I have a really hard time understanding conservatives. And
not in a “how could they possibly believe that” sort of way. I mean that I have
a hard time generally just following their line of thought. It must have
something to do with the venue: National Review and other partisan outlets,
such as FOX News, are mostly writing to themselves. They service an
increasingly restricted demographic—their audience is shrinking—and as a result
they can assume that their audience already knows the game. I like to imagine it’s
a bit like people who are really into curling. To them it’s grand strategy; to
me, it’s just some guys huddling around a rock on the ice.
The problem, as I see it, is that while they’re talking to
themselves, they’re not talking to anybody else. Their ideas get lost in self-referential
jargon and inside jokes. To insiders, it makes those ideas more accessible and
helps foster an environment of exclusion: like culture broadly speaking, it
helps distinguish “us” from “them.” But it quickly starts sounding as though
you’re preaching to the converted; without external references, ideas get
trapped in a feedback loop. Fundamentally what this means is that those inside
the loop lose perspective.
It’s the same with liberals, of course. The Right has no
monopoly on self-referential ideology. But as the United States moves farther
to the left, it has embraced a form of liberalism that advances a notion of
just behind what John Rawls referred to as the veil of ignorance—that we should
all be treated equally before the law. Behind that veil, people are treated as
individuals absent race, gender, sexual orientation, income, or what have you.
To conservatives, this perspective is patently absurd. Justice,
in their sense, is a function of divine order: the world is naturally arranged so
that certain people assume authority, be they kings, priests, generals, or
fathers. To be virtuous, one had to rely on strict adherence to those
hierarchies. A son had a duty to a father, whose duty was also to the church
and state. Liberalism inverts that order, placing the duty on the state to the
individual, famously in the idea of a blindfolded goddess balancing the scales
of justice. The point is that she doesn’t know who is on either side: a gay
man, a black teen, or the state.
Of course, as citizens we do have obligations to the state
and to society generally. Conservatives are not wrong in that sense. Our
democracy only works when each citizen is engaged in the body politic through
voting (at the very least), expressing their opinions to elected
representatives, and observing duties to their fellow citizen, among so many
other obligations. The reason that Rousseau thought democracies could only work
in small countries was because people were geographically close enough to talk
to one another. So while chatting isn’t exactly a panacea, it would certainly go
a long ways toward alleviating many of the difficulties liberals and
conservatives are having getting their point across.
When you say it like that, of course, it sounds silly. Even
trite. But it requires the moral courage to assume that your interlocutor is
capable of kindness and charity, and then the far more difficult task of
extending those virtues yourself.
