Are Ideologies Important?

In the following post you can safely assume that just about every noun is enclosed in quotation marks. I’ve omitted them to save time and eyestrain. When I read Cameron Smith’s “take” (see what I mean?) on modern liberalism from the standpoint of a conservative at R Street:

Conservatives and modern liberals actually share classical liberal ideology as a common ancestor. That’s where we derive our focus on civil liberties, adherence to the rule of law and an open economy. Like our classical forerunners, most American liberals believe that government’s purpose is to protect our rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness from both government oppression and each other.

But liberals immediately diverge from their conservative brethren with the view that government can and should improve civic equality and actively enhance the lives of Americans.

Perhaps President Franklin Delano Roosevelt best captured a liberal’s view of government. “Government has the definite duty to use all its power and resources to meet new social problems with new social controls,” Roosevelt wrote, “to ensure to the average person the right to his own economic and political life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

I set out to write characterizations of both conservatives and liberals from my own perspective and solicit similar characterizations from my readers but I quickly realized that wasn’t a worthwhile task.

I am neither a liberal nor a conservative but share some views in common with both of them. My views are probably best described as pragmatic (although that word has gotten a bad name in recent years) or—my favorite description—eclectic. I guess I’m just not that much of a joiner.

Consider this from the linked post:

Modern liberals aren’t particularly concerned about the size of government because they believe it ought to be large enough to serve as a social and economic counterweight to the private sector.

I’m concerned about the size of government because I think that the larger government is the more bureaucratized it will inevitably be and the farther it will divurge from its putative job to just preserving the bureaucracy. But I’m worried about large private companies, too, particularly large private companies that derive their wealth from subsidies of various forms provided by the government. That Michael Jordan got a big paycheck didn’t bother me; that Jamie Dimon did because of the vast subsidies being doled out in the form of regulations to JPMorgan Chase.

Indeed, I’m practically a one-man litmus test for whether you’re a conservative or a liberal. If you’re a conservative, you think I’m a liberal and if you’re a liberal, you think I’m a conservative.

On top of that I don’t think that ideologies are that important when you get right down to it. I think that what’s important is what people do not what they think they’d do and there’s real congruence if not identity to what people who identify as either conservatives or liberals actually do. Both of them think that people who are a lot like them should run things and that they’d rather live surrounded by people who think like they do. To give a concrete example, there just aren’t that many white liberals living at 96th and Stony Island.

I think that Robert Conquest put it pretty well: everyone is conservative about what he knows best. Is there a corresponding observation about conservatism?

I’m too interested in how people actually behave in given circumstances and what will actually work to be either a conservative or a liberal.