In an excellent essay on conservatism and the Left-Right ideological scale, Karl-Gustel Wärnberg puts forward an intriguing distinction between the Left and the Right in politics as one between the desire to disrupt the social and economic order and the desire to preserve it.
Based on this distinction, Wärnberg sets out to identify “left-wing conservatism” as part of an ideological common ground in modern Western societies.
His thesis, which is concentrated on political ideas and stops short of political practice, offers a powerful hypothesis on why in the West we have so many examples of widespread political support for large, high-tax governments and their welfare states.
Social conservatism: from theory to practice
Can his thesis be put to work and explain the welfare state as the common ground for a compromise between social conservatism and social democracy?
Let us find out.
To anchor his analysis in conservatism, Wärnberg provides a concise definition of the ideology based on the writings of Benjamin Disraeli, author and former prime minister of Britain. Explains Wärnberg:
One Nation Conservatism differs from socialism in that it is not aiming to take care of everyone and become a social and political behemoth, but rather represents a paternal care for those who are the most vulnerable in society. Similarly, in Germany, Count Otto von Bismarck introduced social welfare, and he too represents social conservatism.
Conservatism sets out to preserve the tried-and-true values of family, community, and nation, with a limited welfare state as part of this preservation effort. He then provides a definition of the traditional Right-Left scale for political ideologies, where the opposite poles are not economic, but methodological: the Right proposes to conserve certain societal values while the Left wants to change them.
To expand his point a bit: the ambitions to preserve or disrupt apply to the entire socio-economic organization of a society. This organization, in turn, encompasses the role of government in both social and economic matters, the legislative and regulatory framework of private enterprise and laws that define, or do not define, the family. In other words, the choice whether to conserve or change is a choice of what type of welfare state we want.
One of the intriguing consequences of viewing the Right-Left spectrum through Wärnberg’s lens is that it reshuffles ideologies compared to where they are traditionally located. The libertarian, a.k.a., the classical liberal, ends up next to the radical socialist or communist.
However, in order to find the practical political conditions under which social conservatism can overlap with social democracy, we need to add a second lens to the Right-Left spectrum. This is the lens of traditional political economy, where the left side of the spectrum advocates expansive state intervention in the economy and the Right side urges restraint.
We can think of Wärnberg’s lens as that of the political methodology of ideologies, while the economic lens reveals their political theory. A political methodology tells us how an ideology proposes to reach its goals, which in turn are spelled out in its political theory.
Political methodologies
The goal of conservatism is to protect, preserve, and reinvigorate tried-and-true values and institutions such as family, community, and nation. Its methodology for achieving that goal is, as Wärnberg explains, preservative. By contrast, the goal of socialism is a society that vastly differs from that which is cherished by conservatives.
The spectrum of political theories or goals runs between two polar opposites, from:
- The Right extreme where the individual supremely supersedes the state, which in turn is limited to its libertarian minimal functions (see Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia for a thorough analysis); to
- The Left extreme where the state assumes universal responsibility for, and authority over, the individual citizen.
Conservatism belongs to the Right on this scale, but not at the extreme. It advocates limited government programs and enumerated regulations of people’s lives. All forms of state intervention in the private sector are designed to preserve institutions and values that reinforce the individual, the family, and the community.
Libertarians share the conservative preference for enumerated government powers, but they oppose any government-sponsored attempt to impact social values as an undue intrusion on individual freedom. However, since libertarian political theory protects the individual from collective force, it opposes coercive socio-economic transformations of the kind advocated by socialists. Therefore, libertarianism belongs at the very Right extreme of the Right-Left spectrum.
Under social democracy, the balance of the relationship between the individual and the state is stood on its head. It is no longer the powers of the latter that are enumerated, but the liberties of the former. The reason is in the goal of socialism—to eliminate economic differences between individuals—which social democracy shares with all branches of socialism.
Their differences are confined to political methodology. Communists advocate a revolution to violently overthrow the existing social and economic order. The social democrat, by contrast, prefers democratically approved reforms that slowly and gradually reconfigure society in his ideological image.
It is here that the social democrat opens for a compromise with the social conservative. A traditional European social democrat would rather preserve democracy and stop short of his political end goal than to sacrifice democracy for full economic egalitarianism.
He is indeed a preservationist, a conservative, when it comes to political methodology.
By the same token, the social conservative is willing to accept a welfare state that goes beyond his preferred realm of government intervention, if it promotes his values and preserves economic and social stability.
Both ideologies reach for the common ground where left-wing conservatism emerges. However, that common ground is far from a given. The threat to it lies in the dynamic practice of both ideologies: if a welfare state grows big enough it flips the default relationship between the individual and the state. Over time, it is not possible to enumerate both government powers and individual freedom.
Three types of welfare states
To illustrate the tipping point, consider the three major types of welfare states that the academic literature has identified (see my Democracy or Socialism: The Fateful Question for America in 2024, pp. 126-134, for a review). The first two belong on the Right side of the political-theory spectrum:
1. Subsistence. This minimalistic welfare state is often exemplified by the British Poor Laws of the 16th century. It offers rudimentary benefits by today’s standards, theoretically comparable to the needs met by Ricardian iron-law wages. This welfare-state type is compatible with libertarianism.
2. Dignification. Commonly seen as socially conservative, this welfare-state type aims to make poverty a dignified experience. Like the subsistence type, it provides benefits on a last-resort basis, but they are not at the subsistence level, nor are they limited strictly to means of mere survival. A good example of this welfare-state type is found in Lord Beveridge’s report from 1942 to the British Parliament on how to alleviate poverty in Britain.
Then comes the third type, which leaps from Right to Left:
3. Redistribution. Benefits are no longer provided on a last-resort basis, but extend to those who are gainfully employed. The purpose of the welfare state is no longer to alleviate poverty, but to redistribute income and consumption among the citizenry. Benefits are comprehensive not only in level but also in scope; funding comes from progressive taxes that place the bulk of the burden on those deemed wealthy.
From these three types, it is not easy to extract a welfare state that would be palatable to both social conservatives and social democrats. It is possible, though. The path to a compromise can be found by navigating the dynamics between political methodology and political theory.
Suppose in a society with a subsistence-type welfare state, government decides to transform it in the image of social conservatism. It could be stated that in this situation social conservatism is disruptive, i.e., ends up on the Left in terms of methodology. Its welfare state requires reforms of such a magnitude—viewed from the point of their absence—that the pursuit of social conservatism ends up disrupting the prevailing social order.
When, on the other hand, the socially conservative welfare state has been established, a government that acts in its defense is clearly preservative in its political methodology. It has achieved its ideological goal of providing a dignified last-resort safety net for those who have no other means of supporting themselves.
Suppose, then, that a socialist government wants a redistributive welfare state. This transformation is more comprehensive than the previous one, as it involves changing the default balance between the private and the public. In other words, this welfare state leaps from Right to Left in the spectrum of political theory.
At this point, it gets complicated for both social conservatives and social democrats to find common ground. They still do, as Wärnberg explains, but it does not come easy.
Economic redistribution, the end goal of socialism, is disruptive by nature. It seeks to synthetically alter the pattern by which the organic forces of the free-market economy distribute income, consumption, and wealth. Its transformative capacity was seen in many countries in the last century. In the 1960s and 1970s, Britain morphed its socially conservative welfare state into a redistributive one. The American welfare state was disruptively reformed, starting in the 1960s under President Lyndon Johnson’s so-called War on Poverty.
Sweden: finding common ground
Sweden may present the most intriguing challenge to compromise-minded conservatives and social democrats. On the one hand, it offers entitlement benefits aimed at families; it provides housing subsidies, child-care services, and child-benefit checks. From the methodological viewpoint, this gives the welfare state a socially conservative profile.
On the other hand, the size of the welfare state and the impact of its taxes and benefits on personal finances discourage self determination. It has also contributed to a decline in marriage and a rise in the share of kids living with out-of-wedlock parents.
To further complicate the matter, the political methodology behind the Swedish welfare state was clearly disruptive in nature. That theory was explicated primarily in a book by economist Gunnar Myrdal and his wife Alva, a sociologist. Called Kris i befolkningsfrågan (The Demographic Crisis), its publication in 1934 laid out the vision for a welfare state that would totally transform the very life, even purpose, of the traditional family. Without exaggeration, Mr. and Mrs. Myrdal proposed social and economic reforms that would reduce parents to feeder units for their children, with the state assuming the role of raising and educating the children from infancy.
The state would even apply far-reaching eugenic measures, such as abortions and forced sterilization, to secure that the children who were born all contributed to a high-quality “population stock.”
Many of the policy reforms that Mr. and Mrs. Myrdal proposed were also put in place, including a program for forced sterilization, which was kept until 1975. Almost all of the reforms were implemented in the 1940s and 1950s, with mostly minor tweaks and expansions taking place after that.
Since then, governments of shifting ideological colors have essentially administered the welfare state. In Wärnberg’s terms, a compromise has emerged between conservatives and social democrats. It is explained in two books with strikingly similar titles: The Welfare State and Beyond from 1984 by conservative politician Gunnar Heckscher and Beyond the Welfare State from 1960 by Myrdal, the aforementioned socialist economist.
Heckscher describes the Swedish welfare state as a logical extension of a centuries-long history of socially conservative policies. Essentially, he sees the current welfare state as an evolutionary form of what emerged gradually over centuries.
Myrdal, on the other hand, sees the welfare state as a force of disruption, designed to shift the balance between the private and the public in favor of the latter. He is quite explicit on how the welfare state inevitably emerges from various, more or less uncoordinated forms of state presence in private lives (p. 61):
[It] will, as time goes on, be less and less possible to maintain that ours is a “free” or a “free enterprise” economy, with exceptions for a certain number of acts of state intervention. The exceptions are gradually becoming the rule.
Sweden stopped short of the all-encompassing government that Myrdal envisioned. Today, generally speaking, its welfare state provides benefits for families on a basis that can be acceptable to social conservatives, not as an accomplishment of conservative policies, but as a palatable compromise where they and social democrats find the common ground that Wärnberg identifies.
Right, Left, and Conservative
In an excellent essay on conservatism and the Left-Right ideological scale, Karl-Gustel Wärnberg puts forward an intriguing distinction between the Left and the Right in politics as one between the desire to disrupt the social and economic order and the desire to preserve it.
Based on this distinction, Wärnberg sets out to identify “left-wing conservatism” as part of an ideological common ground in modern Western societies.
His thesis, which is concentrated on political ideas and stops short of political practice, offers a powerful hypothesis on why in the West we have so many examples of widespread political support for large, high-tax governments and their welfare states.
Social conservatism: from theory to practice
Can his thesis be put to work and explain the welfare state as the common ground for a compromise between social conservatism and social democracy?
Let us find out.
To anchor his analysis in conservatism, Wärnberg provides a concise definition of the ideology based on the writings of Benjamin Disraeli, author and former prime minister of Britain. Explains Wärnberg:
Conservatism sets out to preserve the tried-and-true values of family, community, and nation, with a limited welfare state as part of this preservation effort. He then provides a definition of the traditional Right-Left scale for political ideologies, where the opposite poles are not economic, but methodological: the Right proposes to conserve certain societal values while the Left wants to change them.
To expand his point a bit: the ambitions to preserve or disrupt apply to the entire socio-economic organization of a society. This organization, in turn, encompasses the role of government in both social and economic matters, the legislative and regulatory framework of private enterprise and laws that define, or do not define, the family. In other words, the choice whether to conserve or change is a choice of what type of welfare state we want.
One of the intriguing consequences of viewing the Right-Left spectrum through Wärnberg’s lens is that it reshuffles ideologies compared to where they are traditionally located. The libertarian, a.k.a., the classical liberal, ends up next to the radical socialist or communist.
However, in order to find the practical political conditions under which social conservatism can overlap with social democracy, we need to add a second lens to the Right-Left spectrum. This is the lens of traditional political economy, where the left side of the spectrum advocates expansive state intervention in the economy and the Right side urges restraint.
We can think of Wärnberg’s lens as that of the political methodology of ideologies, while the economic lens reveals their political theory. A political methodology tells us how an ideology proposes to reach its goals, which in turn are spelled out in its political theory.
Political methodologies
The goal of conservatism is to protect, preserve, and reinvigorate tried-and-true values and institutions such as family, community, and nation. Its methodology for achieving that goal is, as Wärnberg explains, preservative. By contrast, the goal of socialism is a society that vastly differs from that which is cherished by conservatives.
The spectrum of political theories or goals runs between two polar opposites, from:
Conservatism belongs to the Right on this scale, but not at the extreme. It advocates limited government programs and enumerated regulations of people’s lives. All forms of state intervention in the private sector are designed to preserve institutions and values that reinforce the individual, the family, and the community.
Libertarians share the conservative preference for enumerated government powers, but they oppose any government-sponsored attempt to impact social values as an undue intrusion on individual freedom. However, since libertarian political theory protects the individual from collective force, it opposes coercive socio-economic transformations of the kind advocated by socialists. Therefore, libertarianism belongs at the very Right extreme of the Right-Left spectrum.
Under social democracy, the balance of the relationship between the individual and the state is stood on its head. It is no longer the powers of the latter that are enumerated, but the liberties of the former. The reason is in the goal of socialism—to eliminate economic differences between individuals—which social democracy shares with all branches of socialism.
Their differences are confined to political methodology. Communists advocate a revolution to violently overthrow the existing social and economic order. The social democrat, by contrast, prefers democratically approved reforms that slowly and gradually reconfigure society in his ideological image.
It is here that the social democrat opens for a compromise with the social conservative. A traditional European social democrat would rather preserve democracy and stop short of his political end goal than to sacrifice democracy for full economic egalitarianism.
He is indeed a preservationist, a conservative, when it comes to political methodology.
By the same token, the social conservative is willing to accept a welfare state that goes beyond his preferred realm of government intervention, if it promotes his values and preserves economic and social stability.
Both ideologies reach for the common ground where left-wing conservatism emerges. However, that common ground is far from a given. The threat to it lies in the dynamic practice of both ideologies: if a welfare state grows big enough it flips the default relationship between the individual and the state. Over time, it is not possible to enumerate both government powers and individual freedom.
Three types of welfare states
To illustrate the tipping point, consider the three major types of welfare states that the academic literature has identified (see my Democracy or Socialism: The Fateful Question for America in 2024, pp. 126-134, for a review). The first two belong on the Right side of the political-theory spectrum:
1. Subsistence. This minimalistic welfare state is often exemplified by the British Poor Laws of the 16th century. It offers rudimentary benefits by today’s standards, theoretically comparable to the needs met by Ricardian iron-law wages. This welfare-state type is compatible with libertarianism.
2. Dignification. Commonly seen as socially conservative, this welfare-state type aims to make poverty a dignified experience. Like the subsistence type, it provides benefits on a last-resort basis, but they are not at the subsistence level, nor are they limited strictly to means of mere survival. A good example of this welfare-state type is found in Lord Beveridge’s report from 1942 to the British Parliament on how to alleviate poverty in Britain.
Then comes the third type, which leaps from Right to Left:
3. Redistribution. Benefits are no longer provided on a last-resort basis, but extend to those who are gainfully employed. The purpose of the welfare state is no longer to alleviate poverty, but to redistribute income and consumption among the citizenry. Benefits are comprehensive not only in level but also in scope; funding comes from progressive taxes that place the bulk of the burden on those deemed wealthy.
From these three types, it is not easy to extract a welfare state that would be palatable to both social conservatives and social democrats. It is possible, though. The path to a compromise can be found by navigating the dynamics between political methodology and political theory.
Suppose in a society with a subsistence-type welfare state, government decides to transform it in the image of social conservatism. It could be stated that in this situation social conservatism is disruptive, i.e., ends up on the Left in terms of methodology. Its welfare state requires reforms of such a magnitude—viewed from the point of their absence—that the pursuit of social conservatism ends up disrupting the prevailing social order.
When, on the other hand, the socially conservative welfare state has been established, a government that acts in its defense is clearly preservative in its political methodology. It has achieved its ideological goal of providing a dignified last-resort safety net for those who have no other means of supporting themselves.
Suppose, then, that a socialist government wants a redistributive welfare state. This transformation is more comprehensive than the previous one, as it involves changing the default balance between the private and the public. In other words, this welfare state leaps from Right to Left in the spectrum of political theory.
At this point, it gets complicated for both social conservatives and social democrats to find common ground. They still do, as Wärnberg explains, but it does not come easy.
Sweden: finding common ground
Sweden may present the most intriguing challenge to compromise-minded conservatives and social democrats. On the one hand, it offers entitlement benefits aimed at families; it provides housing subsidies, child-care services, and child-benefit checks. From the methodological viewpoint, this gives the welfare state a socially conservative profile.
On the other hand, the size of the welfare state and the impact of its taxes and benefits on personal finances discourage self determination. It has also contributed to a decline in marriage and a rise in the share of kids living with out-of-wedlock parents.
To further complicate the matter, the political methodology behind the Swedish welfare state was clearly disruptive in nature. That theory was explicated primarily in a book by economist Gunnar Myrdal and his wife Alva, a sociologist. Called Kris i befolkningsfrågan (The Demographic Crisis), its publication in 1934 laid out the vision for a welfare state that would totally transform the very life, even purpose, of the traditional family. Without exaggeration, Mr. and Mrs. Myrdal proposed social and economic reforms that would reduce parents to feeder units for their children, with the state assuming the role of raising and educating the children from infancy.
The state would even apply far-reaching eugenic measures, such as abortions and forced sterilization, to secure that the children who were born all contributed to a high-quality “population stock.”
Many of the policy reforms that Mr. and Mrs. Myrdal proposed were also put in place, including a program for forced sterilization, which was kept until 1975. Almost all of the reforms were implemented in the 1940s and 1950s, with mostly minor tweaks and expansions taking place after that.
Since then, governments of shifting ideological colors have essentially administered the welfare state. In Wärnberg’s terms, a compromise has emerged between conservatives and social democrats. It is explained in two books with strikingly similar titles: The Welfare State and Beyond from 1984 by conservative politician Gunnar Heckscher and Beyond the Welfare State from 1960 by Myrdal, the aforementioned socialist economist.
Heckscher describes the Swedish welfare state as a logical extension of a centuries-long history of socially conservative policies. Essentially, he sees the current welfare state as an evolutionary form of what emerged gradually over centuries.
Myrdal, on the other hand, sees the welfare state as a force of disruption, designed to shift the balance between the private and the public in favor of the latter. He is quite explicit on how the welfare state inevitably emerges from various, more or less uncoordinated forms of state presence in private lives (p. 61):
Sweden stopped short of the all-encompassing government that Myrdal envisioned. Today, generally speaking, its welfare state provides benefits for families on a basis that can be acceptable to social conservatives, not as an accomplishment of conservative policies, but as a palatable compromise where they and social democrats find the common ground that Wärnberg identifies.
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