And this leftist would support industrial Mordor and Isengard over feudal Gondor and Rohan any day.

There’s a ring of truth in that, and you have Peter Jackson to thank for giving your use of the word “bubbling” a delightfully provocative corresponding visual, but post #66 is the Pratchett to your J.R.R.

“The saltation you invoke would, I guess, make sense if one believed that beliefs exclusively arise from social pressures, but I don’t know anyone who believes that or takes that leap.”

I guess you should get out more then Matthias because the idea that, when it comes to justification, we are not moved by things that justify but rather by our social interests , is the received view in the so called “science studies”.

It is very clearly formulated and defended in the founding text of science studies : David Bloor’s ‘Knowledge and Social Imagery’ 1977.

Even clearer formulation /defense of this is common in feminist critiques of science, see for instance Kenneth Gergen’s ” Feminist critique of science and the challenge of social epistemology” 1989.

Clarification: I am not holding the crazy view that science is not a social enterprise but only that social values do not play any meaningful role in the context of justification ( their role is restricted to context of discovery ). The SC position is that this is naive and that social values are key in both contexts.

I thought it clear in your initial post that you were referring to “liberalism” in the modern American, not the classical or European, sense, as was the article that set off this discussion. What you said makes no sense to me at all if another sense of the word is imputed. I used the word in the same sense. If we all agree that we are using the term in this sense, why bother arguing about different senses of it now? Someone did mention the “problem” that the word is used in different senses, but that’s not a problem – many words are used in different senses; that’s why dictionaries have multiple entries for the same word. We just have to be clear, and I see no cause for confusion here.

When I said liberals are the new Burkeans, I meant this in a fairly limited sense: 1) That much of what liberalism sought has been achieved and is therefore the status quo. Therefore, liberals are in large part defending a status quo they embrace, rather than seeking to overturn it, and 2) That much of what liberals currently defend are the things that emerged from the conflicts of the 20th century. These ideas are not necessarily defended from first principles because that is not how they were arrived at; they were compromises, chiefly, but their track record is such that liberals believe they are more desirable than the boundary positions of the dispute. This is particularly so in terms of the key economic conflict of the 20th century between socialism and laisser-faire.

The glory days of lassie-faire were the 19th century, not the 20th. Leading conservative intellectuals like Milton Freidman and Roger Scruton acknowledge this. The 20th century saw trust-busting, the Federal Reserve (a compromise between having the currency in the hands of private banks, as previously, and having it in the hands of the federal government), and a radical labor movement. All that before the New Deal. After WW2, the shape of the compromise became visible and fairly stable, and it was liberalism – that was the compromise. Even Eisenhower said that all were liberals now. Part of what kept this together was the need to maintain social solidarity against the Soviet Union. After Kennedy, however, the Cold War was a stalemate, which gradually became clear. It was Nixon who bought himself breathing space by starting to wind it down – initiating detente and arms control with the Soviet Union, and recognizing China, and, at the same time, undermined the existing liberal economic order by ending the Bretton Woods currency regime. It was also about this time that it became clear that time was on the West’s side in the cold war; the Soviets were stagnating, and the Chinese were going nowhere. The last quarter of the 20th century saw the Cold War resolved and the elites feel less need to compromise. So there have been serious and partly successful efforts to restore a sort of laisser-faire, but not really the 19th century kind, as this is not the 19th century. Nonetheless, we are still in the compromise; we have just moved closer to the other pole; we are still in liberalism.

As for “mediating institutions”, no I don’t mean that liberals are thorough-going Burkeans, but actually they do seem to have matched big government with big mediating institutions: private entities focused on public ends, which have no government authority but which often seek to influence the government or fill public needs it does not: Amnesty International, the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, Greenpeace, the NAACP - the very backbone of liberalism. Benjamin Barber uses the very words “mediating institutions” to characterize these entities, and Peter Drucker said in the 80’s they had been for several decades and would be for several more the fastest-growing sector of the world economy. Not all are liberal, of course, but they seem to be a liberal forte. Not that it matters; I think my point about Burkeanism is made.

Where you most often see this principle invoked is in discussions of, say, racism and sexism, where the lesson is that we’re subject to all sorts of social pressures of which we’re unaware, and so even if we can look at the evidence and say “we’re all equal,” our subconscious is going to make us act such that we don’t actually believe that, and so we need to be on guard. Also, that we should be skeptical of the claims of “common sense” and our intuitions because they can reflect powers of which we’re unaware. But reason is king, here.

The saltation you invoke would, I guess, make sense if one believed that beliefs exclusively arise from social pressures, but I don’t know anyone who believes that or takes that leap. The left blogosphere’s self-appellation is the “reality-based community,” and “faith-based” is an epithet for beliefs based on social pressures rather than the evidence.

“The modern liberal ideal seems to be a technocratic, bureaucratic centralization of everything, with grudging concessions to reality. There is no role here for “mediating institutions” independent of and disconnected from the central government – the modern liberal idea seems to want these to be, at best, functions or organs or subsidiaries of the government”

This is just wrong headed because best modern formulation /defense of liberalism is in Rawls ,and on his view almost nothing is centralized not even ideology ( see especially his later work for this ).
It is hard to take Luis seriously when he gets the basics wrong.

“Metaphysical social constructivism of the Rortean variety does probably have some sway among left academics within the humanities but is a very minor one within the broad category of left politics. The dominant view on the left if anything – certainly on the far left – is moral absolutism (just not the right’s) and metaphysical materialism. ”

There are two things wrong with this picture. First a small point .I think your suggestion that far left is moral absolutist and so on is maybe 40 years out of date because postmodernism has made inroads here.

Second ,SC comes in another flavour besides metaphysical one i.e. social construction talk is often applied to our beliefs about facts. This involves epistemic claim that the correct explanation for why you have a particular belief has to do with the role that particular belief plays in our social lives and not exclusively with the evidence advanced in its favour.

What this means is that we can abandon beliefs without fear of irrationality : if you have a belief not because there is good evidence for it but because having it serves some contingent social purpose , then if we happen not to share the social purpose it serves ,we are free to reject it.

It is quite easy to see how this leads to relativism and if we assume uncontraversially that this is a widespread view on the left it is easy to see how conservative’s take is vindicated.

I wouldn’t say MQ misstates my position, so much as overstates, based, to be sure, on a rather glib comment, so let me break out the nuanced version. Not that nuanced though; this is a blog comment, so I’m going to have to stick to the broad brush. And I’m afraid it’s going to ramble because I have a lot of ideas here, but they’re not all organized and worked out.

First of all, I said “in this age” because I’m making an argument specifically about the 21st century, not a generalization about history, although some of the latter is folded in. In other eras, Burkeanism may cut it. I agree that there are good reasons for prudence and for wanting to be incrementalist, but I still say Burkeanism is a losing hand in the long run. The reason we have radical conservatism is that Burkean conservatism failed consistently. Even when it had momentary successes, such as the suppression of the 1848 rebellions, it still generated a system significantly different than it wanted or intended, and the rebellious forces just re-emerged in a new form. Partly, this is the problem of defending the status quo along a particular axis. Because the status quo relies on complex dependencies among various factors, not all of which are necessarily understood, aspects of it cannot be maintained in isolation, save in the very short term. OTOH, aspects can be attacked in isolation, provided one is radical – that is, not committed to maintaining the status quo overall. That is the structural advantage of radicalism.

Let me give a recent example. I think the one major global success of liberals in the last quarter century has also been the one major issue where they have not been struggling to protect previous gains against conservative assault, but instead to mainstream an idea that had just recently been considered quite radical: gay rights. Who would have predicted in, say, 1975 that maintaining a progressive tax structure against assault by the rich but small minority disadvantaged by it would be difficult and mostly fail, but that mainstreaming sexual practices and identities long regarded as abhorrent and criminal by most of the population would be comparatively easy and mostly succeed? There are two ways to respond psychologically to living in an era of great change, as we have pretty much constantly since the industrial revolution. One is to resist it by clinging to the old ways, and the other is to embrace it by consciously trying to constantly reorient oneself. Not only do I think the latter course better, I think in modern cultures it has become more prevalent, so people were more open to the new idea of gay rights and also the “new” one of destroying the welfare state. The liberal’s self-image as being always the hip moderns on the side of progress is neither true nor desirable.

Liberals have come to terms with the modern world? Whither K-12 education? We all agree it has problems, right? Conservatives propose changes: vouchers, charters, home schooling. There are hidden agendas at work that tend to undermine these solutions even when the basic idea may be sound. But what is the liberal alternative? Stick to the Bismark model and futz around the edges? Is there any future in this? Will not the 19th century conception of public education fall further and further short of 21st century needs? Burke will turn you into an old aunt whose heart palpitates at the mention of change. And the conservatives taunt the liberals for sticking to “old ideas”, which is true, in this case.

You want modern? Accepting the 1960’s isn’t modern anymore. Let’s talk designer babies. Barring collapse of civilization, that technology is coming, right? There is a libertarian, a plutocratic, and a racist position all pretty easy to anticipate, so at least major elements of the conservative coalition are ready for this, at least in principle. What is the liberal position on it? Should genetic enhancements be sold in the open market? If not, how allocated? Forbidden? Simply trying to be muddle through pragmatically on the basis of experience won’t cut it; it is too alien to our experience. The only way to think about it is to think big. In the face of that sort of thing, there is no defending the status quo. Is this science-fictional? We’re on the Web here. Our lives are science-fictional to someone from the 19th century.

One also cannot count the libertarians and neoconservatives as marginal in evaluating conservative thought. Though small in number, those are the intellectual big guns. And, yes, they are very much in tune with this time.

The liberals – or, in Europe, the Social Democrats – formed a pragmatic compromise between the socialists and the laisser- faire capitalists that worked out in practice better than either of those ideas did in pure form. This is probably what led to Burkeanism. One can argue strongly for libertarianism or socialism from first principles, but what worked best is a compromise that does not purely follow either “ideology” (to adopt Russell’s term). And virtually all governments in the world today have some degree of free market and some degree of social welfare. This is why the economic aspect of liberalism is not so much argued on first principles; it did not come from first principles, but rather emerged from experience.

What forced the capitalists to compromise, though, was the pressure generated by socialism and other forms of radicalism. Most of the major institutional changes effected in the 20th century by liberalism came in two decades: 1932-1942 (“the thirties”) and 1964-1974 (“the sixties”), not at all coincidentally the decades of the greatest widespread radicalism as well. Without some vision of how society should be different from how it is – because it will not stay the way it is – liberalism has no where to go and will remain impotent, despite its successes. As successful in practical terms as liberalism has been, a Democratic Congress elected to end the War cannot take serious action to do so. This is because radicalism has no voice in the Democratic party, so all pressure comes from the Right.

I regard fascism as the first wave of radical conservatism. WWI and the Bolshevik takeover had made clear that no Burkean organic sense of tradition was going to contain radical change. So the conservatives developed their own brand of radical change. To still sound conservative, it had to pretend to be asserting a Burkean traditionalism, but it was in fact attempting to transform society into something utterly new, just as communism was. Since misleading people is part of the ideology of fascism, I think the first mistake in analyzing it is to take its rhetoric at face value. It called itself anti-modern, whereas communism called itself the ultimate progressive philosophy. Ultimately, though, I’m with Arendt; these are variations on a theme, and that theme is quintessially modern.

I also don’t see how to be a Burkean modernist. If modernism means anything, it means welcoming change and holding no cow too sacred, and if Burkeanism means anything, it means being suspicious of rapid change, especially when it runs afoul of existing prejudices, be those well-founded in reason or not. Now, holding these two things in tension may produce a useful approach, as I think changes should be evaluated on the substance, but they are in tension, not complementary. And if one looks at changes on the substance, rather than being for or against “change”, I think one is neither a Burkean nor a modernist (this is my own position).

I do think that Jacoby, given his examples, is pretty clearly talking about policy proposals and not goals. (In fact, rereading the article, it’s appallingly hackish; on two of the three main issues that he uses to demonstrate ideological diversity among Republicans [immigration and health care], not only does he not demonstrate that Democrats lack ideological diversity, he doesn’t even bother to make an assertion about what the Democrats’ position is. On the third, abortion, he disregards Harry Reid.)

Your restatement of the problem is very interesting indeed, and I agree that your position, to a degree, is the same as mine. I will quibble (of course) with various of your points.

The political/economic success of democratic capitalism was won through its preservation against its enemies. Whatever claim US liberals still have to that is the result of policy compromises that had to be made to ensure success, the Danegeld paid to the socialists. You are the heirs to those compromises, not the core and essential substance. This is clear in the universal and bitter hatred of private enterprise on that side. There isn’t a good word heard for business, unless, grudgingly, it comes with an obvious hypocrisy or in patronising terms.

No doubt there are US conservative strains that run counter to Burke and old liberalism, but they aren’t influences to the degree that the socialist/bureaucratic impulse dominates on your side.

A variation of this theme is that the right likes to treat “natural” as a not only meaningful but desirable quality, whereas for significant portions of the left, if it’s a meaningful quality, it’s a negative one. Rightist love of the organic above the synthetic (however defined) goes from lowest-common-denominator opposition to homosexuality and miscegenation, to Burkean preference for evolved over designed institutions, to ev psych defenses of traditional gender roles, to the presumption that markets are the natural state of an economy absent obviously synthetic “intervention,” and so on.

There are certainly segments of the left – the World Peace Through Crystal Power set, some but by no means all or even most environmentalists, and so on – that take nature as normative, just as there are the high-modernists who view the synthetic as superior (Marxists, liberal policy wonks, secularists, a good chunk of feminism, &c.) and those who are sufficiently strong social constructivists that they don’t see “natural” as having any real meaning. There’s certainly more diversity on the left than the right in this area! Right modernists seem to be restricted to Ayn Rand worshippers and neoconservatives, the latter of whom were emigres from the left anyway.

Metaphysical social constructivism of the Rortean variety does probably have some sway among left academics within the humanities but is a very minor one within the broad category of left politics. The dominant view on the left if anything – certainly on the far left – is moral absolutism (just not the right’s) and metaphysical materialism. But when conservatives decribe the left their major impression is that they are extreme relativists, social constructivists, and so on. The best guess I can make about this is that because lefties tend to say that certain things that the conservatives think are both natural concepts and morally important – the nation, gender, religion, race, capitalism – are in fact artifacts of human social processes, and because most of the arguments that the left and right have are about these sorts of things, the natural conservative saltation is that the left doesn’t really believe in anything, do they, they believe in total moral anarchy.

(A less interesting explanation would be that professors in the humanities are, like highly-paid actors, a subset of liberals whom liberals/leftists pay absolutely or very nearly no mental space to but whose importance to liberalism at large is percieved as very great by conservatives. But this begs the question of why they find humanities professors to be so very important to the left.)