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Blinded by the Left
Liberals are at their best when they recognize the difference between themselves and radicalism. Too often in American history, they haven’t.
Twentieth-century American liberals have a record of glorious achievements. In the 1920s, they responded to the hysteria unleashed in the wake of World War I by crafting the modern First Amendment. In the 1930s, they mobilized to succor the suffering of millions in the midst of the Great Depression. In the 1960s, they were at the forefront of the movement for civil rights for African-Americans and economic security for the sick and elderly.
For the first seven decades of the twentieth century, liberal intellectuals were buoyed by a historical narrative that assumed the world was progressing their way. They saw themselves as a vanguard guiding the country into a future that resembled their ideals. But in the years since the 1960s, liberals, drawn into the interest-group ideologies that emerged during that era, have largely lost their way. Paul Starr’s important new book Freedom’s Power: The True Force of Liberalism tries to reconnect contemporary liberalism with its illustrious past.
Freedom’s Power is designed to guide a liberal restoration by scraping away the barnacles of past political shipwrecks so that a refitted ideology can sail to success. Indeed, with Republicans in disarray and Democrats in a position to possibly control both elective branches of government after 2008, liberalism looks as though it could be poised to make a comeback. A co-founder and co-editor of the liberal magazine the American Prospect as well as a professor at Princeton University and a widely published author, Starr is in a strong position to seize the moment. But Starr’s zeal for a purified, ahistorical liberalism makes it impossible for him to come to grips with its past failures and future opportunities, a reckoning necessary for a liberal rebirth.
There are few books that state their thesis as straightforwardly and effectively as does this relentlessly upbeat effort. As Starr explains in the preface, the book is “about what some may regard as the counterintuitive propositions that freedom requires power in the form of a strong and capable constitutional state and that modern democratic liberalism–by enlarging that state in some respects while constraining it in others–makes it possible for a society to achieve both greater power and greater freedom.” Time and again, he restates his thesis that the modern liberal society is successful because its state is “strong yet constrained”indeed strong because constrained. This is the classical theory of freedom’s power.”
Starr sees contemporary liberalism as a juste milieu. He explains, in the somewhat dated framework of the New Deal era, that while leftists wanted to “socialize the means of production” and the right to “rely on the free market,” liberals “lacking an equally comprehensive remedy” had been willing “to mix state and market and testing out different hybrid approaches.” His liberalism represents an appealing tradition of open-minded gradualist experimentation. And yet Starr is anxious to refute perhaps the most common criticism of American liberalism, namely that its talk about experimentation implies an absence of long-held underlying principles. Liberalism, say its conservative detractors, lacks a navel, an organic connection to the American political tradition. Not so, insists Starr, who, presenting himself as a great-great-great grandson of the Enlightenment, explains, “Unlike those who see a sharp discontinuity between classical and modern liberalism”–usually differentiated between the original small and later large “l” version–I see the two as closely related–the latter growing out of the former in response to historical experience.” And to prove his point he spends four chapters and 100 pages on a longuer-laden, potted history of English and American liberalism in an attempt to teach the untutored reader the correct conceptual table manners for enjoying the feast offered up by the current variety. Mature readers would be advised to skim this primer-like exercise about the inevitable march of the liberal spirit through the problems of the division of powers, separation of church and state, and the public/private distinction.
Nevertheless, what’s peculiar about Starr’s presentation is that, after having marched the liberal spirit across this historical landscape, he then falters, barely discussing the intellectual origins of liberalism as we know it today. Following the conventional narrative, Starr sees liberalism as an early twentieth-century reaction to the growth of monopoly corporations under the regime of limited-government liberalism. He’s right as far as that goes. But modern liberalism was much more than that. It was, at the time of the founding of the modern American university, an attempt by Progressive intellectuals to literally re-found the Republic.
When Virginia Woolf made her famous assertion that “on or about December 1910 human character changed,” she (perhaps unknowingly) spoke directly to the hopes of a new generation of American intellectuals. They had shed the Founding Fathers’ pessimism about human nature; they hoped, in the words of the modernist poet Ezra Pound, to “make it new.” The notions of continuity Starr insists on would have seemed odd to men like Herbert Croly, founding editor of the New Republic, who saw reverence for the constitution as a form of “monarchism”; Charles Beard, the ground-breaking constitutional critic and author of An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States; and, despite the stray quote that Starr produces, pragmatist John Dewey, who dismissed the Founding Fathers’ idea of natural rights in favor of what he called “creative intelligence.” From journalists to professors, these progressive thinkers saw themselves breaking sharply with the American past even as they employed some of its elements to create a re-founded regime led in large measure by disinterested intellectuals, experts, and social scientists like themselves.
As a former "liberal" turned "conservative" turned libertarian (note that I did not feel a need to put the word libertarian in quotation marks ) , I saw my own political evolution playing out in Mr Siegel's excellent article. As I see it, the modern progressive movement accomplished two great things : the political emancipation of women and of minorities. And as a gay man, I believe we must extend civil union (equivalent of marriage ) rights to gay people, and allow gay people to serve without fear in our armed forces, both of which I think will happen, eventually. But the remainder of the modern leftist agenda is counterproductive if not disastrous, in my opinion. It should be obvious to anyone who is intellectually honest that the pragmatism allegedly lauded by some self-described "progressives" is betrayed by their own actions and advocacy. Most of today's "progressives" are loathe to challenge any of the interest groups who have a stake in any government program, even if a given program needs to be reformed or abolished. For example, education reform - which is desperately needed, especially in our poorest urban areas - must be blessed by the teacher unions, which of course means no reform, unless it expands the existing bureaucracy and provides more money for the bureaucrats. So the result is of course --- no meaningful reform, just endless blabber. Apply this same formula to just about any current "issue" - health care, Social Security reform, etc. The name of the game is to empower social engineers, not people. It is to concentrate power in Washington, rather than to disperse power and choice to communities, civil society, and individuals. Individuals cannot be trusted you see. The arrogant elites know what is best for 300 million people ( hint : for the elites actually ). Hence, no school vouchers, no private accounts for Social Security. I laugh when I read so much lately about the political right being bankrupt. It is a fact that many of the biggest political ideas on the right have never been tried, because of the entrenched leftist establishment in the media and academia. It is the left which is bankrupt. They appear to be winning at the moment, but it is by default, and not because of their ideas. The "progressives" of today are not progressive. They are statist. True progressives are pragmatic. Government is anything but pragmatic. "Liberals" are trapped in a prison of their own making. The most pragmatic system in the world is the market. The greatest force for progress in human history is free market capitalism.
Jun 13, 2007, 1:16 AMI'm not convinced that Keynesianism died in the 1970's. In fact, the Republicans, under the guise of supply-side economics, have been conducting a thoroughgoing policy of "priming the pump" since Ronald Reagan was in office. Give tax cuts to the wealthy, spend huge sums of money and borrow the shortfall when revenues fail to cover expenditures. Hence the origin of our now impacted national debt. After 25 years of running against big government, the Republicans have left it bigger than ever. Jeff Faux at the Economic Policy Institute argues that they have done this essentially to force Democrats to adopt a formerly Republican policy of balancing the budget whenever they succeed in winning power. A very clever strategy. Democrats have let this happen because our millenarian and moralistic agenda of personal freedom, an agenda promoted by the left since the 1960's, has pushed economics overboard and the working class that FDR brought into the party has left for the moralizing, millenarian right of the Republican Party. The party of the common man is now home to intellectual elites who really belong in the Republican Party and the party of the rich has welcomed the common man! And these two extremes dominate our debate with social issues that have nothing to do with economics and shouldn't be of political concern. What a mixed up state of affairs.
Jun 13, 2007, 5:23 AMWe currently have two big-government parties. The Republicans have been corrupted by power, and the Democrats do not even see government power as the inherently corrupting institution it is. A sad state of affairs indeed. But the real reason that our politicians in both parties would rather talk about trivial nonsense like "creationism vs evolution" and misinform the American people about the nature of high gas prices - including the nonsense that Washington should "do something" about gas prices - is that tackling the really important issues ( education reform, Social Secuirty , health care ) would ruffle too many feathers. And politicians are by nature not risk-takers. Solving this paradigmatic problem begins with the realization that this current sad state of affairs is the inevitable result of centralized government trying to do too many things. So many people now have a vested interest in the corruption in Washington (K Street lobbyists, farm subsidies for agribusiness, teacher unions, AARP, etc ) that any meaningful change in any program is literally impossible. So politicians take the easy way out and make government even larger. There is ONLY one way to rectify this dilemma - radically downsize the federal government.
Jun 13, 2007, 6:40 AM"What a mixed up state of affairs."
The mixed up state of affairs, Mr. Abbot, is that the culture of liberal democracy given its strongest contributions by the likes of John Stuart Mill, John
Dewey and other intellectuals who took personal liberty, especially of thought, speech, and the like, should have been trumped by the economic statism of New Dealers and Great Society folk who now and forever resist facing their failures. The economic consensus among the most liberal democratic thinkers does not favor free trade for nothing. It favors it because liberalization is the genuine path of progress, economic strength, and more genuine, empirical economic equity.
Empirical evidence clearly validates economic policies which support freedom and free market. The moralizing is of New Deal and Great Society nostalgia that refuses to face the short term benefits from activist governments giving way to long term failures.
That is the point of Mr. Siegel. Empirical evidence should not be trumped by a nostalgic liberalism that forever sees no error in its ways. That is the most illiberal of all ideological orientations, and it is exactly that type of self-righteous and defensive liberalism that is in need of rethinking.
Mr. Sutherland,
I don’t understand how you can blame the Democrats for accumulating the massive amounts of debt that have been wracked up by Republican administrations under the pretext of “supply side” and laissez-faire economics. The free-marketers are the ones using New Deal Keynseian spending and refusing to pay for it, not the Democrats! Republicans have never taken a real chance with “supply side” theory, always preferring to bolster tax cuts with massive spending. Ronald Reagan spent more than $1 trillion on the military to break the back of the Soviet Union and I’ve heard estimates of the cost of the war in Iraq that approach $2 trillion. I’m not against the military. And I’m not against trade, either. I just think ensuring that the American middle class survives globalization’s deflationary tendencies should concern us a great deal more than it has. That means negotiating some protections for working people, like real labor union contract enforcement by our trading partners and making sure that American and foreign companies producing in other countries incur costs comparable to companies that stay here at home. I’m sorry, but putting more money in the pockets of middle class people means that they’ll have more to spend on goods produced by American companies. Business produces wealth, and God love American business people for being so good at it. But for all the brilliance of the “free market,” they won’t knowingly produce what someone else isn’t prepared or able to buy. I don’t see how you can argue with that fundamental premise. And if you agree, then you can see that I not talking about inhibiting the market but rather I’m encouraging the opportunity for everyone to participate more fully, both here and abroad. That’s all.
Liberals of the past quite rightly saw that an unfettered free market had stark limitations when it came to protecting the disaffected, the poor, and others whose participation in the market doomed them to poverty.
We live but once; and life is brief. If we were immortal, which of us would not be an avid free-market capitalist? After all, with an infinite span of time in which to succeed at whatever the market dictated was economically valuable, each of us would be, however briefly, kings and captains of industry.
Sadly, however, the Almighty Market dictates that, in the eighty or so years we are given to live, of which say, sixty, are economically productive, we must gamble that our proclivities, our aspirations, and our luck meld happily and amicably together to produce economic success. It should startle no one that some of us will, indeed, must - fail. But is it not the first goal of a just society to make sure that those unlucky many who either could not, or in any case did not so succeed should be somehow supported?
The question is not an idle one, and it is a nub upon which a philosophy may turn. If one does not accept this, then one must be happy that whether few in number or many, there will be rootless, impoverished, and economically unsuccessful people in our society.
The other great human flaw - an abiding suspicion of those who are different from ourselves - only exacerbates this problem, since we will band together, subconsciously or not, to assure the success of those like ourselves, and to undermine the success of those we deem unlike. Gated communities, homeowner's covenants dictating what color we shall paint the houses we purportedly own, and economic policies that make it impossible that those unlike us can share our sheer luck in being economically successful are all painted with the same brush. Despite the vaunted libertarian streak that many conservatives claim to possess, it is a love of the "us-them" dichotomy that distinguishes contemporary conservatism. Liberalism, at its best, is a profoundly inclusory political position that says that, however expensive in the short run it may be, we are always better off ensuring that no human person is doomed to failure in achieving his or her potential. It is an awesome and far-reaching task, because it requires overcoming the worst of human nature rather than, as conservatives would have it, merely insulating ourselves from the results of that nature. Another difference between true liberalism and true conservatism is that liberalism believes that greatness comes from the actual doing of things. Conservatism says that greatness comes from the RESULTS of doing things. The difference is not merely academic. Conservatives "do" many things in order to succeed in the marketplace; those most honored are those who find a niche of whatever kind and exploit it for maximum financial gain. Whether that be a chain of radio stations or dry cleaning establishments matters not; the success, the wealth itself, confers honor upon the entrepreneur. Liberals believe that WHAT one does matters in its essence; that all human labor and undertaking has dignity and worth. Ideally, we should all be glad for, and enjoy the fruits of one another's labors.
Conservatives forever ask artists, educators, and other creative people, "Yeah, but what can you DO with that?" In other words, how can you sell "that" so as to become wealthy? To them, there is really no other purpose of labor than to enrich the laborer. Ideally, others should labor for one's self because this more efficiently transfers wealth to the self. Exactly what one does or makes - ships, shoes or cabbages - is ultimately unimportant to the free market conservative.
The "intellectual" conservative perfunctorily notes that many of their businesses serve people in some way and thus opines that there is something good, something heroic, in thus laboring for one's own gain only. Add a little hubris to the observation and suddenly - voila! - a philosophy of conservatism is born: Greed is Good. What no one on the right seems to understand is that such a system, by its very structure, CANNOT possibly attend to the real and pressing needs of all people. With industry and cunning, it is true that many people - perhaps most - will find themselves somewhere in the economic spectrum from subsistence to luxury. We can be assured, however, that the luxurious will forever be few in number and disproportionately large in their influence. They will press their now assured economic advantages onto their successors and assigns, creating a kind of aristocracy of wealth. The closely-held conservative belief of the self-made man is frequently just a myth. Many wealthy people are wealthy because of the canny and prudent investments of their parents. It takes very little effort to merely maintain wealth at its present level. Those who manage to do this ought not to be able to idly exist with no need unattended when so many die from the lack of attention to their needs. To call free-market conservatism a philosophy, therefore, is a disgrace. To call liberalism a calling is an aspiration.
The comments of J. Patrick McGrail re: Fred Siegal's article make an excellent introduction to
responding to Cain's vexing question:
"...am I my brother's keeper"?
Some people are more taleneted than others. Some people are more ambitious than others. These are unalterable facts of the human condition. It is also a fact that the entire human race suffers - ESPECIALLY the less talented and ambitious - when those people who are more talented and ambitious are not free to develop their talents and reap the rewards of their ambition. It is also a fact, proven by a tremendous amount of empirical evidence, especially in the 20th century, that free enterprise capitalism is the only "system" in which talent an ambition are harnesed for the greater good, and that statism turns talented people into crooks and monsters who are unaccountable to the people.
Talk about "conservatives" and "liberals" obscures the real issue. I find it almost impossible to have a rational conversation about politics with a Leftist. I think this is because they know they will lose a rational debate. Given the evidence of history, belief in Marxism, or it's derivative of welfare statism, are not the products of a rational mind. Rather, they are forms of a secular religion. And "religious" people are not persuadable by logic and empiricism. If one believes that disparity of wealth is inherently immoral, then statism and Marxism can fail - as they have - over and over and over again, and the Leftist will never be convinced otherwise, because he is a Romantic. A true adherent of the principles of the Enlightenment would look objectively at those arrangements which have OBJECTIVELY improved the human condition and conclude that capitalism, NOT the state, is the most progressive force in human history. But since the so-called "Progressive Era" in the US, the Left has been at war with capitalism, rather than being seekers of knowledge. The Left is never wrong in its own eyes, becuase they refuse to believe that statism is not the answer, even when it is proven to fail repeatedly. And now they tell us that everything is merely a "social construct", none any better than the other. This phenomenon of denial and blind hatred of free markets largely explains the advanced state of rot that exists in the humanities departments in our universities. The clock has stopped. The 1960s never ends for these people.
Capitalism is not "perfect" ( whatever "perfect" means ) because human beings are not perfect. But free market capitalism disperses knowledge and decision-making to a greater extent than anything in human history. This is not deniable. This is also why social engineers hate capitalism.
Would the world be better off if Bill Gates had not become very wealthy ? Some people act as though someone else would have that wealth if Bill Gates did not have it. WRONG. If Bill Gates did not have that wealth, it NEVER WOULD HAVE BEEN CREATED IN THE FIRST PLACE !
Am I my brother's keeper ? Not unless he cannot keep himself. And even then, my goal should be to get him to a point where he can become his own keeper, if I truly love my brother.
And, even so, saying the I am my brother's keeper says just that. "I" am his keeper, NOT the state !
Liberalism must have an empirical base.It must use trial and error and not be ideological but pragmatic?How can we further reform welfare? How can we help the displaced due to more free trade and thechnological improvements? How can we make free trade even better? What would be a good health system that would make more bang for the buck,giving more people better access to healthcare and better healthecare at that? How do we get a better mililtary? How do we use diplomacy more effectively? How do we better safequard freedoms? With trial and error, as in science, we come to know where to put the independent, private and public sectores to work for the common good.As a philosophical naturalist, I want trial and error methods, not faith-based ideological ones! Fr. Griggs rests in his Socratic ignorance and humble naturalism.He might be wrong! His cognitive defects might hurt his posting. Bless all!
Aug 22, 2007, 10:10 AMPost a Comment
Fred Siegel is a professor of history at the Cooper Union for Science and Art and the author of Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York, and the Genius of American Life.
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