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system’s suppression of both individual liberty and the communal traditions in which that liberty is naturally at home. Both individual liberty and communal tradition provide obstacles to the exercise of government power (and a focus on limited government thus helps us see that the alliance between traditionalists and libertarians is a more natural one than is often claimed). Because conservatives are skeptical of the exercise of government power, they have no difficulty mounting a defense of liberty and tradition as alternative principles of social order, and a critique of communism on these grounds thus came naturally to them. But liberals—with more impatience for what Oakeshott called “the want of greater perfection which belongs alike to oneself and one’s circumstances”—have tended to view individual liberty as something that we have not yet realized and that must therefore be produced through government intervention; and tradition they have regarded more often as an obstacle than as an aide to liberty’s realization. Liberals have thus tended not to view liberty and tradition as valuable in their own right, as the proper alternatives to state power, but rather as only contingently valuable, to be tolerated when they do not interfere with government’s attempts to bring about a more just social order. In these respects too, we see that liberalism’s own political instincts contributed to its failure of political judgement in the second half of the twentieth century.
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hat I have said thus far essentially maps onto the description of conservatism that I offered at the outset. But a full explanation of the important differences between liberalism and conservatism, I think, requires an additional factor, one that brings a religious dimension into the discussion and clarifies the place of the Christian right within the conservative coalition. To identify this factor, we need to say something more about why liberals were led, beginning especially in the ‘60s, to criticize American society in terms that blinded them to its fundamental difference from the Soviet regime. In particular, we need to pay liberals a compliment. For I have not yet given due weight to an essential motive that underlay those liberal criticisms. They were motivated in large part by a genuine indignation at real injustice. Despite government efforts, racial discrimination had not yet been eliminated. Despite government efforts, women did not have a social status equal to that of men. Despite all the democratic idealism of the ‘60s, the United States 27