| I found McGowan's book a surprisingly difficult read. Unlike Paul Krugman's Conscience of a Liberal, McGowan's book feels as if it is written by an academic for an academic audience. McGowan's prose is often at its best in his copious endnotes; the book is a slow read because you are skipping to the notes, reading it, then skipping back to the main text. The book is densely written; many passages easily bear repeated scrutiny. To compensate for that, the book is highly and intelligently structured, with each of its larger sections broken down into manageable pieces addressing specific ideas - for instance, Book One, Liberalism: Principles and Values is divided into six subsections - 1) Liberalism and Democracy 2) Preventing Tyranny Promoting Freedom 3) The Rule of Law 4) Pluralism 5) Liberty and Equality 6) Values. McGowan isn't a firebrand, nor is he a demagogue; instead his book embodies the values and political system he espouses - he gives conservatives a fair hearing and treats core conservatives ideas with respect while critiquing them and finding them wanting. He consistently espouses the view that pluralism is good and then demonstrated by offering a wide range of ideas. McGowan draws primarily from four 20th century thinkers in his description of modern liberalism - John Dewey, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John Rawls, and Martha Nussbaum. Historically he draws on a wide range of thinkers both liberal and conservative.
As McGowan describes it, liberalism emerged as a response to religious pluralism. Liberalism's much criticized religious neutrality was a means of keeping the peace between competing religious groups; by establishing a state which does not favor one religion or sect over another, the religiously neutral liberal state freed individuals to find their own religious path, but did so by refusing to allow religious coercion. Though one group may be hold a numerical religious majority, they may not use the force of state to coerce non-believers into belief. In this model, the liberal state becomes an agent of personal freedom by protecting individuals from coercion. From that organizing principle, flows modern liberalism.
The United States was founded on liberal ideals (location 193 - citations correspond to the location in the book as defined on the Kindle):
I think there is a demonstrable continuity-both in political sensibility and through a series of concrete historical steps-between the views of Jefferson and Madison and contemporary, twenty-first-century liberalism. Succinctly put, "classical" liberalism develops a distinctive understanding of liberty, one that links freedom to individual agents, that relies on the rule of law and of legally established civil liberties to counter arbitrary and/or absolute power, and that responds to the pluralism (religious and otherwise) of modern societies by enshrining liberty of conscience, freedom of association and expression, and autonomy in choosing how to live one's life.
While democracy and liberalism are joined in the American tradition, it's important to understand that they are not necessarily the same thing. One can have a liberal, but undemocratic society and as McGowan points out in his conclusion, one can have an illiberal democracy. The American republic was founded as a liberal experiment - the Constitution is the result of a series of political compromises but it nevertheless is a liberal document (location 322):
To call the Constitution "conservative," as Russell Kirk does, is way too hasty because the Constitution eschews the authoritarianism of much conservative thought, and it places so much weight (especially in the Bill of Rights) on enabling individuals. In the widest view, because of his emphasis on civil liberties and his suspicion of any and all accumulations of power, Madison was a liberal. He contrasted with the more conservative Hamilton on precisely these grounds.
Much of the book's central thesis appears in this passage: liberalism is liberal precisely because it attempts to reduce accumulations of power and to enable individuals to experience the greatest level of personal liberty and freedom. Freedom, however, is not simply the right to vote; the kind of freedom that matters is "effective freedom" (1401):
Effective freedom requires having the means and the power to accomplish one's ends. Not just direct domination but also the lack of adequate material and spiritual resources can render individuals incapacitated. No liberal polity committed to truly providing individual liberty can tolerate an economic order that uses people and then throws them away, or social discrimination that humiliates certain categories of of people and/or limits their access to some goods or public spaces.
The ideal of effective freedom lies at the root of the liberal desire to end discrimination and to reduce economic inequality. More than that, however, the liberal seeks to not only guarantee a minimum level of material well-being, the liberal believes that persons should exist in conditions which provide them the ability to flourish. The speeches of Franklin Roosevelt - again and again - hearken to this ideal - the notion that no nation can long exist if a portion of its population is ill fed, ill housed, ill clothed, ill educated and that we have a shared moral responsibility - to ourselves and others - to alleviate material suffering and to guarantee that each person can live a life of dignity.
Effective freedom does not exist separate from the state. Liberalism sees freedom as the outcome of the state taking certain, necessary steps to prevent tyranny - and importantly, tyranny is not solely the result of actions by the state but can be actions by private institutions or persons. Liberalism is suspicious of unregulated capitalism precisely because capitalism tends toward monopoly - which is a concentration of economic power which can be employed in ways which limit freedom. The power of the state - which is legitimate only when it governs with consent of the governed - can and should be used to reduce concentrations of power. Thus the trust busting of Teddy Roosevelt and the liberal support for unions. Liberalism does not seek to end capitalism - it seeks to moderate its tendencies toward the concentration of economic power in too few hands. The liberal state acts in the best interest of its citizens - in fact the liberal state exists to protect the freedom of its citizens. McGowan points out that the liberal desire for guaranteed health care is part of this broader picture - a person who does not have access to basic health care is being denied his/her effective freedom to pursue his own ends. Rights belong to the individual but are created by and through political action. Thus, guaranteeing access to affordable health care for all citizens is a means to an end - a way of empowering persons to seek fulfillment. FDR continuously refined the notion of effective freedom in his term in office - culminating in two distinct articulations - the Second Bill of Rights and the Four Freedoms. As policy prescriptions, FDR offered these as frameworks for expanding the effective freedom of Americans.
Conservatives will probably reject outright McGowan's argument that government is the means by which freedom is secured. That governments can behave tyrannically is a given; but they are not the only institutions that can do so. Conservative distrust of government misses the point - remove government and persons become subject to the whims of more powerful persons and groups. Without government individual freedoms will be trampled. McGowan describes conservatism as a force in defense of a fragile social order which can be easily broken by reforms and changes. Each of the successive rights movements of the past 50 years has seemed to conservatives a dangerous attack on the social order and one which must be resisted in the name of preserving society. Conservatism defended the rights of kings against the American revolution, it defended the rights of slave-holders against Abolitionists, it defended male only suffrage against the right women to vote, it defended Jim Crow against the Civil right movement, it defends straights-only marriage against same sex marriage not (exclusively) because of a hostility towards persons but out of a deep fear that changes to the social order would result in chaos - the social order is carefully constructed and must be preserved lest we be thrown into a world of chaos and disorder. In all fairness bias and bigotry were and are very real forces and in many cases, bigots latch onto conservatism as an excuse to not change their views; but at its best, conservatism does not oppose change out of bias, but out of a deep belief in the value of the social order and a respect for the traditions which have created that order.
Liberal government is not static; again and again, McGowan makes the point that we must constantly be checking and rechecking the balance of power. At times, government must act very directly, other times it can do so indirectly; at times government must provide and strictly enforce regulatory structures, other times it can take a hands off approach. But there is no single, correct balance that lasts for all time.
In the final portion of his book, McGowan explores the connection between liberalism and democracy. He offers a vision of democracy that is expansive
"We fall short of full democracy if the deliberative process is short-circuited to prevent universal participation or if each participant's judgment is not counted equally. The process needs to be safeguarded not only against exclusion but also against excessive distortion by partisans who purvey false information or otherwise manipulate the discussion" (3765)
McGowan articulates a view of democracy that is grounded in deliberative processes - a view in which decisions are made through discussion, interaction, and compromise: "Democracy builds communities through the experience of working together to make good decisions, and it gives the parties to those decisions a stake in working together to implement them, to demonstrate that they were right." (3722) He explicitly rejects the notion of democracy by plebiscite - "So once again we are brought to the view that elections are necessary, but not sufficient, for full democracy." (3785)
In this model of democracy, the process by which one arrives at a vote is the cornerstone of democracy, not the vote itself. To state it differently: democracy culminates in a vote, it does not begin with it. (McGowan carefully avoids criticizing the Bush administration's approach in Iraq which regarded an election as proof democracy had taken root; instead he argues that the true measure of democratic government is peaceful transfer of power from one group to another.) This model of democracy gains legitimacy through guaranteeing participants that their voices will be heard and that defeats are not permanent. Legitimacy derives a process which is open, fair, regular, and applies equally to all. Democracy itself is attacked when one group seeks to permanently bar others from the process. The process itself defines democracy - not the outcomes. In that sense, when entrenched interests dispatched misinformed (i.e. lied to) crowds to disrupt town hall meetings, they were attacking the democratic process (their tactics of drowning out anyway they disagree with, of trying to intimidate elected officials are anti-democratic). Again and again, over the last decade, we have seen the Bush administration and its conservative allies use tactics and rhetoric designed to create the impression that it is illegitimate for critics of the administration to participate in public debate; when critics of the Iraq war were attacked as "un-American" and helping the terrorists, such attacks were designed explicitly to brand critics as beyond the pale of legitimacy. In the same way, anti-choice activists calling anyone in favor of reproductive choice baby killers are trying to squelch debate and attacking democratic processes. Identifying such tactics as anti-democratic is worrying but not inaccurate. Democracy thrives and exists when the debate is allowed to be full, fair, at times unruly, but in which all persons are able to participate. Liberal democracy's rules exist to create an environment in which even bitter differences can be publicly discussed, aired, and hopefully ironed out. My personal frustration with the tactics in the 80s and 90s of ACT-UP stems from the same source - that in some sense activists were using tactics that were not productive (although thousands of people suffered needlessly due to governmental indifference towards AIDS victims in the 80s and 90s; I get their anger, I just feel that many of their tactics were flawed).
McGowan's concludes by contrasting liberal and illiberal democracy. Illiberal democracy is democracy by plebiscite - "You voted us in, and you'll get a chance to vote us out, in the meantime, we'll do what we want." By short circuiting the intentional and slow process of deliberation, illiberal democracy defends an unequal status quo, and in many ways makes it worse. Our current model of representation - which creates a host of safe House seats and a blatantly undemocratic Senate - has left the US in a precarious position in which we are facing the very real danger of becoming a fully illiberal democracy.
"illiberal democracy" has emerged in our country over the past sixty years. Its hallmark is the consolidation of power, and its basic appeal is to the need to preserve America's "position in the world" and "economic prosperity" at home. (3976)
Each of these threats-whether the Communists of Joseph McCarthy's nightmares, the "welfare queens" derided in the 1980s, the homosexuals who incense the Christian right, the terrorists who inspire the neoconservatives' foreign policy adventurism, the liberals whose relativism will sap our nation's strength, or recent immigrants-serves to legitimate placing more power in the hands of the haves while marginalizing the have-nots. (3979)
Illiberal democracy actually increases the problems liberal democracy tries to solve.
Liberal democracy seeks to increase equality by increasing participation in public life and by expanding the number of persons who can increase by creating greater equality of opportunity. The process is admittedly imperfect but through constant attention and vigilance, it improves. The end point of liberal democracy is not a successful election but full participation in the public life and body politic by all citizens. To paraphrase McGowan, liberalism isn't worth much if isn't democratic and democracy isn't worth a damn if it's not liberal.
McGowan offers a final section in his book - an appendix of important numbers and statistics to demonstrate both how democracy is working and is not working. Skimming through his copious notes, I've also found myself with a list of probably 20 books I need to read.
I said before that McGowan's book belongs on the bookshelf or in the Kindle of every liberal/progressive. I stand by that. But, McGowan's book is not written for a wide audience, it is a book that will frustrate and stymie most readers. McGowan's ideas are sound, his discussions fair minded. Ultimately, though, McGowan's book suffers a central weakness - he fails to offer programmatic solutions to many of the challenges he identifies. IOW, this is a book of theory not practice; he directs the reader to many books that offer solutions, but in some cases says outright he's not going to discuss those solutions. That's not necessarily bad, but it is the central weakness in an otherwise excellent book. |
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