APRIL 28, FRIDAY

CONSERVATIVE AND LIBERAL

I don’t think I’ve ever really wondered about the terms conservative and liberal. Thinking about them briefly might not be very enlightening to others but I at least I can puzzle about them for myself.

For years David Brooks has been one of my favorite New York Times opinion writers. He also has appeared on PBS Newshour on Friday evenings opposite Mark Shields, who recently died, or another liberal commentator. David Brooks takes the conservative position. He is always thoughtful, always modest, never dogmatic. I like him.

But in the current polarization both the word liberal and the word conservative have been demonized. The other side is always threatening, always wrong.

But David Brooks is neither threatening or wrong. He is thoughtful.

I don’t know why David Brooks became a conservative, but I do know why I became a liberal. It is not something that I reasoned my way to, it is entirely because my parents were liberals and I ended up teaching in a very liberal college. It just seemed the natural thing to be.

Years ago one of the Warren Wilson faculty, Bill Davis, was a staunch conservative. But he had grown up in a liberal family and then had read a lot of books and become a conservative. He made a choice. When the Iraq war happened I was lock step against it because my liberal friends were against it while I hardly knew where Iraq was. But Bill Davis was for the war and for a number of reasons which he could precisely recount for us because he had read all about the Middle East and knew what he was talking about. I still stayed lock step liberal, but I was impressed with him, particularly since his position was so unpopular on our campus.

So obviously you can be a principled conservative. But as I think about it the issue may not be complicated at all.

Just the words indicate to me that a conservative looks to the past and conserves the best of the past. A conservative honors what people before us have found to be the most enduring and life enhancing patterns and for that reason is reluctant to change.

Just the word indicates to me that a liberal is open to new perspectives. He is a progressive, looking to the future and seeking new patterns that are more life enhancing than the old patterns. Liberals are more prone to lead the revolution and conservatives to oppose it.

And as I think about it I realize that one side of me is naturally conservative. I am guided by what I have been taught by my parents and by my experience of what seems life enhancing and what seems life denying. I am guided by my mistakes and don’t want to repeat them. The older I get the more cautious I get about leaping into a revolution because I’ve learned that revolutions often end badly. Revolutions start out with high ideals and often end in dictatorships. Look at the French Revolution or the communist revolutions in Russia or Cuba, or the socialist revolution in Venezuela, or the Islamic revolution in Iran. All ended in dictatorships.

On the other hand the other side of me finds many of the teachings of my elders to be about a world that has changed and that cultural conventions tend to restrict people as much as to free them. Revolution is often necessary and at the time smashing things feels really good.

So half of me at 85 is conservative and half of me my whole life long has been liberal.

What if on the conservative/liberal continuum some people are just naturally conservative, holding on to the past, particularly older people, while other people, progressives, are eager to try new ways, particularly younger people. What if the polarization between MAGA people, trying to return to the glorious past and liberals, opening up to a glorious future is mostly choosing one side or the other and then demonizing the opposite side.

What if we would agree that we have to preserve the best of the past, the most enlivening traditional American values while being at the same time being open to the most enlivening ways of being open to the rights of marginalized people and being open to the rapid changes that technology brings us, changes that we can’t prevent in any case.

It would seem, if all of us already are aware of the fact that we both conserve and open up in our own lives, that we could accept both and the tension between them as the way things are. Instead of choosing one side and therefore being threatened by and demonizing the other side we could be conservatives and liberal progressives at the same time, conserving the best of the past and progressing to the best of the future. If we have both sides within each one of us you’d think it wouldn’t be hard to do.