Conservatives Are Not Liberals

Free markets alone do not make one a liberal. True liberalism begins with individual rights, including the freedom to live, think, speak, trade, worship, love, and dissent without coercion.

A few years ago Anne Applebaum lamented how many of her friends from the political right are now authoritarians. She wrote of a group of friends who were once at her home:

“…You might also have called most of my guests liberals – free-market liberals, or classical liberals – or maybe Thatcherites.”

I suggest she saw this trend among those people because she defined liberal as “free market” primarily; in other words, if someone claims to believe in free markets they are a liberal. Wrong! Economic freedom is one part of the traditional liberal agenda and history, but only one part.

Applebaum seemed to define her “classical liberalism” as primarily, if not exclusively, economic. She equated “classical liberalism” to “free-market liberals.” Depoliticised markets are only a portion of the liberal agenda.

Traditional liberalism was fighting for issues such as abolitionism and freedom of conscience before it fought for markets. Classical liberalism was already explicitly defending rights – perhaps not consistently – well before Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations.

Too many sympathisers to this idea think its core is free markets and thus fall for the delusion that conservativism is some variant of “classical liberal,” because they claim to support markets.

But, a classical liberal holds to individual rights as his core value, not markets. Markets are derivatives of rights theory and intertwined with the liberal theory of rights.

Conservatives tend to oppose individual rights favouring collectivist concepts. The “common good” comes before individual rights to them, provided you define the common good with religious terms, something like what the illiberal Left does.

Individual rights mean individualism – something for which conservatives don’t care. They are primarily advocates of the herd, they preach social conformity in the name of tradition. They are happy for you to be free regarding which toothpaste to buy, just not thrilled if you assert the right to pick which person to marry, outside their approved categories.

Economic freedom is easy; social freedom is hard. Economics, while individualistic at its core, is also herd oriented. Allow me to explain: human economic needs are universal, pervasive, and common to all. We all need to produce to survive; we need food, shelter, etc. These are what Abraham Maslow called lower order needs.

Economic needs are not particularly individualistic. Thus, conservatives don’t immediately oppose this freedom in the short term. I do think they oppose it in the long term, and there were plenty of times in history when conservatives opposed it in the short term as well. Historically conservatives have not been friends of markets overall. Markets just aren’t seen as automatically threatening to the conservative herd identity.

What really gets the conservative’s back up is social freedom. Social freedom is freedom in the social, non-market realm. It is linked to markets, but it is heavily about individualistic wants and needs, or what Maslow called self-actualisation needs. Lower order needs tend to be relatively similar for all. Higher order needs are strongly individualistic.

The conservative is happy with freedom for the herd – that is in those areas where everyone has roughly similar needs – just not freedom for the individual – where needs and wants are unique, individualistic, perhaps even idiosyncratic or eccentric.

The further you get from herd needs the more uncomfortable the conservative becomes. Transgender individuals are a relatively small percentage of the population but take up an inordinate amount of conservative attention – all of it negative. The smaller the minority the more likely they are to attack it. The closer it gets to the unique individual, the further it drifts from the herd.

Their values fit a world where food was scarce and life was primitive. It just isn’t fit for a world of surplus and relative ease – relative to how humans lived for most of history. For the conservative mind it is easy to be “liberal” when it comes to property rights, difficult when it comes to gender identity, same-sex marriage, religious skepticism, free speech, etc.

In today’s world, economic freedom is largely respected – not enough perhaps – but economic freedom alone is not enough. We can’t just equate traditional liberalism with economic rights. Given the consensus in favour of markets – impure ones perhaps, but still markets – it is much more telling to discover how much social freedom one is willing to grant. Where they stand on rights for immigrants, or censorship, is more indicative as to whether they are a traditional liberal than their position on price controls or lower taxes.

I suspect many of Ms Applebaum’s friends were only “liberal” regarding economics, but underneath they were advocates of herd conformity to some degree. Capitalism empowers individualism which threatens conservatives. If to enforce herd values they must restrain economic freedom they will do so. When herd politics becomes dominant – such as fascism, nationalism and other such collectivist-based views – many conservatives will happily goose-step with the herd and turn their back on markets – precisely what we are seeing in America today?

James Peron has written for multiple publications and is the author of several books, including Exploding Population Myths and The Liberal Tide. James is an Associate of the Free Market Foundation.