What Liberals Really Believe

One of the greatest mistakes conservatives and libertarians tend to make is misunderstanding their liberal opponents.  A great misconception about liberals is that they reject natural rights and reduce freedoms to privileges granted to citizens by their government, rather than seeing free people giving power to government in exchange for protection of life, liberty and property.  This false impression is a great folly. If conservatives and libertarians are ever to defeat the left, they need to familiarize themselves intimately with liberal ideology and understand that the motivation of the left is not just a quest for political rule merely for its own sake. They are not seeking allegiance to a crown.

Modern liberals do believe in natural rights.  What is implied by President Obama’s repeated use of the term, “fair share,” if not a claim of natural law? When a liberal says that every individual has a right to clean drinking water, he is expressing a natural moral principle of freedom that is tied to life and liberty. When liberals say that any consenting adults have a right to marry, they are likewise making a natural rights claim that for them is tied to the pursuit of happiness.  When Obama and Nancy Pelosi say that health care is a universal right, that too is an appeal to a natural right. These may be poorly conceived ideas about rights, but they are nonetheless assertions about freedom that appeal to a higher, non-political form of justice. There is an underlying system of moral reasoning within any doctrine of politics. All ideologies begin with “first principles,” in one form or another. Although there is considerable debate about natural law among scholars, advocates of all ideologies believe in something like it.

The fundamental assumption of natural law is that there is a higher, self-evident moral truth irrespective of man-made laws. The classical and Christian traditions of natural law acknowledge freedom but they do not start with it as the basis of all justice. For Locke, however, the natural rights of life, liberty and property are the beginning of moral reasoning.  Advocates of the political right generally embrace the classical, Christian, and Lockean traditions, but Locke is not the only modern thinker to build a theory of government around the existence of natural rights. Rights of man exist in Rousseau’s state of nature, too, as they also do in Kant’s understanding of a pre-political age. Natural rights are also a subtext of Marx’s writings.  Liberals are less favorable to Locke because they do not think his social contract protects rights nearly enough. Liberals therefore look instead to other modern thinkers for guidance.

Nor is “consent of the governed” a principle appreciated only by the right, either.  In fact, most revolutions have been inspired by leftist political doctrines, carried out by a mass “popular front” against its alleged oppressors. In this respect too, then, leftists clearly do seek to apply a form of universal justice.

Left and right conceptualize rights differently, but more significant is the way that they disagree about power.  While the right thinks of power as the force of the state, the left thinks of it as the dominance of the elite class.  For the left, this class consists of corporations, insurance companies, oil companies, banks, whites, men, churches, Christians, and anyone else who has the ability—in the eyes of liberal ideology—to oppress and persecute the weak for their own advantage. So, in the example of a right of all individuals to clean drinking water, liberals believe that the strongest and most powerful people will inevitably control and limit the supply of that water. Their solution, then, is to create an agency that will coordinate and manage water supply. That agency is the state.

In The Metaphysics of Morals, Kant says that “laws of freedom” are necessary to prevent the oppressive habit of conflict. Rousseau uses the stag hunt metaphor to show the inequities that emerge when people try to pool their labor. In his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau writes:

If a deer was to be taken, every one saw that, in order to succeed, he must abide faithfully by his post: but if a hare happened to come within the reach of any one of them, it is not to be doubted that he pursued it without scruple, and, having seized his prey, cared very little, if by so doing he caused his companions to miss theirs.

So, according to modern liberalism, rights are not granted by the state, but mediated by government through management and coordination. The goal is to make sure that the rights of all individuals are held secure. Maximized rights are what advocates of the left mean by the “common good.”

Why is all this important? If the right is going to make its case with voters, it needs to understand that belief in natural rights is not the dividing line between the left and right. Rather, it is how they each understand the source of unjust power. It is easy for voters to identify with the left’s interpretation and put greater trust in government because nearly everyone can relate to experiencing unfair treatment somewhere in the private sector.  Nearly everyone has felt cheated in one form or another by a bank or insurance company, overcharged by a telephone or utility company, or has had to endure poor treatment by an employer. Many people can relate to having financial struggles that give them constant worry while the bankers they owe their mortgages to live in luxury and comfort. It is easy, then, to see why ordinary people succumb to what Jean-Francois Revel called the “totalitarian temptation” to give more and more power to the state.  And when the Republicans defend free enterprise on the basis of natural rights, they are seen as only interested in the freedom of industry, not the freedom of all individuals. The “natural rights” line of argument does nothing to persuade voters to see the pragmatic efficacy of small government. Rather, it causes average voters to dismiss the Republicans as the political instrument of the wealthy elite concerned only with its own profits.

The prospects for the right are not bleak, however.  The solution is for the right to make the case that the over-powerful state is a cure worse than the disease. It is up to the right to demonstrate that it is government, with its intrusive laws, regulations, and bureaucracies, and not the private sector, that creates and perpetuates injustice rather than protects freedom, as Friedrich Hayek argued in The Road to Serfdom.  It is especially essential for the right to make a better case for the universal benefits of unfettered capitalism. These are the harder arguments but they are winnable because just as everyone has had bad experiences with their encounters with the private sector, bad experiences with the state are also common.  People know full well what it is like to deal with the Department of Motor Vehicles, the Internal Revenue Service, or their children’s school administrators.  The most effective message for the right on all of these matters is as Milton Friedman put it, “The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.”

Prof. Adam Fuller teaches at Youngstown State University. His research interests are in the American Founding, religion and politics, and ideology.  His book, Taking the Fight to the Enemy: Neoconservatism and the Age of Ideology, was published in 2011.