On liberals and fellow-travelers

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

Erik's post and the ensuing discussion prompted me to re-examine the merits of political typologies. The matter of classifying political ideologies is just as difficult as classifying species in biology. It may be broadly construed as an option between cladistics and functionalism.

The cladistic approach has its merits: a bird and a bat both fly, but they are (evolutionarily) not closely related. American liberals and libertarians share a more-or-less common tradition, which is different from that of the member parties of the Socialist International. In that sense, the relevant social-democratic party in Britain is Labor, not the LibDems. The LibDems did emerge from the merger of the Liberal and the Social Democratic parties, but the liberal faction has clearly come to dominate, as evinced the LibDems membership in the ALDE (formerly ELDR) and the Liberal International. The US Democrats, I might add, are not themselves part of the Liberal International, but the National Democratic Institute has observer status in the LI.

more...A common tradition leaves an imprint on philosophy and policy, and gives the members of the tradition a common language. But too strict an adherence to cladistics risks the proverbial failure to see the forest for the trees. History and expediency affect political tendencies in many ways.

I don't know whether, in the case of US liberalism, the absence of a viable socialist alternative led people with social-democratic sympathies to the Democratic party, which in turn affected that party's ideology, or whether it was the attempt to co-opt or suppress socialism that led to an engagement with socialist critiques of liberalism.

In Rawls's case, I think the second option is correct. But Rawls provides a more pragmatic justification of the convergence of social-democrats and left-liberals, and makes it into a philosophical position: the idea of an overlapping consensus. It does not matter much whether one supports civil liberties from a commitment to (liberal) individualism or (social-democratic) humanism, or if one advocates for the difference principle from (liberal) concern for equality of opportunity or (social-democratic) solidarity. The shared commitment to political-liberal institutions is an independent "module" that does not require a shared avowal to the philosophical justification of those institutions all the way down to first principles. (A bird and a bat are not closely related, but they both fly, and that ought to count for something.)

Overlapping consensus is something like the liberal equivalent of the communist "fellow traveler", but without the secret desire to shoot the lukewarm ally when the revolution finally triumphs. It omits certain important rhetorical aspects of political discourse, but captures the way in which political alliances (besides unholy alliances of the Red-Brown kind) actually work.