Conflicts within the Idea of the Liberal Tradition

Extract

The aspect of Professor Hartz's book which I find particularly challenging, but with which I cannot wholly agree, is his view that American politics is characterized by an absence of fundamental conflicts. I do agree that American political struggles have been different from those of Europe, and that this difference can be aptly characterized as a consequence of the fact that, in the Tocquevilleian formula, we have arrived at a state of democracy without having had to endure a democratic revolution. Americans have seldom experienced the particular passions engendered by the impact of the idea of equality upon class distinctions derived from a feudal regime. But it seems to me that the conflicts of American politics, while in one sense attenuated by the comparative absence of a feudal inheritance, in another sense have been intensified by this very fact, by reason of the immediacy of the demands of equality. If all Americans did not accept with such thoroughness. the pre-eminent “Lockeian” tenet, there would not be the persistent record of violent anger and frustration attending what each group of Americans regarded as its just inheritance from the operation of that tenet. To take the single most overpowering present-day example: where in the world but America could there be such simultaneous demands for color-blindness and color-consciousness in the regulation of all institutions patronized by law? Yet both the power and the simultaneity of these demands are assertions of the claims of equality: one side insisting that no law is valid which recognizes inequality of rights; the other insisting that none is valid which does not incorporate their uncoerced opinions or consent. Hartz does not examine the genuine difficulties which inhere in the attempt to create a society dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. He observes the virtual unanimity with which Americans have been committed to it, and he observes that they have nonetheless gone on quarreling. He concludes wrongly, however, that they have therefore quarreled over phantoms or irrelevancies. The reason for this mistaken judgment is the implicit thesis that quarrels which are genuine and profound are always quarrels in which the idea of equality is in competition with its opposite.