George Will has been and promoting his latest book collection of his columns. I can't say I'm a regular reader of his columns, but I found a couple of things he said on Colbert and Charlie Rose earlier this week interesting as indicative of a kind of conservatism that I find respectable (as opposed to the right-wingism of the GOP). But I see it as a conservatism that must be vigorously debated and refuted by people like me who are neither liberal nor conservative as Will would define them. I think I, and others like me, represent a way out of the liberal/conservative impasse, and Obama is the public figure that comes closest to embodying in the political sphere what I believe is the way out of that impasse.

Watch the Colbert clip, in which I thought Will was very good good in explaining the difference between conservatism and liberalism.  He says in response to Colbert's request to define the difference between conservatism and liberalism:

The competing values are freedom and equality at all times. Conservatives tend to favor freedom and are willing to accept inequalities of outcome from a free market. Liberals tend to favor equality of outcome and are willing to sacrifice and circumscribe freedom in order to get it. . . . What conservatives say is that we will protect you against idealism; we will protect you against the liberal faith that they can make something straight from the crooked timber of humanity. We understand that the government's job is to deliver the mail, defend the shore, and get out of the way.

That's a pretty cogent, concise definition of libertarian conservatism. (I am somewhat surprised, though, that  he thinks it's the government's job to deliver the mail.) I would even go so far as to say that this critique of liberalism long ago made it clear to me that I could not be a Liberal, and that's why I call myself a progressive–they are not the same. My progressive faith differs from liberalism in that I think we humans do evolve in the cultural sphere, which is the sphere of spirit, and that our politics evolve to reflect what happens in the cultural sphere. That's different from the liberal faith that progress can be engineered top-down. I see activity in the cultural sphere as yang and activity in the political sphere as yin.

The politics of any society is limited by the cultural assumptions and values of the leading figures who shape or advance and articulate those values. Sometimes a politician arises out of the culture to play a role in the political sphere that advances its politics because he articulates what a majority agrees is the next step. Reagan and Thatcher, on the contrary, articulated the backlash against the welfare state, and their assumptions shaped the majority view over the last thirty years or so.  Obama will be attacked as a liberal for the same reason I am often labeled a liberal, but I have reason to hope he will articulate a subsidiarist vision of a social democracy that eschews utopianism while holding freedom and equality in a dynamic tension that moves us forward.

Roosevelt was two steps forward; Reagan/Bushes/Clinton, a step backward.  Obama's presidency, I hope, will begin a several decades long process during which we'll take another two steps forward. Inevitably there will be excesses and a backlash, and then another two steps forward. That's how I imagine the progress by which I label myself progressive. The really interesting people are the ones that move us forward–the Franklins, Jeffersons, Lincolns, Roosevelts, Kennedys, and now (let's hope) Obama.  They are not "saviors". They are simply the ones who advance the story. The conservatives are simply necessary foils to provide some ballast keep the progressives honest.

I agree with Will and most conservatives in thinking dangerous the utopianism that they associate with the liberal impulse. I have often criticized it in comments I've made about Jacobinism and top-downism here. At one point in the Rose interview he says that to talk about nation building is as oxymoronic as to speak about orchid building. I agree. This is a Burkean idea that societies and political cultures are organic and have their own patterns of development and growth. Will is therefore critical of the neoconservative project to spread freedom and democracy, and sees religion and ethnicity as enormously powerful resistant forces to such "idealistic" projects. But by the same logic he must also think that societies evolve and make progress, and that their politics are a reflection of that progress. It's just that progress cannot be imposed.

So my impression is that Will sees things in the either/or terms that have typified the debate between conservatives and liberals: either you're for freedom or you're for equality. But I would argue that it's not either/or but both in a dynamic tension. Enshrining either as an absolute, or even one as primary and the other as secondary, leads to tyranny. So if I had the chance, I'd like to sit down with him and see how he'd respond to an argument for an evolutionary progressivism. I'd like to explore with him the possibility of his acceptance of a politics that sought balance and sanity rather than the enshrinement of any one particular value. I'd like to ask him what he thought about subsidiarity as the philosophical basis for a social contract that best provides the chance for such a balance.

I'd like to know what he'd say to me if I granted to him that equality is not a goal that ought to be looked upon as the raison d'etre of our politics, but insisted that the imbalances of inequality are a social problem that must be addressed by our politics. That came up in the Rose interview, and Will's answer was the inadequate "education will solve it" argument.  For Will, obviously, education should be market driven with tax dollars going into vouchers that enable parental choice rather than school districts who otherwise have no incentive to solve the problem of the woefully inadequate education they are delivering particularly to inner-city kids. I'm not going to get into the weeds of the problems with that argument, but it is inadequate–maybe another time if the issue ever becomes relevant.

In the Rose interview he dismisses concerns about the overweening influence of big business on big government by saying that if there was no big government, there would be no K-Street. But I guess if the world is a terrarium in which the stronger dominate, then it doesn't matter if there is no government to check the already powerful from getting more power and the rich from aggregating to themselves an evermore larger share of the national wealth.  For that is the inevitable consequence of making the market your religion, and apparently that's a tradeoff he's willing to live with in the name of freedom. So I'd like to ask him: If the already rich and powerful are left to do as they please by eliminating any countervailing power that protects the broader common good, what will keep America singular and exceptional, and prevent it from devolving into a stratified, oligarchic society like every other society composed by the crooked timber of humanity?

I agree with Will that dynamic growth in any society comes from the creativity and imagination of its people, and the people should be left to be as free as possible to create and imagine as they please.  And I would agree that the purpose of government is not to achieve utopia or anything like it, but rather to protect (and to a limited degree promote the conditions) that allow people to be free to create and imagine.  But there is no real freedom for most people in a society in which power and wealth have been amassed by a relatively few. Government's purpose isn't to engineer utopia, but to solve pressing problems that can't be handled by individuals, church and community organizations, and competing (or monopolisitic) players in the market. And the imbalances created by an unfettered free market are real problems that we need government to redress. That's simply reality. And it's better to live with the inefficiencies and cumbersome functionality of government than to live with the far greater suffering than comes with those imbalances.

And then I'd like to ask him why economic freedom is so centrally important? And since when is the idolization of consumer materialism a truly conservative value? What does it conserve? Why is he so ok with the way that the
creative destructive forces of market capitalism undermine people's freedom and creativity in the
cultural sphere, especially the people whose communities, traditions,
and independent livelihoods are destroyed by it? Does he really believe that market capitalism promotes diversity, independence, and self-reliance in a world where the only winners are the huge corporations and the startups that sell out to them? Is the associate at Wal-Mart freer and more self-reliant than when he
was the small shop owner that Wal-Mart put out of business?

And I'd like to ask him why the economic sphere was in his thinking the primary arena for the exercise of freedom?  What If "enough" over time was redefined, and people had "enough" and lived in a culture that wasn't so obsessed about getting more? Maybe they'd find ways to use their creativity and imagination in other ways, ways that would be far more deeply satisfying to the human spirit than finding evermore clever ways to buy and sell.  But that's the kind of idealism that people like Will want to save you from.