So what is it about liberals that lead their opponents
to accuse them of communism, and what is it about conservatives that
bring their opponents to call them fascists? Furthermore, what is it
about libertarians that lead their opponents to accuse them of
anarchism? I submit that in American Politics, and perhaps in the
Politics of the West generally, there are three distinct ideological
axes by which political actors orient themselves.
Certain ideological positions share attachments to specific principles, and consequently it is possible for one who does not share the same attachment to fail to see the difference between, say, a liberal and a communist, or a conservative and a fascist, or a libertarian and an anarchist.
Professor Kautz comes close to the mark in identifying at least two of the basic pillars of political ideological preference. However, the language he uses in Liberalism and Community can easily conflate certain preferences (of which he is keenly aware on page 7), and the preference for 'virtue' he describes is but an extension of something more fundamental: 'virtue', as a principle, differs from liberty and equality only in that it describes a kind of habituation dependent upon the laws, mores, manners, and customs of a given body politic, rather than a principle that guides or informs law, mores, manners or customs. What members of one community understand to be "virtuous" may differ from what members of another hold, for members of different communities learn different habits, and these habits may contradict each other or else fail to translate from one community to another.
Virtue may also apply to a particular habituation towards liberty or equality, or even to the state itself. And here we may discern a preference truly distinct from liberty and equality, that of order itself, for the order of a body politic or of the community ultimately determines what that community deems virtuous or not. Thus, it is to liberty, equality, and order that we must turn our attention.
Comments