Community vs. Liberty?

I’ve written before about the tensions between libertarians and conservatives. As a recovering libertarian these ideological differences still interest me a great deal. It seems to me that another way of shedding light on this tension might be by considering our evolving understanding of community.

Conservatives are, in essence, defenders of community. Preserving the tribe and its ways is perhaps the fundamental conservative impulse – the preference for the familiar over the unknown, to use Oakeshott’s phrase. Now, in the early American republic, most people’s primary allegiance was to their local community – the village, the town, or perhaps the state. The idea of a “national community” probably wouldn’t have made sense to most people. The Union was precisely that – a union of discrete communities.

The first major blow to this idea of community as fundamentally local was the victory of the principle of the Union over that of states’ rights that resulted from the Civil War. Progressives like Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson reinforced the idea that the nation itself was the primary community to which citizens owed allegiance. Attachment to the nation threatened to replace attachment to the local community as the chief civic virtue.* Nationalism and progressivism went hand in hand.

What emerged as “conservatism” in 30s and 40s was in large part mounted as a defense of the prerogatives of local communities against the encroachment of the national State. This is also what allowed for a united front with early libertarians (or “individualists,” “classical liberals” etc.). The individualists were concerned, logically enough, with defending the rights of the individual, while the conservatives wanted to conserve local, organic communities. But they were united in seeing the federal government as the major threat to both. This is what accounted for the presence of both extreme libertarians and Southern agrarians in the Old Right coalition.

However, eventually the idea of a national community has come to all but obliterate the preference for localism. This was probably due in large part to World War II and the Cold War – crises that required the nation to pull together with a shared sense of purpose and identity. Few people now think of themselves as Kentuckians or Pennsylvanians first and Americans second.

But as the locus of communal allegiance shifted to the nation, it was perhaps inevitable that the focus of conservatism would shift as well. The Cold War was about defending the nation from threats both internal and external. And the instrument of that defense would, inevitably, be the national government. William F. Buckley saw this as early as 1952 when he wrote of the necessity for creating a “totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores” to combat the Soviet menace.

This understandably made libertarians nervous since their whole agenda consisted of shrinking the federal government. They never abandoned their bedrock principle of defending the rights of the individual. What difference did it make if Big Brother spoke with an American or Russian accent?

As late as the 80s Ronald Reagan talked about a “new federalism” that would return autonomy to local communities and neighborhoods, but at the same time he was a staunch nationalist, perhaps not seeing the tension. In any event, modern conservatism as represented by George W. Bush’s Republican Party and the mainstream conservative press is unabashedly nationalistic. The national community is their chief concern; and defending the national community will require more, not less, activity by the federal government. David Brooks contends that the battle for small government has been lost and should be given up by the GOP in favor of a progressive nationalism in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt.

If this trend continues, libertarians will have less and less in common with their erstwhile conservative brethren, since libertarians regard the growth of the federal government as a threat to individual rights and bad per se. September 11th and its aftermath seemed to have accelerated this trend as a new wave of nationalism has energized what can only be called big-government conservatism.

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*For a critical account of this process see Robert Nisbet’s The Present Age.