Let’s talk this week about ethics and social ethics, especially in the context of views on economic policy versus views on how a society should decide economic policy, because that seems to me the locus of a certain amount of confusion, at least in the USA. Specifically, there seems a tendency in the USA to lump the issues together and discuss only one’s personal ethics, particularly about economic power, leading to an odd state of affairs in which one’s stance on how society should decide such issues does not seem significant.
There’s a world of difference between proposing markets utopian panaceas and wanting to establish authoritarian fascism to ensure voters don’t interfere with them, and viewing markets that same way but being satisfied to vote and make the case to other voters in a democracy. I mentioned in a one-off string some time ago now the confusion generated by our current terminology for discussing political views in the USA based on the previously appropriate but no longer valid assumption everyone involved accepted democratic government. I noted traditional distinctions like “right” and “left,” or “conservative” and “liberal,” have traditionally been used in the USA to refer to different stances on the ethics of economic power given a backdrop of accepting democracy, not to one’s views on democracy itself.
The big development recently in popular political discourse in the USA is conservatives, Republicans, going off the idea of democracy, saying things like the USA was never meant to be a democracy; democracy is mob rule or “socialism”; we should terminate the US Constitution. However, our political terminology hasn’t kept pace. So, for example, a great deal of confusion is generated by the fact “conservative” defined by one’s views on the ethics of economic power is now ambiguous with respect to one’s views on democracy versus fascism. Like any other ethical issue, one may support some particular view on the ethics relating to economic power when one votes, but one may also accept democracy as the way our society should forever temporarily, contingently generate law in that area. Two different issues. To disambiguate, we need terminology that distinguishes pro democracy “conservatism,” something like “democratic conservatism,” from anti democracy or indifferent to democracy “conservatism.” Fascism seems apt for the former but I'm not sure we have any term for the latter.
Into the terminological gap have stepped various rhetorical shenanigans often involving the projection so typical of conservative discourse. Thus, in conservative rhetoric, “liberal” or “leftist” views on the ethics of economic power are often cast as anti-democracy “communism.” The twee construction “classical liberal” is sometimes used to denote something like democratic conservatism, but even there the proposed significance of democracy can sometimes be difficult to work out. Along the same lines, to draw attention away from right wing authoritarian government consistent with conservative views on the ethics of economic power, conservative rhetoric strives to establish fascism was “leftist" and basically identical to communism. Under this rhetorical cloaking device, right wing, undemocratic, authoritarian government enforcing conservative views on the ethics of economic power is meant to become conceptually invisible to voters, to have no name, disappear from the popular conversation. But monsters grow in dark places. We must all strive against misleading, opaque conservative rhetoric in this area given the evidence of right wing, conservative rejection of democracy, coup attempts, political violence, and so on. Call it by its rightful name.
When one encounters any self-described “conservative” one should ask their views on democracy and the US Constitution to determine if one is dealing with a pro democracy conservative or a right wing, anti democracy conservative, fascist. It’s important. The big issue of our day, far bigger than long standing disputes about the ethics of economic power captured in “right” versus “left,” or “liberal” versus “conservative,” is the burgeoning dispute over how our society should make law in that area, the future of democracy.
