Moreover, by the 1870s, British liberals had become quite aware that their previous understanding of economic freedom was a hollow joke, producing vast legions of downtrodden urban poor, and so they began seeking another way to think about freedom, closer to that which slaves have always understood-freedom as a gaining of power for those at the bottom, not to be dominated from above, but to be lifted up by collective support for one another: in short, the New Liberalism of Britain, which 60 years later arrived in America in the form of the New Deal.
I've been meaning to write about this for some time, and now I promised Paul I would, so here's a first installment on the topic. Understanding the transition liberals made from unfettered free market economics in the mid 1800s to the interventionist government model post New Deal is key to making sense of the ideological morass which humanity transitioned through in the past 400 years. I know opinions differ on this subject, and many on the left see a meaningful distinction between progressivism and liberalism, or between classic liberalism and modern social liberalism. I do not. They're all liberals, even though there can be notable policy distinctions between various groups of liberals, there is still only one liberalism, and it is the same liberalism as began (or at least took form) with John Locke in the late 1600s.
This is a daunting topic. When I first became politically aware in my late teens, and pondered what "liberal" and "conservative" meant beyond the trite caricature presented by the contemporary political parties or newspaper discourse, I discovered that no one of any academic merit had particularly good (or widely accepted) answers to this. For example, I have written of how Conservatives cannot define "conservativism." If better read and smarter people cannot reach concurrence, forgive my temerity in making a run at it too. Ideology is at the core of what drives politics and any improvement of our understanding of the topic is worthwhile. The confusion about the topic allows a lot of people who aren't liberals (like libertarians who call themselves "classic liberals") to be confused for them, and others who should be allies to create unnecessary distinctions and look at one another with distrust over what are differences not in core ethics, but technical mechanics. It is strange that we all generally able to spot liberal and conservative ideas intuitively yet seemingly no one can can agree on what these things are. We are left with too many definitions that rest on the specific policy preferences of the ideological groups at different points in history. Just as modern conservatives who love free trade are not really different from past conservatives who loved tariffs and mercantilism, today's liberals who want limitations on trade are not a different species from their Corn Law repealing bretherin of 1846.
Paul Krugman in what may be his finest blog post articulates a fear I have had but been unable to properly express:
But watching the failure of policy over the past three years, I find myself believing, more and more, that this failure has deep roots - that we were in some sense doomed to go through this. Specifically, I now suspect that the kind of moderate economic policy regime Brad and I both support - a regime that by and large lets markets work, but in which the government is ready both to rein in excesses and fight slumps - is inherently unstable. It's something that can last for a generation or so, but not much longer.
By "unstable" I don't just mean Minsky-type financial instability, although that's part of it. Equally crucial are the regime's intellectual and political instability.
The failure here is not the policies themselves, but the 2nd and 3rd order intellectual and social structures that maintain sufficient social support for the policies of curtailed capitalism and the state enforcement of broad social mobility and equality. In this sense, I say the New Deal did fail, because it failed to sustain itself much past the generation of people who lived through the crisis that made it possible. It is getting harder to protect Social Security because with each passing year there are less people with living memory of what life was like without it. Those people were generally immune to the propaganda, but those of us left behind lack that personal connection to seeing retired people reduced to begging and literally dying in gutters and under bridges.
That's what we have to account for if and when we create the conditions to implement a New New Deal. How to make the liberal consensus not only strong enough to do it, but self sustaining?
Over the weekend, I played catch-up with a couple of DVRd episodes of Bones, classic nerd show that it is. If you don't know the show, it's centered on a forensic anthropologist ("Bones") and her team at a Smithsonian Institute knock-off--the "Jeffersonian Institute", in crime-fighting partnership with an FBI agent. In one of the episodes I watched, a sunken slave ship has been recovered, and the remains are brought to the Jeffersonian to be analyzed. The lab's supervisor, Dr. Camille Saroyan ("Cam", played by Tamara Taylor) is black, and why I'm writing about this is the way her co-workers responded when they first learn about the ship.
Although dealt with quickly, it was a complex mixture of shared revulsion and horror over the past it represented and special solicitude for Cam, who, it turns out, had a family ancestor on board. On one level, they all respond as one at a common human level, reacting as horrified as if they themselves were black, while on another level, because Cam is black, they know it's much more intense for her, even before it's known that she has an actual personal connection. They are simultaneously drawn together as a group and aware that Cam is naturally feeling isolated as well. It struck me as a typically liberal group response, intensified by their pre-existing relationships.
They are, of course, a team of scientists (primarily) and the tensions between scientific observation and analysis on the one hand and life its own self on the other are a constant presence in the show. The slave ship instantly cuts through the customary scientific detachment for all of them, and yet that scientific perspective in a way is what makes them take it seriously in a way that others might not. They know that they are part of the same historical and cultural fabric as the slave ship, those who owned it and those who drowned in it. Their shared professional identities serve to reinforce their shared cultural identities as racially integrated contemporary urban Americans. Their sympathies naturally transcend race out of lived experience, yet remain conscious of it. Both tensions and unforced sympathy are part of the mix.
Now, I'm quite aware that many conservatives might respond the same way. But it would not be similarly typical and consonant with their political ideology. Thinking about it further, thinking about Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck and the Tea Partiers, I was struck by the thought that Limbaugh is just fundamentally uncomfortable with black people, at a level just as deep and uncontrollable as the level at which Cam's co-workers are comfortable with her specifically and blacks in general. Of course, Limbaugh is uncomfortable with blacks because he's uncomfortable with himself, they aggravate all his inner uncertainties, all the doubts he does not allow himself to consciously recognize, much less entertain, examine, and act to do something about. Liberalism--reinforced by science--is about critical reflection: on ourselves as well as our social surround (Kegan's level 4). Conservatism--traditional conservatism--is not. It is unreflective, defined by the social surround (Kegan's level 3).
But movement conservatism is reactionary, it is not just unreflective, but anti-reflective, and dominated by level 2 thinking, which sees the world in terms of durable categories (Kegan's term), or natural kinds, one of which is race. Now, not all conservatives are reactionaries. Not all are racists. But they recognize Limbaugh as one of their own--indeed as one of their cultural leaders. And they are as comfortable with him as Cam's co-workers are with her. And though not all Tea Partiers are racists, they are comfortable with racists in their midst. As comfortable as Cam's co-workers are with her. This is what it comes down to, I think: who, exactly are you comfortable with? Who do you look at and see as basically like you? Who is "us"?
You choose who you identify with. And in so choosing, you choose who you are.
A perfect counterpoint to these thoughts was provided by The Simpsons this Sunday, and noted by Chris Hayes, sitting in for Rachel Maddow last night:
With Spain's 1-0 victory over the Netherlands, the World Cup has come to a close. A spectacle watched by millions - perhaps billions - around the world, the four-year tournament constitutes the world's most popular sporting event.
In the United States, long a hold-out against football-mania, interest in the World Cup has been steadily rising. While still below Latin-American or European levels of enthusiasm, the number of people watching games has reached new degrees. In my hometown, for instance, a number of my peers expressed surprising amounts of enthusiasm about the latest soccer news. Even individuals one wouldn't expect - 10-year-old kids, young teenage girls - displayed passion throughout the event.
My hometown is also fairly liberal place. Indeed, one could get away with describing it as one of the most liberal suburbs in America. Coincidence?
It has become increasingly (anecdotally) evident to me that "progressive" has supplanted "liberal" as the preferred ideological term of self identication among the US left. For quite some time it appeared as if the terms were purely interchangable, but my read on the trends now is that liberal is declining. For example, just last night I recently Anderson Cooper's program introduce Media Matters as the "progressive media watch dog group" and a WSJ article also applied the term to Netroots Nation. Both indicate the greater acceptance of the term such that established media use it without irony. In the hunt of some kind of empirical data, I tried a variety of comparative searches, and settled on the Daily Kos internal search engine, because it allows for accurate date ranges on searches, allowing me to examine the trend:
The X-axis represents the number of years back from July 2010 (when I ran the searches), so 1 = the last 12 months, 2 = the 12 months before that (Jul 2008-Jul 2009), 3 is the 2007-2008 period and so on to 6, which represents (counts fingers...) 2004-2005. The engine allows one to go back one more year, but I am omitting it because I'm not that confident about the 2003-2004 data for when the site was really just taking off. What's evident here is that at least among Daily Kos contributors, progressive passed liberal in popularity some time around early 2006. Last year, use of liberal actually declined in absolute terms.
An obvious (fair) objection is that Daily Kos is not the totality of the left. The sociological advantage of the site is the ongoing wide participation of a fairly broad audience of contemporary US left activists. I have put another chart inside which shows comparisons for some other sites I thought to search against, to provide some validation on the sample represented in Daily Kos (which I think it does since the Kos figures do not appear to be an outlier). One problem with general searches (say Google or Bing) is the difficulty of sorting out the number of non-political uses of terms like "progressive" and "conservative." Existing explicitly for politics, it's a safer bet that most uses of those terms on Daily Kos will be in their ideological context.
One of the greatest strengths the United States has constitutes its ability to admit mistakes - to apologize and acknowledge that America has not always been right, and that it has sometimes done things terribly wrong. This capacity has always served the country well; if America has often traveled down the wrong road, it has even more often corrected its path.
Yet although people do the country a great service in perceiving in faults, sometimes the criticism goes a bit too far.
Take my college, for instance, a great institution which I love - but which exemplifies this excessive self-criticism. I have taken classes in which professors have labeled America a nation founded upon "white supremacy." Another course, supposedly chronicling America's history, turned out to be a litany of how the United States had oppressed blacks, women, Native Americans, Hispanics, Asians, the poor, homosexuals, Third World countries, the environment, and everything in between.
I have conversed with friends convinced that the United States has hurt the world far more than it has helped it. I know students so blinded by bitterness and hatred for America's wrongdoings that it is frightening and very sad - who find racism and oppression in every TV show or every action of the Republican Party. Sometimes I feel the blindness creeping on myself.
So in the spirit of fighting this blindness, here are five things America has done right:
Over the past few weeks, the Catholic Church has found itself mired in controversy, plagued by an ever-growing sexual abuse scandal unfolding in Europe. The pope himself has come under substantial criticism, to such an extent that a leading German magazine titled a report, "The Failed Papacy of Benedict XVI."
Yet the media's growing chorus of criticism reveals as much about itself as it does about the mishaps of Pope Benedict XVI. It reveals much about how the media thinks about itself, and about the media's worldview of what society ought to be like.
Ezra Klein likes Paul Ryan. Methinks that this is the first time Ezra has run into a charming and personable Republican selling deficit-exploding plans as deficit reducing ones.
But some of us have seen this story many times before...
This is yet another--if somewhat milder--example of the sensible center critiquing the "sensible center". As DeLong implies, there's nothing new here. In fact, it's just another incarnation of Lucy with the football. But the really annoying part is when Ezra gets all superior to those like DeLong (hey, I'm staying out of it as much as I possibly can, while not staying out of it all!) who've actually got a handle on what's going on:
And now let's get to the paragraph a lot of you will flay me for: I don't think Ryan is a charlatan or a flim-flam artist. More to the point, I think he's playing an important role, and one I'm happy to try and help him play: The worlds of liberals and conservatives are increasingly closed loops. Very few politicians from one side are willing to seriously engage with the other side, particularly on substance. Substance is scary. Substance is where you can be made to look bad. And substance has occasionally made Ryan look bad. But the willingness to engage has made him look good. It's given some people the information they need to decide him a charlatan, and others the information they need to decide him a bright spot. It's also given Ryan a much deeper understanding of liberal ideas than most conservative politicians have.
So do Ryan's arguments persuade me? Not as far as the Roadmap goes. But I'm glad to give him space to try to persuade all of you, so long as he's willing to let me try and poke holes in his arguments while he's doing it. That's an offer I've extended to every legislator interested in taking me up on it, and it still stands.
Ah, where to begin? Ezra's smug superiority? Or the part where Lucy pulls away the football, and Ezra lands flat on his ass? Or the part where Ezra totally misses the point of everything?
Substance is scary. Substance is where you can be made to look bad. And substance has occasionally made Ryan look bad. But the willingness to engage has made him look good.
Memo To Ezra: Looking good is the only game that Ryan's playing. By saying what you've just said, you've made yourself Ryan's bitch. That's the beginning, middle and end of the story.
And this:
It's given some people the information they need to decide him a charlatan, and others the information they need to decide him a bright spot. It's also given Ryan a much deeper understanding of liberal ideas than most conservative politicians have.
is the same sort of standard-less standard that's standard operating proceedure for making the Obama Administration such a staggering disappointment. (Since most conservative politicians understand liberal ideas about as well as meerkats understand quantum physics, I'm not terribly impressed that Ryan understands them as well as orangutangs understand quantum physics.)
Bottom line: Ezra suffers from the age-old liberal disease of thinking that conservatives are just liberals with a different set of policy preferences. They're not: They come from an entirely different culture: a pre-modern culture of warriors and priests. Not surprisingly, their only interest in ideas is as weapons.
It's one thing for Ezra to be taken in by Ryan's con. But he's actually doing much, much more: by legitimizing Ryan the way he does, he's actually participating in Ryan's con.
Despite--or perhaps because of--all his education and intelligence, Ezra really doesn't get that Ryan is offering excuses, rather than reasons, for doing things that any reasonably smart 13-year old can see are utterly catastrophic.
That is, any reasonably smart 13-year old that doesn't already want to be Paul Ryan or Ezra Klein when they grow up.
During Netroots Nation, we are running Golden Oldies plus a few surprises. Regularly Scheduled programming will resume on July 26.
A Paul Rosenberg Golden Oldie
From Sat Jul 25, 2009. Original HERE.
In early 2006, I began working on a book project that never really worked out. (Got a spare $20k? I'm willing to give it another shot!) I wanted to address the extreme disconnect between the conservative political climate in Washington (remember, this was about six months before the 2006 midterms) and the political attitudes of the American people, which, according to the best social science, had only changed modestly overall since the early Nixon era. During the course of researching and drafting an introductory chapter, the importance of conservative identity politics became blindingly clear as the result of a series of number-driven arguments.
As I've been wrestling with recent manifestations of conservative identity politics that I planned to blog about this weekend--the Birthers, The Family, etc.--I remembered this earlier work, and the hard foundations of data on which it rested. I thought it would make a good companion piece to my contemporary observations to go back and resurrect that argument. So I took a draft chapter, whittled it down a bit, and I'm presenting it after the jump.
There are two overarching points that I hope will clearly emerge from this. The first is that my contemporary focus on conservative identity politics is not just some arbitrary whim. It emerges out of an inquiry that was not originally concerned with it at all. In fact, I was taken by surprise as the logic of it virtually ambushed me. The second point--closely related--is that conservative identity politics cannot simply be ignored, or factored out of other discussions. It lies at the very heart of understanding conservative hostility to liberals, which is the main driving force polarizing our politics today, and interfering with the important work of solving major problems that confront us as a society--such as meeting the challenge of climate change.
This is a long diary, over 4000 words, so feel free to skim the parts that may seem tangential to you. I wanted to preserve enough of the original to accurately reflect the range of factors that I had considered. And I hope that even if this is a bit long for you to read online all at one go, you'll want to bookmark it and return to it again. Heck, maybe even as soon as my next diary posts.
Update Jul 25: Some great comments inside on what conservatism actually is, as opposed to the weak and often self-refuting definitions offered by conservative intellectuals. - D.
During Netroots Nation, we are running Golden Oldies plus a few surprises. Regularly Scheduled programming will resume on July 26.
A Daniel De Groot Golden Oldie
From Thu Jan 01, 2009. Original HERE.
As a starting point for defining conservatism, and nailing down what the real atomic core of conservatism is, I started by asking: What do conservatives think it is? How do they answer this question?
It turns out, they don't really know. Their efforts to define it are worth studying though, partly because the answers they provide are revealing, but also because their own failure to find an answer satisfactory even just to themselves points to the need for outsiders to step in and provide the answers conservatives can't or won't face.
During Netroots Nation, we are running Golden Oldies plus a few surprises. Regularly Scheduled programming will resume on July 26.
A Paul Rosenberg Golden Oldie
From Sun Jan 20, 2008. Original HERE.
I had a wonderful post on this subject, what got et when the site went down yesterday. It did go down, didn't it? It wasn't just me? So you'll just have to make do with this vastly inferior version.
Regardless of his intentions, Obama has been doing a pretty good job of splitting the left for some time now. Secular humanists, peace activists, Boomers, gays, all have had their turns feeling particularly spurned, while his version of triangulation has many even more nervous than the Clinton version made them. Many think he's got the perscription exactly backwards-Democrats don't suffer from being too much like the always-combatative Republicans, but from being too wimpy, too reluctant to stand up and fight for what they belive. And many think that now's not the time to reach out with a hand of friendship, just when they're sinking like a stone.
In this diary, I'm not going to try to solve all the differences just mentioned. Rather, I'm just going to look at one prominent example from the last week, and look at how it could have been handled differently, so that the divisions generated would have been among conservatives, not progressives. It's a very logical strategy to pursue on two counts: First, as a progressive, Obama should naturally want to unify progressives. Second, given that only some conservatives are genuinely interested in cooperation, while others are dedicated to oppostion, it makes perfect sense to reach out specifically to those who are reachable in a way that clarifies their differences from those who are not.
I am not suggesting a Machiavellian manoeuvre here. Quite the opposite. I am suggesting a clarifying manoeuvre to bring hidden differences out into the open, in order to preempt yet another round of Machiavellian maipulations to prevent the very sort of cooperation that Obama advocates for. What I'm going to do is recall Obama's remarks about Ronald Reagan, which have once again divided progresssives, and then I'm going to suggest two possible alternatives that could have found broad acceptance among progressives, while causing legitimate, and clarifying consternation among conservatives.
The first alternative questions the efficacy of Reagan's conservativism, and pushes the case that Eisenhower is a better, more substantial model to follow. Eisenhower isn't generally thought of as a conservative, but that's beause movement conservatives are actually reactionaries, who have kidnapped the "conservative" label. Eisenhower's model of gradual adaptation, not seeking to radically alter what has become part of the organic fabric of society (such as Social Security) is perfectly in line with the main thrust of Edmund Burke's thinking. Joseph de Maistre, not so much.
The second points out a number of liberal inconsistencies in Reagan's record, and casts doubt on whether he'd be accepted today as a true heir of himself. The example of Mike Huckabee is instructive in this regard, too.
For the next five days we'll mostly be at Netroots Nation or in transit. David will be doing a post a day--probably around noon, and we'll be running Golden Oldies as out mainstay. There will be guest Left Ed diary on Sunday at 1 PM. Here to start things off on a slightly different note, I'm hoping to stir some back-and-forth by republishing a comment by T. Jacobsen from an interaction primarily with fladem in my diary "Herding cats: Some thoughts on the quest for a functional progressive coalition ". The general topic under discussion is the framework of liberal political theory vs. a more ill-defined progressive alternative, which T. Jacobsen fleshes out somewhat:
The Green Mountain state profoundly shaped my perspective about how my particular progressive political views intersect with electoral politics, policy-making, and governance, though in my case from the late 90s when I lived there. There is also a wealth of experience regarding left alternative party building in the state, both good and bad.
I also agree Fladem that perhaps the biggest flashpoint between 'liberals' and 'progressives' is found in foreign policy and more or less in the way you frame it: Is American foreign policy generally imperialist or something else and something of an exception to world power politics? But as one might expect from a 'socioeconomic progressive' that is to me just a subset of the larger questions about market capitalism. US foreign policy is at its core about extending and protecting a US-dominated global capitalist system. There really is not much room to debate that, it seems to me, only whether or not that is a good thing.
Up thread you ask 'what is the alternative'? By way of quick response I'd start with:
(1) nothing is more unrealistic or unsustainable than global capitalism and the longer the delay to transition away the rougher it will be and the worse will be the outcomes - presumption is against the status quo;
(2) much of human social experience right now - today - is not subjected, or at least not willingly and readily, to market logic. In my view, the challenge is to 'protect' those areas as much as possible from the application of market logic. These include things like family life and public goods, and market promoters are relentless in their efforts to extend the logic of the market to new profitable areas. Enclosure continues as the market reaches and consumes ever more of human social life. A litmus test of a sort is for me water: should water resources and their delivery be privatized or not? One cannot support privatization of water and be a progressive, in my judgment, under any conditions whatsoever;
(3) the possibility of alternatives and the worst consequences of the current system are most visible from outside the US political context, for the most part. Something to think about;
(4) there is The Market and there is the market. Free market advocates often perceive critics as somehow anti-trade. That is not entirely unfair in some cases in as much as many progressives (and ecologists) encourage local production and consumption over disaggregated production and consumption systems across the entire globe. But that is really just a shift in the locus of trade. But more generally, and in a highly, and perhaps uselessly, abstract way, progressives can embrace a market in which monetized trading practices are permitted but which are embedded in and subordinate to larger social structures and rituals that reflect communal values. Then there is The Market, which is the thing US and most global elites promote as the highest and best form of human organization that can ever be achieved, so don't even contemplate alternatives because there are none (that is the ideological function of the TINA refrain);
(5) the long term alternative - in my own view - is to leverage our way into social democracy and greater ecological restraint on our way over many generations to bioregional political federations as a type of libertarian socialist socio-economic configuration. But that is so far off it is usually pointless to engage in discussions about such matter, at least not until the wee hours of the morning after a lively evening.
Plenty of ideas to comment on there, IMHO. What think you?
It's not that I didn't know it, or even that I had forgotten, but rather obviously this is something that we as country seem not to realize, from Brad DeLong, in a piece about Obama's infamous deficit commission:
Four centuries ago, the consensus, in Western Europe at least, was that good and even adequate government in this fallen world was inevitably a rarity. Democracy always degenerated into mob rule, monarchy into tyranny, and aristocracy into oligarchy. Even when well run, democracy took little interest in the distant future, aristocracy took little interest in the well-being of those whom Simpson calls the "little people," and monarchy took little interest in anything other than legitimate succession.
Then, at the end of the eighteenth century, the founders of the United States of America and their intellectual successors claimed that this pessimism about government was unwarranted. "The science of politics...like most other sciences," claimed Alexander Hamilton, "has received great improvement....The regular distribution of power into distinct departments...legislative balances and checks...judges holding their offices during good behavior; the representation of the people in the legislature by deputies of their own election...are means, and powerful means, by which the excellences of republican government may be retained and its imperfections lessened or avoided..."
Perhaps Hamilton was too much the optimist. When I look at Barack Obama's deficit commission - indeed, look at governance worldwide - I see many imperfections, but few or no examples of excellence.
One of the great accomplishments of America is that it showed the possibility of good government at more than local scale, which in turn helped to show that some misfortunes taken to be beyond human reach are in fact avoidable. This, in turn, was directly a product of the development of modern liberalism, which provided both a philosophical foundation and an institutional architecture for the blending of classical and Renaissance republicanism with a new conceptual framework of individual rights, checks and balances and democratic self-governance. Once the possibility of good governance was proven possible, the doors were open to explore different ways of achieving it.
As DeLong properly notes, we're faced with rather grim prospects just now, but given the history of the past 200+ years, the grim prospects now facing us no longer appear as inevitable necessities of nature. If we are headed toward a massive return of evil governance--a distinct possibility, let's not kid ourselves--this is still just an historical/political development pressed forward by specific political/economic forces, and not a metaphysical necessity. The difference between the two is the difference between possibility and impossibility, between rational hope and irrational despair.
Over the past few weeks, the Catholic Church has found itself mired in controversy, plagued by an ever-growing sexual abuse scandal unfolding in Europe. The pope himself has come under substantial criticism, to such an extent that a leading German magazine titled a report, "The Failed Papacy of Benedict XVI."
Yet the media's growing chorus of criticism reveals as much about itself as it does about the mishaps of Pope Benedict XVI. It reveals much about how the media thinks about itself, and about the media's worldview of what society ought to be like.
Historically, the Catholic Church and the Western media have always had moments of tension. The two are almost naturally at odds; their philosophical foundations constitute polar opposites. The church is fundamentally a conservative institution, hierarchy-bound and traditional. It embodies a force - religion - which often works in a conservative direction.
The modern Western media could not be more different from this.
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