Liberal Hearts and Conservative Brains:
The
Correlation between Age and Political Philosophy
Ron Lipsman
Reviewed by
Amitrajeet A. Batabyal
Professor
Lipsman---Professor of Mathematics at the University of Maryland in
College
Park---gets the title for his book from the following statement usually
attributed to either Benjamin Disraeli or to Winston Churchill: "If you
are young and not liberal, then you have no heart; but if you are old
and not
conservative then you have no brain." He has four objectives in this
book.
First, he claims that whereas young people are generally more
comfortable with
liberalism, as they age, there is a tendency for them to gravitate
towards
conservatism. Second, he explores the nature of what he considers to be
the
most interesting counterexamples to the above noted tendency. Third, he
provides a perspective on the past, the present, and the expected
future of the
conservative/liberal divide in the United States (US). Finally, he uses
personal vignettes to delineate the experiences that have resulted in
his
eschewal of liberalism and his embrace of conservatism.
The
proceedings begin in right earnest with Professor Lipsman's
presentation of two
dozen issues that, he claims, can be used to define the key differences
between
conservatives and liberals. Some of these issues---conservatives
(liberals) generally favor fewer (more) governmental regulations---are
straightforward but others are anything but straightforward. For
instance,
consider the issue of taxes. According to Professor Lipsman,
conservatives
generally favor lower taxes and liberals favor high taxes. Is this
really true?
In addition, is it illuminating to look at the tax issue along the
lines
proposed by Professor Lipsman? What is true is that conservatives tend
to focus
on economic success and hence favor a system of taxation that does not
penalize
success. In contrast, liberals focus more on equity in society and
hence tend
to favor a taxation system that does not favor the rich. In other
words, the
objective functions of conservatives and liberals are different. No one
really
favors high taxes per se. Unfortunately, this kind of nuanced
reasoning
is frequently absent in Professor Lipsman's discussion and hence this
discussion is open to the charge that it is simplistic, if not flawed.
The
past, the present, and the expected future of the conservative/liberal
divide
in the US take up a significant portion of this book. The perspective
Professor
Lipsman provides on the past, in particular, is helpful and he says
several
sensible things about the divide in question. When discussing
segregation and
the civil rights movement, in a rare concession to liberals, he
acknowledges
that "this is an arena in which...government intervention seems to have
been required in order to solve the problem" (p. 102). Regrettably,
this
eminently reasonable discussion soon begins to get incendiary in
nature. Two
points stand out. First, Professor Lipsman accuses liberals of paying
"poor women to boot out their husbands and have babies with multiple
partners..." (p. 104). The author notes on more than one occasion that
he
would like us to read this book as an extended op-ed piece and not as
an
academic tome. In principle, this is fine but for any op-ed piece to be
credible, the presented opinions must ultimately have something to do
with real
world facts. This is clearly not true for the sentence just quoted.
Second,
President Ronald Reagan is manifestly one of Professor Lipsman's
greatest
heroes. He repeatedly heaps praise on President Reagan but, on
occasion, he
lets his zeal get the better of him. He commends President Reagan for
his
"support of local armed resistance to Soviet clients..." (p. 111).
This support concerns activities in Afghanistan and as the events of
the last
two decades have abundantly shown, far from being laudatory, President
Reagan's
support of the jehadis was based on a bafflingly myopic interpretation
of US
interests and US foreign policy.
The
existence of "aging liberals" runs counter to Professor Lipsman's
first objective---mentioned above---in this book. Therefore, he goes to
some
length to explain why some liberals, as he puts it, "won't grow up."
He acknowledges that his explanations "may sound harsh, even
insulting..." (p. 213), but he fearlessly marches on. His opening salvo
in
this context is that some liberals don't grow up because they fail to
learn
from their mistakes. As far as these mistakes are concerned, exhibit A
would
appear to be the support of liberals for a minimum wage. This support
may or
may not be a mistake---remember this book is supposed to be an extended
op-ed
piece---but there certainly is at least one mistake in Professor
Lipsman's analysis
of the impacts of a minimum wage. First, the impact of a minimum wage
depends
in part on whether the market in which the minimum wage is to be
introduced is
competitive or non-competitive. Second, although it is true that a
minimum wage
often does cause some unemployment it is also true that this minimum
wage has a
salutary impact on those workers who are able to find work at the
higher
minimum wage. Therefore, even in this simple scenario, whether the net
impact
of a minimum wage is positive or negative depends on whether the
"unemployment effect" dominates or is dominated by the "work at a
higher wage" effect. Professor Lipsman mentions none of this but,
instead,
gives the misleading impression that a minimum wage is always a
"mistake."
Professor
Lipsman's second salvo is that some liberals don't grow up because they
are
unwilling to accept responsibility for their actions. He bitterly
laments the
fact that liberals, although eager to set up all manner of unnecessary
and
wasteful social programs, will not accept that these programs are
collapsing
and that they "will not apologize to those who are injured by [the]
collapse" (p. 220). How interesting! One can think of several
conservatives who have not apologized for their misguided actions and
statements.
For instance, in an interview with Larry King in 2005, Vice President
Dick
Cheney said that the insurgency in Iraq was in the last throes. He was
flat
wrong. Has Cheney ever apologized to the American people either for
this
blunder or for subsequent policies enacted on the basis of this
erroneous
belief?
In
sum, this book is very much a mixed bag. The book is written in a
"chatty" style and hence it is both easy to read and entertaining in
parts. In addition, other parts of this book which discuss the ways in
which a
modern research university functions are "spot on." Finally, there is
no gainsaying the fact that this book's fundamental contention that
there is a
correlation between age and political philosophy is probabilistically
true. Even
so, it is important to note that this book suffers from errors of both
commission and omission. Second, Professor Lipsman adopts an
inexplicably
arrogant and frequently insulting tone towards liberals. Therefore, if
his main
arguments are insufficiently appreciated, then it will be because of
statements
like the following: "I stand by all the arguments I have made
throughout
the book for the superiority of conservatism, and by my descriptions of
the
various tragedies that liberalism has inflicted on our society" (p.
232).
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