In actual politics, as opposed to abstract theories of politics, a good outcome often consists of avoiding a worse one. The perfect tends to be the enemy of the good--rather than accept that we can't solve all problems and right all wrongs, we frequently end up making more things worse by trying to make everything better.
Demands for substantial change (let alone transformation) are misguided when what you have has seldom been achieved before. Because democracy and individual freedom are precious and rarer than gold in the dismal annals of human experience, they should never be taken for granted or needlessly put at risk. Those advocating change never seem to grasp that the concept logically cuts both ways.
Contemporary liberalism tends to be less aware of these political pitfalls because its ideological vision, like that of the left as a whole, is inherently, unconstrained and ahistorical.
Precisely because their view of government (and human nature in general) is more skeptical, conservatives seek to politicize fewer aspects of life. They believe that there should be large swaths of society shielded from state power and question the idea that government is always the best instrument for correcting life's myriad injustices.
For conservatives, government is both increasingly ineffective the more it seeks to do and more threatening to individual freedom. Government is necessary to remove us from a "state of nature," and thereby secure our rights, but when it grows too large it undermines its capacity to do what it should do and is capable of doing.
The left, in contrast, can't resist what Robert Bork termed "the temptation of politics" because it represents less a coherent ideology than a psychological reflex flowing from dissatisfaction and alienation. It is more a movement than a belief system because it withers if it stands still; hence the constant scanning of society for sources of grievance and cases of oppression and exploitation, even if they have to be manufactured.
Perhaps because afraid of what it might discover, the left resolutely resists any self-criticism or assessment of its handiwork as it hurtles onward and upward toward its next cause. The law of unintended consequences, so crucial to conservative hesitation, has no place in liberalism.
Whereas the right finds good to be good enough, the left is never happy short of perfection itself. As long as utopia has failed to arrive (and it, of course, never will), government must always have to get bigger and do more.
There is thus no limiting principle of any kind in the leftist compulsion that keeps government from growing too big, or even any recognition of the need for such a thing. Indeed, the idea that there should be some kind of decision-making rule that allows us to decide when government should or shouldn't act is foreign to a worldview which consists of little more than demands for governmental action in response to a never-ending series of challenges and crises. Everything becomes politicized when government is expected to solve all problems, and there is never an end to problems, elastically defined.
At the root of what Russell Kirk called "the conservative mind," then, is the idea that we must cherish and nurture our civilization's hard-earned progress and achievements, and move forward carefully lest we end up in a worse rather than better place. Such thinking is cognizant of human frailty and therefore the limitations of all human constructs, including government (as James Madison famously asked, "But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?").
Given all this, one of the more interesting exercises for delineating the psychological tendencies of left from right is to ask liberals and conservatives what the role of government should be; what precise functions it should perform. The response from the right is usually specific and limited, with a healthy awareness of the distinction between the public and private; the response from the left is invariably open-ended, ambiguous and thus meaningless as a basis for discussion.
And therein lies the essential problem with the "progressive" left--it represents less a vision of the good society than simply a frenetic, hyperactive tendency that inexorably pushes always in the same direction, bringing ever more areas of life under state control and guidance. It constitutes a tendency but not a program, or at least not a program that has any coherent content or ultimate vision.
The left is never willing to tell us the purpose behind all of its frantic activity and urgent demands and consciousness-raising. It never actually tells us where it wishes to go, except that it will always require more government than we already have. Trying to determine its ultimate goals is thus equivalent to attempting to nail Jell-O to the wall.
Both conservatives and liberals know that if Barack Obama and other liberals miraculously got everything they wanted tomorrow, meaning more taxes, more regulation and more spending, they would demand more taxes, regulation, and spending the very next day. With the exercise repeated ad infinitum, until we got to....what, precisely? Nobody knows.
Leftism isn't a belief system; rather it is simply a perpetual-motion machine bleating out the single word "more."
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 04/06/2015