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What's in a name? Brand confusion muddles writing on think-tanks

By Andrew Norton - posted Tuesday, 26 August 2003


Am I having an identity crisis? In just one article last week, the think-tank I work for was described as neoconservative, neo-liberal, and New Right. Another article characterised us as having a "libertarian/ laissez-faire" philosophy. And we are regularly tagged as conservatives and as economic rationalists.

In truth, this is a categorisation crisis, not an identity crisis. These labels don't all signal the same things, and can't be used as synonyms. The differences on some issues may be minor, but on others diametrically opposed views are branded with the same name.

Recent debates over American foreign policy make the 'neoconservative' label particularly prone to mislead. Neoconservatism emerged in the United States more than 30 years ago. It was made up of American liberals who, in Irving Kristol's words, had been "mugged by reality". The reality at the time was the 1960s and 1970s attack on liberal institutions and bourgeois values by the counter-culture and the radical left.

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Back then, neoconservatism was new in two ways. Many of the individuals were themselves new to conservatism, and some of their ideas differed from mainstream conservatives too. In the current context, the most important difference was on foreign policy. Most American conservatives were either of the realist school, believing that America should only act internationally when its security or interests were at stake, or isolationist, believing America should not meddle overseas.

Prominent neoconservatives were different. They believed America should actively promote democracy and freedom abroad, that American values had universal currency and should be the basis of American foreign policy.

These days, this is probably the only remaining distinctive neoconservative view. Though most of the original neoconservatives are still alive, public debate is carried out by second and third generation writers. Their style reflects the movements' origins in the world of New York intellectuals, but foreign policy aside their broad policy agenda has merged into mainstream American conservatism.

The tensions within American conservatism have been very evident this year, with division between those wanting to achieve limited security objectives in the Middle East and those wanting to spread democracy to Iraq and beyond.

When the Sydney Morning Herald describes my employer, the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS), as "neoconservative", people who have followed the extensive local coverage of American debates would naturally assume that it backs the neoconservative line.

In fact the CIS's leading foreign policy expert, Owen Harries, specifically opposes this view. Harries, the former editor of the American journal The National Interest, said in an interview with Policy magazine last year that he "spent most of the 1990s arguing not against the Left but against the neoconservatives, arguing for prudence and restraint in American foreign policy, as against the rather gung-ho approach they favoured".

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Nor is there much else in Australian conservatism that justifies the "neo" prefix. Only a handful of conservative commentators - Keith Windschuttle, Christopher Pearson and Michael Duffy - started out on the left, and only Windschuttle was prominent prior to his conversion. They are too few to count as a movement, and with Robert Manne doing a back-flip to his youthful leftism the net gain is small.

While they've all pursued issues that other conservatives hadn't taken up in detail, there's nothing that doesn't fit with older conservative concerns. Conservatives were fighting the left over Australian history long before Windschuttle alleged fabrication of Aboriginal history or Duffy rehabilitated John Macarthur.

The highest profile self-confessed conservative is the Prime Minister. His conservatism, too, seems evolved from past conservative beliefs, not something new or striking. The old conservative concern with social cohesion is there but no longer the view, once held by both parties, that racial purity is necessary for that goal. Experience has shown otherwise.

Similarly, the Prime Minister has accepted the changed role of women, trying to help mothers who stay at home, but also those going to work to manage their dual responsibilities. Even his recent stance against gay marriage was prefaced with a disavowal of discrimination against homosexuals. In all cases, Howard has adapted to community practice and expectations.

If there is anything novel in the Prime Minister's political stance, it is his combination of market economics and mild social conservatism. Historically, conservatives have often been skeptical of the market, fearing that its dynamism would create too rapid change and disrupt the social order.

True to form, in the early 1990s there was a conservative backlash against "economic rationalism". Robert Manne, then the conservative editor of Quadrant, published in its pages many articles against market reforms, along with a book and his own newspaper commentary.

Is this combination of market economics and social conservatism a new form of conservatism? Or is it a new form of liberalism, since Howard's social conservatism is so muted compared to Australia's past or conservative parties in other Western countries? Given Howard's own insistence that his thought includes conservative and liberal elements, we are probably best off describing it as not one or the other, but as conservative liberalism.

In the Australian context, the "neo" labels don't add much. Neoconservatism is positively confusing, and "neoliberalism" implies the ideas are more "neo" than is the case. Many of the people described by others as neoliberals - most of the people who write for the CIS fall into this group - prefer "classical liberalism", highlighting our intellectual heritage, not our novelty.

Even if we date classical liberalism from its 20th century revival, major writers like Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and James Buchanan, all Nobel Prize winners, had written significant books well before Irving Kristol decided that he was a neoconservative.

Calling Friedrich Hayek the "global godfather" of the neoconservative movement, as Wilson da Silva did in The Sydney Morning Herald, is particularly wide of the mark. More than 40 years ago Hayek wrote an essay called "Why I am not a conservative". Ironically, this essay appeared originally in a book that da Silva once called "a bible of the new social conservatism". Social conservatism owes nothing to Hayek.

So I suggest we stop calling anything new unless it really is, and adds a meaning that we might otherwise miss. Neoconservatism in the US qualifies, but nothing in the contemporary Australian scene. Conservative or social conservative will do, as will liberalism or classical liberalism to describe the free marketeers who, in the old line, want to keep the government out of the bedroom as well as the boardroom.

For those who mix liberalism and conservatism, conservative liberal or liberal conservative should suffice. Which word is the adjective and which the noun will depend on which philosophy is emphasised.

Libertarian should be kept for describing those who want to radically shrink the state, not those in the think-tanks with more modest agendas. The most far-reaching reform proposal I've found from the think-tanks would have taken Australia back to the size of government it had when the Whitlam government came to power in 1972. A genuine libertarian would condemn such statism.

Economic rationalist is a term we can keep, but to describe an issue movement rather than a distinct philosophy. The economic rationalists were a pro-market policy alliance that included a social democratic Labor federal government, the Liberal opposition and then government, export-oriented businesses, economists in the bureaucracy and academia, and the think-tanks. They agreed on a reform agenda more than an underlying philosophy.

Using these labels would avoid the kind of brand confusion that engulfed The Sydney Morning Herald's recent think-tank stories. They are generally accepted by the people they describe. And they will keep the controversy about ideas, not name calling.

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Article edited by John Carrigan.
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This article was first published in The Australian on 19 August 2003.



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About the Author

Andrew Norton is a research fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies and Director of the CIS' Liberalising Learning research programme.

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