding positions likely to make one a raging liberal in most times and places. This no doubt doesn’t help, particularly given the strange usage of ‘liberal’ in US politics. (Basically, for politically cross-dressing social democrats.)
A cautious liberal such as Edmund Burke gets treated as a conservative because he is a sense (1) conservative about quite of lot of things, but he is not really a sense (2) conservative.
Given Western civilisation is a very dynamic (and broadly liberal) civilisation, a cautious liberal might well seem the way to be a Western conservative. Particularly in Anglo-America, with its liberal political (and economic) traditions. Conservative in sense (1), not really so much in sense (2). Even more so in the US, since it is has so few pre-liberal institutional elements and is so technophilic.
So Sontag manages to capture a lot of truth about the US in her pithy comment. (The above summarises a post of mine on what is a conservatism.)
And, as an aside, since US liberals are cross-dressing social democrats--so a favourable to an institution notoriously inclined to inertia (government)--of course lots of the changes in a technologically and organisationally dynamic society seem threatening to such. Such changes "need" taming and the taming mechanism is generally trying to play catch-up.
Posted by: Lorenzo at Mar 16, 2007 4:33:23 PM
I think the US is an inherently conservative party. Both major parties are essentially status quo parties, and the differences between them are relatively minor compared to the differences in parties in European systems. Indeed, we do not have any left parties or movements of particular strength or legitimacy.
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