Candor and Civility

Andrew Klavan writes in City Journal that the problem with conservativism and the political advantage of liberalism is that conservatives are, gosh darn it, just too doggone candid. Liberals, by contrast, profit from, nay, thrive on sacrificing truth for the good manners of not calling things what they are, Klavan contends. (Golly! My first thought was to write “calling a spade a spade,” but someone might think I was a racist. Could Klavan be right?)

Though there is no little truth lurking behind some of what Klavan writes, what he in fact writes as he in fact writes it is nonsense, a fact easily shown by his concluding reference to Lincoln. Refresh my memory, was Honest Abe the personification of 19th century conservativism? Hmmmm...

Liberals and conservatives both suffer, in fact if not in appearance, from a failure to follow through on their own logic. Thus, just as liberals are prone to claim “Things would be so much better if only we changed X” and conservatives to claim “Things were so much better before we changed X,” neither do a very good job of answering “Better for whom?” or “At what cost?” True, much of modern liberalism has failed to live up to its earlier promises, but so too do many conservatives’ overly fond preference for the Good Old Days rely on unreliable or at least highly selective memories.

When, exactly, did we have it right, Mr. Klavan? When our acknowledgment that men and women were indeed different led conservatives to conclude that women shouldn’t serve in the military, or a bit earlier when they thought women shouldn’t serve as lawyers and physicians, or a bit earlier when women were thought unfit to vote, or how about when the law refused to recognize rape inside marriage? Just how long-standing is the conservative view that “that black people bear the same responsibility for their actions as whites”? A view, one might suspect, which also entails the notion that black people bear or should bear the same rights? Was that your father’s understanding of conservativism? Your grandfather’s?

That is not to say that contemporary conservativism is racist or sexist, though some liberals still view it as such, any more than to say that the abiding trust in government among contemporary liberals equates to Stalinism, as some conservatives still argue. Both sides favor far too much government and far too little liberty for my tastes, but turning one’s ideological opponents into a caricature, however much fun it may be, is in fact the opposite of the sort of intellectual honesty that Mr. Klavan’s brand of candor avoids.

Liberalism does tend to obfuscate the truth for the sake of its ideological agenda; but if the current administration is the standard bearer for conservativism, especially in its public pronouncements regarding Iraq, it is difficult to imagine how contemporary conservativism meets the New Testament standard for casting the first stone.

Civility is not a bad thing, deriving as it does from the notion of civilization, something one would think conservatives cared deeply about. For that matter, truth-telling is a virtue, too. Here, then, is one such truth: Mr. Klavan’s sort of candor is the least sincere form of honesty.