On the post about the non-ideological era, there’s a couple of things I need to clarify I think, since a couple of commenters seemed to think I agree with David Brooks that we’re entering a non-ideological era. I don’t at all, and my point is that we’ve been in a non-ideological era since conservatives sold out what little ideology they had to get Clinton impeached. My earnest hope is that we really are seeing the beginning of liberalism returning to its rightful spot as the dominant ideology. I do agree with Brooks that liberalism was in something of a disarray after the 60s, though. I couldn’t quite articulate why, so it’s quite fortunate that Ezra put a post up about just these issues.
So why has liberalism been in disarray and what will it take to bring it back? Well, Clinton was right that it’s the economy, stupid, but as Ezra points out, it’s also about the power. Clintonomics grew the economy but that wasn’t enough.
The hitch: Wages didn’t track. Productivity and growth went up, but they weren’t distributed across the economy. Wages increased somewhat throughout the mid-to-late 90s, but as the supercharged growth gave way to the robust numbers of the past few years, the rich began sucking up the gains (if you’ve been reading this blog, you already know that. For a refresher, go here). The left has tried to explain this away as a consequence of Bush’s fiscal policy. Sadly, the trends show up in pretax income also. The right has tried to explain this accelerating inequality as an unstoppable structural feature of the new economy: It’s the meritocracy, or computers, or benefits, or global trade. Unfortunately, those explanations are largely bullshit. Europe also has computers, and trade, and mobility, and benefits, and has easily avoided the widening chasm we’ve seen. So what makes us different?
In a word, power. Or the distribution of it. Europe has strong unions and active governments; countervailing powers that wrest a portion of the pie for their constituencies. We don’t. This is a point I made in my riposte to Jacob Hacker this week, but it can’t be said often enough. There is a tectonic shift in liberal thinking underway. We used to think the country’s economic problems were about economics. At times, that’s been true, It isn’t now. Now, they’re about power. And that’s a conversation the Clintonites are very grudgingly, very awkwardly, coming to accept.
There’s a lot of discussion lately about what exactly is liberalism, and I think in a lot of ways, it’s actually pretty simple. Liberals are the people that take the government’s constitutional duty to promote the general welfare very seriously. It’s not about “big” or “small” government when a government for and by the people is technically as big as the population. Though I would agree that the debate is about big vs. small in the sense that small is the number of people conservatives think the government should work for (straight rich white guys, a small minority indeed) and big is the number liberals thing the government should work for.
Under the Bush administration, people are beginning to finally see that the “trickle down” theory, i.e. if the kings are rich, the serfs should do well theory, is not workable. If the Iraq War didn’t demonstrate that, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina certainly did. Phrased the way I put it, it’s sort of hard to understand why anyone that’s not a straight rich white guy would want to be a Republican, but I think the answer is in the fact that Republicans are pretty good about sniffing out where liberals have failed, claiming our blind spots are a result of our philosophy and advocating giving up on the philosophy altogether. (Also, as I noted earlier, they play identity politics well.)
A classic example is the welfare debate. (Thanks, Roxanne, for giving me this idea.) Conservatives point out where liberals really dropped the ball on welfare—they point out that going on welfare is degrading and disempowering. And this criticism got traction because, as anyone who’s ever applied for welfare can tell you, it is degrading and disempowering. They ask a lot of nosy questions, the money’s no good, there’s no way to move up, and you don’t have much of a future in it. The problem is that the conservative “solution” to this problem was to make it worse with welfare-to-work programs that were even more degrading and disempowering. The problem with welfare wasn’t that it was too liberal. The problem with welfare is that it’s not liberal enough. Genuinely liberal welfare programs should find creative ways to address the disempowerment and degradation issues. (I have about one million ideas that are pretty broad, from terminating the War on Drugs to federally subsidized day care to reinventing the WPA.)
Liberalism as an ideology has been kaput for some time for just this reason—we forgot our main task was the general welfare and the common good. (Or our leaders did.) Ezra’s predicting that era is over and the issue of shared power is back on the rise. Here’s hoping he’s right.
24 Responses to “Liberalism in ascendance”
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The Clintonian theory really was a good one– It managed to completely flip me from a Randoid into a Democrat. The problems, of course, are as you describe…
The Right simply has been driving the debate for too long. Antonio Gramsci made the point about a multi-level debate. On one scale, you have public intellectuals creating the big theories, and on a smaller scale, you have the mass-media creating (what today we call) Sound Bites. For a very long time, the Left has done a wonderful job creating the big theories, and a terrible job at soundbitting them…
The results are that Right-Wing ideas sound like “common sense”– and Left-Wing ones sound too complicated to work. Have we ever said simply “Of course for-profit health insurance is more expensive than non-profit health insurance”? No. Meanwhile, the Right is saying “government is the problem”. And that’s why non -rich -white -strait guys are voting for the Republican Party. We’re doing a piss-poor job of communication…
There are a few difficulties with discussing the economy right now.
First, people have spread the meme that the “free market” (read as: laissez faire capitalism) is a good thing, and it is not. It is dangerous to try to regulate the market too much; there will be a free-ish market no matter what you do, the only question is whether it will be legal or not. (Ref: the war on drugs.)
Second, a lot of folks are confused about the difference between “money” and “wealth”. Money is just paper; it means nothing. Wealth consists of stuff; stuff that you need. If you are hungry, a sandwich is more wealth than a pile of gold (assuming you can’t trade the gold for food). If you are dying from an infection, ten bucks worth of pennicillin might be worth more than a thousand acres of prime real estate in the hottest real estate market in the country.
The United States is very good at making money, but it is not creating nearly as much wealth at the moment… witness the trade deficit. Every dollar we import is wealth we’re bringing in that we didn’t create ourselves, and it means there’s more wealth flowing out of our country.
When you think about the national debt, things get even worse. People have talked about Social Security, but one thing has been strangely silent: that in a few years, the Social Security Trust will stop *buying* bonds, and start cashing them in. Forget the trust’s running out of money; once we lose a large market for our bonds, we’re going to be having a much harder time selling the bonds we need to keep us afloat.
I’m hopeful that things will change, but I also hope it happens soon, because if it doesn’t, I think we’ll be headed for a bigger crash than most folks realize.
Yes– I like that idea (as presented regarding welfare) that often the sense of contradiction or inadequacy one feels about certain governmental policies does not stem from the fact that there is an element of liberalism about them but that there is an insufficient element of liberalism about them. This is what produces the sense of half and half logic, which can be undermined by the logic of power as the one rightfully prevailing force. Let us move instead to the logic of secular humanism as that single, logical force for society.
Actually, Europe is seeing a widening chasm. The first-world country that has seen the greatest increase in inequality since the 1970s isn’t the US, but Britain. The rest of Europe is following Britain’s path now: Germany is not content with having a rigid anti-inflationary monetary policy, but is instituting American-style welfare reform; France is moving toward an American approach to hiring and firing; even in Sweden the level of economic inequality is on the rise, the main difference being that the US started its rise at a Gini index of about .37 and Sweden started its at .21.
The most annoying thing about people who rant about how welfare is anti-freedom is that the rules they tend to impose on it make it so. There’s no FSM-given rule that says single moms on welfare shouldn’t be allowed to live with their boyfriends. There’s no natural law that mandates that skilled workers can’t get unemployment insurance if they refuse a job that they’re overqualified for.
I’d heard it said that there was another really, really nasty problem with welfare. I heard it said that there was some kind of “man in the house” rules where, if there was a healthy man living in the household, you weren’t eligible. I’ve never been able to research this, but I did recall hearing people bitterly talking about the government breaking up black families (because fathers and husbands had to leave, or watch their children starve).
I don’t even know how to begin researching this… but it’s an infuriating thing, if true. The damage could well span many generations.
Brooks is rehabilitating a threadbare end-of-ideology thesis, itself the ideology of a class – the professional-managerial class – of which he is a leading apologist. The collapse of the Keynesian consensus had real sources in economic theory & history, about which most popular liberal discourse is not well informed, but they aren’t the whole story. Policy also follows politics, & the liberal crack-up predated the crises of Keynesianism & Fordism, 1973 & 1979 oil shocks, stagflation, etc. Economic policy is neither exogenous nor determined solely by economic conditions & economic theory. The adverse trend already was evident in the 1966 election, the real beginning of backlash against New Deal-Great Society liberalism. The rise of the populist New Right was overdetermined – Vietnam, sexual liberalism, diffusion & conventionalization of countercultural mores among the middle-class young, Warren Court jurisprudence – but behind it all there was also race.
This last accounts, I suspect, for much of the peculiarly virulent moralism of post-1960s populist conservatism, which was partly a reflex of the moral humiliation its constituency suffered at the hands of the civil rights movement. This was a disorienting narcissistic injury, & it’s difficult to overstate the resentment it created. People accustomed to thinking of themselves as righteous were publicly shamed, (plausibly) called un-Christian, by a despised caste – one widely viewed as morally inferior – & with the connivance of elite institutions & the country’s governing political party, for their racial views & fundamental social ‘traditions.’ That, more than anything Madeline Murray O’Hair or Timothy Leary wrought, was what rankled, & it was inevitable that they would seek ways to reassert their moral rectitutde in other ways. So the likes of Jerry Falwell, who by the mid-1960s were utterly morally discredited segregationists, reemerged a decade later as an avenging Moral Majority. The other movements of the 1960s – feminism, gay rights, environmentalism, etc. – were profoundly influenced by the civil rights movement, but so were their opponents, & although the latter certainly didn’t like feminists or sexual minorities, they also brought to these other conflicts not just their anger over, but their felt need to reassert themselves morally after, their humiliation over race.
Lyndon Johnson, the last liberal President, sought racial equality clear-eyed that there’d be a vast political price to pay – he famously said that he’d flipped the Solid South from Democratic to Republican for at least a generation – & right-wing populist moralism is one of the forms it took. That, as much as anything, was what empowered politicians who consciously massively redistributed income to the rich, encouraged the destruction of the (weakly institutionalized) labor movement, reasserted the hegemony of laissez faire & moral traditionalism – created the ideological world we’re living in.
“Brooks is rehabilitating a threadbare end-of-ideology thesis, itself the ideology of a class – the professional-managerial class – of which he is a leading apologist.”
In short, he’s a technocrat?
John Palmer:
Yes, there was a man-in-the-house rule. AFDC originated as a way to help the minor children of working-class widows - they were thinking esp. of miners - & it was never intended to help ‘intact’ families. Case workers routinely visited recipients, & had the authority to inspect their homes for evidence of a man’s presence. Shoes under the bed or stray bits of clothing put benefits at risk. Conservatives deduced from this that aid should be cut even if no evidence was found (cf. Charles Murray). Things are a bit more complicated under TANF, but not better, notwithstanding the widespread view that ‘welfare reform’ was a success.
If any of you would like to lend or give money to poor people to help them rise up out of poverty, whether daycare or WPA, nothing is stopping you from doing so as citizens of the republic. Why not act rather than demand the government does it? Wouldn’t our communities be better off if we did it ourselves?
The right wing controls the media. Until that changes, nothing will change. Most people will take what FOX or CNN dishes at them as the gospel truth.
I’m a big fan of federally subsidized day care.
KH:
Brooks is rehabilitating a threadbare end-of-ideology thesis, itself the ideology of a class – the professional-managerial class – of which he is a leading apologist.
Numad:
In short, he’s a technocrat?
Sort of. What KH is referring to, I suspect, is the “end of ideology” thesis advanced in the 1950s by intellectuals like the sociologist Daniel Bell. The idea, crudely summarized here, was that neither the traditional right or left could solve the problems of industrial society. What was needed was a non-doctrinaire set of solutions, achieved by consensus, rooted in enlightened democratic capitalism. You can see the contradiction right there: capitalism is an assumed first principle in the “non-ideological” society. But Bell and several other intellectuals in the post-WWII era tended to see consensus rather than conflict in American history and politics; Americans had largely arrived at agreement on the big issues and were not riven by the kinds of social conflicts they saw in Europe.
It’s also a view deeply informed by the Great Depression and the Cold War. The Depression demonstrated the failure of the right, and the Cold War demonstrated the dangers of going too far left.
The end of ideology was not without its critics - see C. Wright Mills, for example - and certainly by the 1960s, the thesis was seriously undermined.
Actually, I’d imagine there’s a decent case to be made that people have an ethical obligation via NL that those who can work should, regardless of overqualification. Re: welfare & dignity: for those of good will, it would be ideal to reduce the degrading nature of welfare. The problem, which conservatives were correct to hammer on, is that when we presuppose that beneficiaries of welfare act in good faith, and when we reduce the paperwork necessary, we end up systemic problems. So dignity isn’t withheld out of spite; it’s a casualty of certain trade-offs to increase efficiency & administration.
I have offered a diferent explanation about a year ago. The shift started much earlier - in about 1965 it started slowly, then accelerated in about 1980 to reach the pinnacle about two years ago or so, starting a reversal and a new cycle just about now.
The problem is that the conservative “solution� to this problem was to make it worse with welfare-to-work programs that were even more degrading and disempowering. The problem with welfare wasn’t that it was too liberal. The problem with welfare is that it’s not liberal enough. Genuinely liberal welfare programs should find creative ways to address the disempowerment and degradation issues.
We know this now from personal experience, as we finally signed up for “CalWorks” last week. So, what is the very first degrading thing California forces upon welfare applicants? Fingerprinting and photographing - because, you know, the poor are guarenteed to be criminals, so why not get a jump on it. The argument is that this prevents “fraud” - so why isn’t it required for CEOs and CFOs? You know, this might have prevented Skillings and Lay from defrauding Enron customers and their employees out of billions, but instead, we’re only worried about the $800/month “grant” a family of six now receives.
Should more and more middle class Americans find their career options outsourced to overseas markets, don’t expect welfare-to-work to help - the only career assistance they’ll provide is for you to get your GED, perhaps your AS or BA if you’re already enrolled when you go on “public assistance”. If you’re already educated, it’s expected you should have no problem getting a minimum wage job at Walmart.
I now think everyone in America should have to experience at least a few months of the welfare. I was paid staff on Clinton’s ‘92 campaign, and I think I would have burned him in effigy a thousand times last week, for his fucking “welfare reform”; there was no war on poverty, only war on the poor.
The welfare-to-work staffer told me last week that it’s only going to get worse over the next few years. States have these full compliance requirements, which they absolutely cannot fulfill, and if they don’t, the federal government will start decreasing their block grants. Good old Grover’s government drowning master plan in action.
John Jay:
As it turns out, I know many people who have given money to poor folks when possible.
However, your question seems to betray a misunderstanding of the United States. If we demand that the government act, is that not our action? Power is derived from the consent of the governed, correct? Why would we not have the right to ask the government to act as our agent?
This is especially true because the federal government is controlled by people who claim to be followers of Jesus, who commanded his followers to help the poor. Why should we not remind them of this obligation they have? They are certainly not hesitant to remind us of their religious beliefs when it’s to their benefit; why shouldn’t we demand that they stop just talking the talk, and start walking the walk?
Not so; SOX is far more difficult to satisfy than fingerprinting & photographing. The corp world doesn’t just get to do what they do unimpeded by state regulation.
I’m sure they do in a manner internally consistent with their beliefs (ie, they donate time and money to charities). The critique isn’t to ask them to walk the walk (as I’m sure many, if not most, do), but to demonstrate that the walk they walk is structurally insufficient to the talk they talk.
Variations on a theme:
If any of you would like to lend or give money to build internal improvements like roads and canals (early 19thc. version) or roads & national high-speed internet access (early 21st century version) to help transportation and commerce, nothing is stopping you from doing so as citizens of the republic. Why not act rather than demand the government does it? Wouldn’t our communities be better off if we did it ourselves?
If any of you would like to lend or give money to the military to help them defend our country, nothing is stopping you from doing so as citizens of the republic. Why not act rather than demand the government does it? Wouldn’t our communities be better off if we did it ourselves?
&etc.
John Palmer
Every church I know of makes efforts to help the poor, perhaps inadequate but legitimate. We are entitled to ask, but the asking is not an action any more than any talking is action.
Dan S.
To build a road you need consensus from the people who live there. And the military wasn’t a very good example for you to choose, since this country was founded on independent militias who actually did take care of their own community.
To both:
The best counterpoint you have to me is that govt is the only way to extract the money from the rich, but I think you can do this equally well through independent charity organizations who prey on their guilt.
I am heartened to look around and see a lot of issues where people have stopped waiting for the govt and started themselves. For instance we waited so long expecting action on Kyoto, and people got sick of waiting and started that anti warming initiative among all the US mayors.
It just seems so apathetic to see someone in need and think “That gummint should do something about it” rather than “I should do something about it.” Then the govt doesn’t do anything and we can sit back smug and blame Republican bogeymen for our community’s problems.
This is both irrelevant and wrong. Look, when you start your own independent militia and get back from Iraq, you may have somethning interesting to say about the ability of the private sphere to take over government function.
That’s it? “I think?”
Amanda,
John Jay’s “libertarianism” is a clue as to what the real problem with liberalism in the USA is. We are so steeped in pro-capitalist propaganda that it seems outrageous to point out that we live in an exploitive society, in which every degree of prosperity, or for that matter mere safety and security in respect to basic human rights, enjoyed by the vast majority of the population has in fact been won in constant, ongoing, generally vicious, sometimes fatal class struggle. This was just as true back in the 1930s and ’40s, and in fact going back to the earliest political divisions of the Union when the Constitution was framed. We have always had a propertied ruling class that has tried and generally succeeded in forcing the very terms of debate to concede their privileges without question, as though they are natural rights and not concessions won in return for providing effective management and government. On the contrary, the basic right of human beings not to be the property of some propertied person was denied and every other point from the right to vote to the right not to have poison wastes dumped in the drinking water has been disputed by these same believers in the natural and eternal wisdom of the regime of private property.
Thus these fatuous concern troll “suggestions” from Jay, who affects not a clue that much of the “misfortune” we seek to redress is actually the systematic result of the very same processes that enrich a few. We are to rely on the sweet generosity of the master to the slave, and we cannot allow ourselves to see the whips or the chains.
In this context, we can see that what we now look back on as the classic liberalism of the USA at the peak of our global power and prestige was a very limited, conditional agreement by the managed propertied classes to deliver something like good government with the appearance of accountability in return for the unqualified, unquestioning support of the ruled for the enlightened rulers’ agenda of global empire. It was contingent on the success of that empire being so great as to secure surpluses of profit which could be comfortably shared with the masses; but even more to the point it was contingent on those masses staying within the lines drawn by their betters for the good of all. Unprecedented prosperity was the carrot; a national security police state whose judgement calls about effectively declaring problematic ideas to be beyond the pale of reason, and people who stubbornly spoke them unpersons outside the general liberal contract, was the stick. This stick was of course applied to Communists, Socialists who would not cooperate with the anti-Communist witch hunt, and by association even cooperative socialists and union organizers. As we here know if John Jay doesn’t, it was applied to feminists, to civil rights organizers, to pacifists–to absolutely anyone who rocked the boat.
It is hard to say whether the global economic crunch of the early 1970s killed consensus liberalism by cutting into the margin of profit and raising the question of whether there would ever be such surpluses to share again, or the failure of the stick of selective police state rule with consensual approval to suppress dissent against racism, sexism, homophobia, and unaccountable global militarism and irresponsible interference in the affairs of just about every other nation on Earth is what caused the ruling classes to panic and seek out a new consensus with no pretense of universal democracy or concern for the general welfare. Both aspects of the social shake-up of the 60s and after were in fact closely interrelated, part of a general crisis of the whole system, a crisis basically caused by the promises that calmed the social waters a generation before coming due and going unpaid. The capitalist system can be reformed and palliated only to a certain degree; beyond that point the decisive power of the propertied ruling class comes into question and they react by sabotaging the system piecemeal–or by organizing a more systematic reaction to beat back the creeping mob of ordinary people expecting to see the promises kept.
Classic liberalism was restricted by the general concept of a liberal society hammered out as a compromise consensus back in the 1790s between radical democrats and the boosters of propertied enterprise; progressive projects could go only so far and no farther, could only be pallatives and not systematic solutions.
By the same token, modern reaction is also on air unless they can somehow rationalize away the USA’s radical democratic revolutionary heritage. Take away the Spirit of ‘76, the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, FDR’s can-do declaration that we had nothing to fear but fear itself, and we have no positive national identity left. Everything we do is supposed to be justified by the consent of the governed, but modern reaction cannot trust the governed to consent, not indefinitely anyway. What to do? Christofascism seems to be the answer, allied with such property-is-without-stain “libertarians” as “John Jay.” But they haven’t sold it yet, not a solid majority, and they never will without repression and massive national trauma.
Mark, well said…
I hope you’re wrong but I fear you’re right…
If we don’t have a “new” New Deal that takes the needs of American citizens into account, and not just the power-hungry corporations and their mega-wealthy owners, this will truly be the death knell for the “American Experiment”…
John Jay:
Ah, but the question is not if we are *entitled* to ask. We aren’t *entitled* to ask. We aren’t “entitled” to “ask”.
*WE HAVE THE POWER*. Got it? Us. It’s *ours*. That’s where the power of the government comes from. They are not “our government”, they are our *servants*.
We have the right to demand that the government help. And while that doesn’t eliminate the obligation of those who recognize the need to help others on a more personal level, it also means there’s nothing wrong in using our share of the power of this nation to do the right thing.
The government has the power to offer help to any who come forward, to declare that anyone who meets the criteria is entitled to that help. That is completely different from private people or organizations helping, where people who are in need must seek out, and beg for, assistance.
Which is the entire trouble with welfare programs as described. They’re demeaning, and yes, that was a problem. But I’d be very interested in knowing who made them demeaning: the people who wanted to help, or the people who wanted to avoid helping, as much as they could.
So… let me get this straight: US Mayors are not part of the government, but the President is. Do I have that right? How is it that one elected official is not part of the government but another is part of the government? Why is action at the least-effective level preferable to action at the most-effective level? Your line of argument needs some serious rethinking…