The Perils of Purity

St George and the Dragon by Raphael

George Orwell repeatedly condemned the leftists of his time and place – 1930’s England – for their thoughtless and irresponsible rhetoric: their unreflective pacifism in the face of the fascist menace, their self-deluded justifications of Stalinist brutality, their blithe dismissals of patriotism and middle-class virtue.  Orwell’s insight was that they spoke irresponsibly because they knew they would never achieve any real political power.  Power may corrupt, but marginality breeds recklessness.  And power and marginality distort judgment for the same reason: they insulate one from public accountability.  They both alienate.  Keep that dynamic in mind when you consider the ongoing struggle between the GOP establishment and the Tea Party insurgency.

The Tea Party has lost most of the battles recently, with establishment candidates winning primary elections in Kentucky, North Carolina and Georgia, but the Tea Party forced a runoff in Mississippi (which they just narrowly and bitterly lost).  And on June 10^th one of the pillars of the establishment, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor unthinkably lost his primary race to David Brat, an unknown, hard right economics professor.  Many on the right heralded Cantor’s defeat as a win for the people against the powerful, as David slaying Goliath.  But it was the conservative grass roots that sent Cantor – who is quite conservative – to Congress to fight the right fight, and now they perceive him as a big-government sellout?  In the last few years the Tea Party has successfully moved the Establishment to the right, and there is now precious little programmatic difference between the two.  As John Nichols of the Nation perceives, both rival GOP primary candidates in Mississippi “oppose abortion rights and marriage equality, support restrictive Voter ID laws, promise to oppose minimum-wage hikes, rip ‘Obamacare,’ the IRS, the EPA and OSHA and trash ‘entitlement’ programs.”

But if the fondest desire of both groups is to curtail the welfare state and reduce the national debt, why do Tea Partiers hate their own leaders so?  It’s seems the conflict is largely symbolic and temperamental.  That is, the Establishment sees the national debt and the welfare state as complex realities to be prudentially and incrementally blunted and reduced, while the Tea Party sees them as monsters to be slain.  The grassroots hungers for a crusade.  They love Republican Senator Ted Cruz because he tried to kill Obamacare by shutting down the government and threatening debt default; and they hate Eric Cantor because he buckled and voted to end Cruz’s threat.  But the Establishment doesn’t understand; they want the same things, so why does a mere difference in tactics elicit such acrimony and demand such purity?  Erick Erickson of redstate.com has an answer:

What the circle of jerks in Washington sees as a conservative quest for purity, many of those in flyover country see as fighting against out of touch, entrenched elements in their party who’ve grown far too cozy with lobbyists and Wall Street. The conservative fight in Mississippi, Virginia, Texas, and elsewhere is mocked and ridiculed by a left-leaning and establishment-oriented press when, in reality, it is overwhelmingly a response to a Washington that has grown out of touch. Yes, the grassroots want more conservative members of Congress, but they want them because they believe the people there are in the pockets of special interests and the politicians have abandoned their core beliefs for cash and connections.

That is, Cantor only pretended to want what Cruz wants.  He tried to hoodwink the base with slogans and dishonest ads, but he was more interested in a profitable career of accommodation and obeisance to Wall Street money and Washington power.  But the Tea Party is finally hip to that game.  The GOP pretends to be fighting against the federal Leviathan but only the conservative base really wants to slay the monster.  They pursue purity not out of temperamental indulgence or ideological dogmatism, but out of necessity.  Only the chaste heart, nurtured on the common sense of the common folk, inspired by the love of Constitutional freedom, eager for battle against aristocracies of privilege and power – only such a knight in shining armor can resist the Whore of Babylon that elite America has become.  Purity isn’t the Tea Party’s goal, it’s their weapon.  Righteousness – and the ideological clarity that flows from it – protects them.

It does seem the Tea Party is more serious than the Establishment about ending the welfare state.  But Erickson is kidding himself that purity is merely an instrument for conservatives.  Purity has always been at the heart of American conservatism.  No one can yearn for crusades who isn’t dazzled by his own purity.  To the conservative common folk, America has been corrupted and polluted by sexual license, godlessness, illegal aliens, liberals, the welfare state, etc.  The failure of the Bush administration and the successes of the Obama administration have convinced them that the Republican Party is complicit in that corruption.  What’s the point of a Republican Party if it can’t stop Obamacare?  The Tea Party, as the more perfect distillation of those conservative impulses, is predicated upon the notion that sufficient purification is the solution to all our problems, that purity can be won only by the pure.  Thus their infamous aversion to compromise and conciliation; compromise only pollutes good with evil.  It is the American essence itself that has been compromised and that needs to be purified.  But the GOP must be cleansed before it can become the vehicle for that purification.

But only if real conservatives come to power.  So then why is the man who is replacing Cantor as Majority Leader not a Tea Party purist?  Two ambitious House Tea Partiers made half-hearted attempts, but they were bested by a better-connected and better-organized moderate conservative backed by the Establishment.  As Dana Millbank so nicely explains, a true believer will never learn to work the system as well as a pragmatist.  The failure of the Tea Party to capture Cantor’s post is widely seen as a simple expression of Tea Party weakness within the Republican caucus: there just aren’t enough of them.  But Tea Partiers everywhere were quite angry that Cantor’s primary loss didn’t result in the elevation of one of their own.  They’re even angry at their own Tea Party House conservatives who, as Erick Erickson says, “refused to step up and make a play for leadership, choosing instead to just obstruct.”  The grassroots is ever more eager to topple more GOP leaders.

But maybe that’s why no Tea Partier took the post, because once one does there’s a target on one’s back.  Purity is never sated.  The conservative populism that sees regular folk as pure and Washington and Wall Street as corrupt automatically makes any elected leader – even a Tea Party leader – suspect.  As Michael Warren of the conservative Weekly Standard writes:

As majority leader, Cantor likely expected Republican voters to appreciate their congressman’s proximity to the center of political power in this country. But that’s not what Nancy Russell [chair of one county’s GOP in Cantor’s district] heard from her fellow Virginia Republicans. “I almost feel like they’d rather not have their representative in the leadership,” she says. In a cautionary tale for any ambitious member of Congress, Cantor’s success in Washington was, back home, his ultimate undoing.

The base is so hyper-aware of the temptations of political life – influence-peddling, elitism, cronyism – and so dogmatically and habitually hostile toward any concentration of power that, like right-wing commissars, they constantly scrutinize their leaders for signs of deviationism.  It’s easy to imagine that many Tea Party Congressmen don’t believe leadership is worth the scrutiny.

And the realities of the legislative process demand from its leaders just the sort of compromise and deal-making that the base finds so repellent.  True believers will still come to Congress, maybe even in greater numbers, but true believers make unproductive legislators.  They only make good obstructionists (much to Erickson’s disappointment).  They can shut down the government and refuse to raise the debt ceiling but at the last minute the grown ups have to step in and make sure that the world keeps running.  The less purist, more career-oriented, more realistic conservatives like John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Mitch McConnell understood that Obamacare could not really be stopped and the debt ceiling could not really be breached.  They may be careerists – with Cantor the most slippery and repulsive careerist of them all – but careerism forces them to govern prudentially.  The Tea Partiers – unfettered with the responsibility of actual governance – are free to make outrageous demands and release fire-breathing denunciations of the capitulators.  Pressure from the base may compel even the more sensible leaders to grandstand and take us all to the brink of disaster, but as bearers of responsibility they understood that the business community, the American people, and simple reality dictated their capitulation.

And on some level the purist conservatives must understand that they can only act so irresponsibly because they don’t control the Congress.  On some level they must be grateful that those more pragmatic leaders saved them from their own reckless and irresponsible actions.  And the shrewdest ones among them must know that the American people don’t really want Leviathan to be slain, that most people are happy to receive their Social Security checks and their Medicare reimbursements.  The conservative base is still being conned, but now they’re being conned by their own pure heroes.  And really, of course, they’re conning themselves.  Tea Party hopes are simply incompatible with American political and fiscal reality.  Tea Party Congressmen, demanding government shutdowns and calling their own leaders squishes and RINO’s, are doing the most they can given the present circumstances.  One can either be a purist or a responsible legislator, one cannot be both.  During the campaign Cantor complained to a conservative crowd about Brat’s cheap criticism: “It is easy to sit in the rarefied environs of academia, in the ivory towers of a college campus, with no accountability and no consequence.”  He was answered with jeers.  But how is the Tea Party back bench any less of an ivory tower?

We clearly see the fundamental Tea Party ambivalence toward power.  They desire it and they fear it. They wish to acquire federal power so that federal power can be subdued.  They know they need power to purify America but they’re excessively fearful of the corruption it brings and they’re insufficiently respectful of the responsibility it demands.  And they fear democracy.  They fear its ends – the maintenance and expansion of the welfare state – and they fear its means – compromise, deal-making.  Democracy, like responsibility, is messy and confusing and disillusioning.  It is incompatible with purity.  The Tea Party’s goals are unreachable, their means are romantic and their populism is visceral and immature.  Their only real accomplishment has been to hamper responsible and productive governance. 

And to eat their own.  Brat slew Cantor as David slew Goliath, but he could easily become the next Goliath himself.  He will soon face the choice whether to remain pure or to become effective.  If he chooses the former he consigns himself to futility, though it can easily be a noisy and gratifying futility in which the conservative media complex hails him as a hero.  If he chooses the latter, however, in a few years we’ll be reading bitter right-wing denunciations of “Brat the RINO” and “Brat the sellout” and beholding his primary demise at the hands of a genuine, true, pure, immaculate candidate to his right.  And Eric Cantor will smile.
 

Toward a Smarter Welfare State

“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.” – President Eisenhower

The recent government shutdown and debt ceiling standoff have deepened and illuminated the most important division within conservatism, that between the pragmatists and the radicals.  The latter were only too happy to use any means necessary – even the threat of economic conflagration – to slay the monsters of Obamacare and debt, while the pragmatists understood that political battles are won with more than the simple iron resolve that moral certainty bestows.  That is, the radicals have jettisoned pragmatic considerations almost entirely, as if process and outcome were dirty words, corruptions that only inhibit the full manly functioning of righteous moral strength.  How can you compromise when your enemy is the socialist vanguard pointing like a dagger at the heart of Americanism?  But alas, the real world – a Democratic Senate and president, an anxious business community, an unconvinced public – turned out to be less than tractable to idealistic holy war.  As the pragmatists perceived all along, bravado has its limitations.

But the differences between the pragmatists and radicals are more than merely tactical or stylistic, they are substantive as well.  In the past few weeks a few thinkers on the right have explicitly endorsed the welfare state as created by liberals in the 20^th century.  Here’s Arthur Brooks, president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute:

One of the things, in my view, that we get wrong in the free enterprise movement is this war against the social safety net, which is just insane. The government social safety net for the truly indigent is one of the greatest achievements of our society. And we somehow want to zero out food stamps or something, it’s nuts to want to be doing something like that. We have to declare peace on the safety net.

And James Pethokoukis, Brooks’ colleague at the AEI, acknowledges that without federal welfare programs our recent economic troubles would have impoverished many Americans:

The pain from the Great Recession, as bad it was, would have been far worse for middle- and low-income Americans if we were still in a sort of 1920s, Coolidgean world that many on the right these days seem to long for.

Even hard conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer agrees:

There’s no question of accepting the great achievements of liberalism — the achievements of the New Deal, of Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare.  The idea that you rescue the elderly and don’t allow the elderly to enter into destitution is a consensual idea [accepted by] conservatives, at least the mainstream of conservatives.

When such important conservatives urge a declaration of peace on the social safety net, it’s news!  Until now this has been the position that dare not speak its name, at least not sincerely.  Conservatives constantly issue protestations of support for programs like Social Security and Medicare, but haven’t we known all along they didn’t really mean it?  Liberals, at least, have long suspected as much.  If Brooks, Krauthammer, et al. are urging conservatives to accommodate the New Deal doesn’t that mean that until now they’ve been waging war against it?  Haven’t they been trying to roll it back since, well, since it was created? Certainly Red State writer Erick Erickson understands that the founders of modern American conservatism hoped to roll it back:

The present editors of National Review, over the last several years, have made it clearer and clearer that they now speak mostly for the well-fed [i.e. accommodationist] right and not for conservatives hungering for a fight against the leviathan. They have made their peace with the New Deal, moving beyond Buckley. For that matter, Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, and most of the defunders have largely made their peace with the New Deal. And still National Review is too timid to join the merry band of defunders themselves too timid to approach the parameters under which William F. Buckley started his charge.

To Erickson even the rabid radical insurgent Senators throwing their own bodies into the gears of the welfare state – pledging their sacred honor and risking almost certain presidential candidacy – have too easily resigned themselves to the slow suffocation of liberty that is the welfare state.  Has extremism for its own sake become Erickson’s pre-eminent value?

If the radicals consider Cruz and Lee to be too accommodating then they naturally perceive the welfare state concessions of Brooks, Krauthammer et al. as nothing more than abject surrender to the statist enemy.  To Andrew C. McCarthy of National Review, it’s obvious that all real conservatives oppose the safety net; to accept it is to “deviate significantly from . . . the tradition of Buckley, Goldwater, and Reagan.”  No real conservative could accept “redistributionist schemes that fleece some citizens for the benefit of others.”  McCarthy’s definition of conservatism precludes support for any program based upon progressive taxation, i.e. everything on Krauthammer’s list.  The entire liberal welfare state project is just a huge scam:

The New Deal and its Great Society successor programs, by contrast, are frauds designed to create permanent dependency on government (and fealty to the party of government).

The welfare state is a devious instrument designed to enslave the population.  The well-off are tied down by taxes and regulation and their lessers are urged to discard their self-sufficiency and lounge lazily in the gilded cage of government largesse.  And liberal politicians sit at the top, laughing malevolently as they corrupt the moral principles Americans once held dear:

There is no disciplining or escaping Leviathan. And if, as is inevitable, federal officials expand their outlandish schemes and promise favored constituencies more than they can deliver, they just borrow or print ever more money: Government borrows from its tapped-out self, monetizing its debts, degrading our currency to reward sloth and punish thrift even as it steals from future generations.

Even a onetime moderate like Mitt Romney seemed to actually believe such foolishness, or pretended so to raise money.  But does this McCarthyite nonsense represent the mainstream of conservatism?

Reihan Salam – a genuinely thoughtful conservative, one always worth reading – puts all this in perspective:

Recently, a friend of mine observed that conservatives can be divided into roughly three camps with regards to the idea of a federally-financed social safety net: (1) there are those who oppose it on normative grounds and who believe that political efforts should be geared towards rolling it back; (2) there are those who oppose it on normative grounds yet who recognize that its political entrenchment can’t be wished away, and so they believe that political efforts should be geared towards containing its size, restraining its worst excesses, improving it at the margins, and rolling it back when the opportunity presents itself; and (3) there are those who affirmatively believe that the federal government ought to play a role in financing the safety net, yet who are keen to make it as fiscally sustainable, work-friendly, and pro-growth as possible.

Both the first and second groups – call them purists and pragmatists, respectively – wish to cleanse America of the corruption that is the liberal welfare state; but the pragmatists, daunted by its deep popular support, wish to fight it with prudence and stealth.  The third group – call them technocrats – wants to remake it in conservative fashion.  The purists and the pragmatists differ only in means; the technocrats differ from the other two in ends.  Most of the Tea Party clearly falls into the first group, while most of the GOP establishment falls into groups two and three (or is it only group two?).  Indeed, the goal of the Tea Party is to make the Republicans exclusively purist!  And the purists seem to have trouble distinguishing the pragmatists from the technocrats.  McCarthy, for instance, seems to think the establishment is entirely made of technocrats:

It is not an exaggeration to say the GOP establishment is more sympathetic to Obama’s case for the centralized welfare state than to the Tea Party’s case for limited government and individual liberty.

No, it is quite an exaggeration, as any liberal can attest.  Salam’s categories are quite illuminating. Consider that while many conservatives denounced Romney’s 47% remarks, many supported them.

But the purists are indulging themselves in one great denial fantasy.  Simply put: the welfare state is here to stay.  Conservatives typically make a great show of accepting the sad inevitabilities of human existence – notably social inequality – while decrying the liberal urge to improve society as foolish utopianism.  But isn’t the welfare state, even with its systemic downsides, part of the fabric of society, and a beneficial part, at that?  Doesn’t it make capitalism more humane?  Doesn’t the public – even the Tea Party with their “Keep Government out of my Medicare” signs – demand its continuance? Aren’t purist conservatives – wide-eyed idolaters of virtuous, anarchic capitalism – the true utopians?  The group we’re calling conservative pragmatists are only pragmatic about methods; there is nothing pragmatic about hoping to repeal the New Deal.  Not because the American people would loudly object; but because modern capitalism unfettered by a strong, countervailing welfare state would cause intolerable economic and social suffering.  Indeed, it was the concession to pragmatism – a classic conservative principle from Aristotle to Burke – that brought liberals from their classical free market idealism to the modern welfare state meliorism they now advance, if sometimes in excess.

Ah yes, liberal excess.  Wouldn’t conservatives better serve their country by making themselves the skeptical interrogators of liberal schemes rather than romantic, bomb-throwing revolutionaries determined to blow them up?  Do they wish to destroy America in order to save it, or do they wish to really make it better?  Conservatives are painfully aware that the real world, with its overwhelming complications and obstinate unpredictability can confound the noblest and best researched reform plans.  Humans have a way of undermining the most incisive sociology.  Which isn’t to say that no program can be well designed or positively beneficial; many are.  It’s to say that of all the contributions that conservatives might be disposed to make to our arguments over the structure and scope of our national welfare state, the most helpful is keeping liberals humble.  Constructive conservatism can keep liberal feet on the ground.  And it could force liberal awareness of the genuine moral dangers – dependency, rent-seeking, alienation – lurking behind all welfare programs; not in order to sabotage those programs, but to strengthen them.  Together, hopeful liberalism and cautious conservatism could forge a smarter welfare state.

And liberals must learn not to confuse constructive, technocratic conservatives with the pragmatic or purist ones.  Not all conservative welfare proposals are demolition plans in disguise.  Though, sad to say, many are.  Does anyone really believe that George W. Bush proposed the partial privatization of Social Security in 2005 in order to save Social Security rather than starve it of funds?  And no reasonable person can mistake Paul Ryan’s plan to turn Medicare into a system of ever-less-valuable vouchers for a plan to save that program, despite protestations to the contrary.  Even if ideologues like McCarthy find Ryan’s proposal much too welfare-friendly, the numbers simply prove otherwise.  And all the recent supposed panic over the size of the national debt is primarily a technocratic excuse for the purist desire to reduce spending; if the debt was their real concern conservatives would be only too happy to raise taxes as well. Liberals can be forgiven for not trusting technocrats when the principal intent of the pragmatists is to trick people into thinking they’re technocrats!  The best recent example of liberals reaching out to conservative technocracy is the Obamacare saga.  President Obama, the Conciliator in Chief, crafted a market-friendly health insurance program originally proposed by seemingly genuine technocrats in reputably conservative think tanks, successfully launched in Massachusetts by its genuinely technocratic Republican governor, and supported by a whole host of (quite transparently) pragmatic conservative heavyweights.  What did liberals get for their attempted compromise?  Purist stonewalling, mendacious propaganda and McCarthyite paranoia.  At any stage in the legislative process conservatives could have joined in and helped improve Obamacare; even now they stubbornly refuse to do so.

How can liberals hope to deal in good faith with a party so dominated by purists and pragmatists?  A party in which the purists think their own pragmatists are traitors to the essence of America?  A party whose pragmatists deliberately conceal their true purist intentions?  Genuine conservative technocracy seems as elusive a mirage as the purist dream of a dismantled welfare state.  We seem to be stuck for the foreseeable future with a Republican Party and a conservative movement in thrall to populist Tea Party purism.  And we see now that the real conservative divide is not, as is normally understood, that with purists on one side and pragmatists and technocrats on the other.  Rather it’s between those who would – with whatever tactics – undermine the welfare state and those who would improve it, between conservatism as a small-government crusade and conservatism as accommodation to the real world.  But this is quite an uneven division; adult conservatism seems to exist only among a very few thoughtful writers, like Reihan Salam, Conor Friedersdorf, Daniel Larison, Russ Douthat, David Brooks.

If there is hope it resides with what some have called Sam's Club Republicans; that is, working class whites with generally conservative instincts who nevertheless wish the federal government would do more to ameliorate their tough economic conditions.  Such a group might make a respectable constituency for a genuinely technocratic Republican Party.  For the moment they seem to lack the populist passion displayed by their upscale, better-educated Tea Party overlords; but a smart politician might appeal to them with a technocratic program that satisfies both their instincts and their interests.  There are perfectly workable and sustainable conservative technocratic proposals, as Obamacare itself is beginning to show (alarmism to the contrary). Widespread support for a moderated welfare state would go a long way toward marginalizing Tea Party purism and easing the unbearable polarization that causes us so much grief.   The welfare state – fought for by working people, desperately needed by the poor, embraced by a middle class frightened of capitalist cruelty, wrangled from hard struggle against concentrated wealth and privilege – is too precious, too necessary to be lost.  The good news is that it won’t be.  The bad news is that one of our two major parties is dominated by those who don’t think that’s good news.  At least – and at last! – Arthur Brooks, Charles Krauthammer, Andrew McCarthy and Reihan Salam have made all that quite clear.

The Politics of Intransigence

William Buckley, in the first issue of National Review in 1955, famously distilled conservative instincts down to the desire to “stand athwart history yelling stop,” and ever since that’s just what conservatives have been doing.  They haven’t stopped history, but that hasn’t kept them from yelling, even when history has long since passed them by.  And particularly in the age of Tea Party purity, to be a conservative is to be forever fighting wars long lost.  Tea Partiers throw themselves into the debt limit breach like Spartans at Thermopylae, though the fiscal Persians passed through long ago.  They denounce the progressivism of Franklin Roosevelt and even Woodrow Wilson.  They call Social Security a Ponzi scheme.  They wish to eliminate Progressive Era reforms like the Federal Reserve, the income tax and the popular election of senators.  They rail against radical cultural developments like the widespread use of contraception.  And – the cultural battle du jour – they hope to forestall gay marriage.  But now President Obama, canny leader from behind that he is, has publically joined the fight for marriage equality just as conservatives are losing that war, too.

And make no mistake, that war is lost.  First there were civil unions.  Then there were state supreme court decisions.  Then there were democratically elected state legislatures (such as New York and Washington).  Last year the Obama administration announced it would not defend DOMA (the Defense of Marriage Act, the Clinton era law preventing the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages).  Now federal courts are striking down key provisions of DOMA.  It looks like some states, such as Maryland, are about to legalize gay marriage by popular referendum.  Sure, there are states which will never accept it (North Carolina comes to mind), but that won’t matter if the US Supreme Court rules that marriage is a civil right that cannot constitutionally be confined to heterosexuals.

And this is a big loss.  It might just be the last big loss for cultural conservatives, only because they have little left to lose.  Since the days of Bill Buckley’s exhortation to intransigence, conservatives have resisted racial inclusion, gender equality, drug usage, secularization, and the entire sexual revolution, including the acceptance of contraception, pornography, experimentation, abortion, homosexuality, and blatant sexual expression in the popular media.  How many of those battles have conservatives won?  Drug use may be the only one.  (And thank God they did win that one, though not without some terrible repercussions; for example, the war on drugs remains blindingly irrational.)  A generation from now, the vast majority of Americans will think about gay marriage the way we now think about inter-racial marriage.  That is, we won’t understand why anyone was ever against it.  (Presumably, though, even then some small stubborn conservative contingent will still be struggling to reverse it.)

Why do conservatives keep losing?  What is it about the cultural evolutions mentioned above that have proven so irresistible to standing athwart?  What do those developments have in common? Some commentators sense the unifying theme: Andrew Sullivan explicitly draws out the connection between acceptance of homosexuality and acceptance of recreational marijuana use; Rod Dreher sees parallels, as well.  Daniel McCarthy casts his net much wider, claiming that these recent developments are “a consequence of a shift in the foundations of Western civilization that has been taking place over centuries—a shift from Christian to liberal foundations.”  Could any conservative disagree?  That is, all the cultural developments listed above are about individuals defining their own meaning and controlling their own lives.  They’re about liberating individuals from cultural constraint.  In the good old conservative days, each person was expected to fulfill well-defined social roles – father, employee, countryman – each with powers and duties that could not be ignored or questioned.  And each role fit neatly into its spot in the social hierarchy.  That is, each role dictated who owed deference to whom: women to men, children to parents, non-whites to whites, etc.  And it was the job of social institutions – family, church, community – to define and enforce those roles and that hierarchy.  But individuals and groups that were exploited or oppressed by that hierarchy began to rebel against it; first blacks, then women, then gays, and so on.  That’s the problem: and so on.  The engine of individual liberation, once set in motion, is exceedingly hard to stop.  In 1955, the notion that black Americans could control their own lives, unconstrained by white supremacy, was radical.  But once you accept it, how can you demand women stay in their place?  What about other races?  What about gays?  What about the sexual impulses of white suburban kids, previously constrained by Puritan repressiveness, but now urged to liberation by the irresistible physicality of rock-n-roll?  The cultural scolds of the 1950’s were right: Elvis’ dancing was revolutionary!

And, as Noah Berlatsky nicely explains, present-day conservatives are just as right when they claim that allowing gays into the institution of marriage fundamentally changes that institution.  More precisely, it caps marriage’s evolution into an instrument of personal development, all as part of the liberal cultural movement described above.  Conservatives are dead right when they stress the centrality of marriage as a social institution.  They know that when marriage has completely succumbed to the philosophy of personal liberation they will have lost one of their most important battles.  But once again, they’re fighting a battle already lost.  The meaning of marriage has been changing for a very long time, and the changes started long before anyone considered that gays might marry each other.  (Conservative historian Garry Wills explains that marriage was not even a Catholic sacrament until the 12^th century!)  Stephanie Coontz provides an excellent summary of the fundamental changes in the understanding of marriage over the last couple of centuries.  “For millennia, marriage was about property and power rather than mutual attraction. It was a way of forging political alliances, sealing business deals, and expanding the family labor force. For many people, marriage was an unavoidable duty.”  But then it became permissible to marry for love.  Then the need for parental approval was dropped.  In the 60’s the Supreme Court struck down state bans on contraception within marriage and on interracial marriage.  And, most relevant to our discussion, in the 60’s and 70’s marriage lost its patriarchal strictures and became thoroughly liberalized.  Coontz writes, “The collapse of rigid gender expectations and norms has fostered the expectation that marriage should be an individually negotiated relationship between equals, replacing the older notion of marriage as a prefabricated institution where traditional roles and rules must be obeyed.”  Marriage is no longer about the political or economic merging of families.  It is no longer even primarily about fostering the proper setting for child-rearing.  The arrival of no-fault divorce in the 1960’s made legally explicit the notion that marriage is about individual choice and individual happiness.  Contemplating this history makes clear that the conservative fight against gay marriage is essentially symbolic. Liberal individualism has already changed marriage immeasurably; allowing gays to marry merely completes that change and makes it undeniable.

But marriage is a special case; it’s different from the other cultural developments listed above: it is not a merely an individual choice.  The point of marriage is to employ the weight of society to buttress a personal relationship, for social and individual good.  It used to be that there were three parties to marriage: the bride, the groom and the rest of society.  (Check out Roderick Long’s excellent depiction of the understanding of marriage in 19^th century America; it showcases wonderful historical expressions of the view that society has much to say about the particulars of individual marriages.)  And as a social institution with a pragmatic social purpose, its particulars could be defined collectively through the democratic legislative process.  But it’s not just that the purpose of marriage has changed from economics and child-rearing to personal fulfillment.  That change effects a much more radical transformation: marriage is no longer a social institution.  If it’s just about personal fulfillment then it’s simply a contract between individuals.  Society is no longer a party.  Society no longer has any justifiable claim upon marriage or one’s duties as a spouse and parent.  I decide if I marry or divorce in the same way that I decide if I eat chocolate or vanilla.  And my spouse and I define our roles within our marriage.  No one has any right to tell me what to do.  And it follows inexorably that neither can anyone tell a gay person whom to marry.  The triumph of liberal individualism simply and starkly prohibits society from constraining personal choices.  And it makes marriage into merely another such choice.  For good or ill – actually, for good and ill – all social relations are now choices.

But consider the question: Could conservatives have allowed gays to marry each other while maintaining the general framework of well-defined, hierarchical social roles?  Could there have been room for gays in the old conservative vision of marriage?  Theoretically, yes; but realistically, no freakin way!  You’d have to put aside the fact that acceptance of gays and gay marriage came much later than the transformation of heterosexual marriage, and put aside the tenacious Old Testament revulsion of homosexuality (and of sexual expression in general), and put aside centuries of irrational prejudice and oppression.  Even putting aside all those stumbling blocks you’d still be stopped short by the deepest of conservative fears: the fear of mixing categories and blurring boundaries.  Hierarchies demand discreet roles.  Men must be men and women must be women.  The God of Genesis made each animal distinct and separate; one never gives rise to another.  If a man marries a man it confuses those separate categories, it blurs the distinctions between the sexes.  To conservatives, gay marriage is a moral monstrosity, like the miscegenated giants of Genesis 6, born of the daughters of men, fathered by the sons of God.  And hierarchies, particularly ones based on social categories like gender, race or sexual orientation, cannot help but oppress.  The logic of conservatism seems to require a subject class.  It’s no longer acceptable to advocate subordinate status for non-whites or women.  Once gays are safely on that no-oppression list, conservatives may have no one left to bully.  (Thank God for Muslims!)

Liberalism taught subject classes that their subjection was unjust.  The rest is merely the inevitability of that idea.  But there’s more: there’s conservative complicity in the overthrow of their own worldview.  Conservatives hold that freedom and equality are enemies, that more of one means less of the other, but the broader debate surrounding gay marriage nicely demonstrates how closely bound freedom and equality can be.  As we’ve seen, the goal of the liberal cultural project is the complete liberation of the individual from cultural constraint.  But this dauntingly vacant freedom implies an equally daunting and radical egalitarianism.  For each person to be free no one can claim power over another.  No person or institution has any justified authority over anyone’s meaning, goals or standards.  Thus, as conservatives have argued for almost perfect freedom in economic affairs – sounding like anarchists – they have inadvertently undercut their own arguments about cultural and moral truth.  But not just in the obvious way that conservative embrace of market freedom contradicts their defense of cultural control.  When they argue for freedom they unknowingly argue for equality as well, and that equality is a dagger aimed at the heart of cultural authority.  Modern conservatives thought they could be cafeteria liberals, simultaneously champions of freedom and warriors against equality.  But they were wrong: hierarchy and freedom are as much enemies as allies.

When gay marriage becomes widely accepted, it will have become so through liberal process and in liberal form.  It will be seen as the culmination of the liberal cultural revolution whereby all social institutions have been relieved of their authority to shape individual judgments.  It will not be an accommodation of gays into the conservative notion of marriage, though some conservatives – most notably Andrew Sullivan – have long urged such accommodation.  Sixty years ago, American social conservatism was about hierarchy composed of well-defined social roles that themselves expressed received moral truth.  But all the standing athwart in the world could not withstand the righteous power of those demanding liberation from that hierarchy.  Rhetorically at least, conservatives have repudiated that old-fashioned hierarchy; now all they have left are the well-defined social roles and the received moral truth.  But those roles and that truth are quickly succumbing as well. And it could not have been otherwise.  As an important conservative theorist once said, ideas have consequences.  More to the point, they have momentum.  Conservatives, being conservatives, waited too long to lose the hierarchy.  They defended it so long that the notions of well-defined roles and moral truth have become conflated in the public mind with that hierarchy, and they have all been rejected as a whole.  Thus the new non-hierarchical conservatism is punished for the injustices of its hierarchical progenitor.  The sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons.  By forcing impulses of liberation into liberal channels, conservative resistance against social developments like gay marriage has only added to the triumph of the new individualism.  What started as emancipation from arbitrary and unjust power became emancipation from every possible external constraint.  In the new liberal vision, persons are not the roles they play, but unique, growing, complicated, uncertain creatures; each one a project, a growing, an ongoing liberation.  Modern freedom is self-actualization defended with relativism.  My life is entirely mine and entirely not yours.  Granted, conservatives have much to say against that disposition and they are furiously standing athwart it and yelling stop.  The history of the last 60 years promises that there will indeed be much yelling, but no stopping.