Upward and downward counterfactuals: Liberalism vs. Neo-liberalism and libertarianism

by: Paul Rosenberg

Fri Dec 24, 2010 at 15:00

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.

Daniel put the crux of this very well:

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.

While dry intellects may cling to the negative concept of liberty, those who know the true story of the civil rights struggle, those who are familiar with the role that King's distinction played--and especially how he explained it in his famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail"--will almost instinctually shun the negative concept of liberty.  They will, in fact, recognize it as one of the forms that resistance to racial justice loved to take on, pretending to a higher position from which to look down on the call for racial justice and dismiss it as misguided.  Indeed, this is precisely what Rand Paul did last summer, when he somewhat torturedly explained that he would not have supported all of the Civil Rights Act--even as he falsely minimized how much of it he would have oppossed.

Indeed, the distinction between upward-looking and downward-looking counterfactual thinking went to the very core of the civil rights struggle, and which side you stood on.  If all you could see was the potential loss of rights to discriminate--a loss of rights at the hands of the state--then you were thinking in terms of downward counterfactuals.  But if you thought in terms of the potential gains of rights not to be discriminated against--then you were thinking in terms of upwards counterfactuals.  And at the time, the balance turned out to be held by those who realized that the "rights" defined by the downward counterfactualists at the time were not, in fact, worthy of being considered rights at all, any more than the "rights" of slaveholders to hold property in the form of slaves had been worthy of being considered a right.

Daniel did not discuss this cleavage at length, and yet it is a crucial one, and one that's clearly rooted in the dichotomy of upward vs. downward counterfactual thinking.  Let's now turn to a second distinction that he talked about in much greater length.

Early vs. Mature Concepts of How Economies Work: Upward vs. Downward Counterfactuals

While Daniel marshalls a broader, more nuanced argument, the core of it for our purposes can be summed up in this excerpt, which begins with the initial arguments for free-market capitalism vs. mercantilism and its parent feudalism, which is essentially a mix of upward- and downward-looking arguments, and then proceeds to the more mature state, when those who persist in clinging to such earlier arguments deliberately ignore the changed circumstances, new evidence, and upward-counterfactual arguments that are being advanced:

You have to consider Smith's vision of capitalism in contrast to what it displaced, the mercantilism and even legacy of feudalism which dominated life.  Capitalism was simply better than those in providing autonomy.  A feudal peasant is simply born into a caste from which he can almost certainly never escape.  The mercantilist worker may draw some sentimental happiness from the success of her nation in the zero-sum competition with other nations, but her lot does not really change whether or not her nation secures that choice colony in the New World.  

Flash forward to a world in which feudalism has shrivelled to nearly naught, and mercantilism has begun to give way to capitalism.  Where are liberals?  They've won a major battle, but now must re-evaluate what they have really accomplished and where to go from there.

This is the slow march Paul describes at the start.  After all capitalism was new.  It hadn't been done before.  Smith and other liberals who followed him had high hopes, but the results did not pan out as well as desired.  Better than feudalism?  Sure.  Good enough?  No.

Now we're ready to arrive at our answer for the libertarians:  Yes, in many ways their policy preferences today map very well to the policies pushed by liberals like John Bright and Richard Cobden in the UK, Jefferson and Madison in the US or William Lyon MacKenzie in Canada.  The classic liberals.  However the difference is that those men did not have the extra 150 years of experience with the reality of capitalism.  Libertarians have stuck to a set of beliefs that liberals abandoned because they weren't serving the true goals of liberalism.  Rather than assume libertarian thinkers are unaware of this history, we must conclude that they either do not share the same goals as liberals, or lack the rational capacity to reach the correct conclusions about the empirical policy record.

Conclusion

Although Daniel said nothing about neo-liberals in the passages quoted, it should be obvious that the same applies to them as well.  They are "neo-"liberals because they have re-adopted the rejected logic of the 19th-Century liberals, although in somewhat different form than libertarians.  But at the core they are following the same outdated logic, and rejecting the upward-counterfactual arguments and outlook of those of us who look at the world that they envision with enthusiasm and shudder in disgust.  "That is not a better world" we say. "And if you cannot plainly see that, then you are surely blind."

One can, of course, turn this fundamental perception of reality into a much more sophisticated moral, philosophical or intellectual vision.  But it is, at bottom, fundamentall a matter of perception--and orientation.  An upward-counterfactual orientation that looks at the world in terms of what it could be and should be and asks, "Why not?"

Such is the perspective of justice, dignity, hope and transformation.