I got some grief from some liberal emailers for only posting that “hooey” email earlier. So let me post now what I think is a thoughtful one:

Jonah,
I was extremely impressed by your piece “What Is a ‘Conservative’?” As a liberal, though, I have a worry about your argument.
Towards the piece’s end, you write this:
“Christianity, as I understand it, holds that the perfect world is the next one, not this one. We can do what we can where we can here, but we’re never going to change the fact that we’re fallen, imperfect creatures. There’s also the whole render-unto-Caesar bit. And, of course, the Judeo-Christian tradition assumes we are born in sin, not born perfect before bourgeoisie culture corrupts us into drones for the capitalist state.”
This passage expresses your endorsement of the belief that since “nine out of ten” proposals for social change will inevitably lead to disaster given our imperfect natures, we had better be, well, conservative. Call this claim “benign pessimism.”
But here’s the problem: liberals needn’t–and shouldn’t, for precisely the reasons you give–reject benign pessimism. It’s been a long, long time since liberals believed, with Mill, Dewey, and the other thinkers you cite, that human nature is perfectible. Indeed, Schlesinger’s _The Vital Center_, the great statement of mid-twentieth century liberalism, swore off precisely that belief. And John Rawls’s entire political philosophy–I’m thinking of _Political Liberalism_, in particular–is an attempt to square the liberal commitment to pluralism and tolerance with the fact of our fallen natures.
To conclude, I have two points. First, the “liberalism” you set up in your piece as a foil to conservatism is a straw man. No one has believed that form of liberalism for over half a century. Second, and more substantively, benign pessimism doesn’t argue for conservatism; it argues instead for a sober, careful liberalism–Schlesinger’s vital center. The fact that we must take care to rock the boat only when doing so is absolutely necessary goes no way towards showing that government doesn’t have a legitimate role to play in ensuring equal opportunity for all citizens. Benign pessimism isn’t an argument against public education, social insurance, progressive taxation, labor unions, civil rights, etc.
Your brand of conservatism, whether you care to see it or not, will lead only to plutocracy. Perhaps such a prospect doesn’t frighten you, as your sanguine attitude towards “hierarchy” suggests. But it does frighten the liberal. But that liberal doesn’t want a “perfect society.” Benign pessimism teaches us that nothing of the sort can be had. The liberal simply wants a fair society.

Me:There are some interesting points here. Let me respond to two. I agree that there are liberal intellectuals who understand that humans are not perfectable creatures. But in a very important sense I’m not sure that matters as much as the reader does. The piece I wrote in the current issue of the magazine addresses some of this in more detail, but I think modern liberalism has very little use for formal philosophy. I’m hardly alone on this point, as a slew of prominent liberals — from Martin Peretz, to EJ Dionne to Michael Tomasky — have made this point in recent months or recent years (if this is a controversial point to folks out there, I’d be glad to defend it further).

I think liberalism today is much more of an agglomeration of emotional states, unarticulated convictions, and religious impulses. And at the psychological and sociological level liberalism operates like a religion which believes in the perfectability of man even if many of its smarter practitioners will deny it when pressed (just as many very religious Christians, Muslims or Jews might stray from dogma if interrogated). When one looks at what offends liberal sensibilities, what arouses liberal passions, what drives liberal activism it is hard not to come to something like this conclusion (at least for me). And when you look at the sub-ideologies of the left — feminism, environmentalism, etc — it becomes even more difficult to avoid such conclusions. I really don’t believe I’ve set up a strawman version of liberalism.

As for my second point, I guess I don’t see why my version of conservatism is destined to become a justification for plutocracy, but depending on what you mean by plutocracy, I’m not so afraid of it either. We have in a very real sense a plutocracy now. We had a plutocracy yesterday. And will, in all likelihood, have a plutocracy tomorrow. Now, I don’t mean that literally, but only a fool would deny that rich people don’t run the country more than your average poor person. The Senate, after all, is the world’s most exclusive millionaire’s club. It is the nature of rich people to go into government in democracies and in non-democracies being in government makes you rich. Even in the warped economic systems we call Communist that is and was true — it’s not like the politburo lived shabbily. It’s true in the social democracies. It’s true everywhere. The hope is that in a healthy society the wealthier people appreciate their privileges and accomplishments and understand that they need to set an example. I like elitism, and I think social stratification is inevitable. But that doesn’t mean I have to approve of every elite or think that every member of the top strata deserves to be there (again: the Politiburo was not my kind of elite).

This is in part what I mean about being willing to tolerate contradictions. We in America are an egalitarian society and we are a society of inidividual opportunity. Both are good things, but they conflict with each other at some point. As a conservative, I like that we’re all equal before the law, but it doesn’t bother me in the least that we’re unequal economically. In short, it’s not my version of conservatism which results in “plutocracy” it’s human nature. My version of conservatism merely recognizes that fact.