I've repeatedly argued for Chris's take that liberalism could best and most naturally expand by making an alliance with non-ideological good government reformers along the lines of Larry Lessig, and against the notion that they could advance by making common cause with libertarians, an approach favored by Markos, among others. Obama's hasty retreat from his promises of openness and transparency have severely damaged the chances of Chris's proposed development, but the explosion of the Tea Party--stirred on by all manner of libertarian sloganeering--has likewise dimmed the the prospects of a liberal/libertarian alliance.
Now it's taken another blow. On Monday, David Weigel reported ("A Purge at the Cato Institute?") that two prominent "liberaltarians" at the Cato institute who were prominent advocates of such an alliance--Brink Lindsey and Will Wilkinson--have been eased out:
[Y]ou have to struggle not to see a political context to this. Lindsey and Wilkinson are among the Cato scholars who most often find common cause with liberals. In 2006, after the GOP lost Congress, Lindsey coined the term "Liberaltarians" to suggest that Libertarians and liberals could work together outside of the conservative movement. Shortly after this, he launched a dinner series where liberals and Libertarians met to discuss big ideas. (Disclosure: I attended some of these dinners.) In 2009 and 2010, as the libertarian movement moved back into the right's fold, Lindsey remained iconoclastic-just last month he penned a rare, biting criticism of The Battle, a book by AEI President Arthur Brooks which argues that economic theory is at the center of a new American culture war.
Part 1: The Break
Lindsey's criticism of The Battle--published at the American Prospect's website, no less ("Another Culture War? No Thanks")--was particularly telling. It began:
"America faces a new culture war," declares Arthur Brooks, president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, in the opening sentence of his new book The Battle: How the Fight between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America's Future. "This is not the culture war of the 1990s. This is not a fight over guns, abortions, religion, or gays. ... Rather, it is a struggle between two competing visions of America's future. In one, America will continue to be a unique and exceptional nation organized around the principles of free enterprise. In the other, America will move toward European-style statism."
And who, according to Brooks, are the combatants in this conflict? Wearing the white hats, "70 percent of Americans support the free enterprise system and are unsupportive of big government." Wearing black hats, meanwhile, is what Brooks calls "the 30 percent coalition": the "intellectual upper class" of academics, journalists, and well-educated professionals; African-Americans and Hispanics; and the young. In other words, pretty much the usual suspects from culture wars gone by.
Although he mentions the Tea Party movement only in passing, Brooks' call to arms is very much in the spirit of that populist uprising. He seeks to "rally the 70 percent majority in the battle for the soul of America": In other words, as the Tea Partiers often put it, it's time for "real Americans" to "take our country back." Just as the protesters vent their fury at coastal elites and, especially, elitist-in-chief Barack Obama, so too does Brooks.
Of course, Brooks is as crazy as they come. As I've repeatedly shown, a solid majority of conservatives supports the welfare state--and has supported it for as far back as polling goes.
Lindsey makes it clear that on economic policy he's closer to Brooks than he is to his audience at the American Prospect, but that's not the point:
But Brooks' book isn't about policy; it's about ideology and how to engage in politics. And it is, I'm sorry to say, a thoroughly wrongheaded way to approach these questions. The attempt to turn economic policy disputes into a populist cultural crusade rests on deep-seated confusion about the nature of those disputes and how best to effect constructive policy change. Brooks' key move is to cast our "free enterprise system" as an instance of American exceptionalism -- in contrast to the social democracy of Europe and other advanced nations. Thus, economic policy becomes fodder for cultural politics: Supporters of free markets are defending a unique and precious American heritage, while members of the "30 percent coalition" have thrown in with the foreigners -- worst of all, with effete, decadent Europeans.
In running through what's wrong with Brooks' approach, I was heartened to see Lindsey cite the 2001 paper, "Why Doesn't the United States Have a European-Style Welfare State?" by economists Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote, which highlights the role of race in limiting the growth of America's welfare state. I've cited this study on various occassions, more extensively in "Racial Divisions vs. Public Social Spending", last August. Lindsey's awareness of the racist background here is both rare and commendable coming from the right, and leads into him arguing as follows:
But Brooks doesn't want to use economic arguments. He counsels against "getting stuck in the old arguments over money." Instead, he wants to defend America's track record of more modest social spending on cultural grounds. And that is a really bad idea. Our tragic history of race relations may have inhibited spending, but we should be ashamed of that cultural heritage. We certainly shouldn't embrace it and brag about it. Brooks apparently doesn't realize what he's doing; he thinks he's touting good old Yankee self-reliance. But his argument is offensive even if he's oblivious to how offensive he's being.
In fact, of course, it was the self-reliant Yankees who created the American welfare state, starting with universal public education, and it was the Southern slaveowners who opposed it bitterly because it threatened their stranglehold on power--until, of course, they were able to strike a deal in the 1930s that let them control the welfare state apparatus on the county level, so that it served to reinforce their power, rather than challenge it. But I digress.
The feeling I got from reading this piece is "Finally! Here's the one conservative in America that Barack Obama can sit down with a strike a grand bargain with!"
Too bad the right has disowned him!
Part 2: Material Forces
And why is that?
Commenting on the developments at Cato in Salon's War Room, Alex Pareene wrote:
Various libertarians (and, to a much lesser extent, liberals) have wondered, as Lindsey did in that 2006 piece, why libertarians so often align themselves with conservatives instead of liberals. Considering the number of anti-libertarian policies the conservative movement fights for, it seems slightly odd that libertarians would act as an arm of that movement. But I think the answer is sort of obvious: While some outlets, like those leather jacket-wearing rebels at Reason, just tend to go after whoever's currently in power, most of the big libertarian institutions are funded by vain rich people. And these vain rich people care a lot more about tax policy (specifically a policy of not having to pay taxes) than they do about legalizing drugs or defunding the military-industrial complex. And if they're keeping the lights on at Cato and AEI, they want Cato and AEI to produce research that relates more to hating the IRS and the EPA than to hating the NYPD or the FBI.
The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry-especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers' corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst's Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a "kingpin of climate science denial." The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies-from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program-that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.
In a statement, Koch Industries said that the Greenpeace report "distorts the environmental record of our companies." And David Koch, in a recent, admiring article about him in New York, protested that the "radical press" had turned his family into "whipping boys," and had exaggerated its influence on American politics. But Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said, "The Kochs are on a whole different level. There's no one else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I've been in Washington since Watergate, and I've never seen anything like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times."
With folks like them behind Cato--and a welter of other related organizations--there's really no mystery at all why libertarianism tilts so heavily to the right.
Still, that's not the only thing that's going on.
Part 3: Deep Ideology
In his 1996 book, Moral Politics, George Lakoff explains how liberals and conservatives derive consistent worldviews based on two contrasting family models--"Strict Father" for conservatives and "Nurturan Parent" for liberals. But that's not all he did. He also explained a good deal about variations within the two different ideological camps. Lakoff identified four parameters of variation:
(1) Linear scales.
(2) The Pragmatic-Idealistic Dimension.
(3) Moral focus.
(4) "Clauses" within the Moral Order (Strict Father model only)
This aspect of his work came to the fore in Chapter 17: Varieties of Liberals and Conservatives". In that chapter, he described Libertarianism as:
a variant on the model that is pragmatic in the extreme, that is ... a conservative who sees the point of self-interest as the principal end, and conservative morality (self-discipline, self-reliance, etc.) as a means to the end. Someone who is extremely pragmatic will be willing to sacrifice aspects of conservative morality if it interferes with self-interest. Now imagine such a pragmatic conservative having the moral focus: non-interference by the government. So far as I can tell, this is what a "libertarian" is, namely an extremely pragamatic conservative whose moral focus is on non-interference by the government. In short, a libertarian is two steps away from a mainline conservative.
It is the combination of the inner logic that Lakoff describes and the material conditions that Mayer's article focuses on in a specific sense, and that "Why Doesn't the United States Have a European-Style Welfare State?" describes more broadly that all work together to define the historical reality of actually existing libertarianism. And it's extremely ironic that it's a philosophy with virtually no adherents when it comes to actual everyday decisions--such as holding onto Social Security and Medicare by Tea Party members. Yet, even as the overt dream of unifying libertarianism and liberalism appears to be crashing apart, what better describes the hidden machinations of the Catfood Commission--and, quite possibly and ominously the shape of America's coming Dark Age?
