In my younger, headier days, I thought most human impulses could be traced back to social conditioning. I have since grown skeptical of that view. Among other things, I now believe most humans harbor an innate conservative tendency to fear the new and cling to the familiar, regardless of what dispassionate analysis might tell us. This tendency is perhaps less present among self-styled progressives than among out-and-out conservatives, but it is nonetheless present. In some ways, moreover, the bespoke and often reactionary form of contemporary progressivism—a product of progressivism’s journey through the tumultuous twentieth century—dovetails naturally with this fundamentally Burkean ethos.
What do I mean?
This afternoon, I was talking to an acquaintance who works in renewable energy consulting. Expecting a positive response, I asked what he thought about permitting reform. He was skeptical, he said; he did not like it. Probing further, I uncovered two principal arguments: first, he worried relaxing the permitting process would lead to unforeseen and presently unforeseeable harms; second, he believed permitting reform efforts were driven by big business, and a political project backed by big business (or anyone with a profit motive) was guaranteed to hurt society.
To be clear, permitting reform is urgently needed to address the climate crisis. Ezra Klein, Jerusalem Demsas, Paul Krugman, and others have made the case more thoroughly than I can, but the gist goes as follows. Solving the climate crisis requires replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy. Replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy requires building a lot of new infrastructure. An onerous permitting process impedes construction, leaving us with less renewable energy and, consequently, higher carbon emissions. Put differently, the current permitting process benefits the status quo—and the status quo is killing the planet.
Yet my acquaintance, by society’s account quite liberal—and, what is more, a renewable energy consultant—balks at reform. “I am a liberal,” he says, “but I embrace the status quo.” Some liberal! In truth, he is nominally liberal but functionally conservative. Self-adopted labels can say more about our emotional attachments than they do about our politics.
And this is precisely my point. Calling oneself a liberal is not the same as resisting the innate (and wrongheaded!) Burkean impulse that afflicts most humans; it is often simply a signal for which emotional attachments that impulse will channel itself through. “Liberal,” in this sense, means an ideological alignment with economic regulations and against the excesses of the free market. It means a healthy distrust of anyone looking to make a buck. It does not mean—though it should—a healthy skepticism of the way things are and an eagerness to make them better.
Hence, my acquaintance. Citing unforeseen and unforeseeable consequences is not a persuasive justification for refusing to change things. A true liberal—a true progressive—would support the best policy that can be formulated based on the available evidence. But citing unforeseen and unforeseeable consequences can signal liberal emotional commitments, provided those consequences redound to the detriment of something liberals care about—say, the environment. And since these consequences are undefined and hypothetical, they can always be posited to so redound. My acquaintance cited the example of DDT, a pesticide American agriculture adopted widely with little oversight or regulation, and which was later found to wreak enormous havoc on the ecosystem. Permitting reform, he argued, would open the door to analogous ills: we might not be able to foresee them today with any specificity, but they would surely materialize. Keeping up the strict guardrails, which delay and impede construction, was the only sensible way.
Arguing against a policy on the basis that some monied interests back it likewise reflects muddied, conservative thinking—and signals a strong commitment to maintaining a liberal social identity. America has a free market. Something like seventy-five percent1 of what gets done in this country is accomplished by profit-motivated entities. If you want to get something done, you will very likely have to rely to some degree on the private market. The Inflation Reduction Act, for example, channels hundreds of millions of dollars to renewable energy companies through various incentives, grants, and regulations. Despite this, the Inflation Reduction Act stands as an unimpeachably progressive piece of legislation. Objecting every time the profit motive enters the picture will slow down a lot of progress. In practice, it means fighting nearly every policy that stands a chance of passing into law, and this means fighting for the status quo. This reactionary “No!” is the province of conservatives; so-called liberals cannot seriously claim to embrace it as anything other than a social signal.
Policies should be built around the evidence we have, and they should be built to solve problems. They should not be built to signal emotional commitments. That is progressivism. Clinging to the status quo for fear of the unknowable “what-if,” and running from proposals on the grounds that they benefit some market actor, may win you points among the angry left on Twitter, but at the end of the day, it is conservatives who are laughing.
This is based on the ratio of government spending to gross domestic product (GDP). I’m not completely sure it’s correct, though, since not all government spending counts towards GDP, and some non-government production is also non-profit.