On “Nice” Liberals and “Mean” Conservatives

I got a lot of responses to my article about reaching out to the younger generation and encouraging it to at least consider conservative ideas. One of the most interesting came from a Twitter follow of mine who’s a whippersnapper but also whip smart: For his generation, conservatives are the mean and nasty ones while the liberals are nice and compassionate. Many young people might have nuanced views on wokery and cultural liberalism, but if pressed, they’d rather be woke than wankers.

It’s an understandable and logical position to take. Even if you’re the type to have doubts about child transgender surgery or general libertinism, if you’re young you’re at the age when peers matter more than anything (spending so much of your time in school or hanging out with them, including peers of differing ethnic backgrounds or sexual orientations) and who wants to lose friends and create drama over silly stuff? Besides, who wants to be like the parents you’re often rebelling against, let alone those icky Boomers who keep saying mean things about all of us?

To this, we can add the natural and generally healthy desire of many young people to make the world a better place – with most cultural institutions insisting that cultural hyperliberalism and wokery being the way to do it – and it’s possible to see how this makes liberalism attractive and conservatism, with its image of being nasty killjoys, not even an option.

I am inevitably painting with a broad brush here – any generation of tens of millions of people will contain a great deal of variety in terms of family background, education, religious levels, peers, &c – but I think we have enough reporting and polling and voting data from a lot of sources and places to presume this picture very roughly or broadly correct.

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Before we break down the arguments, it’s important to always remember that none of this is all that new. Modern conservatives and liberals have been accusing each other of being heartless reactionaries and utopian maniacs ever since democratic politics started to become a thing. I invite readers to read the sort of vicious, often deeply personal invective they hurled at each other in election time in any given country and then tell me with a straight face that politics is particularly nasty today in terms of content or attacks.

So…what changed?

For a start, and I know this sounds hard to believe, but conservative values of one form or another used to be quite popular across generations. Stuff like lifting yourself up by your own effort and initiative (“lift yourself up by your bootstraps”), respecting your elders’ wisdom and the importance of at least some traditions, staying out of trouble, &c were things that people at least paid homage to, even if they didn’t always heed them themselves. It’s the homage that hypocrites often paid to virtue, and when conservatives spoke in favor of it, even those who didn’t personally live that way conceded they should.

Over time, thanks to a whole series of changes including technological and economic shifts as well as cultural rebellions (the 1920s, 1960s, 1990s), those ideas were weakened or entirely dropped over time. This left and continues to leave conservatives of positive things they can espouse and encourage in a way that means much to current generations, at least without a cultural revival of some sort.

On the flip side, what I would call the Progressive-liberal approach to life, based at least ostensibly in science and total human autonomy, and suspicious and even contemptuous of old ways, has been gaining strength for over a century. So thorough is this victory that even rightwingers often sound very libertarian and skeptical of the idea of any sort of universal morality outside of increasingly strained readings of the rule of “do no harm.”

The pinnacle of this is the complete triumph of therapeutic language in culture. Being nice and respectful to fellow citizens at a basic level is of course a necessary condition of healthy democratic life. In any democracy, people will disagree on a lot of things, including on how to live, so a baseline level of “agreeing to disagree” and be prepared to work together on shared projects is necessary for the whole thing to work. On this, liberals were and are right – at least some forms of prejudice or discrimination often keep out talented citizens who can and do contribute to the commonweal and the efforts use to shut out whole swathes of citizens undermine the effort to form a greater whole.

But therapeutic language and culture takes this much further. Democratic etiquette is about cordial and polite behavior while still allowing for dissent and disagreement, even raucous disagreement. But in the world of therapy, anything and everything can be so dangerous for someone’s psyche (the modern term for “soul”) that disagreement can and must be minimized or indeed eliminated. It is compared to actual physical “violence” for a reason – in an inversion of John Stuart Mill’s Harm Principle, intended to be minimal and allowing for maximal speech, now any speech can be considered harm.

The result is what I would call a precautionary principle of argument: If it might hurt someone’s feelings (and it is always assumed that this can reach the level of actual trauma), then it will and you should be silent. For the sake of democratic peace, you must now not only agree with whatever anyone seen to be vulnerable says, but must indeed accept that their truth is effectively truth as far as you are concerned. This is a hyper-individualistic approach to life, very appealing to young people who are seeking their place in the world, and encouraged by adults who, out of compassion and seemingly good intentions, wish to encourage.

Why “Nice” Isn’t Always “Good”

Conservative skepticism and sometimes opposition to all this, no matter how it’s said, thus seems cruel and callous. But deep down, we reactionary troglodytes have very good reason to not like this new state of affairs, even when we still very much agree with the baseline argument of fair and equal treatment of citizens.

For a start, as the late Peter Lawler noted, the “nice” we’re talking about is a “corporate nice.” It sounds as fake and manufactured as any corporate PR effort, a cynical or profoundly misguided attempt to *seem* well-intentioned rather than actually being so. So many HR and DEI presentations in favor of changing words sound like what the author thinks is a good idea and genuine etiquette rather than something most people outside this professional bubble consider so. It’s largely pretending to be virtuous rather than being so.

Furthermore, we conservatives have repeatedly warned that good intentions are simply not enough and indeed are often counterproductive.

Defund the police sounds nice until you realize that the alternatives are worse and more destructive for the very minority communities you’re trying to help (and who want reformed cops, not no cops). Reducing school standards for the disadvantaged not only sends those kids out into the world unprepared for any real challenge, but even implicitly declares agreement with outright bigots that they can’t actually do any better. Massive subsidy of often exorbitant student loans or not reforming entitlements at all seems good and compassionate until you realize that the math is what it is, no matter how much we want it to be otherwise. There were and are many more such examples.

Acting nice is too often cheap, and even free. It’s almost literally lip service. Instead of the hard work of trying to provide people with lasting help and purpose, and instead of doing the hard work of deciding between usually imperfect options for complicated problems, the folks with the cultural power and the idealistic young people go in search of ghosts or hunting down anything that might possibly make someone uncomfortable at some time, often making far more people uncomfortable as they engage in one struggle session after another. It’s a recipe for more anxiety and uncertainty, not less.

On Facts and Feelings

But the truth must also be said that the conservative reaction to all this is often counterproductive and sometimes downright stupid.

Take the famous or perhaps infamous slogan “Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings.” This is ostensibly the decisive rebuttal to the idea that public and private life needs to constantly be based solely on gut instinct and emotion rather than cold, hard realities, which we navigate as best we can. And there’s much truth to this.

But it errs in two ways.

The first is making it personal. Saying “your feelings” makes the whole thing seem like a personal attack, one which even in the pre-therapeutic age would have led to a fistfight or duel or even a grudge. It’s guaranteed to fail. The truth is that facts, to the extent we can discern them, don’t care about our feelings. They certainly don’t care about mine, either. Instead of convincing everyone that we’re all in this together to make a better future, it just comes off as bullying for its own sake.

The second is the strange disregarding of feelings. Feelings and sentiments are important, even if they don’t determine external reality. The Declaration itself spoke of the importance of the “pursuit of happiness” and many other thinkers and movements in democratic history thought in this vein, each defining happiness in different ways. Reacting to therapeutic culture by seemingly declaring we should all be unfeeling hyper-rational robots is to take away a big part of what makes us human, and usually in a good way, and goes against the core principles of America itself.

This all brings us back to what I said earlier: Conservatives don’t really aspire to stuff anymore or promise positive visions. Once upon a time, conservative politicians culture warred with the best of them, but they did so in combination with genuine alternative visions for the future – economic, social, even spiritual. Nixon, Reagan, W, HW all spoke of aspiration and the future and values to be preserved; Wallace and Perot did not, and crashed and burned for that reason. They offered their voters not only something to conserve but also something they could make their own.

At least since the rise of Trump and maybe before, this hasn’t been the case. Yes, sometimes we hear of freedom in the abstract but never any direction or recipe for using that freedom. Donald Trump and his following is something almost unheard of – grievance without any aspiration, despair without any hope, revenge without any thought of rebuilding. It’s a conservatism that has given up entirely on the idea that there is anything worth conserving, only a world so fallen that all that is left is to launch (often effective and correct!) critiques of the world now dominated by progressives and liberals.

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My point, then, is not that conservatives are meaner today than they were in my parents’ generation or before (same for liberals). They probably aren’t. Rather, far too many conservatives today seem to have nothing in their arsenal but complaints, no matter how legitimate.

All young people aspire to something better. We offer them nothing. Before any talk about specific tone and ways to make arguments, that needs to change. Yesterday.