It has become a cliche that the right/left, liberal/conservative labels are becoming meaningless. Glenn Reynolds of InstaPundit is constantly called a conservative even though he is pro-choice, pro gay marriage, anti-drug war, etc. There are conservatives for the war and against the war, for free trade and against free trade. When the liberal or conservative label is applied to someone, you don’t know anything more about where they stand on any particular issue than you did before.
I would suggest that a more useful distinction is between utopianism and messy, imperfect, corrupt compromise, better known as liberal (in the original sense of that word) democracy. Mao, Hitler, Stalin, Castro, L. Ron Hubbard, Karl Marx, Osama Bin Laden, Ralph Nader, and all who believe in the perfectability of humankind, are utopians. Where they fall on the political continuum is irrelevant. Thus we see the current phenomenon of “War is not the answer” leftists allying themselves with Kim Jong Il and Jew-hating, women-oppressing Islamic fascists.
The American founding fathers were visionaries, but they were not utopians. Principles such as the serparation of powers and the separation of church and state, and institutions like the electoral college are frank admissions that human nature is not perfectable. There will always be demogoguery, ambition, greed, lust, and all the seven deadly sins. There will always be disagreement about everything. And war will remain as the ultimate settler of disagreement when there is no other way. The reason that no democratic nation has ever, thus far, attacked another democratic nation, is that democracy is a method that acknowledges and accepts the inevitability of disagreement and provides mechanisms for imperfectly resolving it without violence. Citizens of democracies gradually evolve cultures where the expectation is that one will never have things just exactly as one wants them to be. Perfection can only be imposed, because there will always be someone who objects to the program.
The pitfall of anti-utopianism is the trap of believing that improvement is not possible. As the Zen master Shunryu Suzuki once said to his students, “You are all perfect just as you are, but you could use a little improvement.” Believers in human perfectability have traditionally been the leaders and shock troops of movements to extend civil rights to all races and to women. They have been in the forefront of the efforts to care for the sick and the elderly, to eliminate child labor, to clean up the environment, and a host of other worthy causes. Just because human nature is essentially unchangeable does not mean that therefore the status quo is always the best we can hope for. The trick is to work within the parameters of human nature, rather than against them. Forward, “progressive” evolution of human society always involves a mixture of idealism and appeals to baser human instincts.
My favorite president is Abraham Lincoln (apparently he was gay!). Lincoln was the great compromiser, and a master manipulator. He had no qualms about dealing, often quite underhandedly, with all kinds of racists, megalomaniacs, and utopian crusaders in order to reach his goal, which was not utopia but Union. And by union he meant the acceptance of the Constitution as the framework within which disagreement must be constrained. Slavery was reluctantly acceptable to him, but secession was not, because if the principle of secession were to prevail, then there would be no constitution, no democracy, no way to reconcile disagreement except might. And then the flickering beacon of a middle way that the constitution represents would fade back into war-lordism. Without Lincoln there would be no United States of America, and in all likelihood the present spread of democracy in the world would not be happening. Instead there’s a good chance we would all be citizens of the Third Reich, and there would be no Jews.
So I’m glad that there are Democrats and Republicans, and that they are both so wrong about so many things, and that we never seem to have a very good choice of candidates. I’m glad that Iraq is a mess. It’s a big improvement on what it was before. And I’m glad that no matter who wins the election, a bunch of people are going to be very unhappy about it.