Who Gets To Infringe On Our Liberty?

In the old days, the party associated with social conservativism was also the party associated with the economic interest of the poor, while the more socially liberal party was the pro-business, pro-rich party. Those were the (racist) Democrats, party of the poor white Southerner, and the Whig or Republican Party, party of the educated Northern businessman. Nowadays, the socially conservative party is the pro-business party, and the socially progressive party is the (relatively) pro-poor party; the Republicans and Democrats respectively. In other words, if you picture the Political Compass's two-dimensional map of political space, the line along which most politicians lie currently is the bottom-left to upper-right diagonal, but in the old days it was the top-left to bottom-right diagonal. What happened? I have a theory.

The fundamental theory of government works like this: in a world of anarchy, the so-called "state of nature" which is really just taking men as they are and no laws at all, everyone has a choice, roughly "cooperate" or "defect." A cooperator plays by the rules of conventional morality, more or less, even though there are no laws: they don't steal, they don't murder, etc. They might use the rules of standard white-market economics to rationally pursue their own self-interest, but they don't do so in ways that flagrantly hurt others. A defector, on the other hand, does rob and steal and cheat: he or she uses all possible avenues to advance their own self-interest. The problem with this set of incentives is that a given individual will do better as a defector than as a cooperator, regardless of what everyone else in society is doing.

This means that everyone has an incentive to defect, and we all know the result: "...and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." It would be much better for everyone if everyone would just decide to Cooperate. But of course, the single best position to be in is the single outlaw in a world of cooperative citizens, so the everyone-cooperates model is massively unstable. The solution is to craft a Government, an entity with tremendous power that will use that power to punish the Defectors and thereby disincentivize defection. As long as the government is the most powerful player in the room, preferably by a large margin, it can act as an enforcer, keeping everyone in line and giving us, approximately, the everybody-cooperates world.

Any government can function as this enforcer; Thomas Hobbes thought that the government should be a Leviathan, an all-powerful monarch that would rule with a relatively iron fist and therefore really really scare people into not breaking the law, and John Locke was open to a "mixed regime" of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy functioning together. But the sticky question of "legitimacy" always makes people question just what it is, exactly, that gives these monarchs or aristocrats the right to rule. The result, and by now the massive consensus about what kind of enforcing government is also legitimate, is a liberal democracy: a government that basically does what the people want, but observes some limits as to how it uses its power.

The two most natural "parties" for a society to split into, then, under a framework of liberal democracy are liberals and democrats. The liberals would favor more robust rights provisions, stronger restrictions on the use of the government's power and stronger protections of "liberty," while the democrats would favor letting the people's government do whatever it wanted. In the old system of Democrats vs. Whigs and Democrats vs. Republicans up until about 1900, these were indeed the factions: the Democrats were the, well, democrats, and their opponents were the liberals. Yes, slavery was an infringement on liberty, but hey, if it was what the people wanted, it was perfectly fine, said the Democrats (popular sovereignty). The liberal Whigs and Republicans, on the other hand, were just not okay with slavery, as being such an obvious destruction of liberty. Now, in this model the democrats favor a stronger government and the liberals a weaker one, which sounds weird given that the Democrats of the 1800s favored a weaker federal government and the Whigs/Republicans a stronger one, but bear in mind that because of federalism not every increase to federal power is an increase in government power. Indeed, what the Republicans/Whigs wanted most was federal power over the state governments, to prevent them from holding a large portion of their people in slavery, which I think would be a net reduction in government power.

But then something happened that forced this system to collapse. Specifically, it caused the "liberal" and the "democratic" factions to align with each other. That thing was the rise of truly big business, and it sparked the Progressive Era. Because there's a bit of a problem in the fundamental logic of governments: it only works if the government is actually the most powerful player in the room. If there is someone else in the game who can overpower the government, then they just get to rule on a purely might-makes-right basis. And during the latter half of the 19th century, corporations started to get strong enough that it looked like they just might become stronger than governments in the near future. This changes the equation entirely. Before the rise of a credible competitor with governments as power players, every decrease in government power was an increase in the liberty, narrowly defined, enjoyed by the people. But if a weak government will in fact be weaker than large corporations, then those large corporations will just rule the roost, and having absolutely no legitimacy there is no reason to think that those corporate overlords would have any respect for either the liberty or the well-being of the people they would then rule.

What this means is that if you want to protect liberty, even if you want to protect narrowly-defined liberty, you now must want a government strong enough to keep corporations in check. So now the liberals and the democrats are in agreement that the government must be made quite strong indeed to check and subdue its rivals. This gave us the Progressive Era, during which just about everyone agreed that it was imperative to strengthen the government against the encroachments of big business. Then after 1920, or certainly after the Depression, when the government had been made strong enough to withstand the new threat, at least for the time being, two new factions emerged: the liberals and democrats together, who favored keeping the (legitimate) government strong enough and vigilant enough that the corporations would not be able to gain the upper hand going forward, and, well, the business community, which obviously wanted very much to overpower the government.

From 1920 through 1929 the business community was winning that war, probably because they had people convinced that they had been soundly beat by Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and they didn't pose a danger anymore. The Depression changed that. After Franklin Roosevelt had made the government even more robust than the Progressive Era had done, the business community wasn't able to garner support for very much of its agenda, because the liberals and democrats were still united and were, well, most of the populace, and even the Republicans could only win with Eisenhower. But after 1964 a new opportunity presented itself to the business interests, namely racists. Now, to be fair, it's not just racists, but the bloc of Republican voters who are Republicans mainly or purely out of prejudice and intolerance is quite large: racists, homophobes, antifeminists, xenophobes, etc. That's the social conservative wing. As Eisenhower himself foretold, the business community has made very good friends with the military, and is therefore able to wrap itself, or its agenda at least, in the flag. Finally there are those who are still naive enough to believe that every ounce of power added to the government is an ounce of freedom taken away from We the People, rather than an inch closer to corporate dominance. That, then, is the Republican coalition: the business community, having aligned itself with militarism and the "uber-patriotic" faction, the racist/social conservative faction, and the American libertarians who continue to believe in a simple "Government = Bad" philosophy. And the Democrats are the liberals and the democrats, both concerned lest legitimate government of the people by the people for the people should be swallowed by corporate plutocracy.