Conservative Chaos
Conservative Chaos
The conservative family in Canada and North America has always been a coalition of many different interests, issues, and ideologies. Conservative leaders dance the fine line brokering these interests while at same time “sticking to the truth” of the conservative tradition.
In a sense, the conservative family is always on the verge of chaos. The idea of staying true to your principles has always had a tougher time with compromise and consensus.
The political events of the conservative family in Canada are sure to convince us of conservative chaos with a disquiet sense this may not only be chaos but a normal state of affairs to last for some time.
Much of the discussion about Canada’s conservative chaos and its possible solutions remains at the political and electoral level—it is about strategy, leadership, first-past-the-post elections, money, media, etc. I don’t discount these discussions. Leadership and strategy can sometimes overpower the deeper and more foundational troubles at the root of this chaos.
This evening, I wish to argue that the forces that divide the conservative coalition run far deeper than our present public discussion has posited. Furthermore, I will argue there is a divergence rather than a convergence in the conservative family—chaos is a state of the future, not just the past.
My motive for making this argument is to sharpen the debate among fellow conservatives, to give an honest look in the mirror, to challenge us to a different language, and to keep us drinking beer in harmony as we resolve our differences.
Finally, I wish to suggest an approach that I believe will hint toward how a diverse conservative community can live together and have an impact on our social and economic order in Canada. It is an idea called sphere sovereignly developed and articulated by Dr. Abraham Kuyper, prime minister of the Netherlands (1901–1905), founder of the Free University, journalist, theologian—a brilliant man of wisdom and political genius.
For the purposes of this lecture, I will divide the conservative coalition into three separate groups: the social conservative, the pragmatic conservative, and the libertarian (often referred to as the fiscal conservative). My rationale for this distinction is this: the social conservative and libertarian operate out of defined historic and known worldviews. The pragmatic conservative—of whom there are many—will most often jump onto the latest conservative fad acting from tradition; peer influence; wrong newspaper, personal, and business interests; and sometimes from an intuitive sense that it just makes the most sense to be conservative.
Let me broadly introduce the social conservative.
John and Alex are good friends in Edmonton. John, his wife, and three children worship at a local evangelical bible church down the road. Alex is a younger Catholic—part of the charismatic renewal in the Catholic church. Twenty years ago during high school, John and Alex hardly new each other—evangelical kids and Catholics didn’t play together much—but now their paths are crossing more and more.
The local pro-life or anti-abortion rally is where they first met, discovering the fact that they live only one block over from each other. Over a coffee at Tim’s—although Alex was hoping to have a good dark beer at the local pub—their conversation would hit on at least the following topics:
1. family breakdown in Canada;
2. millions of abortions in Canada;
3. the homosexual agenda;
4. taxes so high mom and dad are both working—government is too big;
5. public morality of the younger generation; and
6. church stuff.
Both Alex and John are major Focus on the Family fans, and John listens to CCM—Alex has a thing for classical music.
The social conservative entry into public life in Canada is only a recent development of the last 25–35 years. Mark Noll, well-known historian at Wheaton College, a prestigious liberal arts university in Wheaton, Illinois, succinctly places this development in historical context. In an effort to chart the development of churches in Canada he writes:
By the 1940s, Canada’s “other churches” were beginning to show considerable strength. These included immigrant bodies like the Mennonites, the Dutch Reformed, the Lutheran, the various Orthodox churches, and the Greek Catholics. They included also a host of conservative evangelical groups like the Christian and Missionary Alliance, the Plymouth Brethren, the Salvation Army, several Pentecostal bodies, and still others who were able to establish flourishing works in particular locales. Although these groups were establishing a foothold, they were not affecting the broader society as Catholics and the older Protestants had done. For various reasons—ethnicity, language, a passivity-inducing Holiness theology, or a stultifying fixation on biblical prophecy—these “other” Christians have often been content to remain in self-contained social, intellectual, and cultural ghettoes.
The dramatic developments and influence of the religious right in the United States has, in part, launched these social conservatives into the political and public arena. However, as my stereotype of John and Alex suggests, this entry into the public life had a narrow and specific focus.
Social conservatives’ participation in the political arena has largely been focused on family-related moral issues of great importance. The criticism that social conservatives are single issue/interest groups in the political arena is often true—although sometimes harshly judged. There are two key reasons for this single mindedness.
The first is a pragmatic reaction of no one fighting in public life for the protection of the traditional family being attacked by radical feminists and social liberals.
William Gairdner notes in a recent essay that in their “effort to repulse the left’s persistent reaching for state power, conservatives have always sought to fortify the many alternative forms of social and moral authority that are natural to human communities.”
The second is based on a theology of individual faith and concern with being saved as opposed to a Christian worldview for all spheres of life.
This situation has not served publicly active social conservatives well in Canada. As a matter of fact, Dianne Francis, Canada’s conservative goddess, once remarked that social conservatives are not fit to govern and should be prevented from doing so. Others with social conservative tendencies content themselves with other aspects of public life and politics that don’t really have much to do with their personal faith and religion and everything will be okay.
So much for the social conservative.
Let me introduce the libertarian.
The primary principle at work for the libertarian is the freedom of the individual. Period. It’s simple and easy to apply.
Brian Lee Crowley, president of the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, reviews David Boaz’s Libertarianism: A Primer. In a succinct and lightly sarcastic essay, Crowley says:
The disappearance of the all-embracing state as a credible alternative unleashed a flowering of thinking about what made the newly attractive liberal-individualism and market-oriented social order work, and how could they be expanded.
One of the main currents of thought to emerge from this intellectual ferment is libertarianism, an ugly contrived new word for a powerful set of old ideas. These ideas—individual liberty and responsibility, the rule of law, limited government, robust property rights, and the power of competition to tame potentially dangerous social. . . .
[Boaz’s] libertarianism flows from a kind of revealed truth: that each human being has natural rights, that these rights are self-evident, and that people create governments in order to protect their rights. The rights are essentially the right to self-ownership (I, including my body, belong to me and no one else), and the right to live your life as you please as long as you don’t infringe on the equal right of others to do the same.
Professor Tom Flanagan, in a Fraser Institue occassional paper entitled “The Uneasy Case for Uniting the Right” (Public Policy Sources, Number 53), more simply defines libertarians as “those who want free markets and individual choice to be the main determinant of public policy” and conservatives as “those who like free markets but are also concerned about the maintenance of traditional morality.”
Karen Selick, a lawyer and writer in Belleville, Ontario, and a self-described libertarian, says
one of the most important tenets of libertarianism is that the state has no business telling consenting adults what they may or may not do, so long as they are not initiating force or fraud against others. Behaviour that is only self-destructive, but that does not involve the use of force against other people, would probably be considered immoral by many, perhaps even most, libertarians, but would never be made illegal in a libertarian society.
So practically, libertarians get real concerned about regulating pornography and television programming, preventing responsible adults getting access to recreational drugs, setting community standards for acceptable art, requiring prayer in the classroom, or the community (family) first idea of some conservatives.
They also get antsy about more leftist ideas like redistribution of income, protecting consumers and employees from shady and exploitative practices, and cleaning up the environment.
Observations
On Leadership
The libertarian movement has clearly led the right in Canada—both in the think-tank world and in the political arena.
On Human Nature
Libertarians are optimistic about the goodness of the individual; social conservatives are more cautious and realistic and sometimes pessimistic.
On the Common Enemy
The conditions of the last 50 years or so have given reason for the social conservatives and libertarians to join in a long and partly successful battle against the welfare state, state intrusion into all aspects of life, and the sense of a loss of freedom and responsibility.
Furthermore, many social conservatives, when it comes to issues beyond family and morality, readily accept the libertarian line of thinking. Some do so for pragmatic purposes—it is the best available line of defense against a social liberal government. Others try to make ideological sense of this merger by calling themselves Christian libertarians.
This rally cry against the welfare state is losing steam due to the foggy sense of governments becoming more fiscally responsible, the national debt less on the daily news, and talk of smaller governments.
Conservative Divide
This leads me to my argument that the conservative divide will deepen. Libertarians and social conservatives will increasingly find themselves on different sides of issues that have great importance to them.
Gairdner, in the following statement, introduces this divide and its possible future:
And this is where the confusion begins, as so many who call themselves conservatives today do so simply because they happen to favour free markets. However, it doesn’t take long to see that this sort of conservative usually has very little interest in, and may even openly disdain the natural forms of civil authority. In this respect he is more like a modern liberal or a libertarian. To preserve this distinction, such people sometimes call themselves "fiscal" conservatives to indicate that they will fight for freedom in the economic arena, and they believe all moral and social matters "should be left up to the individual." In other words, along with their modern liberal counterparts they embrace all the ideals of the autonomous, freely-choosing individual, and only part company with liberalism when it favours the broad use of state powers to correct society or to make things artificially equal. Simply put, these conservatives want the state to stay out of all transactions of private life, especially economic ones, and they proudly imagine their "free-market individualism" to be the best argument and defence against state power.
Alas, it has turned out to be the worst.
So what are some of the frontline examples that evidence this divide?
Demographic
Libertarians of the younger generation are not shaped and or limited by the Judeo-Christian morality and culture that many of the older libertarians have work, lived, and thought under.
Policy
Traditional issues like abortion have always divided the conservative coalition; however, the issue was clearly articulated and the battle lines clearly drawn.
This is not the case with some more recent policy issues such as biotechnology/genetic engineering.
Michael Cromartie, in a conversation with Francis Fukuyama on his latest book Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology
Revolution, talks about this issue.
[Cromartie] But this is an area, isn't it—because the dangers of runaway biotechnology are so staggering—where there can be real coalitions crossing political lines? It seems that people on the Right and on the Left can agree that certain boundaries ought to be put on certain biotechnological advances.
[Fukuyama] That's happening already. I think in the cloning bill you've already seen an alliance of social conservatives and religious conservatives with environmentalists and other kinds of progressivists and certain feminists. On the other hand, there is a fundamental split between libertarian conservatives and people who take religious seriously. Libertarians believe in the complete sovereignty of the individual and individual preferences. There's really no higher moral basis on which an individual's choices can be criticized. This fundamental difference in outlook has been papered over in the existing conservative coalition, but the biotechnology revolution will expose it.
Compassionate conservatism and the faith-based initiatives in the United States are another example.
Let me quote from the mission statement of the newly formed Center for Compassionate Conservatism.
The compassionate conservative movement must be fully equipped to defend the compassion and morality of government policies that show due respect for the individual, civil society, and the marketplace. To that end, the Center for the Study of Compassionate Conservatism works to promote pro-active, people-centered approaches to public policy by providing a forum for compassionate conservative thinkers who recognize a real, but limited, role for government in furthering the common good.
By rejecting the reactive anti-governmentalism that has too often characterized the conservative movement in the past, the Center offers a distinct brand of conservatism capable of realizing America's greatness through the goodness of her people. Our attention is focused largely upon developing a positive conservative agenda for issues that often receive insufficient attention within the conservative movement, such as poverty relief, educational reform, universal health care, environmental stewardship, and racial reconciliation.
Stephen Goldsmith, a policy adviser to George W. Bush during the presidential campaign, in “What Compassionate Conservatism Is—and Is Not,” says “compassionate conservatism recognizes that we’re not going to become a virtuous and robust community of neighborhoods in this country just by relying on the forces of the marketplace. Instead, prosperity needs to have a purpose as well.”
Compassionate conservatism clearly wishes to distinguish itself from the libertarian line of thinking in the conservative movement.
Even the school voucher issue—the favoured child of the American right—is now becoming a democratic social justice issue. A growing partner in the school choice lobby are Democrats fighting for educational diversity in inner cities in the Unites States.
Religion
There are winds of change in the social conservative community. Many are frustrated with their lack of success in the political arena and the misunderstanding of their motivations and vision for the public square. Furthermore, many are looking for an intellectual tradition to develop a broader view of active public life that speaks to economic issues, community issues, poverty, water, environment, and technology.
Charles Colson, one of the most respected conservative leaders in North America, in his book How Now Shall We Live?, argues for such a vision.
He says:
Our choices are shaped by what we believe is real and true, right and wrong, good and beautiful. Our choices are shaped by our worldview.
The term worldview may sound abstract or philosophical . . . but actually a person’s worldview is intensely practical. It is simply the sum total of our beliefs about the world, the “big picture” that directs our daily decisions and actions. And understanding worldviews is extremely important. . . .
Every worldview can be analyzed by the way it answers three basic questions: Where did we come from, and who are we (creation)? What has gone wrong with the world (fall)? And what can we do to fix it (redemption)?
My point is that social conservatives over time will develop a more integrated worldview for all aspects of public life. This worldview will result in policy implications that will chart a different course than that of the libertarians. Interestingly, this worldview vision is being rediscovered in the Catholic and Reformed traditions. Evangelicals will increasingly turn to these traditions to find the intellectual tradition to give strength and foundation to a more integrated understanding of public life and of how to properly order society.
Furthermore, the social conservative community is placing more emphasis on the practical aspects of building an intellectual tradition for active public life (post-secondary institutions, innovative leadership programs, think-tanks, etc.).
Finally, in a global picture, we are increasingly seeing lines of conflict being drawn over differing worldview and religions. I think it would be rather naive to think these developments will not impact Canadian public debate.
Strategy and Worldview
Tom Flanagan, in “The Uneasy Case for Uniting the Right,” says “there is nothing intrinsically conservative or libertarian about the challenges facing the Canadian right today; they are issues of political party competition and institutional structure, not of ideology per se.”
I respectfully suggest that the diverging views of the libertarians and social conservatives do constitute a challenge for the right in Canada, and it is time to have a frank discussion about what they may be and how we deal with them.
Sphere Sovereignty
What this evidence boils down to is this. Libertarians in our postmodern world will develop public policy initiatives increasingly outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition heavily committed to the primacy of the individual, while social conservatives will develop a stronger and more integrated worldview more sharply contrasted to other religious and secular worldviews.
Quite frankly, I consider this a disturbing picture. It means either the continued reign of a liberal mediocrity—slowly sapping public and private institutions of creativity, innovation, and vision—or a sharper, more hostile public marketplace of convicted and convinced adversaries.
The political spectrum provides good context for introducing the idea of sphere sovereignty to this dilemma. The political spectrum has provided us with a useful (but soon to end) language to communicate ideas. Those on the left see the state or government as the overriding institution having authority over all aspects of the social and economic order. Those on the right see the individual as the primary institution in society and all other associations as contracts of individuals. The centre brokers between the government and the individual based on conditions, interests, and other reasons.
Many have decried the simplistic measurement of the political/ideological spectrum. However, think about this. The political spectrum more accurately describes the public debate and social and political order better today than ever. The welfare state has led to an undifferentiated society where increasingly government plays its hand in affairs historically not its own. The voice of opposition from the right is increasingly one of individual freedom and liberty.
So where does Abraham Kuyper’s view of sphere sovereignty fit in?
The idea itself is simple: society is made up of many different spheres, each relatively independent of the others. It's almost a truism: a school is not a church is not a state is not a business is not a family, etc. Each of these institutions has a proper sphere with a relatively independent authority: school boards in the sphere of education; parents in the sphere of family life; business owners, managers, and union representatives in the sphere of economic life; government in the sphere of political life; and so forth.
Similar to the idea of civil society, sphere sovereignty helps us to understand that society is not just a dog-eat-dog individualistic free-for-all, but neither is it a government-dominated collectivistic whole of which schools, families, businesses, labour unions, and so forth are merely subsidiary parts.
Dr. Richard Mouw, one contemporary Kuyperian scholar, notes:
Kuyper’s perspective on social issues has much in common with the views being put forth today by thinkers who are concerned with the proper shape of the “good society.” A number of North American social critics (Peter Berger, Robert Bellah, and Mary Ann Glendon among them) have emphasized in recent years the important role that “mediating structures” play in providing a buffer zone between the individual and the state. . . . Like these contemporary thinkers, Kuyper was eager to curb the power of the state. The various cultural spheres do not exist by governmental permission.
In his Stone Lectures, delivered at Princeton in 1898, Kuyper points out that
there exists, side by side with this personal sovereignty the sovereignty of the sphere. The University exercises scientific dominion; the Academy of fine arts is possessed of art power; the guild exercised a technical dominion; the trades-union rules over labor—and each of these spheres or corporations is conscious of the power of exclusive independent judgment and authoritative action, within its proper sphere of operation. Behind these organic spheres, with intellectual, aesthetical and technical sovereignty, the sphere of the family opens itself, with its right of marriage, domestic peace, education and possession.
Within the sphere sovereignty framework, the sphere of government has a unique place.
Bound by its own mandate, therefore, the government may neither ignore nor modify nor disrupt the divine mandate, under which these social spheres stand. The sovereignty, by the grace of God, of the government is here set aside and limited, for God’s sake, by another sovereignty, which is equally divine in origin. Neither the life of science nor of art, nor of agriculture, nor of industry, nor of commerce, nor of navigation, nor of the family, nor of human relationship may be coerced to suit itself to the grace of the government. The State may never become an octopus, which stifles the whole of life. It must occupy its own place, on its own root, among all the other trees of the forest, and thus it has to honor and maintain every form of life which grows independently in its own sacred autonomy.
Does this mean that the government has no right whatever of interference in these autonomous spheres of life? Not at all.
It possesses the threefold right and duty: 1. Whenever different spheres clash, to compel mutual regard for the boundary-lines of each; 2. To defend individuals and the weak ones, in those spheres, against the abuse of power of the rest; and 3. To coerce all together to bear personal and financial burdens for the maintenance of the natural unity of the State. The decision cannot, however, in these cases, unilaterally rest with the magistrate. The Law here has to indicate the rights of each, and the rights of the citizens over their own purses must remain the invincible bulwark against the abuse of power on the part of the government.
In sorting through these theoretical reflections, three insights emerge that are helpful in thinking about the social order. The first is that within the various spheres, there are different created norms or standards by which institutions are to be guided. The second is that sphere sovereignty challenges the dominance of any one sphere, including the economic sphere. The third is that government has a positive role in creating space for the different spheres to function according to their defining norms. (See Ray Pennings, “Kuyper’s Sphere Sovereignty and Modern Economic Institutions” in Comment, Winter 2003).
My colleague Dr. Gideon Strauss, in a Comment editorial, gives practical meaning to sphere sovereignty:
Here at Comment we believe in markets. We believe markets to be the best way—no, the only sane way—to structure interactions in economic life. We don’t only believe this because of the historical evidence from the complete failure and ghastly horror of socialism and fascism, but even more because we consider markets to be built into the very design of economic life. Markets as the proper setting for economic interaction, for buying and selling, are in our view a feature of the structure of reality. So we flagrantly support the idea and the reality of a market economy.
But this does not mean we support the idea of a market society—what Warren Bennis calls “a bottom-line society.” Human life is not all about economics. Contrary to rational choice theory, we human beings do not make all of our decisions simply in terms of cost/benefit analyses.
While economic life needs room to flourish and protection from the encroachment of excessive government intrusion, it also needs limits. The sphere of economic life not only provides businesses with space for the wealth-generating manufacture of products and provision of services—and labour unions with a space for negotiating fair participation in these activities—it also sets the outer limits for business and labour.
There are many spheres of human life where economic considerations appropriately play a role but do not dictate decision-making. Families, schools, and hospitals all have to balance their books—but they don’t exist to balance their books. In each of their cases, love, learning, and care, respectively, trumps the bottom line.
One of the great challenges facing us is cultivating a society in which economic markets can flourish without overwhelming other spheres of human life.
With that in mind, it’s heartwarming to know that when Warren Bennis asks his undergraduate students to list their most admired leaders, the people they cite first are their family members and high school coaches!
So what is the benefit of this line of thinking?
It means that the spheres or institutions beyond the government and the individual must take leadership to exercise their own authority and properly assume their sphere in the social order.
For example:
- Traditionally, labour and management have depended on the ideological leanings of the ruling government to use the hand of government to establish their relationship with one another. This encourages the already adversarial premise of labour relations policy in Canada. As my colleague Ray Pennings, chair of the Centre for Industrial Relations Innovation, suggests, intermediary institutions such as industry associations, collective bargaining institutions, and professional organizations may be more effective in developing cooperative employee/employer relationships.
- It also challenges the social conservatives’ overly optimistic view of governments’ ability to legislate morality and the libertarians’ view of the primacy of the individual and the free market over all of life.
- Sphere sovereignty distributes responsibility and leadership more effectively through the social order. It takes a positive view to the diversity of spheres and institutions, including the sphere of government. It refutes the claim of the left that when we limit the government’s responsibility to its proper sphere all social problems are left for the market and the individual to solve.
- Politically, the idea of sphere sovereignty is a useful model to mediate the diverse views of the conservative family. Furthermore, I believe it may be a more effective way to communicate the message of the conservative idea to a broader base of electors—without giving into the social liberal tendency to buy people with their own money.
I recognize that the idea of sphere sovereignty is not an independent, unique concept. The Catholic idea of subsidiarity is a parallel concept with a longer tradition. The civil society movement in North America has a sphere sovereignty premise. The volunteer movement in Canada is a limited practical example of sphere sovereignty. And there are many others.
Public Discourse and Political Debate
So what are the dynamics of this idea of sphere sovereignty on the public discourse and political debate in the conservative community?
- On language, let me compare the speeches of two Alliance candidates in the last federal election. One speech was filled with phrases such as “the less government the better,” and we have “too many politicians in Ottawa.” The speech communicated government as only a necessary evil. It communicated the idea of the...