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Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.
But why do liberal politicians tend to list remedies, rather than rally around inspiring stories of shared principles which explain why they recommend taking steps that seem to them necessary? In fact, the storytelling gap today starts in philosophy, because liberal philosophers do not fashion for other liberals the interlocking concepts they need to justify activism. Consequently, those other liberals – including scholars, publicists, and politicians – lack common “truths” around which they might rally, rhetorically, over time.
This claim requires a caveat. I am about to show how liberal philosophers do not create materials for a common liberal narrative. This does not mean, however, that philosophers on the Left are failing to do something that philosophers on the Right manage quite well. Rather, as I shall discuss in a moment, liberals are strong in academia. In that world, consistency is hard to maintain, because university work encourages many professors – and especially social scientists and humanists, who include philosophers – to maintain a constantly moving conversation, one “paradigm” after another, whereby scholars get ahead by offering new ideas and rejecting those already in place.
Conservative Philosophers
But this is exactly what most conservative philosophers don't do. Instead, they interpret and refine stories which appeared in Western society before them and will live on there after them. For example, while many liberals criticized laissez-faire “capitalism,” conservative thinkers after World War II switched to speaking of “free markets.” Later, in the 1980s, conservatives like Jude Wanniski and George Gilder promoted the notion of “supply side economics” in praise of such markets. Capitalism; free markets; supply-side economics: it is really all the same tale.
In Chapter 5, I will further explore the fact that conservative philosophers tend to tell old stories in updated versions. Meanwhile, we should note that the stories conservative philosophers tell – unlike the successive paradigms fashioned by liberal philosophers – tend to remain on target. One reason for this is that these stories are touted from outside of academia by people who have something to gain from perpetuating the same stories.
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