I ran across this in my reading this morning, even though it is from over a year ago. Since this thread got bumped, I'm posting it. I think Reynolds makes some interesting points, but I'm sure I will be in a pathetic minority around here. Truth be told however, it's not uncommon for a self-titled Progressive to react to "Free Market" (and I'm not even talking about 100% economic anarchy, but moreso even minor events like price gouging) much in the same way Pentecostal preachers react to Darwin.
Loose Definitions
The religious streak running through US politics makes it hard to say what conservative means, says US political blogger Glenn Reynolds
Thursday October 7, 2004. The Guardian thinks I'm a Republican and a conservative. I shouldn't let on that this belief is based on somewhat shaky ground, because this column is a sweet gig, and - well - why rock the boat?
But in truth, I'm neither - or at least, whatever I am sheds some light on how useful (or not) such labels are. The reasons I don't fit in very well on either the left or right sides of US politics shed some light on that divide, too.
I'm certainly not a Republican, although I will very probably - actually, almost certainly - vote for George Bush this time. But I have been a card-carrying member of only two parties, the Democrats and, when I grew disenchanted with them, the Libertarians.
I broke with the Democrats because, under President Clinton, they seemed to have abandoned their traditional support for civil liberties: Clinton's 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act was, in many ways, a more sweeping assertion of government power than Bush's Patriot Act, which was really just about plugging some holes in the Clinton legislation.
As for conservative - well, I don't know what that word means any more. I certainly don't fit in with the religious right. I support gay marriage, drug legalisation and abortion rights. I am in favour of stem-cell research, and against prayer in school.
Nevertheless, some people call me a conservative because I support President Bush's war on terror, which is really (although Bush is too diplomatic to say so) a war on fundamentalist Islamist terror. I also oppose gun control (you can read a rather lengthy discussion of my views on the right to arms under the American constitution here, and a much shorter treatment here).
Does that make me a conservative? To paraphrase Clinton, it depends on what the meaning of conservative is. As I posted on my weblog recently: "I'd be delighted to live in a country where happily married gay couples had closets full of assault weapons."
Is that a conservative belief? Perhaps, if the notion is the traditional strain of American belief that government should mind its own business, and that what goes on in our bedrooms, or our closets, is none of its business.
Meanwhile, religiosity - something often associated, especially by Europeans, with American conservatism - is also a staple of the US left. Just look at that icon of US liberalism, Hillary Clinton. The north-eastern style leftism associated with her is sometimes frankly, sometimes implicitly, religious. As Michael Kelly noted in a profile of her, reprinted in his book Things Worth Fighting For:
"The politics of Hillary Rodham Clinton are indeed largely liberal (although, the post election evidence indicates, no more so than those of her husband), but they are of a liberalism derived from religiosity. They combine a generally 'progressive' social agenda with a strong dose of moralism ...
"They are, rather than primarily the politics of left or right, the politics of do-goodism, flowing directly from a powerful and continual stream that runs through American history, from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Jane Addams to Carry Nation to Dorothy Day, from the social gospel of the late 19th century to the temperance-minded Methodism of the early 20th century to the liberation theology of the 1960s and 1970s, to the pacifistic and multi-culturally correct religious left of today ...
"It is concerned not just with how government should behave, but with how people should. It is the message of the preacher, a role Hillary Rodham Clinton has filled many times delivering guest sermons from the pulpits of United Methodist churches."
And, actually, the roots of this do-goodism are ultimately in New England Puritanism, which had many characteristics associated with today's left. Among them were a hostility to wealth - illustrated by sumptuary laws - a belief that the welfare of the community trumped the rights of individuals (Hillary combined both these aspects in her famous recent statement: "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good"). Puritans favoured dense settlement in towns over spread-out farmers - they were, in a sense, the first opponents of "sprawl".
Even the most stereotypical aspect of the Puritans is not as out of place as you might think. Puritans were, of course, notoriously hostile to sex, but the modern left has threads of those sentiments, too - witness the anti-sex screeds of Catharine MacKinnon or Andrea Dworkin. In fact, Puritans, who were actually quite enthusiastic about marital sex, may actually have been less Puritanical in this regard than some modern feminists.
Not all leftwingers in the US are as frankly religious as Hillary Clinton, and many don't even realise that the ideas that they champion have deep religious roots. But even for these people, being leftwing has itself become a sort of religion, with those who disagree viewed as sinister, almost demonic forces, rather than simply as individuals holding different views.
The language of righteousness and sin, if not that of redemption and grace, remains a hallmark of the purportedly secular left, though I find it no more attractive than the language of the religious right.
I don't fit into the religious right or the religious left. But, in America, you don't get to choose a major political party that does not have some sort of religious strain to it.
And it strikes me that one reason why politics in the US have become so much more bitter over the past couple of decades is that two rather different threads of religiosity have come to dominate the two major parties in distinct fashion, where each party had previously incorporated major components of both. This has turned political battles into quasi-religious ones.
Not being a devotee of either strain of American politico-religious faith, I find this rather tiresome, and more than a bit disturbing - but I think it's likely to represent the state of things for the foreseeable future.
