What Independents Can Learn from the Right and the Left

Half the fun of being a political independent is examining interesting ideas from across the ideological spectrum—not just accepting limited concepts promoted exclusively by one team or the other. As a kind of old-school liberal myself, my preferences lean towards concepts grounded in freedom, pluralism, and a mixed economy model based on capitalist enterprise and universal social insurance programs.

But I’ve learned a lot from both the right and the left over the years.

In the spirit of absorbing good ideas from different sources, here are some of the better theories promoted by both conservatives and those on the left that independents should keep in mind when analyzing politics and public policies.

Good ideas from conservatives

While more strident conservative ideologues promote an unfocused disdain for government that is often counterproductive to American interests, conservatives on the whole provide important and mostly measured criticisms of government overreach and irrationality.

Conservative ideas, at their best, serve American interests by stressing the importance of free enterprise and the limits of centralized power. A well-functioning private economy is critical to American jobs and wealth creation, and policymakers would be wise to incorporate suggestions coming from conservatives and the private sector when designing new laws and rules.

Subsidiarity and localism. Subsidiarity is a confusing term—used mostly in Catholic social teaching—that represents an important concept: policies are best handled at the local level and within natural social contexts such as families, neighborhoods, religious communities, and workplaces. This notion of localism doesn’t preclude or replace all government social programs, nor does it give license to different sets of rules that might threaten individual rights. Rather, a proper commitment to subsidiarity and localism merely asks political leaders to design policies—such as infrastructure investments or anti-poverty programs or work-training efforts—from the ground up rather than from the top down.

The correct insight here is that Americans themselves know more than far-off bureaucrats about what is needed for their own families, businesses, and communities. This approach not only produces better results for people, it also upholds freedom and citizenship for all Americans. By placing more decision-making authority in the hands of smaller units in society, the big decisions that affect everyone equally are then reserved for the national government on matters like security, trade, and commerce on the whole.

If the government wants to help people, the main thing it can do is offer support and money from the top and leave it to local leaders and citizens to figure out what works best for families, businesses, and development projects in their specific contexts.

Tradition and common sense. Tradition and common sense are concepts often derided as covers for the status quo or biases that serve some people more than others. In some cases, this can be true. However, tradition and common sense properly understood represent inherited wisdom, experiences, and norms that groups of people commit to collectively and refine over time to justify behaviors, laws, and customs.

Religious principles and practices are one source of tradition. Cultural education and family histories are another. Basic legal requirements or best practices in the business world are a third source of tradition. And American history and constitutionalism serve as a final source of tradition. In each case, values, experiences, and laws honed and improved over time offer important guidance to people about how to do things today.

Traditions are vital to maintaining softer norms that keep society together and encourage different groups of people to look out for one another. Likewise, when governments fail to respect or outright threaten these traditions, democratic legitimacy declines and anger rises. Democratic pluralism requires governments to work with and not against people’s belief systems and traditions, within constitutionally defined parameters.

Common sense offers a good corrective to other bureaucratic traditions that are often unreasonable and should be changed—think of convoluted queues for services at the DMV, random and shifting screening rules to board an airplane, or the multiple hurdles people must jump over to get a business started or access unemployment, health care, and housing benefits.

Unintended consequences. One of the sharpest insights from the more libertarian wing of conservative thought—and economics and other social sciences more broadly—involves the notion of unintended consequences. The main purpose of examining unintended consequences is to scrutinize the utility or effectiveness of various governmental regulations or policies. This idea is related to common sense but goes a bit further by requiring decision-makers to analyze potential and real spillover effects from implementing a particular set of rules.

If we enact this law or rule, how will behaviors change in response, and will the law or rule advance our primary goal or just create new problems?

Smart policymakers should take heed of potential and real unintended consequences like these when designing and implementing policies if they want laws that are both effective and respected by citizens and businesses.

Good ideas from the left

While conservatives remind us about the problems of big government and the benefits of local actions, the mainstream left reminds us about the problems of big business and the benefits of collective goods and universal social insurance protections.

The perils of concentrated economic power and class inequality. American liberals in general understand the importance that markets play in producing wealth, creating jobs, devising new products and services, and meeting the needs of individuals and consumers. But the left side of liberalism—the populist, non-socialist left—also highlights historical examples of how market economies are prone to speculative bubbles, monopolistic behavior, mistreatment of workers, and corruption if they are not closely monitored and checked.

Left-leaning economic ideas start from the premise that markets often fail and that they are not always self-correcting.

At the same time, the left highlights how concentrated economic power grows in tandem with rising economic inequality—as the fruits and profits of this economic power get turned into outsized income and wealth for a small group of people—and leads to concentrated political power as companies and the wealthy exert undue influence over the rules and laws put out by states and the federal government.

Anti-monopolists on the left correctly argue that when industries, sectors, or corporations get too big and too concentrated—think big pharma, big banks, big ag, and big tech—competition is reduced, small businesses are squeezed, consumer prices hit, and workers’ bargaining and wage power are diminished. For example, this is an acute problem in rural America where family-owned farms have faced decades of pressure from gigantic multinational companies and single buyers that have dramatically undercut America’s traditional self-image as a nation of small producers and landowners.

Determining the proper regulatory line between the beneficial aspects of large corporate enterprises—such as superior products for Americans—and the malign effects, like rising inequality and diminished competition, is difficult to define. But the economic left rightly reminds policymakers to at least look empirically at this market concentration and take steps to protect ordinary workers and smaller producers from the depredations of the biggest players.

The importance of public goods. The left also reminds us that many private businesses and big corporations operate in self-interested ways focused mostly on shareholder value with little regard for negative “externalities” such as air and water pollution, overuse of natural resources, impacts on local communities, or system-wide financial risk in the pursuit of profits.

Similarly, the left correctly recognizes that the private sector has little incentive to invest in key public goods such as education, infrastructure, research and development, or public safety and national security measures that produce long-term, society-wide benefits.

As John Kenneth Galbraith defined it, public goods are “things [that] do not lend themselves to [private] production, purchase and sale. They must be provided for everyone if they are to be provided for anyone, and they must be paid for collectively, or they cannot be had at all.”

What are examples of public goods? Throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries in America, governments at all levels promoted important investments, financed through progressive taxation and government borrowing, to do things such as maintain a strong military and ensure public safety measures; support public schools and access to college education; build and maintain public utilities, highways, airports, railways, and broadband infrastructure; provide health care and retirement security for Americans; and invest in new energy research and other forms of innovation.

The need for universal social insurance programs. In conjunction with concerns about the downsides of private economic activity, the left highlights the importance of universal social programs in promoting our common welfare and ensuring that all people have adequate standards of living and protections from unemployment, a slide into poverty, sickness or injury, and the lack of income in old age.

The key insight from the left is that these programs should almost always be universal—meaning they are available to all people and paid for by all people—if they are to work best and maintain public support over time. Think of Social Security’s provisions for retirement income and support for the disabled or Medicare’s treatment of the elderly or unemployment insurance with contributions from both workers and employers.

These programs are better thought of as a form of social insurance, meaning that people and businesses directly contribute in some capacity to programs that serve all people, even if payments may be based on income and some benefits may be concentrated among those most in need.

The logic and benefit of these universal programs is clear. People get sick or hurt, and everyone gets old. Some people lose jobs through no fault of their own. American society cannot function without protections from these life circumstances.

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These are some of the better ideas coming from different sides of the ideological spectrum.

The left correctly argues that Americans are better off when they challenge concentrated economic and political power, invest in public goods, and pursue universal programs that people themselves support through taxation.

Matching these insights with conservative ideas for administering things locally, relying more on common sense in rule-making, and considering potential consequences of governmental action, we have the makings of a nice hybrid public philosophy that can build solid foundations for successful families and free individuals along with a strong national economy that benefits everyone and maintains America’s position in the world.

Free agents don’t have to choose between the conservative concern about government overreach and the liberal left’s view that markets often fail and government needs to provide important public goods. We can judge policies by their outcomes, not their ideological origin, and adjust them accordingly consistent with the basic American commitment to freedom, pluralism, and opportunity for all.

Editor’s note: This is a combined and revised article based on a short series I did for The Liberal Patriot.