What kind of classical liberalism does the New Reform Club seek to conserve?

A recent reader sent along that inquiry after finding his way to the New Reform Club thanks to one of the recent Instalanches now regularly triggered by the excellent work done by our co-blogger, Seth Barrett Tillman. While I am sure that my colleagues here at the New Reform Club can each come up with their own take on how our work her ties back to the classical liberal tradition, I thought I would share my own answer to that question. In short, this blog exists to further the classical liberal tradition's orientation to politics and culture: an openness to argument & dialogue, grounded in a normative understanding of human nature, expressed through the language of natural law & natural rights, giving rise to a commitment to government limited in scope but vigorous in its legitimate functions, supported by a society that embraces innovation & individual initiative, mediating institutions and the vitality of traditional bonds of social order found in family, faith & friendship.  

Okay. That was a long sentence. Let's take a breath. Okay, now back to it. 

This approach to political and cultural engagement is most often associated with the political right today, but it not exclusively the preserve of the right. Left-conservatives like Christopher Lasch and Bill Kaufmann have embraced much of its wisdom, as have paleo-conservatives like Russell Kirk and M.E. Bradford. Distributionists like Belloc and Chesterton also fit comfortably within this definition. Belloc perhaps most of all due to his career as a member of Parliament, elected as part of the original Liberal Party in Great Britain, the successor party to the Whigs of blessed memory, which in turn had been the political home of the English statesman and grandfather of modern conservatism Edmund Burke.

As Russell Kirk once commented of Burke, "he was a conservative because he was a liberal." It is in that sense that this blog embodies the grand tradition of classical liberalism.  It avoids the ideological fervor of both modern left-liberalism and both left- and right-libertarianism. It seeks to cultivate the garden of discourse with strong opinions and strong convictions, preferring disagreement to superficial conformity. Embracing the wisdom of the liberal approach to politics that developed in the West in the aftermath of Reformation and Enlightenment, it seeks to conserve those Permanent Things that exist both above and beyond the control of the State, while recognizing the positive role that government plays when active within the proper sphere of its authority. This commitment to the liberal approach to politics is grounded not in relativism or in a sense of the futility of politics to discern moral order, but rather in the understanding that there exists a moral order discernible to human reason through observation of and reflection upon natural law.

And what is this natural law? For this we rely again on the commentary of Russell Kirk, this time from his lecture The Case For and Against Natural Law (1993):

Objectively speaking, natural law, as a term of politics and jurisprudence, may be defined as a loosely knit body of rules of action prescribed by an authority superior to the state. These rules variously (according to the several differing schools of natural-law and natural rights speculation) are derived from divine commandment; from the nature of humankind; from abstract Reason; or from long experience of mankind in community. But natural law does not appertain to states and courts merely. For primarily it is a body of ethical perceptions or rules governing the life of the individual person, quite aside from politics and jurisprudence. [...] The natural law should not be taken for graven Tables of Governance, to be followed to jot and tittle; appealed to in varying circumstances, the law of nature must be applied with high prudence. As Alessandro d'Entreves writes, "The lesson of natural law is in fact nothing but an assertion that law is a part of ethics." And, he concludes "The lesson of natural law [is] simply to remind the jurist of his own limitations.... This point where values and norms coincide, which is the ultimate origin of law and at the same time the beginning of moral life proper, is, I believe, what men for over two thousand years have indicated by the name of natural law." On the one hand, natural law must be distinguished from positive or statutory law, decreed by the state; on the other, from the "laws of nature" in a scientific sense -- that is, from propositions expressing the regular order of certain natural phenomena. Also natural law sometimes is confounded with assertions of "natural rights," which may or may not be founded upon classical and medieval concepts of natural law.

Acknowledgement of natural law, the avoidance of ideological dogmatism, the adherence to tradition, and an understanding that this side of heaven, change is inevitable and reform desirable mark this blog's approach to the issues of the day.  At the same time, this blog recognizes that constructive reform preserves a continuity with the past that is integrated rather than fragmented. Beneficial reform does not embrace disruptive change for the sake of disruption. All of us stand or fall as part of a great chain of being that links our ancestry with future generations. To uphold these bonds, these mystic cords (to borrow a phrase from Lincoln), is the task of everyone who identifies as a classical liberal. It is also the task of the New Reform Club. 

Edmund Burke, that great conservative and great liberal, would expect no less. 

Libertarianism isn't the same thing as classical liberalism

The often-identified-as-libertarian scholar Richard Epstein makes that point in this post from 2014: My Rand Paul Problem.  As Epstein, one of today's intellectual leaders exploring free markets & smaller government, notes well, libertarianism often overlooks the complexity of modern life in favor of a simplistic & overly naive understanding of human behavior and society. Specifically, libertarianism's rejection of the legitimate authority of the State to enforce basic & fundamental norms overlooks the problem of what Epstein calls "holdouts" -- those who will not refrain from violence or other anti-social behavior:

The sad experience of history is that high transaction costs and nonstop opportunism wreck the widespread voluntary effort to create a grand social alliance to limit the use of force. Society needs a coercive mechanism strong enough to keep defectors in line, but fair enough to command the allegiance of individuals, who must share the costs of creating that larger and mutually beneficial social order. The social contract that Locke said brought individuals out of the state of nature was one such device. The want of individual consent was displaced by a consciously designed substantive program to protect both liberty and property in ways that left all members of society better off than they were in the state of nature. Only constrained coercion can overcome the holdout problems needed to implement any principle of nonaggression.

Epstein holes libertarianism below the water-line with that observation, grounded as it in in the prudential understanding of human nature that undergirds not only the classical liberal approach to politics but also the conservative approach as well.  Like its kissing cousin modern liberalism, libertarianism in practice denies the existence of sin or evil within human nature. And this denial has a host of concrete policy implications, as Epstein explains. The holdouts -- the anti-social and violent that will always be part of human society this side of heaven -- make a libertarian vision of society based purely on voluntary non-aggression impossible. Given human nature, such a society would invariably result in the strong preying on the weak, the sociopathic running riot among the decent. Indeed, it will not be society at all, but rather will be a state where human community will be dissolved to the point of, to use Thomas Hobbes' phrase, "a war of all against all."

As the Prophet Isaiah teaches, the wolf will indeed one day dwell with the lamb (Isaiah 11:6), but only when the fullness of God's reign is established. Until that happy day, human beings live in a fallen and sinful world, where the State is sometimes necessary to restrain the wicked and encourage virtue.

A Liberal Against Leftism, or: I am a scumbag

(Executive Summary: If justice becomes our primary concern, we'll all be in jail and there will be nobody left to feed or protect us.)

A buddy of mine recently wrote that conservatives have been wrong about virtually everything over the last 50 years. A strong and sweeping statement, but that's cool. I like strong and sweeping, as it often holds more truth than weak and mealy-mouthed.

It's hard to know what conservative means. If it means opposing radical change, then yeah, I plead guilty. If being a conservative means opposing all progress, well, I wouldn't want to be caught dead in a field with one.

Conservative commonly means defending the status quo, and since the world is not as good as it can be, conservativism cannot be the embodiment of good. And where conservative can become a catchall for all the imperfect or even bad in the status quo, liberalism can be a catchall for all things good.

It's clear that America as a whole has embraced the New Deal as a good and desirable safety net for the weakest among us, so liberalism in the FDR sense has captured and defines the American center. Even Edmund Burke, the philosophical godfather of conservatives, acknowledged the need for change as essential to the life of a nation or a people, and both he and the reputed apostle of capitalism, Adam Smith, saw the need to make provision for the poor as both a moral and practical imperative. We may properly call them classical liberals.

Many conservatives think of themselves as classical liberals, at least the best of them, and in economics, free markets and personal enterprise are often referred to as neo-liberal. The conservatives in Australia are known as the Liberal Party. Rhetorically, when liberal equals good, everybody wants to be a liberal.

Hey, I'm a liberal. I can live with that.

What's troubled me about the current vocabulary is that there is a difference between liberal and left. Conservative is routinely used in contradistinction to both, which lessens its accuracy. By that standard, almost anything can become conservative. For instance, the radical Islamic revolutionary mullahs in Iran, although also anti-liberal, are now "right-wing" in the common media parlance. But conservative might be most properly used in contradistinction to radicalism, and Iran's in particular.

Lyndon Johnson's Great Society in spirit is/was liberal for instance, to lift the lowest, and as one of FDR's Four Freedoms, it pursues the freedom from want. One of the two children secreted under the robes of Dickens' Ghost of Christmas Present was Want.

The other was Ignorance. Had Dickens lived another 100 years later, he'd've had to include their evil triplet, leftism, which combines and maximizes the worst features of both. Its willful ignorance of human nature serves only to increase, not alleviate, human want.

What Hugo Chavez is up to in Venezuela right now, bringing the economy under control of the state, is leftist, radical, and supposedly in the name of justice, of homogenization. This equals that equals you equals me. Because he has decreed what everything should cost, the grocery store shelves are empty of everything that people tend to like and can still afford. All that's left is filet mignon and canned turnips, the sublime and the ridiculous.

What the classical liberal seeks to liberate is the human potential, our individual talents and pursuit of our individual excellences, but leftism is another kettle of fish altogether. If America is not a melting pot but a seafood salad or a cioppino, think of putting one in your Cuisinart. Ick. They're trying to feed us Purina Human Chow, and no matter how tasty it is at first, it's disgusting after a mouthful or two.


The question becomes whether progressivism as a politics, when its end becomes justice and not charity, saps its host society of its dynamism and cohesion.


And so, per Edmund Burke, I find myself a conservative and a liberal on the same day. Conservativism, when used in its best sense, is not opposed to change but to radical change, which is why, unlike the more radical Thomas Jefferson, the French Revolution scared the bejesus out of Burke.

Although the tension is often unbearable, change and status quo must remain in tension, so we may sort out babies and bathwater. So I'm conservative not out of dogma, but because as Burke would note, once the baby's tossed, you seldom get it back. The inevitable consequence of radicalism, of leftism, and of Chavez and Marxism in particular, is that babies get tossed, usually off the highest floor.

By disposition, conservatives don't do anything, which is their failing and their virtue. They aren't creative towards the problems of our condition. Not progressive, if you will.

On the other hand, that's not their role. It's not fair to judge them on what they "do," but on what they by persuasion or obstruction prevent. You might say conservatives are the condoms of the human race. History doesn't reveal its alternatives, and prophylactics don't come with a printout with all the bad things that didn't happen because of them.

I can live with that, too.