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Ok, I’m new here, so let me introduce myself and my views before I present you with this brief essay that I’ve written. I am a person who is fascinated by partisan politics and political people, though I myself am not very political, in the sense that I don’t have strong opinions on most political issues. I like to write about the structure of political relationships, and to try to understand why differences of opinion exist. I think it is interesting and valuable to present these thoughts to people who are fairly opinionated on both sides of the political spectrum, and the DU seems like a good place to converse with the left side. What I’ve written in the paragraphs that follow tries to point out some fundamental differences between the left and the right (which I’ve decided to title “progressive” and “conservative”) in terms of their take on a specific issue that has been in the news lately.
Let’s start with asking the question: “what makes a position conservative?” The immediate problem we run into is that whether or not a position is conservative depends both on the status of the law itself, and on the values of the society as a whole. A position can be conservative in regards to law if it seeks to limit additional government regulation. In this sense, a "ban" on gay marriage is not a conservative action, because it creates additional law. But if the existence of marriage as a legal concept is itself due to legislation, and the inclusion of gays into this legal concept would constitute additional legislation (by broadening the possibilities for what constitutes a legal union of 2 individuals), thus making the opposition of gay marriage a conservative position. I don't know the specifics of marriage law, and the press is never exactly clear on them, so I don't know which of these two possibilities is the correct one.
Turning now to values, a position is conservative in relation to values if it seeks to preserve the status quo in terms of the general perception of what society finds valuable. If the majority of society opposes gay marriage, then technically that stance is a conservative position (there is a difficulty with this, in that many conservatives are "stuck in the past"--they favor values that were once popular but have now become the values of a minority of the population). If the legal status of marriage itself permits gay marriage, and there is a general push for it by a significant portion of society, then conservatives are faced with a dilemma: should a conservative stance towards the law be violated in order to serve the conservative stance towards a value? If this is the case in society today for example, then I would speculate that, with his amendment, Bush seems to be banking on the assumption that most conservatives favor the latter over the former, at least in this particular case and its implications (we will see, come election time, whether or not that assumption proves correct).
Now let’s turn to the notion of what makes a position “progressive.” Roughly, I take a progressive to be someone who considers “progress” to be an important value. Now, logically, “progress” can only be defined in reference to some sort of goal, and often it is not made explicit by progressives themselves what that goal is, in the same way that it is often not made specific by conservatives what fundamental values they are “conserving.” Despite this, we can point towards a key characteristic that distinguishes progressives from conservatives: progressives frame their view of what is ideal in terms of the future, whereas conservatives frame their view of what is ideal in terms of the past. This may seem abstract, but it actually plays a very clear role in what each tends to focus their attention on.
It explains, for instance, the differing attitudes that each take towards civil liberties, which is relevant to the example of gay marriage used above. The concept at work here is “equality” or “equal standing under the law.” A conservative will see this principle as something that was established once, and ought to be fixed permanently as a value to society. A progressive, however, sees this principle as something on which society must expand. Thus a conservative views the accomplishment of equal standing under the law to be the prime achievement of the notion of equality, whereas the progressive sees it as the first step in an evolving process of progress, out of which certain other legal and value changes will inevitably result. Thus the creation of gay marriage is valued by the progressive as an achievement precisely because it can be seen as working towards the expansion of this principle.
Both conservatives and progressives are capable of being overly radical. The difference between how this is so is a telling one: progressives, at their worst, focus all of their mental energy towards creating a society that could never exist, whereas conservatives, at their worst, focus all of their metal energy towards preserving a society that never existed.
Thoughts, anyone?
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