Liberals and Conservatives

Just like biological organisms, words evolve.  That is, they change their meanings over time.  Part of this evolution is natural, reacting to a new environment; and part is artificial, where some alter the use of words for partisan purposes.  So it is with these most important and most maligned political words, liberal and conservative.  In this essay, I will attempt to demonstrate the evolution of these words’ meanings.

The goto place for a discussion of word origins is the Oxford English Dictionary (the OED to scholars) (work began on the OED in 1857 and is ongoing).  Unhappily, access to the online OED is by subscription only, at $100 / year.  So, I chose the second-best online option: the Online Etymology Dictionary.

So, let’s get to work and examine these two most consequential words in all of politics, liberal and conservative.  Indented paragraphs are lifted without editing from the Online Etymology Dictionary.

Word Origins, first English Usage

Liberal (adjective) (see)

mid-14c., "generous," also "nobly born, noble, free;" from late 14c. as "selfless, magnanimous, admirable;" from early 15c. in a bad sense, "extravagant, unrestrained," from Old French liberal "befitting free people; noble, generous; willing, zealous" (12c.), and directly from Latin liberalis "noble, gracious, munificent, generous," literally "of freedom, pertaining to or befitting a free person," from liber "free, unrestricted, unimpeded; unbridled, unchecked, licentious."

Liberal (in politics)

Purely in reference to political opinion, "tending in favor of freedom and democracy," it dates from c. 1801, from French libéral. In English the label at first was applied by opponents (often in the French form and with suggestions of foreign lawlessness) to the party more favorable to individual political freedoms. But also (especially in U.S. politics) tending to mean "favorable to government action to effect social change," which seems at times to draw more from the religious sense of "free from prejudice in favor of traditional opinions and established institutions" (and thus open to new ideas and plans of reform), which dates from 1823.

Liberal (commentary)

This is the attitude of mind which has come to be known as liberal. It implies vigorous convictions, tolerance for the opinions of others, and a persistent desire for sound progress. It is a method of approach which has played a notable and constructive part in our history, and which merits a thorough trial today in the attack on our absorbingly interesting American task. [Guy Emerson, "The New Frontier," 1920]

Conservative (adjective) (see)

late 14c., conservatyf, "tending to preserve or protect, preservative, having the power to keep whole or safe," from Old French conservatif, from Medieval Latin conservativus, from Latin conservatus, past participle of conservare "to keep, preserve, keep intact, guard," from assimilated form of com-, here perhaps an intensive prefix (see com-), + servare "keep watch, maintain" (from PIE root *ser- (1) "to protect").

Conservative (in politics)

As a modern political tradition, "antagonistic to change in the institutions of a country," often especially "opposed to changes toward pure democracy," conservatism traces to Edmund Burke's opposition to the French Revolution (1790), but the word conservative is not found in his writing. It was coined by his French disciples (such as Chateaubriand, who titled his journal defending clerical and political restoration "Le Conservateur").

Conservative (commentary)

Strictly speaking, conservatism is not a political system, and certainly not an ideology. ... Instead, conservatism is a way of looking at the civil social order. ... Unlike socialism, anarchism, and even liberalism, then, conservatism offers no universal pattern of politics for adoption everywhere. On the contrary, conservatives reason that social institutions always must differ considerably from nation to nation, since any land's politics must be the product of that country's dominant religion, ancient customs, and historical experience. [Russell Kirk, "What is Conservatism," introduction to "The Portable Conservative Reader," 1982] 

Modern Political Usage, Burke/Paine

Leaving the comfort of dictionaries, our modern real-life sense of what Conservatism and Liberalism begin to mean is often attributed to Edmund Burke (1729-97, Irish-English MP) and Thomas Paine (1737-1809, English American pamphleteer), respectively.  Burke and Paine crossed paths (and were friends for a while) over two consequential world events: American independence and the French Revolution.  Burke felt that Britain had treated her colonies poorly and that they had reasonable grievances with the mother country; he did not want war to settle their differences.  Paine nearly single-handedly moved his countrymen to outright independence and a war of revolution.  Burke believed that the French Revolution was a mistake (Reflections on The Revolution in France, 1790) because the French people were not ready for self-rule, while Paine helped it along (Rights of Man, 1791), nearly perishing for his troubles.  Burke believed in gradual change, Paine believed that fighting a war for independence and democracy was worth it.

The political debate between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine is too large a subject for this brief essay.  So, let me leave you with this: if you are interested in what these giants of political philosophy had to say, either a) read them in their originals, b) check them out online at Brainy Quote, or c) read Yuval Levin’s The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left.  Personally, I have NOT finished reading Levin’s book (three attempts!), as he is no better an author than his hero Edmund Burke, who wrote for his over-educated peers, not a mass audience of semi-literate Brits.

American Politics splits into Factions

America’s first political divisions were not conservative and liberal, they were Federalist and Anti-Federalist.  Federalists fought for the states to ratify the new U.S. Constitution, the Anti-Federalists demanded the addition of a Bill of Rights as their condition for ratification.  Federalists wanted a strong federal government (like Democrats of today), Anti-Feds wanted the states to remain sovereign (like Republicans of today).  The leaders of these two factions (parties) were Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury and his Secretary of State, respectively.  But neither of these two camps morphs easily into liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans. Take a few moments and read my essay Ham & Jeff.

The first president elected from the just formed Democratic Party was Andrew Jackson (1829 – 1837), a real man of the people, from Tennessee, the first president not from Virginia or Massachusetts.  His party quite literally was the party of the people (the word Democrat means the people rule).  President Jackson threw open the doors of the White House to the “common man” (whose recent suffrage allowed Jackson to defeat his quasi-aristocratic opponent) and urged them to cut off a chunk of cheese from a 1,400-pound block of locally grown cheddar cheese.

The first Republican president was Abraham Lincoln (1861 – 1865), his party having been formed in 1854 to actively fight the institution of slavery from expanding.  The Civil War was fought, not over political differences or states’ rights, but over slavery.  Lincoln Republicans were abolitionists (today: Civil Rights, like Democrats) and pro-industry (today: pro-business, like Republicans).  They remained so until the mid-1960’s, for one hundred years.

Lincoln Republicans were successful until the Great Depression.  From 1861 through 1933 – 72 years – Republicans held the presidency for 56 years while Democrats held it for 16 years, Republicans held the Senate for 60 years while Democrats held it for 10 years (there was a tie for a single session of 2 years), and they held the House for 46 years while the Democrats held it for 26 years.  Lincoln Republicans, recall, were the party of Civil Rights and Big Business, and the economy boomed, under the thumb of “Robber Barons,” except for two Great Depressions.

The word “progressive” was added to our political lexicon before the words liberal or conservative.  Teddy Roosevelt – a Republican president (1901 – 1909) – took down some Big Business monopolies (which Adam Smith would have approved) and he introduced conservation/environmentalism into our list of issues by creating our National Parks system.  He would be a Democrat in today’s world.  Trust-busting is not anti-capitalistic; trusts (monopolies) are an inevitable consequence of unchecked free-market capitalism which Adam Smith felt needed to be reined in by government, as competition is at the core of capitalism (Big Business disagreed!).  And conservation is … conservative.

20th Century Party Divisions

After the Republican Party’s “Roaring Twenties” came to an abrupt halt with the Great Depression, the Republican president Herbert Hoover had nearly his entire term to react; acting as a free-market true-believer, he chose to let the market cure itself.  That is, he did nothing; and the economy kept collapsing.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt did not campaign against the evils of capitalism (indeed, many have claimed that he “saved capitalism from itself”).  While Hoover did nothing to address the problem of runaway unemployment, FDR created jobs (on the government payroll) and put people to work.  Indeed, we have lived in the world of FDR Democrats from 1933 thru 1981 – forty-eight years – while the Democrats owned the Senate and the House in all but four years.

Please note that in all this time, I have barely mentioned our key words, liberal or conservative, because they were rarely spoken.  We begin here.

FDR was a Democrat, but he was not a “liberal.”  Democracies have always been called “liberal democracies” by scholars before the word was ever used to describe a political party, the Democrats.  Perhaps liberal and democrat are redundant and mean the same.  Philosophical conservatives sometimes claim that we are a republic, not a democracy, as though we can’t be both at the same time.

Modern American Conservatism

Modern American political conservatism had its birth with the publication of the magazine National Review in 1955.   The brainchild of William F Buckley, Jr. (1925 – 2008) (author of God and Man at Yale), it is still the gold standard of what is truly conservative in American politics.  But the word conservative did not become mainstream in American politics until Barry Goldwater (1909 – 1998) – senator from Arizona – published his book The Conscience of a Conservative in 1960, only five years after the publication of National Review, and ran for president in 1964 (where he was badly beaten by the (liberal?) Democrat, Lyndon Johnson).  Johnson had passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with the help (mostly) of (Northern, Lincoln) Republicans.  The white Jim Crow South had voted for Democrats since the Civil War; but as a Democratic president had shepherded the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965) through Congress, white Southern Democrats (Dixiecrats) began to dessert their party and re-label themselves as Republicans.

How complete was this shift in party identity?  Republicans have been pro-business since their inception, but they shifted on race in the mid-1960’s (no longer were Republicans the party of Lincoln, the Great Emancipator).  Democrats have been the party of the people since their founding, but their tent collapsed when Southern Dixiecrats felt betrayed by a fellow Dixiecrat from Texas, President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

At this point in my essay, I would like to propose tentative definitions of modern liberal and conservative thought before I explode it all with the realities of the present day.  In answer to the immortal Biblical question, “am I my brother’s keeper?”, liberals say yes, and conservatives say no.  Liberals want the federal government to help those who need a helping hand; Conservatives want us all to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps.  Liberals want an activist federal government; conservatives want as small a federal government (and federal budget) as possible.  If it were that simple, Democrats (the so-called “party of the people”) would be the dominant political party in American politics (because most Americans are workers, not entrepreneurs).  And Democrats were the dominant political party, from 1932 through 1980, the era of FDR, with the help of Southern Dixiecrats.

Today’s Political Divisions

So, what happened?  Republicans have been as successful or more successful in American politics than Democrats since 1980.  What happened to shift the balance?  How has a party that embraces “survival of the fittest” become so strong among average Americans?  And my answer is: by appealing to millions of Americans who do NOT subscribe to our foundational creed, that “all men are created equal,” especially non-white, non-Christian, and non-straight Americans; that there is something peculiarly AMERICAN about those who are the descendants of Europeans who fled Europe for reasons of religious persecution or to escape debtor prisons.

Race.  The Civil Rights movement of the mid-1960’s split Americans into two camps: those who embraced racial equality and those who did not.  Lincoln Republicans were more responsible than the typical Democrat in Congress for the passage of President Johnson’s Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (1965).  When the dust settled, Dixiecrats began to dessert their 100-year-old home, the Democratic Party, for the Republican party.  By 1970, national Republicans had embraced their “Southern Strategy,” courting former Democratic voters from the South.  As an aside, there is nothing “liberal” or “conservative” about these differences – about racism, about bigotry – but they did divide the two major parties.

Religion.  The movement dubbed the Moral Majority (more recently called the Religious Right, and more recently than that Christian Nationalism) was born in 1979, the virgin child of the Reverend Jerry Falwell, a TV huckster of great influence.  It sold the notion that REAL Christians (Evangelicals) voted Republican – for “obvious” reasons; forget that the teachings of Jesus could not possibly square with the pro-business mentality of Republicans all the way back to their origin.  But it gave millions of white Christians cover to vote their racial sensibility without guilt.  And cover to vote their anti-gay and anti-women and anti-immigrant sensibility, too, as though the Holy Bible told them so.  Once again, there is nothing inherently conservative or liberal about being a good Christian (putting aside the offense that is implied toward non-Christians).

Classical liberalism and conservatism are separated over the role of government in our lives.  Nevertheless, Republicans and so-called “conservatives” embraced their new-found racial and religious identities.  And liberals and Democrats have had little success combatting this unholy marriage (because, frankly, they lost their mojo).

Taxation.  President Reagan, the first modern president who successfully embraced the term conservative, wanted to cut the federal government down to size.  But, failing to cut government spending, he cut taxes anyway, leaving us with the first case of a peace-time deficit that was not solely the result of optimistic thinking (“as our GDP is growing, we’ll be able to collect more taxes without raising tax rates”).  Few Americans protested as very few of us connect paying federal taxes with paying for what we want as a nation; that is, paying our bills.  And many voters seemed not to care that the bulk of these tax cuts benefitted the multi-millionaires and billionaires among us, as long as it seems to benefit them.  Before Reagan took office, our National Debt stood at less than $1 trillion; by the end of Reagan-Bush I, it was $4 trillion; 30 more years of tax cutting presidents (Republican and Democratic, alike) and our Debt is nearly $31 trillion.  I am not suggesting that President Reagan was a bad president; indeed, scholars rank him pretty highly (in recent years, about 11th or 12th), but mostly because of his rapprochement with Premier Gorbachev and the USSR.  The Reagan era ended in 2017, with the inauguration of another (kind of) Republican, Donald Trump.

Compromise.  In 1994, Newt Gingrich of Georgia published his Contract with America, a blueprint for conservative Republicans.  Implicit in this document was the lockstep that Republicans would now walk.  A lockstep of no compromise (with Democratic presidents).  And, yes, I am quite aware that the man himself worked out compromises on income tax rates with not-so-liberal Southern Democratic President Bill Clinton (who in 1996 declared “the era of big government is over”) that brought us four years of budget surpluses, the first since 1969, under Republican President Nixon.  Once again, there is nothing inherently conservative or liberal about one’s willingness to compromise with the other party.  But the unwillingness to compromise has become a key strategy of governing among Republicans, if not conservatives.

The Tea Party.  The Tea Party leaped out of the mouth of Rick Santelli, a CNBC reporter, on February 19th, 2009, a day less than a month after President Obama, a black man, was inaugurated as president of the United States.  The Tea Party married whiteness with libertarian politics.  But, what it did, much more importantly, was energize millions of Americans who felt threatened by … multi-culturalism.  I wholeheartedly applaud an increase in our citizens’ political energy and activism, when it is backed up by an increase in civic awareness and knowledge, and good will.  But the Tea Party gave permission for batshit crazy people (e.g., Christine O’Donnell, Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, Joe “You lie!” Wilson) to run for national office under the conservative Republican banner.

Conservatives?  No, just MAGA's stars

Education.  The success of the Tea Party movement opened the closet to millions of Americans who had heretofore remained hidden, because of the unseemliness of their beliefs.  White supremacists, Ku Klux Klan members, neo-Nazis, Christian nationalists, et al.  Not only did they vote, but they also became quite vocal.  Indeed, violence was not unacceptable to them in the pursuit of their aims.  They gave rise to the election of the most unfit candidate for president in American history – Donald J. Trump – and the January 6th insurrection.  Trump has famously declared, “I like the poorly educated.”  The Tea Party and Trump’s MAGA movement appealed quite deliberately to uneducated white Americans, Americans who had been ignored in the decades since World War II, when our returning soldiers were rewarded with the GI Bill of Rights, a free college education.  White men with little education had been the backbone of the Democratic coalition from FDR forward.  But Democrats changed course, and Republicans took up the slack.  And have given us political luminaries such as (in alpha order) Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Josh Hawley, Kari Lake, Herschel Walker, et al.

Gender.   At first, it was gay marriage.  Thank heaven that fight is over (legally, and in families with a gay member who has come out).  Now it’s trans rights.  Should a biological male who has been rendered female use the men’s’ room or the ladies’ room?  Is it fair for a biological male who has been rendered female to compete in sports against women?  These may be legitimate questions, that perhaps should be answered locally, but they bend many of today’s so-called conservatives to the breaking point.  And they keep us from debating real issues.

Identity Politics.  We are used to thinking that political parties and political ideologies are defined by their stances on political questions or issues.  Being a Republican or a Democrat used to mean differences of opinion on tough political questions.  Being a Conservative or a Liberal used to mean differences of opinion on tough political questions.  And those questions always concerned the relation between the governed and the governors or the government, not between classes of voters.  Today’s small government “conservatives” are a) Christians who b) are uncomfortable with race, an impossible marriage, as no real Christian would see his black or brown brother as anything but a brother.  And uncomfortable with any alphabet (LGBTQIA+) person too.  And undereducated but not necessarily “poor” at the same time, another mixed-up marriage.

Liberals?  What in dickens are they anyhow?  In the 1980’s, candidate Reagan tied liberals to a “welfare queen” who had bilked the treasury of hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars.  Of course, Reagan’s welfare queen was a fiction.  But Reagan era Democrats lost their mojo and have not regained it since.  Now, Democrats worth the name call themselves “progressives” (the last true “liberal” was Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, 1991-2002, author of The Conscience of a Liberal: Reclaiming the Compassionate Agenda [the title a self-conscious nod to the last true conservative, Barry Goldwater], published the year of his death).  A classical liberal, “Wellstone was known for his work for peace, the environment, labor, and health care; he … support(ed) the rights of victims of domestic violence. He made the issue of mental illness a central focus in his career.  He was a supporter of immigration to the U.S.  He opposed the first Gulf War in 1991 and … spoke out against …going to war with Iraq again.”

But liberalism has not evolved.  Most Democrats have regressed into what progressive Democrats would call corporatist Democrats, or Republicans lite.  Democratic Socialist (that is the party name that is on his ballot) Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Democratic Representative from New York’s 14th District, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are close to being classical liberals.  Many call them socialists; they are NOT.  A classical liberal believes that he IS his brother’s keeper, that government is obligated to help people who need assistance, and that those who are more fortunate than most should be taxed more heavily.

In a real sense, classical conservatism has not evolved either; it still means that “the government is best that governs least” (spends less and taxes less); and that it has a very limited role in assisting individuals or corporations, or for that matter telling them how to live.

But race, religion, education, gender, and tolerance has separated millions of Americans into TEAMS.  The conservative Republican “team” consists of straight, non-college-educated, white, Christian, men; the liberal Democratic team consists mostly of … everyone else (the Red TEAM boasts of its intolerance).  Teams that are separated by identity politics, where one team talks openly about the possibility of civil war, and a break-up of the states into separate Red-Blue nations.  Where members of each team stay true to their Team’s values, rather than thinking and speaking for themselves.

One last word before I wrap up.  MAGA Republicans are not Republicans, as they don't support any Republican ideology of the past.  MAGA Republicans are not conservative, either, as they don't support any conservative ideology of the past.  MAGA began as a principle, Make America Great Again – a kissing cousin of America First, an isolationist movement that collapsed the day after Pearl Harbor.  But MAGA very quickly showed its true colors: "where Donald Trump goes, I will follow."  If it means shredding the norms of American life, so be it.  MAGA is not a political movement, it is a religious movement – a cult of personality – and its members crave a "strong leader," an authoritarian leader, because individual freedom – the core value of Republicanism – is too big a burden to bear.

We live in perilous times.

The danger is not that liberals and conservatives hate each other, all the way up to a possible civil war; no, the danger is that we have so few liberal and even fewer conservative, lawmakers and voters.

And, in a democracy, where the people rule themselves, it is not the system that needs repair, it is the people themselves who need to be fixed.  With education and agency.  And, while civic literacy will not fix everything, without it our democratic republic is doomed.