Digby on Conservatism

Read it.

I can accept some of the tenets of so-called "classical" conservatism, such as maximum personal freedom, small, unintrusive government, and the like. In the real world, however, we have problems that are beyond the ability of the private sector to cope with, one of them being that we as citizens need protection from the private sector.

My major objection to conservatism, and this is even more relevant to libertarianism, is the lack of community displayed by those philosophies. This is not some dewy-eyed liberal leaning on my part, but is solidly grounded in human biology: we are social animals. We need to be with people and we need to care for and be cared for by our group. We've now, after maybe five thousand years of real civilization, managed to construct groups that are beyond our capability as individual to deal with. Most people can be intimate with a group of no more than about two dozen. You can readily associate with a group of maybe two hundred. Beyond that, it becomes terribly remote -- 300 million is a little much for a nice dinner party.

So we construct a group-surrogate -- a government. And I think, and I can quite legitimately argue, that one of the functions of government should be the welfare of the individuals it governs. (That should be a no-brainer, but it's amazing how seldom it comes up in discussions of conservatism by conservatives.) I don't think it needs to be a total welfare state, but safety nets and universal health care are not out of the question at all. Those are legitimate functions.

I think one reason we run into problems in our current set-up is that capitalism, as I've noted before, is the natural partner of oligarchy; socialism of one form or another is the natural partner of democracy. I guess that leaves me with the idea that some quasi-socialist government is the natural partner of a democratic republic. I'll let the theorists play with that one.

This is, believe it or not, relevant to the post below. Individual welfare in a polyglot society (and that is the source of some of our problems, as well) has to be contingent on erasing the boundaries between groups, in some areas at least. In that vein, things like hate-crimes laws are perfectly appropriate, as well as being regrettably necessary.