Reader Brian in comments to yesterday's post questions my designation of Larison as a Whig. My response got too long for a comments in my post about Larison yesterday, so I'm posting it here instead:
I
see Tories as defined by their commitment to the preservation of status
quo power and wealth arrangements that benefit their class. They do not
live by principles but only by a kind of primitive instinct to preserve
their prerogatives. Philosophy or thought has the value of
expediency–ie, valuable only insofar as it provides a justification
for the preservation of privilege and are discarded as soon as they becomes ineffective in that regard. Tory bankers, for instance, are
libertarians only when it justifies lower taxes and de-regulation; they
jettison libertarian principle as soon as they need the government to
prop them up.
There are second-level Tories who might be described as wannabes who
aspire to the attainment of Tory privileges whether they succeed in
attaining them or not. And I suppose you could describe third-level
Tories as those who don't benefit from or aspire to Tory privilege, but
accept that the world is run by Tories and are content to play an
uncritically subservient role in that world.
A Whig is a lower-case 'r' republican who vigorously resists the
natural tendencies of all societies toward oligarchy. Larison's
vehement, principled rejection of the Paulson bailout is Whiggish, not
Toryish, as are many of his other values. No one is a pure type, but I
would argue that he is more Whig than Tory for these reasons.
Whigs, at least the way I think about them as a class, fall within a right/left
spectrum, but in either case embrace both a gradualist or
organic idea about social or civilizational progress and at the same time a modern
affirmation of the free, rights-endowed, self-reliant individual. The
Whig lives in the creative tension between individual freedom and the
discipline of life framed within a tradition lived in community. Whigs reject the radical individualism of Libertarian/free-market, and the type of human promoted by socialism in which the individual is absorbed into the collective. As I've written about before, I argue that subsidiarity is Whiggish principle that avoids either extreme.
Now obviously what it meant to be a Whig in the 18th and 19th
centuries is very different from what it means or could possibly mean
now. One could possibly make the argument that it is impossible to be a Whig because in a globalizing, pluralistic, market-driven
social environment because it has destroyed the tradition as a living organism. And so along these lines I think that what distinguishes a left-leaning Whig from a right-leaning Whig is his
imagination of the how tradition shapes society and personal identity.
Those on the right tend to accept tradition as a "given" that might have been weakened but which has not been destroyed and that what remains must be bolstered; those on the
left accept that it has been destroyed but that parts of it can be chosen and preserved. Or to put it
another way, they accept that the living tradition is like a great tree
that has died, that it is delusional to believe that it still functions
as a living organism, but that it has left behind seeds that need to be
retrieved and cultivated.
Right-leaning Whigs are a type of modern, but they tend to think of Enlightenment rationalism as akin to Jacobinism as a
fundamental mistake; those on the left accept that Enlightenment modernity along with free-market capitalism, for
better or worse, has destroyed the "given" living traditional framework, and they are more receptive to the postmodern critique of modernity. While
they appreciate what modernity contributed to human cultural evolution,
they see it now as stale and inadequate at best, and at worst dangerous
for its excessive, soul-destroying rationality which has come to shape a dominant cultural imagination of the human being as either merely a talking animal or as a wetware machine.
So while I would position myself on the left side of the Whig
spectrum and Larison on the right, I see people like him as more of an
ally, or as one with whom I share more common ground, than I do with
the typical liberal/secular Democrat.
See also my post Whigs & Tories, Jacobins and Fascists.
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