In my elevator pitch about the difference between liberals and conservatives, I know this much. Liberals use the power of the state to defend against the depredations of the family. Conservatives use the power of the family to protect against the depredations of the state.
That's a good start, but Bruce Fleming has written an outstanding analysis of why left and right think so differently. He's a professor at the US Naval Academy and wrote in his essay 'Why I Love Conservatives':
The primary difference at the deep-structural level between liberalism and conservatism is that liberal ethical pronouncements are expressed int terms of actors, conservative in terms of actions.
This is very significant. He continues:
For conservative thought, the action itself, regardless of the nature of the actors involved in it, is forbidden or allowed. Liberals, by contrast, express ethical dicta in terms of actors. As a result, the particularities of the person's situation are relevant to the liberal, and irrelevant to the conservative. A statement of the form "thou shalt X' or "thou shalt not Y" is an intrinsically conservative dictum. Negatives are better than positives, from the conservative perspective, because they're so much clearer. With positives, we still don't know how we're going to accomplish it. a negative, however both tells us what we want to do and the fact that we're not going to do it. A negative is a complete little drama, all in itself.
Thou shalt not, for example, steal. Only a liberal, to who the particularities of the actor's situation are relevant, would ask, Is it alright to steal if you're starving and you're stealing bread from a millionaire who won't miss it? It's not that conservatives always say "no" to such questions. The question itself doesn't process as a legitimate part of the conservative world-view. To conservatives, the individual is a relatively meaningless unite that is constantly wanting with respect to The Action, that great looming thing outside of him. The conservative individual as a result is constantly struggling to achieve what he perceives as something greater than himself, to be able to fulfill a teaching or dictum.
And finally...
Conservative thought doesn't say that everybody has to be alike, because conservative assertions are in terms of actions, not actors.
I want to get all of this into the blog. I will be referring to it often.
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