Abstract
This chapter proposes a fourfold political classification: social conservatives, libertarian conservatives, social liberals, and civil liberties liberals. It points out that social conservatives outnumber libertarian conservatives and that social liberals outnumber civil liberties liberals in the United States. As a result of an unrecognized de facto alliance between social conservatives and social liberals, freedoms have been limited, including those relevant to therapy and research.
The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
George Orwell, Politics and the English Language
An earlier version of this chapter appeared in the 2005 The Independent Review, 10(2), 273–280. ©The Independent Institute, and is used with permission.
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Notes
- 1.
Anthony Gregory (2004) expresses a similar sentiment.
- 2.
Maddox and Lilie (1984) present a classification that is similar in many ways, though different in others. Their categories, in parallel order to those here, are libertarians, liberals, conservatives, and populists.
- 3.
In discussing some of the issues raised in this article, a blogger, self-identified as “Independent George” (2004), comments that “commerce is to the left as sex is to the right.”
- 4.
For example, an August 1996 poll by the Lake Research Center for Policy Alternatives asked, “In your view, should more be done to expand the availability of good, affordable child care, or is this something better left to families and individuals?” Respondents’ support for “do more”: women, 63%; men, 41%.
- 5.
For example, a question from a September 1996 New York Times/CBS poll asked, “Should affirmative action programs be continued or abolished?” Respondents’ support for “abolished”: women, 36%; men, 52%.
- 6.
Perhaps never (see Higgs, 2003).
- 7.
This argument is not novel; its classic statement a century and a half ago, as alluded to in the first epigraph, appears in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. Even at that time, Mill commented, “Though this doctrine is anything but new, and, to some persons, may have the air of a truism, there is no doctrine which stands more directly opposed to the general tendency of existing opinion and practice” (1859/2003, p. 83).
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Fish, J.M. (2011). The Conservative–Liberal Alliance Against Freedom. In: The Concept of Race and Psychotherapy. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7576-8_5
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