Let’s stop calling them “liberal” and “conservative.”
Instead, use wings.
NOTE: I post weekly rhetorical pieces in my free Substack newsletter. Only a few end up here.
If you happen to be an educator, you know that schools are dealing with a wild cheating epidemic. Students are smuggling smartphones, letting robots write their papers, and even hacking online tests. But what alarms me most is how some entitled parents react when their kids get caught. How dare the school even think of punishing their little criminals?
Unless I’m hallucinating, it seems that the American zeitgeist has changed suddenly. There was a time when people who broke rules got a hearing followed by punishment. Now the national ethos seems to accept that power and influence (or money, same thing) comes with a Get Out of Jail Free card.
Blame this new my-cheater-should-prosper ethic on the Biden/Trump presidential pardons; blame it on the oligarchy or the defund-the-police movement or Mother Russia. But please, please don’t use conservatives and liberals to label either side. Whatever is happening to our culture and politics is neither liberal nor conservative. In fact, it’s been a while since I’ve spotted an American of either species.
People who ignore rules and overturn long-established norms cannot by any stretch of the political imagination be called conservative. Sure, those who cry for some lost Eden often sound conservative. But there’s a more accurate label for these deluded or cynical souls.
Here’s a hint: When I was a kid, hippies often sounded like wannabe agriculturists. Listen to the lyrics of the Woodstock anthem by Crosby Stills & Nash: a “child of god” wants to “get back to the land to set my soul free.” Give the kid a fishing pole and some straw to suck on, and you’d have a Norman Rockwell painting. But that child of god was a radical.
Now you have people overturning 80 years of international agreements and a 238-year-old Constitution, and yet news organizations insist on calling them “conservatives.” Go ahead and support the insurgents if you like. It’s supposed to be a free country, and I hope it continues to be so. But that makes me, not them, conservative. Anyone trying to set their soul free by burning everything down to the root is a radical.
The Latin root of “radical” is radix, meaning root. (Only a total nerd would find that last sentence delightful; you’re welcome. Or I’m sorry.) It’s where we get radish, the bitter root vegetable that you harvest by yanking the whole innocent plant out of its comfortable bed as if you were the DOGE of gardening.
Not to pick on the right exclusively. Hillary Clinton’s disastrous “deplorables” slap was thoroughly illiberal. And the intolerance of many leftists toward the merely confused—those who fail to stay au courant with the language du jour—is anything but liberal.
(A true liberal will argue with me.)
Aren’t I getting all illiberal and thought-police-y myself? Well, my beat is rhetoric, and rhetoric—the art of persuasion and of resolving differences—starts with definitions. As does thinking.
So it’s helpful to see how the American founders defined “liberal” and “conservative.” If you told someone in the eighteenth century that you were a conservative and not a liberal, he would drop his clay pipe, mystified. You might as well say, “I’m not an American, I’m a writer.”1
To the founders, the opposite of liberalism might be factionalism. Liberalism was a belief in a liberally educated elite—an enlightened group educated in the “liberal” arts. This bookish, science-loving professional class was supposed to be beholden to no one. Instead of a permanent European-style aristocracy, the founders advocated a universal educational system that would engender a “natural” elite. The smart kids would rise to the “liberal” class.2 While working men and women were yoked to employers, professionals were assumed to be free agents. They were liberated, untied from special interests. Or so went the theory.
The founders hoped to prevent the rise of embedded class-based interests. The reason the Constitution neglects to mention political parties is that the founders hoped there wouldn’t be any. When they studied history, they saw that most democracies ended up as dictatorships. Out of the chaos of factions in ancient Rome emerged a Caesar.
To avoid that mistake, they built a balancing system into the Constitution. Those checks and balances—a House of Representatives balancing the Senate, the White House balancing Congress, the judiciary balancing everyone else—were supposed to prevent factions from tearing our republic apart. But how could such an elaborately checked and balanced government get anything done? What would keep the machinery from grinding to a halt?
Here we come back to liberalism. The founders believed that a minority consisting of liberally educated, disinterested gentlemen beholden to no faction would provide the swing vote. They would act as moderates. Alexander Hamilton wrote that these liberal men, these moderates, would serve as “impartial arbiters” among the various socioeconomic factions.
In an enormous irony, these same liberally educated gentlemen ended up forming parties of their own behind two of the best educated men in America, Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Each conceived his party as a temporary organization whose primary mission was to suppress the other party.
Hamilton despised the Jeffersonians for their democratic aims. Democracies are most prone to factionalism and lapse into dictatorships, so the Hamiltonians worked to prevent the Jeffersonians from turning the republic into a democracy.
To Jefferson, on the other hand, the Hamiltonians were the Walmart of their time3, replacing the land-based aristocracy with commercial enterprise and special interests. Each accused the other of being “illiberal.”
When the founders finally understood that neither party would go away, many thought they were witnessing the demise of their republican experiment. The Constitution had failed to prevent those factions—those permanent interests. And liberally educated men could no longer serve as impartial arbiters since they themselves were “partial,” belonging to separate parties.
This factionalism caused a shocking collapse in civility. The early nineteenth century constituted one of the nastiest periods in our political history, second only to the Civil War. And so our nation lost its faith in a liberal elite.
Along the way, they lost the rhetorical knowledge that fostered that elite in the first place. When fifteen-year-old Daniel Webster applied to Dartmouth in 1797, he had to recite Cicero’s speeches as an entrance requirement. In Latin. Cicero, the great orator and rhetorician, was the SAT of the time. But Dartmouth itself didn’t teach rhetoric. Webster had to learn the art through membership in the United Fraternity, a debating club that had a better library than the college did. The United Fraternity eventually became the Alpha Delta fraternity, AD, which served as the inspiration for “Animal House.” And classical debates devolved into the toga party.
Meanwhile, the Boylston Chair of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard passed from Massachusetts Senator John Quincy Adams to a minister. These days, the Boylston chair is occupied by a poet. I gave a lecture on this to students at Harvard.4
Our failure to understand rhetoric—the original liberal art that created the original liberal elite—helps explain the devolution of “liberal” and “conservative.” Liberals kept the rap of educational elitism while losing the reputation as disinterested arbiters.
The wing that currently flaps disconsolately is not the “liberal” but left wing. The other side is not the “conservative” but the right wing.
Left, right. The thoughtful among us speak and think somewhere in between.
Get your conservative liberalism on, through the power of soul bending.
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Please don’t use that distinction on me.
Shreds of that belief continued to sustain America’s ambivalent support for universities and liberal arts colleges right up till now. Seen through the lens of Jefferson and Hamilton, the current attack on higher education is literally anti-republican.
Sam Walton had yet to launch his empire from Bentonville, Arkansas ( I’ve been there a couple times, and it’s very nice), but anachronism is the nostalgist’s poetic license. Besides, I love the thought of Jefferson hating on big box stores. You know he would.
It’s very long and I don’t recommend it unless you love Harvard or enjoy lamenting its crimes.
