But this is what conservatism is, in the end: The belief that there’s more to a flourishing society than just the claims of autonomous individuals, the conviction that existing prohibitions and taboos may have a purpose that escapes the liberal mind, the sense that cultural ideals can be as important to human affairs as constitutional rights.

Ross Douthat on his opposition to gay marriage, “A Response to Andrew Sullivan (II),” The New York Times, September 17, 2010

It’s good to see a conservative come straight out and admit this instead of hiding behind fictions of individual freedom and personal responsibility. (Genuine libertarians are rare, and even more so in politics, an arena that sooner or later has to abandon the secure realm of theory for the real world.) The idea that conservatism is based on a concern with the interests of the individual is so common that I even hear liberals try to attack it on those grounds. Not only is such a strategy self-defeating — in America, and similar Western democracies, the belief in some kind of individual liberty is so powerful that to be running against it is a deadly handicap, and to willingly be doing so is foolish — it is incorrect. I’m a liberal because when I began paying attention to politics, I saw that it was the left wingers looking out for individual interests. It’s the left that spent the civil rights era trying to integrate schools and end Jim Crow. It’s the left that wanted to make sure people accused of crimes got a fair trial, or who had unpopular or merely impolite opinions didn’t have their speech criminalized. It’s the left that wanted to make sure folks who wanted to earn a buck or consumers who wanted a fair deal weren’t getting railroaded by big corporations, with help from governments who looked the other way. It’s the left who was interested in protecting individuals from being paid less just because they were women, or not white.

(And that’s why, incidentally, I have no time for communism or socialism, or the portions of the left that sympathized with those ideas during the ’60s and etc. I went to a union rally back when I was an undergraduate — to report on it, not to participate — and I couldn’t believe these folks were still calling each other “comrade.”) 

The thing is, because liberty is such a dearly held principle in Western society, most everyone believes in it. I don’t think conservatives are lying when they say they support individual freedom. But in practice, they act as Ross Douthat describes. I’ll throw a not at all well thought-out definition out there: Conservatism is an ideology interested in preserving prevailing social structures — that is, prevailing power structures. Ross Douthat’s not your everyday conservative, which is perhaps why he’s willing to cop to that. And sure, I understand why folks might find such an ideology appealing: After all, it’s got us this far, and we’re doing OK. (It’s an even better argument if you are doing OK.) 

But I’m a liberal; I care about the individual.

(Source: screwrocknroll)