Compare & Contrast Modern Conservatism and Modern liberalism - Essay Example

# Compare and Contrast Modern Conservatism and Modern Liberalism The nature of liberalism is founded in the word liberty in which no oneman’s choices can impede the choices of another. Locke is quoted for having said that liberty is “a State of perfect Freedom to order their Actions…as they think fit…without asking leave, or depending on the Will of any other Man” (Guide 3). In other words, liberalism is the belief that the will of a man is not subject to the will of someone else. The Fundamental Liberal Principle is defined as the belief that political authority must be justified in order to assert authority over people. The further definition of the principle can be understood by the statement that liberty is “a state of nature in which humans are free and equal, and so argue that any limitation of this freedom and equality stands in need of justification (i.e., by the social contract), the contractual tradition expresses the Fundamental Liberal Principle” (Guide 3). In this discussion of the idea of liberty it must be understood, then that the Constitution is a contractual tradition that is used in order to define how liberty can be expressed, which might be considered a contradiction. However, when examining the Constitution, it is based on defining how each person cannot impede the will on another and what constitutes an infringement that has surpassed the rights of the individual and imposes on the next. It is a difficult and sometimes indistinct structure of what impedes the individual to express their freedom and what is the imposition of the individual of another to express their won liberty. Conservatism traditionally means that there is an adherence to morality that is founded in a respect for authority. A conservative wanted to maintain the status quo with a rejection of things that were either modern or secular (PPT Classical Conservatism 1). Current conservative beliefs are at their core not much different than this with the resistance to science and to secularized governmental separation. The current conservatives seem to desire to assert morality as an absolute over the beliefs of all people rather than allowing for the differences that emerge in a diverse society. One tenet of classical conservatism that seems to have changed is the idea that society is in need of restraints (PPT Classical Conservatism 2). Where classical conservatism once believed that human nature was essential wicked and needed to be held to a high morality, contemporary conservatism believes that there should be less government. The government should remain out of the business of creating regulatory constraints on behavior because the economic system will naturally weed out what is and is not appropriate for society. Free enterprise should be specifically free in order to gain its goals without having to comply with rules that govern its morality. Change is also resisted by conservatives both classical and contemporary. In resisting change, the status of the current society is maintained and the theory that if something is not broken it should not be tampered with is in full swing for conservatives (Guide 41). The belief that the moral high ground is established by the continuation of a system in which some are benefited, usually those that are conservative, is the foundation for the resistance that exists in the conservative political belief system. The system that emerges over time will tend to favor the elite of a society because for a time it will go unchecked as it continues to have the appearance of working. An example is the deregulation of the mortgage system that was well predicted to be a bad idea, but in the end the system broke rather than being changed to be more effective. The reason for this is that it was making money. When it comes down to it, the ‘morality’ of a system and the resistance to change comes from a belief that as long as it can be exploited it should not change. In contrast to the belief that morality should be imposed and that constraints on human nature is necessary, liberalism holds that reason is a way to find solutions and that society should be built upon ideological frameworks that support he strive for good governance. Classical liberalism is defined by the idea of a resistance to oppressive institutions like the military, government, church and social conventions. Human beings are not innately wicked but are born in ignorance and the result of this ignorance is the need for an overriding force that is defined as government. The social oppressing forces are not good for the liberal agenda, but the need for government is, in Thomas Paine’s words, “a necessary evil” (PPT Classical Liberalism 4). At this point it can be good to compare classical and current conservatism with the concepts of liberalism. Liberalism was in the beginning a cause through which less government would have been beneficial. Conservatism called for the need of government to restrain the evil of human nature. Current liberalism often calls on government to place regulations on the evil of human nature for contemporary societal ills. Somewhere in the history of the two opposing ideas some switching has occurred in which liberalism has come to see that regulation is the only way to stop the evil that human beings will do where because of a resistance to change, conservatism does not wish to see government step in and constrain what is perceived as a problem. An example can be seen through health care. Conservatives work tirelessly to see that there are no changes unless it is a deregulation of the industry away from governmental intervention because despite the ills of the system, those who are in the ‘have’ category of the nation’s wealth see only that their way of getting medical care might be interrupted and changed. The great cries of the masses that are without medical insurance and have no access to health care are less noisy than the fear of losing their own control over their own access. The irony of the classical conservatism in contrast to contemporary conservatism is that in modern convention conservatives are less interested in the morality of human nature and more interested in being liberated from government. Modern conservatism can be seen as a reaction to the New Deal which took social issues and placed them in the path of government. The fear of losing what is in favor of a better society is so great that they will fight with all of their power to resist change and protect what is currently the structure of society (PPT Modern Conservatism 1). No matter what the true level of the conservative’s status of wealth, someone who ascribes to conservatism believes that a change is going to impact their freedom to continue forward using the benefits that they are used to enjoying. To change means to put at risk all that they have attained. Even more important to those conservatives who are at a lower middle class income is the fear that when they finally get there, when they achieve the wealth that is the ‘promise’ of conservative modern life, it will not be there for them to enjoy because the government has taken it away. Modern conservatism is centered in an ‘us and them’ way of looking at life. The ‘we’ of the system is all of those who intend to benefit from the freedoms that are given in a system where regulations do not exist to prevent the acquisition of wealth. As long as ‘we’ are okay, then ‘they’ are the expected casualties of the system. That the system does not benefit them is their fault because they have not lived by the right moral code, obviously, or they would not be in the situation that is affected by less governmental intervention. This has led to the criminalization of poverty, a theory that those who are poor are victims of their own lack of moral state. Poverty has been ideologically criminalized in order to justify social policy that does not alleviate the disparity of wealth. This turn of conservatism away from social support systems is a result of the resistance to change rather than continuing to believe that institutions provide structure for the weaknesses of human nature. Liberalism is focused on the individual, but is often also bent toward collectivism (Guide 16). The individual in conservatism has attained their status according to the morality of their choices. Might equals right to the point that those who are leaders in industry have earned the right to the spoils of their victories whereas those who have not gained this status are surely on the verge because they have adopted the same beliefs and have lived a righteous life. Liberalism recognizes that the state of someone’s life is a collaborative consequence of the choices made in life and the social pressures and impositions onto a life for the sake of the whole of society. Whereas a conservative will look at someone from a disadvantaged neighborhood and see that they could choose to overcome their circumstances thus should take responsibility for the consequences of choosing wrongly, a liberal will see the power of the disadvantaged situation and understand that overcoming society is more often rare than common potential. One problem with the modern libertarian perspective is that it often gives power over with the hope that it will be wielded with the intention of good. Mill wrote that “Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion”. The intention of this thought is that the ability for human kind to improve the state of the individual in society means that it should have the will to do so. Through the ability to create solutions the problems will be solved. However, the theory of creating the best possible society in a zealot framework means that having a despot that rules with absolutism is justified as long as it solves the problems of society (Guide 18) There is danger of despotism when adhering to collectivism or communalism allows for power to be taken over by an authority that appears to have all the answers. Giving over liberty in the belief that the ills of society can be solved through authority is just as dangerous as if not more than resisting any change at all. The experiences of the Great Depression and World War II led to the change in liberalism from a belief in less regulation of the human will to the belief that the greater good must be served by the interventions of power. A distinct shift in ideology during those harsh and transformative events was that the government became responsible for the economic welfare of the citizens, thus placing more power over and responsibility for the individual (PPT Modern Liberalism 1). Modern liberals believe in acceptance of difference in choices about life, which is right in line with the nature of classical liberalism. Conservatives believe that the choices to live alternative lifestyles come at the price of being outside of the advantages of the mainstream. Liberals believe that social ills are the cause of disadvantages for most alternative lifestyles so it requires public solutions for those problems. However, the difference is that because of the level of social injustice and the perception that there is a lack of power in the masses to affect their status in relationship to the social construct; liberalism now takes the stance that a government that intervenes is worth the cost of pure liberated states of existence (PPT Modern Liberalism 3). This switch between liberalism and conservatism is the result of a world that become more tied together through the influence of greater experiences that showed that the influence of power that is beyond the control of the individual can control fate. Where there was a belief that independence was a powerful right and that the will of one need not come across the needs of others, this ideal was shattered when world war and economic instability shook the core of the beliefs that framed political ideals. Conservatives saw that government could be a bad influence on the freedom of the ability to maximize profits where liberals were more concerned with the effect of global influences on freedom to the point that the individual could not enact their will. One of the results of this switch in belief systems is the tightening of the ‘us’ definition that seems to override conservative beliefs. Science and intellectualism more often looks towards reason in order to solve social problems, leading many academicians to be liberally based in their ideology (PPT Modern Conservatism 2). This means that the conservatives must fight against intellectualism in order to overturn reason as a means of solving social problems which might be at the expense of corporate freedom. Creating a larger pool of those who are included in the conservative perspective requires demonizing intellectualism by creating claims of ‘elitism’ which is ironic because true modern conservatism benefits the elite over the masses. In creating enemies of those who are intellectual and find solutions through reason, change is successfully resisted. In the creation of community, conservatism reinforces this sense of the ‘us and them’ strategy for creating inclusion and exclusion from their protections. Community is built on a local level and for the conservative; decisions are made at the local level (PPT Modern Conservatism). This translates into a strong belief in state’s rights and the belief that the central government body has no right to impose law and beliefs at the state level. Where classical conservatism believed that government had a responsibility to legislate in opposition to human kind’s natural wickedness, the belief in the state as the overriding power has now become a part of conservative ideology. Liberalism, on the other hand, once had as a part of their structure the belief that the individual will could not be subverted by the central government and that law should be structure to protect rights and not impose belief. In the new construction of liberalism the state cannot be trusted to self-govern because the choices may not be to the greater good thus the central government has an obligation to protect people from their own ignorance. The belief in local governing principles is also based on the globalized powers that so profoundly influenced the development of ideology in the post Great Depression world. Greater governing forces that imposed the structure of the New Deal onto citizens through affecting their taxes and making them responsible for others became a changing point through which the modern conservatives decided to close ranks and serve the idea of smaller influences on governance rather than larger influences (PPT Modern Conservatism 2). The reaction to a large government that encompassed beliefs that there was a responsibility implied by citizenship was to extract citizenship of the larger governing entity and place it into locality. If large government took money through taxes for the benefit of the masses who were morally not fulfilling their mandate for success, then the solution was to localize decision making and take it from the central government as much as possible so that communities could dictate how and who was deserving of help. In contrast, liberalism seeks to impose reason over belief, taking from people their rights to believe and enact their beliefs on their community in a way that suits them. There is an essentialism based belief that there is a fixed way in which to view the rights of people and that this is an inclusionary based viewpoint. Where conservatism places rights in the hands of those who have earned a position in society, liberalism believes that there is a right and wrong way of dealing with the world and that through this perspective, all people should see benefits and compensations where society fails to meet their needs. The interesting nature of the conservative and liberal perspectives as they compare from classic to modern is that they have essentially reversed positions. Works Cited PPT Classic Conservatism PPT Modern Conservatism PPT Classic Liberalism PPT Modern Liberalism The Guide Read More