Cynics Unlimited

JeffG of Common Sense (Ain’t So Common Anymore) has written a good piece on conservatism and imposing one’s will on others.

People who call themselves Social Conservatives often try and use the coercive power of the state to impose morality upon their fellow citizens. This has manifested itself in many forms over history: The Inquisition, Puritans in England, the “Religious Right” to name just a few.
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There are many ways to emphasise (sic) the different aspects of what it is to be a Conservative, and this post is my attempt to define my opinion on the subject. I would never seek to impose my opinions on others. We conservatives are not a monolithic group, which has gotten us in trouble in the past, with some “wingnuts” being blown out of proportion by the media.

I don’t have a blogger account so I’ll add my $0.02 here …

A question came up about morality and how it applies to left-wing and right-wing politics. Technically, morality is a doctrine or system of conduct, meaning virtually everyone has “morals”. Hence politics –a subjective discipline- is moral at its core and no branch of political thought is 100% free from wanting to impose some form of morality.

With that in mind, the morality of various conservative and progressive groups can be differentiated in terms of adherence to freedom:

• Progressives and moderates from the 1960’s and earlier (many of whom are center-right conservatives today) tended to support positive freedom – the freedom to control one’s own destiny.
• Present-day leftists/progressives tend to support negative freedom – the freedom from obstacles and impediments
• The religious right does not support any specific freedoms but rather clamps down on certain freedoms to ensure a moral order compatible with spiritual teachings. (this definition applies to all religions, not just Christianity)

Positive freedom represents a threat to the controlling group benefiting from the inequity. Women’s suffrage and the original Civil Rights movement were about empowering disadvantaged groups via enabling political participation and synchronizing legal rights with those afforded to white males.

Negative freedom can represent a threat to both the controlling group and, occasionally, the underlying systems created in accordance with positive freedom. For example, affirmative action is based on the moral decision that people from all backgrounds should be free from hiring discrimination, measurable by proportional representation in public and private sector employment. This morality is enforced with the establishment of hiring quotas, which can ignore free market realities (eg group X is underrepresented in education pertaining to the job; there are few job openings in the field) or at worst promote unqualified people from the “right” minority group.

Religious morality is a threat to anyone who doesn’t happen to share the same religious convictions. In the case of abortion, religious fundamentalists and other social conservatives already have the freedom to not partake and to speak out against the practice. However, the religious right attempts to force everyone to become de facto Christians by legally banning the practice for all citizens.

With that in mind, I’ve observed that political groups are only accused of “forcing morality” on others when that morality infringes on the positive freedoms of a large group. When people complain about the “left”, they usually refer to policies that subvert the idea of a free market; complaints against the “right” are often against social conservatives who try to limit the positive freedoms of any lifestyle contrary to their own (e.g. homosexuals and marriage).

To that effect, social conservatives could be called “conservatives” in that they are attempting to preserve the social order of days gone by; however their methods and some of the principles SoCons uphold run counter to the ideas of individuality and freedom often identified with the conservative movement.