Conservatism,
like liberalism, has meant a lot of different things throughout the years. Liberals often point that, during the American Revolution, the Tories - that era's version of conservatives - were against independence. But whatever baggage may be attached to the word , I identify
as a conservative because I believe that the modern American conservative is
devoted to upholding the basic principles that made America a great nation –
protection of the individual rights of life, liberty, and property within a republican
system of government – while the modern liberal often sees these as mere
obstacles to social progress.
It
is my intention in this article to make an exposition on the
principles I have just mentioned, endeavoring to show, first, why the
protection of individual rights must be the central purpose of government, second,
why governments that do more or less than this become instruments for
oppression of the many by the few, and third, who the Forgotten Man is and why
conservatives must be mindful of him.
The
Centrality of Individual Rights
The
centrality of individual rights in the conservative ideology cannot be
overstressed. As written into our nation’s founding law, “We hold these truths
to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by
their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life,
Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness – That to secure these rights, Governments
are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the
governed…”
Some
intellectuals have made quite a pastime of deriding the concept of individual rights
as the foundation of political ethics. Many thinkers, operating on the basis
that the whole is more important than the part, reject individual rights in
favor of collectivism.
Consider, for instance,
the mid-20th-century psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, who developed a
theory of six stages of moral reasoning, each more enlightened than the last.
Beginning at blind egoism, Kohlberg’s hierarchy advances to a moral philosophy
based on respect for the rights of one’s fellow men. However, this is only
stage five; specific legal rights are discarded in stage six in favor of
universal, abstract ethical values and principles.
I believe that there is
a serious problem with this line of thought. Naturally, people disagree on what
is best for the community of which they are a part, and they rarely come to a
consensus on which ethical values are of the most importance, or how an
abstract guiding principle should be made into concrete policy. So if a
commonwealth lacks any constitution more rigid than ‘Take care of people,’
‘Respect human dignity,’ ‘Do what is reasonable,’ ‘‘find a moderate solution’,
or ‘Be on the right side of history,’ then inevitably there will arise a ruling
class which, proclaiming their own interpretation of these ideals to be the
only legitimate one, will crush all others beneath their iron heels.
The only alternative is
government based on individual rights – the bold notion that whatever my own
ideas are about what is the best way to live or how an individual can best
serve his community, I must respect the life, liberty, property, economic and
religious freedom, political franchise, and other rights of my fellow men. I
must respect these rights even if I disagree with the way they are using them,
because that is the only way I can justly expect them to respect my rights
That is not to say that
abstract values such as caring, respect, dignity, reason, and progress are
unimportant, only that they are not politically enforceable and must remain in
the realm of personal morality, not public law or regulation.
My own personal values will
inform my own decisions. But when it comes to my dealings with my neighbor, I
have got to respect his or her rights: let everyone exercise them in the way
they think best, so long as they respect the rights of others. And those who
desire that more people live their lives in accordance with universal values of
caring, respect, moderation, progress, loyalty, purity, or whatever moral principle is most dear to their hearts, should reject the temptation of trying
to get the government on their side, and instead rely on the gentler methods of
persuasion to bring about their worthy ends.
We should by all means
avoid rash appeals to the coercive power of the state, which destroys the
equality of men and the peace of society and all too often places the resources
of the entire community in the hands of its cruelest and most power-hungry inhabitants.
Proper
Role of Government
The
conservative ideal with regard to the role of government, especially the large,
distant federal government, is that governmental force should be used only when
necessary to defend our God-given rights and freedoms from those who desire to
destroy them.
Whatever notions a
particular class of people might entertain, of using state power to advance its
own social or economic standing at the expense of others, should be abandoned.
These notions must give way to a quiet faith that the common man, working alone
or in voluntary associations, can in nearly all cases govern his economic,
moral, spiritual and intellectual life in a better way than the state can.
The
antithesis to this idea, the premise of modern liberalism, is to routinely call
upon government as the only remedy to a grab-bag of highly-visible social and economic ills.
There is no respect for individual rights, no cautious deference to the independence
of those who are out of step with the agenda. As the introductory video from
the 2012 Democratic National Convention put it, “Government is the only thing
we all belong to.”
It
is indeed an ugly thing when a party thinks lightly of the use of force and
violence – which is what all government power is – to achieve unity and
progress, and it belies the extreme illiberalism of the modern liberal
movement.
Equally ugly is the way
in which Democrats often argue for their policies: claiming to feel compassion
for the victims of some high-profile injustice (be it real or imaginary), they
present, as the only reasonable solution, some new curtailment of individual
rights. Anyone who questions the effectiveness of the proposal, or doubts the
morality of imposing it through government fiat, or dares to call attention to
the forgotten man who, though he never figures into the official calculations,
would nevertheless bear the brunt of the new policy’s costs, is branded as
heartless and mean.
The
Forgotten Man
At this point it is
worth setting the record straight concerning the Forgotten Man, who he is, and
what kind of relationship he has with the government. Those who are politically savvy
might be familiar with the term from New Deal rhetoric, but it really goes back
much further, to an 1876 essay by Yale professor William Graham Sumner, who
described him as follows, using pithy algebraic notation:
“As
soon as A observes something which seems to him wrong, from which X is
suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed
to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine what C
shall do for X, or, in better case, what A, B, and C shall do for X... What I
want to do is to look up C. I want to show you what manner of man he is. I call
him the Forgotten Man. perhaps the appellation is not strictly correct. He is
the man who never is thought of.... I call him the Forgotten Man... He works,
he votes, generally he prays—but he always pays...”
Thus Professor Sumner
endeavors to show how compassion for a few highly visible cases of suffering,
combined with indifference toward the many unseen people on the other side of
the issue, is the cause for great evil in our political system. It is rather
unfortunate that Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal liberals turned this
concept on its head, and made X, rather than C, the Forgotten Man, thereby
making the analogy into a mere tool for promoting the kinds of policies which
Sumner found abhorrent.
For the true Forgotten Man is not the one whose
concerns a liberal politician (or any politician) is championing – he is the
man who is too obscure, unpopular, or just plain ordinary for any politician to
care about. The only way to protect the Forgotten Man is to hold fast to the
very conservative principle that the universal rights to life, liberty, and
property must take priority over the demands of loud and well-connected
interest groups that seek special rights and privileges for themselves at the
expense of others.
To the New Deal liberals,
the Forgotten Man might be a farmer who needs help to get a decent price for
his crops. But to a conservative, the real Forgotten Man is the one who doesn’t
enter into the calculation at all – the ordinary working man, struggling to
make ends meet, who suddenly sees the cost of food increase when the government
begins paying farmers to burn their crops in an effort to manipulate prices.
In modern times, the Forgotten
Man might be a youth who can’t find work because of minimum wage laws which
force him to compete in the same market with men twice his age, or a single
mother who ekes out a living with multiple part-time jobs, unable to advance to
full-time work because doing so would bring down a mountain of regulations on
the small business employs her.
Concern for the Forgotten
Man – not some specific person or group of people for whom the liberals are
whipping up an emotional frenzy, but the actual Forgotten Man who doesn’t
figure into the political calculations at all – should be the prime concern of
conservatives. And the truly Forgotten Man can be defended only by defending
the rights, freedoms, and autonomy of all citizens – anything else creates
winners and losers.
Liberals, in their
process of political reasoning, may follow a cycle of See-Feel-Solve, seeing an
injustice (real or imaginary), feeling compassion for some, (seldom most, never
all) of the people involved, and solving the problem through an expansion of the
government.
But principled
conservatives must approach things differently, considering both what is seen
and what is not seen, what is felt and what is not felt. Finally, being of a meek
and cautious nature, they must be very wary of proposing a solution that would impose
their own vision of social progress in place of someone else’s inalienable
rights.
Only in a certain type
of country, a country where the fierce protection of individual rights is the
guiding principle of politics, will the Forgotten Man be remembered.
