Compassionate Conservatism And Positive Freedom

The other day, I posted some excerpts from a recent speech by David Cameron, the British Conservative party's leader, in which he embraced the concept of "positive freedom" and committed his party to helping people lift themselves by their bootstraps - because you can't do that if you have no boots.

It's a stance that is totally alien to American conservatives and would never be accepted by the base if say, Guilliani, was to advocate such a move. And so I posed the question: "have the UK’s Tories lapsed into socialism or are the U.S.’ conservatives just leaning too far right and finding themselves way behind on the compassion curve?"

Today, James Joyner at Outside The Beltway, a moderate American conservative by most measures, kindly responded to my email asking for his thoughts.

In answer to Cernig’s question: Yes, I think the UK Conservatives, and those in Europe generally, are far to the left of the American variety. Indeed, they’re arguably to the left of the American Democratic party. Socialism was born in Europe and has always been more appealing there for a variety of reasons, including a more pronounced formal class structure, the absence of a frontier mentality, and a more homogeneous population.

The American political culture has always lionized the “rugged individual.” In the very earliest days of the Virginia colony, John Smith proclaimed, “Those who will not work, will not eat.” That mentality stuck with us until the New Deal, when the Great Depression spread the misery so wide that utter self-reliance seemed cruel. Even after that, though, there has been a stigma associated with “welfare” programs, partly owing to the fact that “those people” (blacks, Hispanics, illegal aliens, white trash, etc.) were disproportionately on the receiving end.

Still, Cameron and I agree on much of this. There’s little doubt that there are underlying causes to poverty beyond simply the choice not to work hard. Cameron identifies the obvious ones. Then again, I can’t imagine Tony Blair would disagree with any of this, either, aside from the charge that Labour is ignoring “root causes”.

My concern, however, is that saying poverty is a “disgrace” and that these causes must be “tackled” and “focus[ed] on” is empty talk. Coming from someone who seeks to wield the power of the state, though, they strike me as potentially quite scary, indeed, because it is difficult to envision a way in which government might alleviate relative poverty that would not be harmful to individual freedom and destructive to the engine of our economy.

I have to say, I fail to see how rent assistance, food stamps and other programs impact freedom negatively - I would think it would be a positive thing not to be free to starve, go cold or go without shelter. In this much, James seems to consider only the first part of my question without ever really questioning the second. As he himself indicates, it is easy to produce "empty talk" that can pass as actual compassion but actions speak louder than words.

Both James and I might be too swift to ascribe Cameron's words to a lapse into socialism, though. In comments to my previous post, "Illogical Planner" pointed out that Cameron's speech is in a strong British conservative tradition that includes Adam Smith (who believed aiding the poorest of society was one of the necessary functions of government), Benjamin Disraeli and the younger Winston Churchill that predates both Marx and Thatcherite?American Republican thugonomics. That current grew out of one of the few positive experiences with administering an Empire - that it was painfully obvious that there was another direction on the scale of "relative poverty".

As I am always reminding my kids, the poorest segment of American society is unimaginably affluent by comparison with much of the Third World. Even if you cannot easily meet your rent, the home you live in is vastly better than a Third World hut. Even if your schools don't educate your kids to a standard you like, at least the nearest school isn't six hours walk away. You may delay going to the doctor until its a real emergency, because you have no health insurance - but for many even that isn't an option.

Britons are still, via the Commonwealth, more connected to their Third World colonies than most Americans. That expresses itself both as an American parochial tendency to exclude privation happening beyond their own shores from their responsibility and a British tendency, exemplified by Gordon Brown's campaigns, to feel otherwise. With that visceral British realisation that the scale is more extensive than is apparent within our own shores comes another realisation - that, as Cameron rightly points out, allowing the poorest of our society to go without food, power and shelter in our affluent society is immoral and downright uncivilised. That's a real expression of compassionate conservatism and I heartily applaud Cameron's courage in turning away from Thatcherism to return to his conservative roots. I also suspect, very strongly, that those who founded and shaped America would have agreed with Smith, Disraeli et al.

Postscript Dave Schuler, a rightish Democrat, posts in OTB comments a reminder of an old joke from the 1960’s review Beyond the Fringe (explaining America’s political parties to Brits):

“There’s the Republican Party which is roughly the equivalent of our Conservative Party and the Democratic Party which is roughly the equivalent of our Conservative Party.”

Which goes a long way to explaining my own misgivings about the Democratic Party.