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.
Upward counterfactuals look at "how much better it would have been if..."-these reduce satisfaction with reality but help individuals prepare for better performance in the future. The "sanctimonious purists" with whom the President parts company are engaging in upward counterfactuals-and rightly so.
Downward counterfactuals look at "how much worse it would have been if..."-and engender a sense of complacency and satisfaction; to me, they can be rationalizations for "settling" or, worse, defeatist.
The entire line from the Obama administration and its most ardent supporters has been, among other things, one long exercise in downward counterfactualism-"it would have been even worse if we had not gotten x,"
This diary is basically an expansion on a brief response I made to another atute comment by Jeff in the discussion thread of that diary. We've actually covered this territory before, but not from this precise angle. In February of this year, I wrote a diary, "Conservative manifestos are provably false", which contained a brief passage on the emergence of the British "New Liberals" in the 1870s, which Daniel then quoted, and used as a launching pad for his diary "One liberalism through the ages". In it, he argued that "'classic' liberals are just liberals operating in a different socio-political environment"--one that no longer actually exists.
And he turns to Boston College political scientist Alan Wolfe for a definition of liberalism that works to cover both:
Wolfe provides a really good one: "As many people as possible should have as much say as is feasible over the direction their lives will take."
In a radio interview Wolfe once gave, he highlighted the concept of autonomy as vital to liberalism. It is distinct (ironically considering the etymology of the word) from "liberty" (or "freedom"). I have never liked the word liberty. Perhaps it is because those who extol it most often seem to be referring to the liberty of a predator to consume prey. What of the liberty of the prey not to be eaten? Liberty and freedom are negative concepts. They imply merely the absence of formal restraint (usually by the state). However autonomy is a richer and more complete concept. It is akin to the distinction Martin Luther King Jr. once drew between peace that was merely the absence of violence, and peace which contained the presence of justice. Thus it is not merely enough to remove the chains that bind humanity, if they are left destitute in the street to wander aimlessly and hungry. Autonomy requires the capacity to pursue goals. It is still individualistic, but allows for the real support all of us need from without to make any of those goals a reality.
Now, I disagree slightly with Daniel here, since, as I noted in another diary today, Brad DeLong points out that even classical liberal heroes like Bastiat didn't actually believe in "classical liberal" absolutes as they were later articulated by people who I don't think ought to be included as liberals, precisely because they don't really want to protect the autonomy of the prey. Either way, though, I think there are two clearly visible distinctions here, both of which can be seen as reflecting an underlyhing cleavage between upward-looking and downward-looking counterfactual thinking: the autonomy vs. liberty/freedom cleavage and the historical cleavage between liberalism expressed in the early-mid 19th century vs. how it came to be expressed later.
Plus... Breaking Up In The Digital Age... What's The Connection?
In which Adam Smith and Jane Austen both take their bows
The moment I heard about the Google/Verizon deal, I thought of Google's supposed ethic: "Don't be evil".
Ooops!
Such is virtually always the fate of marketplace enterprises. The market rewards virtue... up to a point. But it rewards vice far beyond the limits of virtue, though not indefinitely, as the recent financial crisis revealed. And when the market fails, that's when the libertarians duck out for a quick one.
Remember Net Zero? Remember when it was free? And they ran those ads where they pretended to be
defending freedom against Big Brother?
Then the business model failed.
Ooops!
Dating back several centuries, liberalism is is connected to the market, but surprisingly few people seem to realize why. It's not because the market is good, but because it holds the potential to turn even our more selfish desires toward more useful ends. This is Mandeville's Fable of the Bees:
The Fable of The Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits is a book by Bernard Mandeville, consisting of the poem The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves turn'd Honest and prose discussion of it. The poem was published in 1705 and the book first appeared in 1714.[1] The poem elucidates many key principles of economic thought, including division of labor and the invisible hand, seventy years before Adam Smith (indeed, John Maynard Keynes argues Smith was probably referencing Mandeville[2]). It also describes the paradox of thrift centuries before Keynes, and may been seen as part of the school of underconsumption.
At the time, however, it was considered scandalous. Keynes reports in his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, that it was "convicted as a nuisance by the grand jury of Middlesex in 1723, which stands out in the history of the moral sciences for its scandalous reputation. Only one man is recorded as having spoken a good word for it, namely Dr. Johnson, who declared that it did not puzzle him, but 'opened his eyes into real life very much'."[3]
In the Dictionary of National Biography, Leslie Stephen describes it as follows:
Mandeville gave great offense by this book, in which a cynical system of morality was made attractive by ingenious paradoxes. ... His doctrine that prosperity was increased by expenditure rather than by saving fell in with many current economic fallacies not yet extinct. Assuming with the ascetics that human desires were essentially evil and therefore produced "private vices" and assuming with the common view that wealth was a "public benefit", he easily showed that all civilization implied the development of vicious propensities....
Keynes observes that this is a precursor to his theory of effective demand. He notes that the book describes the paradox of thrift-showing that a community that forsakes luxury for savings achieves neither.
But, of course, the fact that the market can turn private vices into public virtues doesn't mean that it only and invariably does so. Nor does it mean that this obviates any need for straight up public virtue--as should be exceeding clear from Adam Smith's second most famous book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which develops the Scottish Enlightenment's theory of benevolence, pioneered by Francis Hutcheson, but which Smith put on a more empirical foundation (following the lead of the most famous Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, David Hume).
The right to non-discriminatory treatment is part of centuries-old English common law, the very same common law tradition that Tea Baggers and others of like persuasion routinely misappropriate for their own nefarious political purposes. That's just one of several facets of deep stupidity worth noting this week.
So much stupid. So little time. And it's not just Rand Paul I'm talking about. As noted in my earlier diary, "Privatizing public housing--Obama's "Shock Doctrine" march to the right of Bush", and several recent quick hits as well, Barack Obama is doubling down on failed conservative policies like a drunken sailor in his last hour of shore leave. The two are not unrelated. If the Republicans weren't batshit crazy, Obama's mania for bipartisanship wouldn't be batshit in its own way as well. So I'd like to cut to the bottom line here, the bottom-line crazy, so to speak. Although Rand Paul got hung up on his "libertarian" principles, there are really three distinct elements of the patriot-traitor ideology. Libertarianism is one part, "Constitionalism" is another part, and "the common law" is part three. And the patriot-traitor movement he represents fundamentally misunderstands all three, as well as some basic relationships between them. This is the big stupid that we will now briefly explore.
The "common law" aspect was much more prominent in the 1990s "Militia Movement," but it's still a potent force expressing itself primarily in the form of various "grand jury" initiatives, such as the "American Grand Jury" that Rachel Maddow did a segment on back on May 6 (transcript here), or the organizing of Montana conservatives to pass a state initiative or draft legislation that would create what critics call a return to "frontier justice" (hang first, ask questions never.) The way it works, at the most fundamental level, is that libertarianism is presented as America's founding philosophy (based on a complete misunderstanding of John Locke), blended against the background of centuries of Anglo-American common law, and supposedly enshrined in the Constitution. Anything they don't like is represented as fundamentally opposed to all three, with varying degrees of emphasis.
At the heart of Tea Party history is the argument that "progressivism is fascism is communism." Conceptually, such a claim helps frame what many call "American exceptionalism," a belief that the exclusive role of government is to protect individual rights -- to speech, to assembly, to carry guns, and, of course, to own property -- and not to deliver social rights like health care, education, or welfare.
Of course--in addition to the excellent historical critique Grandin provides (you really should read the whole thing)--this ideology is squarely at odds with the Preamble of the Constitution:
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.
Sarah Palin Resigns In A Mega-Blizzard of Lies--Revealing A Crucial Difference Between Libertarians and Liberals
It was a slow newsday, Friday before a holiday, so why shouldn't Sarah Palin suck up all the oxygen in five continents? If only that stupid Michael Jackson fellah hadn't died the week before, she could have totally pulled it off. As it was, she did pretty damn well for a couple of hours there. Her big secret? Same as it ever was: she lied. Seven ways from Sunday. She lied about being cleared in all the Alaska investigations; she lied about their cost; she lied about wanting to serve the people of Alaska; she lied about fulfilling her goals; she lied about people attacking her son Trig; she lied about being like a point guard; she lied when she said "and" and "the". She spoke, therefore she lied.
Why does Sarah Palin lie? She lies to get out of trouble; she lies to shift blame; she lies to get even; she lies to get ahead; she lies to hurt her enemies; she lies to amuse her friends; she lies to relieve boredom; she lies to have some fun; she lies because truth is bother; she lies as a key to strategy; she lies because she has no plan; she lies to confuse anyone trying to keep track; she lies to make sense to those not keeping track; she lies for power; she lies because lying works for her; she lies just for the hell of it; she lies because she can; she lies because that's how she expresses her freedom--a very libertarian idea of freedom, I might well add.
Liberals and libertarians are both about freedom, but their concepts of freedom are radically different, and Sarah Palin's compulsive, multipurpose lying is as a good a way as any to approach understanding the differences between them.
In sharp contrast, liberals characteristically express their freedom by telling the truth, inconvenient truths, as Al Gore put it. Truths about racism and war, such as Martin Luther King told, when speaking truth to power. Truths about the social order and tradition that are not supposed to be said.
After all, this is the story of people feeling unfairly compensated for their efforts who decide to form a union and go on strike in order to secure better wages and conditions. An injury to one is an injury to all.
When EFCA passes, all the rich people threatening to quit creating jobs and prosperity will find it easier to form a union, and be able to keep scabs from ruining their glorious collective action by taking up all the work they're going to abandon.
[Because folks are still being gulled by Ron Paul.]
In ancient Greek mythology, Procrustes (the stretcher) was a bandit from Attica who had an iron bed into which he fitted every passerby. If they were too tall, he would amputate their heads and/or feet, if too short, he would stretch them on the rack. Nobody ever fit, because the bed was secretly adjustable before hand. Ron Paul's libertarianism is just like Procrustes' bed: one size fits all.. or none. Including, of course, the truth.
In my two-part diary "Ron Paul OPPOSSES Cutting Taxes-IF He Smells A Messican!" [ Part 1] [ Part 2], I went into excruciating detail about how Ron Paul fundamentally and repeatedly misrepresented the issue, abandoning his signature stance of opposing taxes because of his underlying nativism and racism. Usually, however, his nativism and racism are expressed through his narrow ideology, not by abandoning it, and thus they are kept in the background. (He's a libertarian, and it's not his fault if destroying the Federal Government hurts people of color disproportionately.) In this diary, I want to highlight two crystal-clear examples of a more pervasively prominent phenomena-how his ideology utterly warps his perception and presentation of fundamental problems for which he has no answers, because his ideology is utterly inadequate.
The two examples I'll use are two biggies: health care and global warming. Neither one can be dealt with via libertarian means. Indeed, the problems with both are direct results of market failure, made much, much worse by the dominance of knee-jerk rightwing ideology that rejects the very essence of what is needed to deal with them: effective Federal Government action to "promote the general welfare" just like it says in the Constitution. This is the subtext of this diary: Far from being derived from or consistent with the Constitution, Ron Paul's rigid libertarianism is directly opposed to one of the Constittuion's core purposes.
This past week, Ron Paul's fundraising got the attention of various bloggers, and occassioned a column by Glenn Greenwald, "The Ron Paul phenomenon". In the letter section, I brought up the issue of Paul's nativist, extremist and racist associations, drawing on work by David Neiwert and Sara Robinson of Orcinus. And I ran into the standard Ron Paul defense:
Ron Paul has argued against racism. He is on record saying that it is collectivist nonsense. He should get the benefit of the doubt. It is also worth noting that he never advocates any policies which disproportionatley benefit one group at the expense of another. He clearly insists that all people have equal rights.
That's not an argument against racism. That's an argument against "collectivism" and a form of denial that he and his kind could possibly be racists.
Furthermore, it's an easily refuted view.
I went on to cite some cross-tabs that I had quickly run on the National Election Survey database, showing that feelings towards blacks were negatively correlated with support for "collectivist" policies, such as government health insurance, government activism to creat jobs, and federal spending on poor people and child care. Here I'm going to expand on that response, and underscore how Paul represents a very significant aspect of one the most significant ways in which racism has rearticulated itself as anti-racism. Indeed, this attempt goes even farther, as we have seen in phenomena such as the phony "Civil Rights Initiative" pushed by Ward Connerly in California a few years ago. This new new racism not only tries to present itself as anti-racism, it tries to present anti-racism as racism, as we'll see on the flip.
I am cross-posting this from the libertarian Democrat website Freedom Democrats. My original diary there focused mostly on thoughts about libertarians and assumptions people have about a "free market." I am modifying the diary's content and posting it here because I think it has some implications for discussions on a progressive "RLC" that would work to further a left-wing mindset within the Republican Party.
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