The Next Republic: An On-Line Journal of Politics and Letters

Goodbye to All That

2005-05-20T10:10:00.000-07:00

Ahoy all,

Hope you missed me. Going back to teaching full-time last fall slowed me down--a lot. So did two collisions with right-wing morons, one on campus at Rutgers, another on-line via Blogspectrum. Mind you, I have no intellectual axe to grind against conservative thinking, and, as attentive readers will have noticed, I have defended Irving Kristol in this very space. But these guys truly amazed me. Their ignorance was so profound that I wanted to call them stupid. Instead, I just walked away. What is the point of trying to persuade people who have renounced reason? Who believe that taxes, social services, and public goods as such are a bad idea, or who believe that the way to improve education is to get the government out of it? Over my thirty years of teaching, many, maybe even most of my favorite students have been those who called themselves conservatives--largely because they had big ideas, strong opinions, high standards, and, especially down in North Carolina, by God they believed in the word.

Now most of those who call themselves conservatives, at least on campus, have relinquished any claim on the Enlightenment. They have big ideas and strong opinions and no standards, whether of intellectual veracity or human decency. Like Dick Cheney, the original American Bolshevik, they'll say anything and do anything in the name of their goals, even if they have to shred the Constitution. They have a higher law and a higher truth to guide them. May the Lord protect us from these arrogant and dangerous fools.

MEANWHILE, TUNE INTO www.politicsandletters.com, THE JOURNAL THAT HAS SUCCEEDED MY BLOG. More dialogical, maybe even more fun. Apply to be a contributing editor, or to advertise!

One last try at Social Security

2005-01-06T13:27:00.000-08:00

The NY Times and the ever reliable Paul Krugman have run good pieces on Social Security in the last week. (Why does The Note dismiss my man by calling him "one-note Paulie," especially in view of the monotony purveyed by that in-house organ?) Some fundamental questions remain.

These are, what are the purposes of privatization? I've heard only four, although all are framed by the "crisis" in funding of Social Security. The near term arguments are (1) we solve the funding problem by diversion of monies to private investment accounts; (2) "it's your money," so you should be able to do what you want with it. Diversion to private investment accounts is stupid because we can get the same results--higher returns on the money invested by the Trust Fund--without relinquishing the principle that animated the original New Deal move (we are our brother's keepers, also our sister's, our parents, and, in this case, our grandparents'). We do this by investing, say, 2% of everyone's contribution in riskier, higher-yielding assets than government bonds, but we do it through public (non-profit) auspices, not through Wall Street.

It's NOT your money, so get over it. Unless you want to live on an island you own, where you do all the "upkeep," stop pretending that taxes are by definition a bad idea. Do you want to live in a jungle? Try a tax-free state, where there are no social services, no public education. Christ, the so-called less-developed countries realized about 30 years ago that either they advertised their emergent infrastructure, a product of public policy, or they couldn't attract foreign investment. Is the US exempt from this developmental logic? Does Hobbes read as a contemporary columnist?

The other arguments in favor of privatization are more perverse. They go like this: (3) we will increase savings if we allow for private accounts rather than Social Security, and (4) we want to dismantle the New Deal as a relic of a static, state-centered past. The last argument is usually not made explicit except in the company of real men like Grover Norquist and Antonin Scalia, the guys who are willing to say, yes, we're smarter than the rest of you poor fucks, and we're going to engineer a world in which you won't have much to say about the future. But it is impending, it is implicit, in every argument against Social Security as a public project. Watch out. They're coming for you, and yes, they still beat off.

Ah, as for increasing savings. Why? If the "ownership society" Bush wants will increase savings rates, we'e all in for a real nightmare. The LAST thing we need is increased savings rates, no matter what the pathetic Peter G. Peterson keeps telling you. The best brace for economic growth in our part of the world is increasing consumption, NOT SAVING, as the figures and the forecasts keep telling us.

The key question then becomes, why don't we need more saving for more growth? Glad you asked.

Education the Issue?

2005-01-02T14:15:00.000-08:00

Here is my second contribution to Blogspectrum.blogspot.com--check it out, lots of interesting weirdness there, including my own.

I want to quote the questions our CO, our esteemed and acrobatic convener of bloggedness, posed because I want to be clear about that we’re up to here:

(1) “What in school changes need to be made to our current educational system?” (2) “What is the case for or against charter schools? Are home schools just a way for parents to rubber stamp their children’s education? Are charter schools just a way for parents to practice intolerance in whom their children go to school with? Does either or both actually work?”

To answer these questions, we have to take at least one step back and ask two prior questions. What are the goals of education as such? In view of those goals, what is the best education we can provide to the most people?

And before answering, we should remind ourselves that the educational system as we know it, from kindergarten to college, appeared only about a century ago. Its appearance was yet another symptom--and attempted cure--of the failure of the family at the end of the 19th century. Education as we now know it supplies most of what families did in the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly the content of what we still call morality and character. That is why our debates about the obligations and purposes of students and teachers—about public education--always sound like arguments about the functions of families. When we talk about schools, we’re talking about what we can and should do for our children. No wonder it sounds personal. Also political.

Failure is perhaps too strong a word. But right around the 1890s, the family stopped doing everything it was supposed to do, according to the expectations inherited from the 18th and 19th centuries. Let me quote Jessie Taft, whose 1915 dissertation was published by the University of Chicago Press as “The Woman Movement from the Point of View of Social Consciousness,” to illustrate the point:

“Its [the family’s] center of gravity has been shifted to the factory, the brewery, the bakery, the delicatessen shop, the school, the kindergarten, the department store, the municipal department of health and sanitation, the hospital, the library, the social centers and playgrounds, and dozens of similar institutions.”

There weren’t a whole lot of people who denied this basic fact back then. In fact the story of the family’s collapse became a popular genre, in fiction as well as in social science, ca. 1890-1930. But there were a lot of people, then as now, who want(ed) to reinstate the inherited expectations—that is, to treat the family as if it could, as if it can, serve all those purposes, personal and political, listed by Taft in her gravitational peroration.

That is why, once again, the personal is political. That is why we talk about something supposedly private, families, when we talk about something supposedly public--education.

So let’s get serious about it. What are the goals of education? And what’s the best education we can offer our children, and the world?

Historically speaking, the goals of education in this country are to (1) equip everyone with the skills necessary to appropriate the texts once decipherable only to the literate minority; (2) offer everyone the possibility of social mobility by virtue of their access to education [in the 19th century, this meant that “mechanics’ institutes” and apprenticeship programs gave way to public schools]; (3) teach everyone that the only thing we have in common as Americans is our ability to argue about what it means to be American. In our own time, we have also tried to give students “emotional intelligence” as well as test-taking skills. This has taken a lot of time and effort. But then we have the summers off.

If you agree with me on the GOALS of education, you cannot believe that the way to fix public schools is to introduce “market competition” in the form of charter schools. If you want to “privatize” education in view of these goals, you are demented. Because the only way to accomplish all three goals is through public education, top to bottom.

You want to send your kid to private school, OK. I did, too, when he was flunking out of the high-rent public school a mile away, and I paid the rent because I thought it would cure him. But don’t tell me that this alternative is anything more than a stopgap—except for the very wealthy, of course.

The best education we can offer our children, I’m afraid, is the education they, and the rest of the world, now get. That is why higher education in this country is still the most amazing bargain available, and why Europeans and Asians keep sending their kids here (the top ten from their standpoint includes Cal Tech, MIT, and Stanford, and it excludes Yale, but we’re not engineers of computers or, for that matter, bridges).

But you will say, what about secondary education, what about what happens before everybody goes off to the college of their choice, more or less, and stumbles upon those brilliant bastards, those unassuming professors, who have been just standing around, waiting for them?

And I will say, take a look. At the before. I know three people who teach and observe closely at this level—in high schools—and they do things that are unimaginable to me. They spend the kind of time with students which comes with a sense of mission, or with a diagnosis of obsession.

OK, two of the three are my brother and my sister-in-law. The third is an old friend I don’t talk to anymore, but I’ve read his books (it’s true, I don’t like him, but his book entitled The Call to Teach is worth reading by anyone who has taught or who has considered a career in this strange field).

These people are teachers. You won’t find them in a private school because they believe in public education. They believe in diversity—hell, my sister-in-law teaches in the public high school from which I graduated, a place that, back then, was 99% white and all managerial except for those pesky working-class punks who beat the shit out of us, and is now about 35% Asian, still managerial but with a nice postmodern twist—and they believe in their students, and they believe in their capacity to shape the curriculum.

To make such beliefs effective, they have joined and led unions, and they’ve gone on strike, and they’ve lost jobs.

So I would insist that the best education available to American kids is the one made available by teachers who know that they should control the point of production—who have enough confidence, and courage, to say that the interests of teachers and students converge more often than not, to say that tests are necessary but not sufficient to the measurement of effort or achievement, to say, finally, that I am here to show these kids how to think, not what to think.

More, or Less, Social Security

2004-12-22T20:27:00.000-08:00

OK, the moral problem, or question, of privatizing Social Security, seems pretty obvious: Do we really want everyone to be on their own in old age, proudly bearing their latest statements from the “private investment accounts” they started back in 2005? Or do we, the living and the working, want to make sure that the elderly are not indigent, ever, and demand, accordingly, to pay taxes in the present to accomplish this redistributive purpose?

The economics of the issue are murkier. The privatizers cry wolf (“Crisis!”) because they know that’s the only way to detach the majority of Americans from the ancient Christian and the modern socialist criterion of need—that is, from the idea that what we get in the form of income, goods, or love, or God’s forgiveness, is not what we deserve, it is what we need.

The approach of the privatizers is simple and sensible and dishonest: “The people won’t go for this unless we can convince them they have no choice. Unless we tell them apocalypse is impending, they don’t budge.” Sound familiar? Mushroom clouds are gathering, only this time it’s over the Social Security Trust Fund.

Like the neo-cons at DOD after 9/11, like the folks at Club for Growth, and like their allies who follow Grover Norquist in his mad quest to “starve the beast”—to kill the welfare state—these guys were just waiting around for the evidence, such as it is, that they need to validate conclusions they’ve already reached.

But let’s have a look at some of it. Briefly, believe me. The Financial Times of 12/16/04 is pretty interesting here [see also Talking Points Memo of last three days: I wish I could do the link thing]. “It is impossible to argue that the US cannot afford to fund the Social Security gap,” the editorial writers state, “but can afford permanent tax cuts and last year’s Medicare benefit—both of which cost more in present value terms.”

Just so. There is no “crisis,” according to these extremely pro-capitalist writers, because the system as it stands takes in more than it pays out, and will continue to accumulate surpluses until about 2020, when the Fund begins to pay out big time. Still, “it will be 2042 before it runs out, and even then the present level of contributions will cover more than 70 percent of obligations.” Hmm.

So there’s no funding crisis for Social Security until, oh, about 2050. Meanwhile, what’s the matter? Well, meanwhile, nothing. In the long run, however, you need either greater returns on the Trust Fund’s investments or smaller benefits for the retired recipients if you want to keep the system intact, legitimate, and credible.

What is to be done? Privatization is a moral and economic disaster. It announces that our collective responsibility for the generation that precedes us, for those who made our lives possible, is quaint. Turn this around and ask yourself, would you disown the next generation, whether it’s composed of your own kids or those of your neighbors, your friends, your colleagues, or, for Chrissakes, your enemies? Of course not.

And don’t tell me that the market can solve this moral problem because those who have diligently accumulated will have the appropriate apartments and appointments in their dodderhood.

I’ve seen this shit. My grandmother, a crazy Irish immigrant, ran a nursing home that was her own home, and it was as scary, as Hobbesian, a place as I’ve ever been. And I’ve been on a bus with members of the Ku Klux Klan, and I’ve been in fights with bikers, and I’ve heard tenured professors tell me that revolution is the only answer to the problems we face. I was terrified every time.

But nothing is as scary as guiding and touching and smelling old people, sick people, the ones who can’t take care of themselves—at close range, when you have to figure out what to do next, whether to hold them, or get the bucket and hope for the best, or maybe feed them. Or just go to sleep, once you’re done.

Yes, it’s the feel and the smell of death. It’s comforting, and it’s bracing, and it’s necessary. In its absence, all those old people are mere abstractions. Say goodbye.

America's Biggest Problem?

2004-12-22T17:15:00.000-08:00

Here is my first contribution to a new blog forum created by The Casual Observer. The deal is that us invited bloghounds write a little ditty about an issue posed by Mr. CO, an ecumenical and intelligent kind of guy. The question was, What is the biggest problem facing America?

The biggest problem facing America right now is work. Put it as two questions. How do we occupy ourselves, and why? What is the proper relation between your effort and your reward, between your work and your income?

It used to be that our occupations defined us. Once upon a time, work was the cauldron in which your character was forged. In some ways, it still is. Who hasn’t been asked “What do you do?” And then watched as expectations took shape on the face, in the eyes, of the stranger who asked the question?

A century ago, there was a similar sense of crisis, or at least frustration, in trying to define the meaning and significance of work. The Populists and the socialists claimed that the paper-pushing mental labor of bankers, lawyers, merchants, and intellectuals—all those prissy “middlemen”—was not productive. In fact they insisted that such labor was parasitic.

By this they meant that the incomes of the bankers, et al., were deducted from the sum of value created by others, by the productive labor of the “toiling millions.” Their assumption was that your consumption of goods was authorized by your production of goods. You weren’t supposed to get more than you contributed to the sum of value, to the stock of real, tangible goods.

Not a bad idea, mind you. It’s what animates some of the more strenuous versions of the labor theory of value—including that purveyed by Marx.

But with the rise of a corporate kind of capitalism, mental labor became central to every enterprise and every sphere of social life. Witness the emergence of higher education as we know it, ca. 1890-1920. Witness the little magazines, the young intellectuals, the government agencies employing sincere young men and the settlement houses employing sincere young women, all in the same moment.

This kind of mental labor looked suspicious from the standpoint of most Americans, not just Populists and socialists (although, if you do the math, these folks were probably the majority of voters in 1894 or 1896). Then as now, people wanted a transparent, tangible, reasonable relation between effort and reward—you were supposed to earn what you received as income.

But how to measure this relation? What exactly do intellectuals and other paper pushers do? Like bankers and lawyers, they clearly don’t produce anything tangible or measurable, or even enjoyable.

The crisis of a century ago was solved by admitting mental labor into the category of work as such, but it took a while. The question, then as now, was How should we think about the relation between effort and reward, between work and income? The question never went away, of course, and it has been answered in interesting ways by recent “reforms” of both welfare and Medicare, under both liberal and conservative presidents, as well as by Social Security and other redistributive programs.

But we are now at a real crossroads. There is no way that private investment can produce enough jobs to employ even the slowing growth of the labor force. Since 1919, we have seen economic growth (larger output of goods and increasing productivity), as a result of declining net private investment and of declining labor inputs to expanded goods production.

Since the 1930s, public policy has acknowledged this very basic fact by attempting to detach the receipt of income from the production of value through work—via the programs I already mentioned, but also by developing the notion of “human capital,” by treating education as the basic industry of the U.S., by trying to come to terms with what is clearly a “post-industrial society.”

But what now is to be done? None of us, left or right, wants to abolish a transparent, tangible, reasonable relation between effort and reward, between work and income. That’s why we tell our children to work hard in school, and why we laugh, or cringe, when someone says Jack Welch earned what he now gets from G.E.

What is to be done is, quite simply, to stop acting as if we can restore the moral universe of the 19th century. We have to understand that our rewards are not, and cannot be, the function of our measurable efforts. I’m not invoking luck here, people, I’m telling you that there’s not enough work to do. And the private sector, the “supply side,” can’t change that. Either we redefine work or we redefine income. How about both?

This is the biggest problem because it is at once an economic, a social, a political, and, most importantly, a moral problem.

P.S. Matthew: MM got this from me, not vice versa: see Pragmatism and Political Economy (1994), Part I

Social Security, Cont'd.

2004-12-20T10:34:00.000-08:00

Farther down in the utopian distance of his 12/11 column in the NY Times, David (Twit-in-Chief) Brooks warns us of the larger and more insidious agenda signified by the camel’s nose of Social Security “reform”: “But the fact is that over the next decade—whether we are talking about pensions, health care or even schools—the central argument is not going to be over whether to apply market competition to these problems. It’s going to be over how to structure [market] competition to produce the most dynamic results.”

Don’t you love how the fact that “is,” isn’t yet here? Makes you admire Bill Clinton’s parse of this pesky verb.

Has it occurred to young David, who reminds us in closing that “this is not the age of big, static state institutions,” that no one is looking for “dynamic results” if the dynamism of the market means penury for the elderly?

If the dynamism of the market means that the diseased among us will have to buy the right not to die? If the dynamism of the market means that public education is starved by tax cuts and killed by the kind of “competition” (from pseudo-private schools) which excludes teachers and their unions from the conversation about curriculum?

No doubt about it, the market is dynamic. Does it follow that the old, the sick, and the young need to be sacrificed to the business cycle? “The market” is not a remote externality, David, some absconded God to be trusted even in his absence, to be retrieved in the name of progress. It’s just a device, a cultural convention subject to social purpose and political action in the name of the common good.

Let’s take a look at Social Security in both moral and economic terms. Our texts will be the competing editorials of The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times for Thursday, December 16, 2004. The WSJ spices its “reformist” remarks with snide references to the redistributional purposes of the original act (“FDR’s greatest contribution to the welfare state”): “The holding pen for this pay-as-you-go transfer was called, brilliantly if dishonestly, a ‘Trust Fund.’ . . .And like all income redistribution programs, Social Security presented politicians with lots of incentives for sweetening [e.g., the level of benefits and the number of people covered].”

The crisis, saith the WSJ, resides in the familiar “demographic” problem—not enough workers in relation to retirees, so the Trust Fund expires around mid-century, blah, blah. The editorial writers actually understate the forecasted shortfall of legal liabilities the Fund carries on their way to the real problem, which is (surprise!) public spending as a proportion of Gross Domestic Product. By 2030, they announce, the combination of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid payments will amount to 15% of GDP.

Oh, the horror, the humanity! As we speak, more than 30% of the labor force is employed either directly by government (federal, state, and local) or indirectly, as a result of government spending. Can someone explain to me why this is a moral problem, rather than a mere fact? Can someone explain to me how private investment could do better at creating jobs? There’s no evidence that it has, that it can, or that it will—on which, if you inclined to check, see my 1994 book, Part I, and the article by John Judis in The New Republic of late January 1997. So why don’t we just relax and realize that Clinton was right to ignore the distinction between private and public investment?

In moral terms, Social Security works because it makes us our brother’s and sister’s keepers. It is, in fact, a redistribution program, just like the WSJ says it is. People who are able and willing to work tithe themselves, as it were, so that their grandparents don’t end their lives in poverty. Don’t kid yourself. In the absence of Social Security benefits, more than half of the people in this country over age 65 would have incomes below the poverty level. That was true in 1994, at any rate. In view of lagging wages, low inflation rates, and declining real rates of return on government bonds, imagine the carnage if we fast forward twenty years.

Do we want to trust in the market, or do we want to trust in our capacity and our ability to provide for those whose working lives are done? This is the moral question that technical prattle about “reforming Social Security” lets us evade.

Even so, next time we lead with political economy, and our text is The Financial Times.

Election Blues, Part II

2004-12-16T13:18:00.000-08:00

Briefly, now. Here's the thing. The election was fought on the "security issues" because BOTH candidates WANTED it fought there--Bush because he's the salamander in chief, Kerry because he thought he could avoid the "liberal" designation if he waged the campaign on foreign soil, that is, outside the jurisdiction of liberals, whose domestic policies are the analogue of the "nation-building" foreign policies favored by the Bush junta.

Didn't work, did it? You want to be a liberal and run for president, you got to show how and why your opponent's FOREIGN policy mutilates the liberal DOMESTIC agenda almost everyone--except the Club for Growth or the Federalist Society--wants enacted. That large crowd of Americans would include Newt and his contracters: a lot of undecideds there, my friend.

Kerry, instead, EMBRACED the Bush foreign policy, and so could never foreground the crucial domestic policy differences. The turning point in the campaign came when Lurch says, "Well, yeah, I'd have voted for war even if I had known there were no WMD in Iraq." Don't get me wrong, I canvassed in Allentown, PA, for this man on the weekend before the election.

But please. You try to make foreign policy, the "security issues," the central themes of the campaign because some twit has told you that you gotta trump Bush on this, and then you say, "What a good idea it was to invade Iraq!"

At that moment, the real undecided voters ask themselves, what's the point of voting for the other guy? The guy who's there is as dumb as a post and just as immoveable, or, more politely, resolute; the guy who's not in the big office is awful smart but agrees with the dumbass on the key issue. Why go for broke? Why go for the guy who confuses you on the issues he's chosen?

Remember, 30-40% of those who voted for Bush do NOT agree with him on the public policy issues. In this, I think, he is another Reagan, and to this extent I dissent from Steve Usselman's post.

But shit, there is such a thing as the blues: "blue devils," the etymology and Albert Murray tell us, those overwhelming feelings of disaster, defeat, disappointment, dismay, disbelief, discumbobulation, despair, disgust. . . We have to play through it, or dance to it, or both, make our way toward the other side however we can. Already it looks closer. See you there.

Social Security Writ Large, Unabridged, Part I

2004-12-16T13:01:00.000-08:00

Everybody's talking about it, even me. See my Letter to the Editor in the last post. It really is on the agenda: back to 1933, before Wagner, Social Security, whew, the whole enchilada. So, all right, let’s get seriously, pornographically analytic about David Brooks and his various faiths.

The sidebar in his 12/11 column for the NY Times reads: “Trusting, not fearing, the markets.” Uh huh. I’m there with you, baby, but no one else is, except your erstwhile colleagues at The Weakly Standard. Oh, and maybe the editorial page guys at the Wall Street Journal.

Here’s the lead: “Before we get lost in the policy details, let’s be clear about what this Social Security reform debate is really about. It’s about the market. [You mean it’s not about that nice preposition, “about”?] People who instinctively trust the markets support the Bush reform ideas, and people who are suspicious [presumably of markets] oppose them.”

Well, OK, in faith-based politics, we do that “instinctively trust” thing. But now that you’re a columnist at the paper of record, shouldn’t you be thinking about—oops there’s that preposition again—these issues, rather than urging us to resuscitate one of the Gods that failed in the 1930s? Remember, it wasn’t communism that sank back then, it was the idea that markets could, in any meaningful sense, be self-regulating.

Once upon a time it was rational for people to believe in self-regulating markets, because anonymous laws of supply and demand did seem to make all producers (not all people) equally subject to the same laws. The “rule of law, not men,” was first enacted, first made observable, in this kind of market, and then it was transposed to the domain of politics.

As Charles Lindblom and Martin Sklar have shown (and here they follow the lead of Smith and Marx and Nietzsche, although the latter’s contribution to the debate has been, I think, overlooked), markets make for politics. And politics in the modern world is largely about—oops—how resources get allocated in and through markets.

But what happens when everyone knows that the once anonymous laws of supply and demand don’t work? When we know that such laws have been abrogated because markets are managed, dominated, or administered by large firms? When we know that the self-regulating market can’t enforce or even allow equality among all producers?

What happens, in short, with the rise of corporate capitalism, ca. 1890-1940? One way of reading the markets, then as now, is to see them as the result of conspiracy—of political manipulation, insider trading, etc., of the “malevolent and shadowy forces” Brooks cites. He’s right, the Populists, then as now, can’t get beyond this narrative.

But everybody else did get over the demise of a self-regulating market (except of course for the contemporary political scientists who call themselves the “new institutionalists”—check out my review of Richard Bensel’s book in JAH June 2002), mainly because they saw it as a promising development. Hereafter, they thought, maybe the market is not an impenetrable externality. Hereafter, they thought, maybe the market is not the cause of equality and the seat of freedom after all. Maybe we have to reinvent this cause, maybe we have to rethink the meaning of freedom.

Once upon a time, they thought, the market functioned as the cause of equality and the seat of freedom precisely because it was impervious to reason, purpose, and social goals—because it was an anonymous set of laws. Once upon a time, the market treated every one alike, because no one producer, no capitalist cabal, could violate those laws and rig the thing.

But now that it has become something else, they said--now that it has become the domain of administration, of choices--we need to think it through.

Remember, in the nostalgic narratives of von Hayek, Friedman, and, for that matter, the Populists, the market must appear as an untouchable mystery if liberty is to prevail. They thought it through, too, and decided that the choice was between statism and laissez-faire: there was no in-between. William Howard Taft agreed with them, and he, not Teddy Roosevelt, was the “trust-buster” par excellence. Pure competition or socialism, Taft insisted, so he aimed dozens of anti-trust suits, through his attorney general, at those big, bad corporations.

Unlike the Pops and his heir apparent, Teddy Roosevelt didn’t think we could exorcise the large corporations that appeared in the 1890s and after as a way of, yes, regulating the market. He did think that an extremely activist state would be necessary to contain their powers within acceptable limits—necessary, that is, to modulate class struggle, enforce social mobility, postpone revolution. If there is anyone in the contemporary firmament who sounds like TR, it’s Jesse Jackson or Teddy Kennedy.

That’s why it’s laughable when the benighted Brooks invokes not just TR but “his great hero Alexander Hamilton” as exemplars of those who would “use the power of the market to solve an otherwise intractable problem.” Neither of them would understand what young David is talking about, and not just because they lived in other centuries and he lives, clearly, on Mars.

The bottom line is this: after the 1890s, almost nobody, except of course the inscrutable William Graham Sumner, believed in self-regulating markets. The question for everyone who was not merely demented--and this category included most businessmen--was not whether but how to regulate markets in the name of social stability, social mobility, and democratic possibility. The question for everyone was, How can we turn a free society, which is by definition a market society that respects the rights of private property, into a just society, which is by definition a commonwealth that promotes the rights of all persons?

They had resurrected James Madison’s question of 1787: how can we reconcile “the two cardinal objects of Government, the rights of persons and the rights of property,” and not, at the same time, forfeit the principles of popular government?

In re: twit-in-chief

2004-12-13T09:14:00.000-08:00

Here's my polite academic letter to the editor of the NYT, who can't very well apologize for the ignorance and mendacity of David Brooks. Following the polite letter is my longer meditation on the privatization issue, which gets more scatological and perhaps less sexual than my introduction to Bill Burr's post. The Cliff Notes version, for those of you who read USA Today, is, Brooks is full of shit and should be ashamed of himself. Cautionary note for self-proclaimed conservatives who believe in "free markets": there's no such thing in the good old USA, not since 1898, and it's a good thing, too. Free markets would leave you at the mercy of morons like Donald Trump, Dick Armey, and Phil Gramm. You would, I think, be better off with the majority of the Republican Senate of New York State, which last week overrode George Pataki's veto and raised the minimum wage to $7.15 (over two years).

To the editors:

Toward the end of his 12/11/04 column on reforming Social Security, David Brooks admits that he “may be a complete idiot.” Let me explore this possibility by noting three astonishing idiocies.
First, he reduces skepticism about the market to worries about the conspiracies that produced crony capitalism in the US. To be wary of privatization, however, you don’t have to believe that the “fat cats” are the real beneficiaries—you just need to know that Social Security addressed a crisis created by market forces, and that no one in his or her right mind, not even private-sector business executives, trusts market forces that are not modulated by public policy, social goals, and regulatory agencies.
Second, he invokes Theodore Roosevelt as a “champion of market forces.” TR was many things, but any biography of the man will tell you that he wanted an activist state to contain the market powers of the new industrial corporations.
Third, he uses ridiculous arithmetic. The productivity of American workers has grown exponentially since the 1930s. The ratio between employees and retirees has changed accordingly. Stating that there will be “only” two workers for every retiree in 2030 should bother us about as much as stating that there are “only” two farmers for every one hundred consumers in 2004.
The way to solve the so-called crisis of Social Security is not to unleash “the power of the market,” as Brooks proposes, but to limit benefits on the upper end of the income scale.

Signature

What socialism is

2004-12-12T15:08:00.000-08:00

Below is my email response to centurion O'Keefe of two weeks ago, you will see his queries in the post that precedes this one. All by way of introducing the topic of socialism, which I try soon to decipher--like, in ten minutes--by addressing the Twit-in-Chief, David Brooks, who, for reasons no one can fathom, is now treated as if he has real ideas as opposed to deep feelings about, say, Iraq, or social security, or, shoot, anything that requires more than partisan positioning. Why in the world is this nincompoop writing a column for the NY Times? We all knew that the dreaded Safire, another hack, was going to retire soon, but why replace him with a guy who makes Mark Shields look like a genius? With a guy who makes everyone, even William Kristol and Bob Novak, sound insightful? And come to think of it, why isn't Novak being indicted by the federal government and attacked by the press? Because he's the J. Edgar Hoover of the moment: another moral monster who escapes scrutiny because he's got power. Well, he ain't got any clothes, either. Why doesn't Al Hunt stop saying, "Well, He's a good guy, he's my friend," and say something more accurate and productive, viz., "He's a coward and a traitor"?

James,
Yes, I'll want to see your piece, and mine will be in today or tomorrow morning. As for your "questions," here are my answers:

Define socialism; has a socialist system ever existed? In theory, socialism entails the collective ownership of the means of production and an allocation of resources consistent with the common good (consistent with distributive justice, which includes commutative justice); in this sense, it is the movement under modern-industrial conditions which acts upon the idea that animated the early Christian church, i.e., the criterion of need (the slogan of 19th-century socialism was "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need"). You might say, following Jane Addams, that socialism is a way of transposing the principles of representation and consent from the domain of politics to the larger society, so that, for example, workers can represent themselves as workers, and must consent to the conditions under which they work. But only the sectarian few would insist that socialism is the exclusive property of the working class. Understood as an order of events as well as an order of ideas, it is a cross-class construction--just like capitalism, liberalism, or republicanism. So conceived, a socialist SYSTEM has never existed (by the same token, neither has a capitalist SYSTEM, simply because it has always been penetrated by feudal remnants and socialist harbingers), but socialism has been a significant component of every 20th century civilization, including that found in the USA. So conceived, socialism does not require statist command of markets; indeed I would insist that socialism can't work in the absence of markets, and works best when modulated by capitalism (as in the USA).

Define postmodernism. It depends on where you are in the debates. For my considered opinion, see the preface to the paperback edition of my Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution. Jose Ortega y Gasset, a philosopher you should admire, once wrote: "But suppose that this idea of subjectivity which is the root of modernity should be superseded, suppose it should be invalidated in whole or in part by another idea, deeper and firmer. This would mean that a new climate, a new era, was beginning." At the turn of the last century, every sentient being understood that modern subjectivity was receding, changing, eroding--most artists, writers, and intellectuals designed their work to address this fundamental transformation, from Dreiser to Proust, from Picasso to Hartley, from James to Heidegger. I don't like the term postmodernism because it is too elastic, but I'm willing to speak of a post-modern era, and in view of the intellectual revolution registered in this pantheon, I'd date it from 1905-1915.

The US comes closest to successful socialism because it remains a weird hybrid of capitalism and socialism, a site where each can contain and modulate the other.

JL

why is there still socialism in the US?

2004-12-12T15:04:00.000-08:00

JL,

The Centurion needs your column by next Friday the 19th.

I have a couple of serious questions for you. I am writing a column on
socialism. These do not have to be your answers. You an speak on behalf
of the ideology, or even quote others, I suppose. (Although what else do
intellectuals do but quote others.) Only answer in a few sentences if
possible. At any rate, fear not, I will probably show you my column
before I publish it so i can get your feedback. I will have more
questions for you later.

1) Define socialism

2) Define Postmodernism

3) Has a socialist system ever existed?

4) What system in the world came or comes closest to successful socialism?

james

Criticism and Self-Criticism, from old friend Bill Burr

2004-12-09T14:41:00.000-08:00

It's true, I have only old friends because all of us are old. Except Josh and Chris and Kamila. And Grace, who won't act her age. Here's a post from the guy who edited The Kissinger Transcripts (New Press, 1999), which was reviewed in NYRB, very favorably, by the China hand at this disreputable journal, and then almost retracted when Henry the K played the insider's hand (viz., Don't you want to be invited to the dinner parties I will be hosting next year?). Emphasis on the almost. Great book, great review. Take a look at both, then hold the nose in reading the response from H the K, then bind and gag yourself in reading the reposte. And then ask yourself, would you do this for a dinner party invitation, even if it meant continued access to NYRB? Let's use the vernacular here. Would you give Henry Kissinger a blow job? "Don't be so crude," my son says, as he looks over my shoulder. I say, "Does that mean you want to give H the K a blow job?" He zooms in on the rolling chairs we have in the study, having realized I'm quoting him, and says, "Don't be an asshole, c'mon Dad, you can't do this." I push him away, it's like we're electronic pucks in a hockey game conceived by the guy who gave us PacMan, except my son weighs 230 pounds and he's not going very far. I gotta finish this before he gets back. . .

Jim—As before, I like very much what you’ve been writing in your blog but I have a few quibbles:

1) Your comments on the Vietnam war protests in your most recent post slide over a problem. Yes, there was a mutiny in Vietnam, but it had a symbiotic relationship with protests, etc. at home. Indeed, the mutiny in Vietnam didn’t really begin until Nixon was in power by which point a broad public consensus, deeply influenced by the protests, had formed that the U.S. had to disengage from Southeast Asia Why else was SecDef Melvin Laird, beginning in 1969, sending troops home as quickly as he could (even if Kissinger disagreed with the pace)? I go along with the measured judgment of Jeff Kimball that the anti-war movement "played a key role in restraining the violence in Vietnam, in forcing an earlier withdrawal of U.S. troops, and in making the war stoppable. Its activities... contributed to the weariness of many Americans with a long, frustrating, bloody, and dirty war." I remember you being skeptical about the student protests of those days but let’s give them the credit that’s due.

2) In your wonderful post on “How to Talk to a Conservative,” you treat “political action” as somehow unrelated to “self-discovery and self-government.” I don’t follow the logic here. How can self-government be possible without political action? Why can’t political action be a “site” for self-government? How can there be social reform or the amelioration of social inequities without political action? Don’t they necessarily go hand-in-hand?

3) Your argument about conservatives hating modern liberalism because it is a kissing-cousin, or even closer, to socialism makes much sense. But I think that the roots of this phenomenon may go back earlier than the 1960s. For example, Sen. Robert Taft’s critique of New Deal liberalism was partly based on his opposition to socialism. Although hardly a reactionary (e.g., his support for public housing/fed aid to education), Taft wanted to rein in federal spending and taxes because he believed that overly high taxation led straight to socialism. I have the impression that contemporary conservatives see Taft as one of their forefathers although intellectually he’s more impressive than the current lot.

William Burr
George Washington University

Hot damn, some debate

2004-12-06T19:11:00.000-08:00

Well, yes, let's have some debate. Me and the boys on the bus have parted company, as you might have discerned from the new comments, but goddamn, let's have a go in cyberspace instead! Here's what we need to talk about. (1) Mutiny in the military will undermine Bush's dreams of empire--not journalistic principle (will Seymour Hersh or Mark Danner have anywhere near the effect of the officer corps?), not wringing of hands among us academics. From the git-go, it's been the War College types who have said, "This is insane, and not do-able." They will prevail. We need to pay close attention as they make their case. To the suits v. re-ups among the reserves, the guard, etc. The end of the war in Vietnam, and the remarkable transformation of the American military, came as a result of mutiny over there, notwithstanding those who want to believe that opposition to the war was a college-student vocation. (2) Universal health care has become the norm, the expectation of both parties, in the last 12 years, mainly because the right of health care has beome a question of political economy: the moral question has become something larger, or maybe smaller, and now it can be dealt with as a mere policy problem (something like the slavery issue, ca. 1838-1860). Everyone, left to right, private to public sector, agrees that universal health care is the goal--the debate is about the means, not the end. [See, e.g., the Business section of NYT for 12/6/04] (3) Actually existing socialism: let's talk. My first post on this will be my bizarre exchange with young centurion O'Keefe, wherein I tried to define socialism and postmodernism for him, and got a clinically hysterical response. My old friend Keith Haynes and I have been compiling a list of socialisms in our lives--following the lead of the Chinese foreign minister, who insists the US is more socialist than his country. Help me out here.
Now we're talking.

Rebuttal

2004-12-02T14:01:00.000-08:00

Here is my good faith summary of S. Hamlin’s “reply” to my column. (1) The sovereignty of the people is good, but “large centralized power” is bad because liberals (for example, James Madison) did it. (2) Individuals are good, and different, and shouldn’t belong to groups. (3) Pluralism is bad because “diehard liberals” (FDR, LBJ) like government spending. (4) Reform is good as long as it doesn’t involve a “large federal bureaucracy.” (5) A free society is good because it is by definition a just society, regardless of what Irving Kristol, the founding father of neo-conservatism, argued in 1978, in dissenting from von Hayek and Friedman.
In sum, then, conservatism is good and liberalism is bad, even though conservatives don’t know what they’re talking about—not even when they invoke conservatism.
Oh, I almost forgot, Dr. Livingston must have missed the election because conservatives are clearly winning the culture wars. They whine about losing “just to combat complacency.” Sure they do. Solid majorities now support civil rights (and civil unions) for gays and lesbians, equality between women and men (which presupposes birth control, abortion rights, access to the job market, and Title IX), and, most important, equality across the color line. Conservatives have already lost all three battles. Where exactly can they win?

Reply to my Column for The Centurion

2004-12-02T13:44:00.000-08:00

Here is the reply to my last column in The Centurion, by one S. Hamlin. I have not changed it except to break up the once-solid block of prose into paragraphs. My rebuttal will follow in this space if I can figure out how to insert it; if not, see the next post. Pretty depressing, all of this, not least because my rebuttal is so exasperated and angry. Maybe even mystified. Might as well be on "Crossfire."

THERE ARE SOME BASIC VALUES in America that breach the political divide. Most Americans believe in freedom, democracy, equality, and choice. How these values get applied is the major fissure in the political landscape between the left and the right. It is in this application where Dr. Livingston’s well-intentioned points fail. First, Dr. Livingston argues eloquently that liberals are for the “sovereignty of the people not the party, state or government.” To buttress this argument he pulls on James Madison. While much of James Madison’s goal is “the sovereignty of the people” his goal mutates into a large centralized power. While conservatives are far from being anarchists, they believe that a small government is best to achieve the greatest amount of liberty. Conservatives feel that the government should be smaller because they feel that the American people know how to spend their money better than the government. (Hence the tax cuts) In that regard, the people have more control over their destiny in a conservative paradigm. This concept of the people knowing how to spend their money better than the government refutes his argument about individuality.

Even if you do not necessarily agree with this point, lets take a gander at how Dr. Livingston defines individuality. Simply, he argues that individuals are only individuals so far as they belong to a group. By Dr. Livingston’s own assumptions, there really is no individual without a group. That is the negation of the meaning of individuality.

His next defining characteristic is equality. He feels that conservatism does not provide for equality because it fails to recognize and cope with the differences in situations of people. What you see consistently in conservatism as an ideology is the affirmation in the individual. Conservatives recognize that there are differences between people, but in the end those balance out. We all have hardships and burdens to overcome. What conservatism tries to accomplish is the empowerment of the individual by removing the yoke of big paternalistic government.

His next descriptive quality of liberalism is that it affirms pluralism. This he defines as meaning that certain groups will be able to get together and get some representation, place stress on distance from Washington. In the words of Richard Nixon from the 1960 debates, "lets look at the record." The biggest expansion of government spending was done under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Another gigantic spender was Lyndon Baines Johnson. Both men were diehard liberals. After they left office, it was clear that the state governments had lost significant amounts of control and the government had become more centralized. This is a major theme one notices in the history of liberalism: state centralization. State centralization in the end eventually kills the power of the small groups that Dr. Livingston affirms the value of. (Just ask yourself the question: who holds more power? the federal bureaucracy or a small urban uplift society.)

Reform is his next area of focus. This however is not simply an issue of liberalism over conservatism. Reform is the mistress of the party out of power. More than that though, the record will show that both reform and corruption follow in the foot steps of an expanding government and centralized power for two reasons: the corrupting influence of power and the patronage system. To accomplish many of the goals Dr. Livingston lays out requires a large federal bureaucracy. This has been the consistent legacy of liberalism, from James Madison to FDR. When this happens, to satisfy political demands of running the party many positions are given out to party loyalists. The paternalism of liberalism mutates into a dangerous and corrupt patron-client relationship, the very same relationship that reform is supposed to dissolve.

The last hurrah of Dr. Livingston’s explanation of liberalism is the claim that conservatives believe that liberty and equality are incompatible, that liberals believe in a more “just” society. This however is not really representative of conservative ethos. What conservatives believe is that people are inherently equal as human beings and they should have the freedom of choice to do with their lives what they want, not have a large, centralized, out of touch federal government give them orders.

The end of Dr. Livingston’s article really captures the major flaw with current liberalism, how really out of touch it is with the American people it claims to represent and how blind it is to the result of it’s own conclusions. He claims that the left has “won” the culture wars and that conservatism is a “losing proposition” in cultural politics. Apparently Dr. Livingston was out of commission this past Election Day. A gigantic part of George W. Bush’s campaign was on the conservative view on culture. And many pollsters and pundits have claimed that the conservative “moral vision” on the family and culture was a major factor in his reelection. While conservatives may claim to be losing the fight, that is just to combat complacency. If liberals derive anything from their defeat it is the need to get back in touch with America and rewrite a plan for its future rather than claim false victory.

How to Talk to a Conservative--If You Must

2004-12-01T09:23:00.000-08:00

Here is my second column for The Centurion, the new conservative student publication at Rutgers. We--the boys on this weird bus and I--had to thrash out a compromise on a "reply" to said column. I resisted until I read the thing, and then I thought, oh man, we're shooting fish in a barrel: maybe these people are as clueless as we thought they were. I wrote a mean-spirited rebuttal, which I will post, along with the "reply," when I figure out how--that is, when my daughter shows me how. Attentive reader(s) will know that I have plagiarized myself from the Kerry speech posted long ago.

In addition to being a Marxist, a socialist, a feminist, a pragmatist, and a post-modernist, I’m a liberal. These seemingly incompatible commitments are, in fact, perfectly consistent, because all of them specify society, not political action, as the site of self-discovery and self-government.

I agree with Newt Gingrich in thinking that liberalism is the hidden transcript of American politics and culture. For it is hard to find anyone who would disavow what I would call the five fundamental principles of modern liberalism.

As a liberal, I believe, first, in the founding principle of American politics—the sovereignty of the people, not the party, government, or state. Like liberals since Adam Smith and James Madison, I believe in the supremacy of society over the state.

Second, I believe in individualism. Our identities and opportunities should not be determined by the class or the race or the gender—or the country—we were born into. Those identities and opportunities should instead be the result of our natural talents, our learned skills, our past efforts. But some of us may need extra help in developing our skills, and joining the mainstream of American society, because in the past we’ve been excluded from certain places, jobs, and schools.

As a liberal, I insist it is a mere perversion of the idea of equality to say that it is the result of treating everyone exactly the same. If we expect women to bear and raise children, for example, equal opportunity for them in the labor market will require us to acknowledge that this cultural difference of expectation between men and women creates a practical disadvantage for women who want or need to enter the labor market. When we continue to treat men and women the same in view of that acknowledgment, we are producing inequality by giving men a practical advantage.

Third, I believe in pluralism. Democracy is not just a political system. Liberty and equality for everyone means that certain groups must be able to represent their collective interests and identities in society, far from the halls of Congress, before and after the next election, especially if those identities and interests have hitherto appeared as illegitimate (for example, the identities and interests of working people in and through their trade unions, or the identities and interests of black folk in and through their public bodies and associations—let us remember that these forms of representation became normal and legitimate only within the last seventy years).

Fourth, I believe in reform. I believe in our ability to make progress, to foster economic growth, to enable social mobility, and to meet social needs, by combining private initiative and public policy. Since the Progressive Era, liberals like me have insisted that market forces and government power are not the terms of an either/or choice. We know they can and should be harnessed together for the common good.

Fifth, I believe, along with the founding fathers, that liberty and equality are not mutually exclusive categories or commitments. They knew that a free society can and must be a just society—otherwise it would devolve, as James Madison understood, into an oligarchy that sacrificed the rights of persons to the rights of property, “the poor to the rich” in his words. As Irving Kristol has pointed out, Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, conservative icons indeed, are among the very few intellectuals of the 20th century who repudiated this liberal principle.

But if liberalism is as unobjectionably mainstream as this citation of principles would suggest, why are liberals in retreat before the rising red tide? Or are they? Let us keep in mind the simple fact that the Left has won the culture wars (according to all accounts, including the Right’s)—which is to say that the liberal values of inclusion, acceptance, and equality have carried the day in matters of race, gender, and sexuality. “Out of doors,” in civil society, in cultural politics, conservatism is a losing proposition, regardless of what Rush, Sean, Ann, and Laura are ranting about today. People born after 1943 don’t pay attention to the angry antics of talk radio when it comes to so-called moral values.

It is nevertheless true that public policy is now more deeply informed by pre-Keynesian, post-liberal assumptions than twenty or thirty years ago. There is still no debate about the ends of fiscal and monetary policy (recall George W. Bush’s acceptance speech, a laundry list of federal contributions to upward mobility), but there are fundamental differences about the means to those ends. And here I think the substantive, (re)distributive vision of recent liberalism is what the so-called conservatives are fighting. As far as they are concerned, since the 1970s it has been either difficult or pointless to distinguish between liberals and socialists. The external threat of communism has expired, from their standpoint, but the internal threat of socialism remains in the form of liberalism.

I am inclined to agree with this view of things for three reasons. First, it helps us understand the otherwise incomprehensible ferocity of right-wing attacks on liberals and liberalism. Second, it alerts us to the possibility that since the 1960s, liberalism in the US has become a great deal more than its left-wing critics would allow (it’s way too individualistic, too procedural, etc., they say)—it alerts us to the possibility that liberalism here has become the equivalent of European social democracy. Finally, this seemingly paranoid view of contemporary liberalism tells us why it’s worth, er, well, conserving.

Election Blues, Part I

2004-11-27T13:07:00.000-08:00

Below please find a letter from my old friend Steve Usselman to his daughter Karen, who attends the University of Georgia. Steve teaches US history at Georgia Tech (his 2003 Cambridge book, Regulating Railroad Innovation, won the Ellis Hawley prize of the Organization of American Historians), and is better equipped than most of us to think through the recent debacle. So I thought we'd start our election "coverage" with this bracing letter.

I'm less depressed than most of my academic and building trades friends because the Left continues to win on the cultural issues--for confirmation of this seemingly anomalous but clearly measurable victory, see Frank Rich's columns of the last three weeks in the Arts ection of the Sunday NYT. Even Nicholas Kristof, who cited the dreaded Thomas Frank the morning after, acknowledged in his column that the liberals had been able to neutralize the abortion issue. Almost everything I've read since then also suggests that the valence of "moral values" in voters' decisions was much less important than the post-election teeth gnashing among liberal leftists would indicate. In fact, Rich points out in tomorrow's column that a larger percentage of voters cited this dubious category in 1996 and 2000.

Here's the letter.

Hi, Karen. Well, that sure was a bummer. I stayed up until 3:30 (trying to hold on long enough to make sure Bush didn't win Wisconsin; if he had, he might have been able to win without Ohio), then was up again at 6:30 listening to NPR.

So, once again I find myself trying to get some perspective on the morning after. Four years ago this meant going back to 1892 and 1916 to find coalitions of states that mapped almost precisely to 2000, except with the parties completely inverted. This time what most immediately interested me was 1988 and the Bush I - Michael Dukakis election. (You can find these maps yourself at fisher.lib.virginia.edu/ collections/stats/elections/maps/). I wanted to know two things: was the popular vote against Dukakis in the South so overwhelming as that against Kerry, and how did Dukakis do in the electoral tally? It turns out Dukakis got 40% or less in much of the South, too. He did not do quite as poorly as Kerry, but then, the South was not so dominated by Republicans back then and the Republicans did not go to such lengths to mobilize the conservative Christian vote. (This mobilization is the new wrinkle that Rove has introduced in American politics. It is the most disturbing thing about yesterday's results, though it remains to be seen whether this will work when the incumbent cannot so easily wrap himself in God and country. We won't be listening to God Bless America during the seventh inning stretch of every postseason baseball game four years from now. At least I hope not.)

The crucial point is this: the South just hates Boston Democrats, and this accounts for much of the shift in the total popular vote from 2000. (Rove again was clever to take the latest liberal social issue coming out of Massachusetts -- gay marriage -- and use it to score huge points against the local boy on the national scene. Rove apprenticed with Lee Atwater, who ran Bush I's campaign, which featured the infamous "Willie Horton" ad, a racist number that drew attention to a Massachusetts prison release program -- another sign of misguided Northern urban liberal softness and excessive tolerance toward others, at least in the eyes of many conservatives, esp. those in rural areas.)

As for the matter of how many states Dukakis won, you will see from the maps that in fact Kerry did much, much better. Unlike Kerry, Dukakis could not hold CA or Illinois or Michigan or Pennsylvania or Maryland and Delaware or northern New England. In New Economy areas with high levels of education and tolerance, then, the Democrats continue to gain in strength over the Reagan years. Bush II is NOT leading a Reagan resurgence in these areas.

That's my key message: Bush II is NOT leading a Reagan resurgence.

That's my basic take on the election. I have some other small bites. One is my growing concern that the American Catholic Church is becoming aligned with fundamentalists, at least in some quarters. Catholics were once a core component of a class-based alliance that looked for the federal government to redistribute economic power (e.g., by supporting unions). Reagan loosened that alliance by questioning whether government was really working for the economic interests of Catholics; now Rove has discovered that some hot-button social issues might mobilize Catholics toward the conservative coalition. Some American bishops are willing to aid in this -- to a greater extent, interestingly, than are their colleagues in Rome.

Another small thing: Kerry did terribly among older voters. I think this reflects Bush's success in taking social security out of play (by signing the drug benefit and running up the deficit) and focusing on security issues. To some extent, this is an echo from 9/11. Old people are susceptible to fear tactics. The prime fear has typically been a perceived threat to a critical government benefit; now it is a perceived vulnerability to attack. Something of the same thing is happening with women; fear of attack is trumping fear of a loss of economic security for children and loss of control over one's body (and the bodies of one's daughters). This, too, is an echo of 9/11.

Finally, looking to the other end of the age spectrum, is the curious fact that young people, despite all the hoopla, did not participate in the election. Mom says she heard on NPR that only 1 in 10 Americans ages 18-24 voted. Any ideas on why this is so? In part, I think it reflects what you have experienced in Young Dems: the people on the campuses who are engaged in politics are really interested in it as a profession; they are not engaged by ideas but by tactics. The overwhelming emphasis on tactics in the last two campaigns has only made this worse. But I also think politics is dominated right now by a culture war that goes back to the 1960s and Vietnam. Both sides are battling to touch key symbols that speak to an enduring cultural divide within the baby boom generation (and, to some degree, its parent's generation as well). My sense is that your generation just cannot comprehend what's going on. Which brings me to what I REALLY want to know: what do YOU think? What WOULD make politics relevant to your generation? As someone who plans to spend many more years teaching young people, I desperately need to get a better grasp on this. Please help.

Love,
Dad

Why I'm Advising a Conservative Student Organization

2004-11-24T09:51:00.000-08:00

Here's my first column for The Centurion, the brand new student publication at Rutgers. It's the brainchild of James O'Keefe, who couldn't find a conservative to advise his organization (see previous post on this). I must say the first issue was pretty funny, in both senses--a lot of white male hysteria, on the one hand, a lot of disconcerting analogies, on the other (for example, a graphic comparison between Dred Scott v. Sanford and Roe v. Wade which would be hilarious except that they mean it).

The deal I struck with James was that I'd be the advisor as long as he ran my column without changes in every issue of the publication. The first issue put me at the back of the book, quite appropriate, but my page had a gray, barley noticeable hammer and sickle as background. Kind of a reply, I guess.

The upcoming issue has another column from me entitled "How to Talk to a Conservative--If You Must," but young James wants to renege on the original deal by running a reply. I met with the executive board Monday night and explained that this was not the original deal, viz., I don't care what you say, and you don't care what I say, and that's that. Everybody gets left alone: laissez-faire redux! Their fears are that the column both negates their opinions and appeals to the liberal majority among students here, making them, members of the besieged conservative minority, somehow laughable rather than, as they had hoped, rigorous and righteous bearers of intellectual rectitude.

The pictures of the founders in the inaugural edition look like parodies of yearbook pictures, all jutting chins in profile or confident tuxedo smiles, except of course the one of Justine, the lesbian who does the photography, the cartoons, the design, and the layout. The top of her glasses bisects her eyes about halfway down from her unruly hair. The camera she's holding covers everything else. Like most feminists, she insists that "Sexual preference is a personal aspect of our lives that should be give minimal attention by the government," and, accordingly, that she "do[es]n't agree with amending the constituion to didtate civil rights." The sidebar says "I'm defined by my values. Not my sexuality." As I read them, those values are straight out of John Stuart Mill: quite liberal, thus verging on socialist principles. But she's found a home here, among guys who believe that equality is a bad idea.

I told them they had to review "The Incredibles," the animated objectivist manifesto, in their next issue, just to demonstrate this bizarrely anti-American belief, but they're so weirdly elitist--so out of touch with popular culture--that none of them had seen it. They reminded me, at that moment, of Mark Lilla's characterization of the second-generation Straussians in the same issue of NYRB that carried Tony Judt's myopic piece on Dreams of Empire: "now they [the Straussians] are in the grip of an apocalyptic vision of post-Sixties America that prevents them from contributing anything constructive to our culture."

By admitting they don't live on the same planet I do, where Ayn Rand and Nicholson Baker are treated as novelists, not social theorists, and where movies are the mainstream of literacy, these young conservatives also reminded me of the sectarian Leftists that now try to run academia: absolutely certain of their truths, completely ignorant of ideas that don't accord with the received wisdom. I hope they don't take over.

My apologies, dear reader, and yes, you're still singular in every sense, as if you were a muse, I do digress. Here's the column.

I’m a Marxist, a socialist, a feminist, and a pragmatic postmodernist. So why did I agree to become the faculty advisor of an avowedly conservative student organization? Two reasons. First, no one else would do it. That is not surprising, of course. By now we all know that the pilot disciplines in the Arts & Sciences are dominated by leftists of one kind or another. Certainly departments of History, Literature, Anthropology, Political Science, and Sociology are—not just at Rutgers, but throughout the nation. Departments of Economics and of Philosophy are more politically ambiguous, but they are less visible on campus and in the larger world. Little wonder that James O’Keefe and Brian Karch had a hard time tracking down someone who would lend his or her name to their conservative enterprise.

Second, conservatism is a valuable political resource at any time, but it is especially valuable just now, at a moment of rapid change—at a moment when cloning and other genetic experiments have become practical questions, when a century of precedent and principle in U.S. foreign policy has been overturned, when radicalism of every kind, on the Left and the Right, seems normal. Conservatives revere the past, and caution us against our American urge to discard customs, rituals, and traditions because they do not conform to the standards of contemporary reason. They object to “social engineering” informed only by zealous devotion to the common good because they understand that unintended consequences often obliterate originally noble purposes. In short, they remind us of what we stand to lose when we want change.

So conservatives deserve a respectful hearing from us liberals, socialists, and radicals. But who’s a conservative these days? George W. Bush wants to privatize Social Security, abolish the income tax, amend the Constitution to prohibit gay marriage, and create a new American Century by fighting preemptive wars. He is not a conservative; he’s a radical who wants to repudiate, not reclaim, the past. Does that make John Kerry, a man of the Left, more conservative than his opponent? You betcha.

The editors of The Centurion tell me they believe in utilitarianism, objectivism, and original intent. How conservative are these beliefs? Utilitarianism—“the greatest good of the greatest number”—would have scared the founding fathers, who feared an “elective despotism” because they knew that majority rule (the greatest number) was not necessarily consistent with justice, and that popular government would last only if it served the cause of justice by soliciting the consent of the governed. Objectivism, the obscure doctrine invented by the novelist Ayn Rand, is an extreme form of “radical individualism”—it is precisely what conservatives such as Robert Bork, George Gilder, Michael Novak, and William Bennett cite as the primary source of cultural decay in the late-20th century.

And then there is original intent. The wonderful irony of this concept is that it is the result of exquisitely complicated intellectual artifice dating back to the late-18th century. There is no such thing as original intent, in other words, in the absence of argument about it in the aftermath of the founding. There has never been any unanimity about what it was, because there can’t be. For the founders themselves disagreed about the purposes of their new nation, as the conflict between “Hamiltonian” and “Jeffersonian” programs in the 1790s (and after) demonstrates. These purposes are, then, a product of continuing reinterpretation, or rather they just are this reinterpretation—there is no difference between the perception and the practical consequences of “original intent.”

If you believe that the founders had the last word, for example, you will probably not believe in the rights of privacy and sexuality recently enunciated by federal courts. But you will nonetheless be engaged in an argument, because you will have to defend your interpretation of the “original” language against another interpretation. Whether it’s the Constitution or the Bible, there are rival accounts of the same text, and all you have is the words on the pages in question. To convince others that your account is better than theirs, you have to do more than recite those words.

Think of the debate about the Constitution that Lincoln changed between 1854 and 1860. By the mid-1850s, conservatives in the North had fallen back to a constitutional defense of the status quo—slavery was sanctioned by the 3/5 clause of the Constitution, they said, so that any ideological agitation or legislative movement against it was a challenge to the legal basis and the political legitimacy of the United States as such (not to mention white supremacy). Radicals in the North, mainly abolitionists, had long since repudiated the Constitution as a blood-stained document on the very same grounds, that it sanctioned slavery. They wanted to challenge the legal basis and the political legitimacy of the United States, and they did so by claiming that the Constitution was an unnecessary and unforgivable departure from the egalitarian principles of the Declaration of Independence.

The conservatives and the radicals agreed on one thing—they assumed that there was no way to treat the Constitution and the Declaration as politically commensurable or intellectually continuous documents. Lincoln changed everything by proving that this assumption was false. From the Peoria speech of October 1854 to the Cooper Union address of February 1860, he insisted that a clear majority of the founders (those who actually made the Revolution, wrote the Constitution, and led the new nation into the 1820s) were committed to the eventual extinction of slavery. That is why they excluded it from the territories by Congressional acts such as the Northwest Ordinance—the first legislative act of the very first Congress—and why those founders who later served in the national government kept restricting its spread by legislative action.

By this account, both the Declaration and the Constitution could be cited as anti-slavery texts, and could therefore be understood as politically commensurable and intellectually continuous documents. To put it another way, the ethical ideal announced but not accomplished by the Declaration (“all men are created equal”) was consistent with the historical reality permitted and determined by the Constitutional settlement. Lincoln was, in this sense, deducing “ought” from “is,” value from fact—a move that neither politicians nor philosophers are supposed to make.

Thus Lincoln had positioned himself as both a radical who would not compromise on the Declaration’s incendiary insistence on equality and a conservative who would not forfeit the Constitution’s protections of enumerated and established rights. That position, that synthesis, was revolutionary in its time. Rather than insisting on an either/or choice between radicalism and conservatism, we should be searching for a similar synthesis in these interesting times. At any rate, we should understand that when we choose between radicalism and conservatism, we steer our fellow citizens toward a political dead end.

Atlanta to Baghdad

2004-11-16T06:29:00.000-08:00

So there I am in this bar in the Atlanta airport, Concourse D, waiting for my 7:45 flight, having arrived at 5:00 in the hope of getting an earlier one and discovering (duh) that you can't check a bag on one flight and get on another. Everywhere the evidence of our interesting times--long lines, anxious faces, small arms, sounds of fear, anger, frustration from both passengers and TSA personnel, huge machines that ingest luggage, and especially the hundreds of soldiers in desert fatigues. They crowd the back room of this small bar (maximum capacity 50, the sign says) where Taya, Marlon, and Ellie, the bartenders, will let them smoke.

Actually, I got to the airport long before 5:00, but there were many obstacles between me and Concourse D. To begin with, my driver's license expired at the end of October. So after a half-hour wait in the line that screens coach passengers, I'm told, "No, sir, we can't even let you through security, you hafta go back to Continental and see what they say." The kind folks at Continental say, "Ooh, you gotta renew this thing, son," mark my boarding pass with a sinister SSSS, cut me into the first-class line, then deliver me unto the glass hallway for the dangerous and benighted and posssibly unlawful. I'm thinking cavity search at this point, but I see no curtains ahead, and lo, a bright young man opens the door and asks me to sit down and take off my shoes. Then I stand and hold the arms out, as directed, for the ceremonial waving of the metal-detecting wand, all in full view of other passengers and TSA types.

But he looks worried after several passes, so I am, too. Maybe this isn't just ritual. Maybe I am dangerous and benighted and possibly unlawful; after all, my driver's license has expired. He finally says, "There's something here," pointing to my right front pants pocket. I dig around in there among the folds for about 20 seconds, starting to sweat--even asking myself "What am I concealing?"--and come up with a dime. I hold it up happily, I can feel myself starting to grin madly, and I ask, in all innocence, "Could this set off your wand?"

He looks at me suspiciously, then looks down and shakes his head as if to say, "Nobody understands this device." Instead he says, "You're good to go, sir, I just gotta have a look at your briefcase." The phone recharger gets a serious tapping, but after that he's going through the motions.

Clear sailing to Concourse D, and finally to Sojourner's, the bar next to my gate. There's a complicated rope line that fends off the unwitting patrons who want to just walk up to the bar from the corridor, and there's a sign that says Please Wait to be Seated at the narrow entrance created by the ropes. I lean over the guy in front of me and say, "Fucking Atlanta, what is this? There's two seats at the bar." He turns and says, "Yeah, that's the non-smoking section. But you better wait to be seated, these people are serious, they'll remove you."

So we wait for those seats. Once we're in them, we are real estate barons: we have more room and more access to the bartenders than anyone else in the place. We're suddenly pivotal figures in the unfolding drama of a place that contains a lot of drunken soldiers on the way to Iraq.

There's about 25 of them back there in the smoking section, but they come and go, typically without any directions from Taya, Marlon, and Ellie, who are otherwise vigilant in enforcing the rule of waiting to be seated. Actually, a lot of people are not seated--they're assigned a highly specific place on the walls near the bar, at counters, where they can stand and smoke as long as they spend $3.75 on a beverage. Beer is $4.50, Absolut is $8.50, so many of these transients in need of a smoke (you can't do it out there in Concourse D) choose a bottle of Coke. Those who are standing at the counters put the place well over its maximum capacity; they're mostly soldiers and they all smoke. It is not unpleasant. The smell of burning tobacco reminds me of home--not the home I'm headed for, no, the original one, where everybody smoked all the time--and so it makes me want to have another beer. It lets me look at these young men without grimacing, without remembering that my kids are old enough to be in uniform.

The guy I waited to be seated with is Jeff. He runs a Yamaha dealership in North Miami. He's pissed at AirTran for taking nine hours to get him to Atlanta on Friday. He's pissed at Bush for starting a war that wasn't necessary. But he has a face that deflects any anger--he looks away, toward the mirror behind the bar, or at the TV behind us, when I turn toward him with questions about politics, and when he does turn toward me, he looks over my right shoulder as he talks. As he should. This is a bar, not a seminar. The guy to my right is Warren, who runs a printing business in Massachusetts and owns a horse farm as well as a residence in New Hampshire. He's pissed at the bartenders for offering him Bud Light or Killian's Red. He's a Republican, he says, and he's going to leave because he can't drink that swill. But he has a Bud in a 23-ounce glass, and then he relaxes a little. At least his shoulders sag and his body starts to curl forward; he looks like a student who wants to nap in class. Sure enough, he puts his forearms on the bar and lowers his head.

Me, I'm pissed that there's a really loud man in an Izod golf shirt and expensive slacks walking up and down in the smoking section, announcing that he's from Jersey and that he's buying a round for the "boys in suits." Suits? Christ, I'm in a suit, these poor bastards are in uniforms, and they're on their way to hell, why is this asshole calling attention to himself, and, for that matter, to New Jersey? But then I think, what a good idea, they should drink for free while they're alive in such a godforsaken place. Atlanta, that is, where the downtown concierges have brochures explaining how to take a tour of CNN, and the adjacent airport, where nothing works except the trains and the toilets.

I rouse Warren, but he leaves, muttering about Budweiser. I turn to Jeff and say, "Let's buy these poor fucks a drink before they're dead." He says, "C'mon, man, they're already drunk." And he's right. But I don't care, they should be. So I persuade him to go halves on a round for the soldiers in desert fatigues. We both insist that this must be an anonymous gift, and Taya, the genius who turns out to be the manager of the place as well as bartender par excellence, figures out the tab (this is a woman who should be running Microsoft--everything in her head, everything under control). We use our credit cards to split it. Jeff says, "I'm gonna write it off, anyway. Hell, this is a business trip." And I think, damn straight, me, too. My way of supporting our troops.

But once we pay, we're public, because Taya very discreetly tells a couple of the boys at the counter on the wall under the TV, and then it's handshakes and fives all around. They're giddy, these boys--they've been in the airport since 7:00 AM, and the bar opened at 11:00, I believe. Sam Benton and John Dungan, First Infantry Division. Sam is older, wiser, darker; John the blond buzzcut with the big nose is clearly a piece of work, the kind of guy bouncers and bartenders want to bind and gag upon entry. Sam was a steelworker who joined the Army because he hurt his back and couldn't get any work. John was, and is, a redneck who joined for fun and adventure: "for the heck of it," as he put it. They're equally disturbing because they're both seething with some strange athletic energy--they might as well be two football players in the locker room right before a game, banging each other's pads to shed their fear. Not that they have anything to fear in this place. Here they might as well be giants.

Sam's eyes suddenly light up. He reaches into his backpack, pulls out a small, sleek laptop, puts it on the bar in front of Jeff, turns it so I can see the screen without leaning, and says, "Company's greatest hits, baby, this is the shit you won't see on CNN. Watch now, wait a minute, let me get this goin' here, all right. Gotta have the soundtrack." John's head starts bobbing as Sam adjusts the settings. The music is part heavy metal, part hip-hop, all male: crunching chords, screeching solos, staccato vocals. All the music stops and starts, but it still bridges the gaps between the images now on screen. These are images of this war, their war. They've already been to Baghdad, they're ready to go back, and they want us to see what they have seen. It's too late to say no.

There are stills and there are moving pictures. The stills are in color, heads and torsos of First Infantry friends sticking out of armored vehicles, posing for the digital camera in a glaring, sand-scoured landscape that looks so desolate it serves nicely as mere backdrop--the kind of barely contoured canvas photographers drape behind models--to the figures who dominate the frame.

The moving pictures are black and white because they they were mostly shot at night, with infrared lenses. We watch from above as insurgents clutching their weapons run across a square beneath a statue, trying, and failing, to avoid American fire. We watch as a man hides, motionless, behind a truck, hoping he cannot be seen. Sam says, "They think we can't see 'em, but we don't need to. Watch, all he's got to do is move and the heat sensors show us exactly where he is. We just wait and, see, there he is, boom! That's what I'm talkin' about."

High fives all around. Me, too, I'm impressed with the technology sitting on the bar and killing people in Iraq. Finally, I'm acting locally and thinking globally.

But then there is the repeated close-range image of the insurgent being dismembered by American fire. This was the company's greatest hit, presumably, because it appeared three times in a ten-minute video. No bird's eye view this time: we see the man from his left, at about 150 feet, as he is felled by fire from our left. When he falls backward, his arms open wide and his left arm is blown off--it sails off screen, drawing our attention from his collapse as a moving corpse onto the curb behind him.

Maybe that's why we needed to see it three times. Maybe that's why the volume of Sam and John's whooping diminished as we got to the last time. Maybe that's why I went to the bathroom. Jeff saved my seat. Then he went, too.

The Question of Competence

2004-09-29T18:57:00.000-07:00

I’m a registered Democrat (I think), a Kerry supporter, a founding member of Historians Against the War, and I’m uncomfortable with the claim that George W. Bush is incompetent. It is a claim that clearly appeals to those who have long believed that this president lacks the intelligence to lead us (on which see the September issue of The American Prospect, esp. the piece by Matthew Yglesias, who is deeply offended by Bush’s lack of intellectual gravitas and curiosity). It is a claim that also appeals to those who think that the MBA president who has surrounded himself with secretive CEO types should be “fired” for “mismanaging” the war in Iraq; at the very least, they argue, he should fire those who misled him—and us—about the purposes and consequences of an American occupation. As my dentist (he voted for Bush in 2000) put it yesterday, “If he’s the president of GE, the stockholders yank him. We gotta do the same thing. It’s our company, not his.”

Yes, I did remonstrate about the corporate analogy, even though I kind of like it because I think Kenneth Burke would have. But I also tried, I would say valiantly under the painful circumstances, to suggest that the claim of incompetence diverts us from discussion of root causes and real alternatives—it obscures the ideological sources of this war and puts us all in the position of providing solutions for the problems Bush has created by waging war. It emphasizes “bad apples,” glaring errors, technical problems, and the like, and in doing so it follows the script the administration has written in response to the revelations about Abu Ghraib: “Mistakes were made, of course, but the mission itself is beyond reproach. And, oh, don’t forget, we’ve court-martialed the rednecks who did the despicable deeds.”

To be sure, this was a “war of choice” based on faulty or fabricated intelligence. The original mistakes have now metastasized. But this was also, and more significantly, a war designed to demonstrate the feasibility of a radically new strategic doctrine—it is a war derived from an ideological urge to use American military power in unprecedented ways. That urge was not an ad hoc commitment concocted in the heat of battle against Al Qaeda after 9/11. Nor was it a function of the president’s Oedipal struggle with his father’s foreign policies.

No, this urge to make war in Iraq was devised by what is now Bush’s inner circle in the decade before March 2003. More important, it repudiated a century of American foreign policy (1) by defining power in narrowly military terms, thus reintroducing “great power politics”; (2) by adopting a unilateral notion of national security; and (3) by reverting to pre-emption as the necessary tactic of just wars against unconventional enemies (for example, the pre-emptive strikes of the Indian Wars, the Philippine occupation, and the Vietnam War). See Max Boot, Robert Kaplan, and John Lewis Gaddis for specious but often hilarious defenses of this atavism: "Hey, we've always done this, man, what's the problem, we used to kill Indians! Aren't you watching the History Channel? No? How about Fox? Oh, yeah, well, we've kicked ass for a lot of years."

Yeah, well, we should be discussing the radical new doctrine, not the energy or the efficiency or the smarts with which it has been pursued. We should be asking how and why it puts all Americans at risk by its reckless disregard for the post-imperial principles and trans-national standards the U.S. has been proposing since 1900. Otherwise we are merely reinstating the assumptions and reiterating the conclusions of Bush’s critics at the Weekly Standard: “Good idea, bad execution.” Otherwise we are merely reproducing the wrong criticism of that longest war in Asia that was often called a mistake. You remember how it goes: “Fighting communism in Vietnam was the right strategic goal, but the military tactics we used ultimately made the goal unattainable.” Robert Bork and Richard Rorty agree on this. We shouldn’t.

For the time being, we must protect our troops (our fellow citizens) with the technical and logistical means available. But we can’t confuse ends and means, strategy and tactics. Let us understand that the shortages of troops, morale, materiel, and popular support in Iraq are the results of arrogance, not idiocy, and that the arrogance flows from the ideological imperatives of the new strategic doctrine, not from intellectual incapacity. Let us understand that we need an “exit strategy” not just from Iraq but from the doctrine that put us in there. Let us understand, in short, that the Bush administration is not incompetent. Using the talents of the best and the brightest, it is quite competently pursuing untenable goals.

What's the Matter with Thomas Frank, Cont'd?

2004-09-15T10:08:00.000-07:00

Clearly I'm still not getting it. The Frank argument may be summarized as follows.

(1) Kansas has been ruled by the Republican Party since 1860, and the Republican Party has not been exactly progressive (in contemporary terms) since, oh, about 1936. (2) Kansas has recently been galvanized by a new offshoot of Republican conservatism, which foregrounds cultural rather than economic issues--for example, issues of abortion rights, drugs, crime, family values. (3) The neo-liberals such as Clinton-Gore-Lieberman have collaborated with the conservatives in this insidious and invidious endeavor by taking economic (read: class) issues "off the table" (see 176, 242-50) and pursuing the New Democratic voters among the white-collar crowd. (4) False consciousness accounts for the political myopia of poor and working-class voters in Kansas, while "insincerity" (235) accounts for the egregious prevarications of the new conservatives (the "Cons"). (5) Kansas is not the country at large. "But it is also true that things that begin in Kansas--the Civil War, Prohibition, Populism, Pizza Hut--have a historical tendency to go national" (248).

So get ready for the backlash on a national scale, Tom tells us, because, well, because Kansas has been acting kind of reactionary for a while. Ever since the 1920s. Hmm. It doesn't sound very convincing to me, or to anyone who's not invested in the idea that the conservatives are carrying the day. And here's the thing. Not even the paranoid Thomas Frank thinks they are--again, according to his own research, they've already lost the culture wars.

Look at the states that used to form the imperial metropole of the late-19th century (this is not my idea, it's that of writers in the 1890s who were trying to explain the regional conflict that was first politically and then verbally condensed as the Populist Revolt): north of the Ohio River, from Illinois through Pennsylvania and New York to Massachusetts, from Chicago through Philadelphia and New York to Boston. Republicans in these parts of the world have until very recently been "tax-and-spend liberals," but whether they've kept this fiscal faith or not is irrelevant to the simple fact that none of them (not Rudy, not George, not Mitt) is willing to go down the road mapped by Frank. (Arnold in California is another example.) They can't play the culture card here, and they won't, and they can't win on the fiscal front, either, even if they want to try, because the public sector and its keepers and benefits are so visible and powerful.

So what's the matter with Kansas--false consciousness and its attendant insincerity-- cannot soon overtake the Northeastern states (Illinois to Mass), perhaps because Populism never took root there. Where else might these inauthentic illnesses install themselves? Got me. Maybe in the South and West, say, Alabama to Texas (it gets ambiguous farther west) and in the depopulating regions of the northern plains. But where the votes are? Nah. John Judis has it nailed here in his book on the emerging Democratic majority.

What's left of this book's argument? Nothing except congratulations to those who believe that the American electorate is at best irrational and, at worst, dangerous. Welcome to the world as understood by those who, like Thomas Frank, got a proper education.

Conservatism on Campus

2004-09-10T08:19:00.000-07:00

No, I'm not finished yet with Thomas Frank's very funny book. But I had an oddly interesting experience this past week that actually bears on the content of this blog. A junior philosophy major here at Rutgers wrote me an email, inviting me to become the faculty advisor of a new student organization (if you're going to get a share of student fee money, you need to have one). Actually, he was begging me to do so, because nobody would give him the time of day. He was desperate, and he said so. Not an auspicious beginning, I admit, but I said, OK, let's talk. I figured, what the hell, it's like every academic job search, you get what you can.

You might be wondering why nobody would even entertain the possibility of advising this new and clearly earnest organization. You will not be surprised: it's an avowedly CONSERVATIVE organization. The two would-be founding fathers, with whom I met on Wednesday, are almost paranoid about their minority status on campus, but it seems that their anxieties are not symptoms of madness. From their standpoint, there are no faculty and almost no students who agree with them--the reception their ideas get in classrooms and in conversation is invariably hostile, they said, so they feel like exiles at their own state university. I think they're accurately depicting their situation. Which is to say that the Left rules higher education.

We talked for an hour. I wanted to know if they were crazy--it's always a bad idea to be associated with such people--and found that they were bright young men with all kinds of weird ideas about liberty, contract, and Bentham (made me think of Marx's hilarious footnote in vol. 1 of Capital). They call themselves conservatives, and they're right to use the label, but they sure do sound like John Stuart Mill, as against, say, Edmund Burke. They like liberty, progress, reform. They think that amending the Constitution to outlaw gay marriage is foolish. They're partisans of utilitarianism, and OK, objectivism as well. Still, their version of what they called "traditional conservatism" didn't sound very conservative.

When we got around to the hot topic of big government, they expressed dismay at W's expansion of spending and deficits. Like Floyd Norris at the New York Times, they have noticed that government has grown rather impressively under Bush II (back in 1980, before the "Reagan Revolution," about 18% of the labor force was directly employed by all levels of government; according to Norris, the current figure is 17.4%, up from 16% in 2000). We never got to foreign policy, so I never was able to ask about the possible trade-off of defense and domestic spending, but they're clearly worried about the Leviathan in waiting.

Our conversation on taxes was truly enlightening. I have never been able to decipher the emotional energy that goes into conservative utterance on taxation. The "starve the beast" approach works for Grover Norquist and a few other Bolsheviks, all of whom have gravitated to the truly demented Club for Growth, but for the groundlings like these two kids--one of them does his parents' taxes--the goal is not the Leninist dream ("the withering away of the state": you can read this line, I swear it, in The State and Revolution). It is instead the equally unattainable dream of stopping socialism and thereby restoring an intelligible relation between effort and reward (or, conceived in terms of crime and punishment, between transgression and penalty).

How so? I ask, "So, what's the big deal about taxes? I don't get it when Hannity goes off." The answer: Taxes=Redistribution. At the local level, property taxes are obviously earmarked for education, that is, for the schools within walking or driving distance. They're egregious, they're ridiculous, but you can see them at work. And you also know that they're offset by that old mortgage deduction, so you pay 'em and you hope the real estate market doesn't ruin your retirement.

But entitlements are another category altogether. Wages without work are anathema to this crowd. Or turn it around. The kid who does his parents' taxes says, "My mom, she's a teacher, she's paying 40% of her income to taxes, where does it go? Who's getting her money?" I want to say, well, she is, if she's working in a public school, and her neighbors are, too, in the form of roads, buildings, and services the private sector can't provide. But I don't say anything because what is happening here is an emotionally charged drama that echoes the Hannity chants about taxes. What they're saying is, "Let my reward be proportionate to my effort, don't give my hard-earned dollars to someone who hasn't expended the same effort." In other words: don't let socialism ruin the American dream. They're also saying, by the same token, "Make your punishment proportionate to your crime, take responsibility for your actions as an individual, not a member of a group." Again, they plead, don't let "the social" override the moral personality that resides in individuality.

I want to say, so, bumptious Jack Welch's rewards were proportionate to his effort? Hello? Or hey, why shouldn't social origins and status be taken into account when assessing accountability (in court and elsewhere)? But again I don't say anything. I sit there wondering why these kids feel so besieged by their culture if Thomas Frank is correct to claim that conservatives have won the heart of America. Nah, it ain't the blue state thing, the left-west coast syndrome. They're right--they're the dwindling minority, not the emerging majority. They're paranoid because they're rational, because they're surrounded by us liberals, socialists, and feminists.

What's the Matter With Thomas Frank, Cont'd.

2004-09-03T08:04:00.000-07:00

One more methodological complaint about Thomas Frank's new book, (What's the Matter With Kansas? Henry Holt, 2004), and then it's on to the substance of his argument.

You will have noticed from the last post that the author and his admirers agree that there is a reality out there which is unitary and material; it is equally available for scrutiny to all observers, no matter where they are positioned. Good ideas--ideas that are not wrong or deluded--are ideas that reproduce, as in a photographic image, that fixed, external reality.

This is the correspondence theory of truth, the product of Enlightenment. In vulgar Marxist hands, it became known as the base/superstructure model, wherein the material or economic base determined the ideal or intellectual (legal, cultural) superstructure. This is the model now reintroduced to American political discourse by Thomas Frank and now celebrated by influential journalists at The Nation and The New York Times.

Hello? How is that possible in the aftermath of Thomas Kuhn and Alasdair MacIntyre, not to mention William James, John Dewey, E. H. Carr, Hayden White, Richard Rorty, Judith Butler, and Michel Foucault? Oh, and Raymond Williams, our patron saint, who understood, explained, and moved beyond the base/superstructure model Caudwell deployed so eagerly and clumsily.

All of these eminent thinkers (save Caudwell, of course) argue(d) that there is no independent body of fact "out there" to which all parties in an interpretive dispute may appeal. They show(ed) that the facts of the case change according to the model or theory or method or paradigm one brings to bear on the interpretive question at hand. Thus reality is not fixed or inert or given; instead, it is performatively produced, whether in speech acts that create as well as designate a relationship ("I now pronounce you man and wife"), or in scientific experiments that manipulate objects as a way of producing and demonstrating a new truth (a truth that was possible but hitherto unknown). This is not post-structuralism with a French accent, it's plain old pragmatism. Like violence, it's as American as apple pie.

So Frank and his admirers have forgotten or ignored the intellectual innovations of the 20th century, particularly the contributions of our own thinkers. That's pretty amazing in view of the wit and erudition on display in their writing. But no more so than the substantive claims predicated on the vulgar Marxoid model Frank has refitted for duty in Kansas. Let's have a look at them.

(1) First, the inversion of Populism (see chaps. 2, 4, and 9). Once upon a time, about a century ago, Kansas was a radical place, full of fire-breathing folks who blamed "the trusts"--the large corporations--for their economic woes, and who tried, accordingly, to abolish them. They were down with, er, devoted to, the Omaha platform of 1892, which called for the nationalization of railroads, banks, and telegraph companies (at least those that did interstate business), and they were mad as hell at the East Coast capitalists who had invented such diabolical devices.

But now, according to Frank, Populism is a cover for capitalism, not an attempt to abort its emergent corporate incarnation. The Republicans of today talk about "the people," but they serve the corporations by practicing cultural politics--by stressing abortion, guns, gay marriage, etc.--which only diverts everyone's attention from the "real [economic] issues."

Well, OK, it sounds plausible as a historical narrative, this inversion. But has it never occurred to Frank that what was once a radical doctrine has by now become reactionary? Nobody in his right mind would today advocate the program of the Republican Party as it appeared in 1860, or 1890, or 1940, simply because times change. What was rightly understood as radical or heretical or just cranky in 1860, 1890, or 1940 looks reactionary in our time. Populism died an ignominious death at the hands of George Wallace and David Duke. Why do we keep trying to resurrect it? Couldn't we entertain Richard Hofstadter's proposition (The Age of Reform [1855]), that Populism was reactionary even at the height of its influence--that even then, back in the 1890s, it was just as nostalgic for a mythic past, and just as afraid of progress, as our contemporary Kansas crowd is? And not just Kansas, of course, since Frank takes aim at the national culture--Kansas is merely the metaphor for that larger problem. But if this metaphorical reduction (metonymy) makes sense, Frank is writing a latter-day version of Hofstadter's Frankfurt School-inflected meditation on the masses, a meditation, we should note, that associated Populism with authoritarianism.

So maybe Thomas Frank is recapitulating Hofstadter's trajectory by announcing his fear of the masses in this age of "illiberal democracy"?

(2) And what do we make of the simple fact that Kansas was born in and bred by the Republican Party? There's never been a Kansas that wasn't dominated by the GOP, as Frank himself acknowledges from time to time (pp. 67, 89, 91, 174-75) So what's the big deal? A state that once hosted radical politics has become conservative because what was once radical is now conservative. Duh. Yes, the GOP caused the Civil War and conquered the slave South and invented industrial capitalism. Since then, it has not harbored any revolutionary or radical intentions, and has become more and more conservative since the 1940s (Nixon and Rockefeller notwithstanding). If a state's political debates are dominated by this party, why should we be surprised by its trajectory?

Try this as a thought experiment. Could Frank have written a book called "What's the Matter with Minnesota?" No, of course not, because that state, like Wisconsin, has evolved politically in ways that broke the grip of Republican hegemony, edging toward Farmer-Labor movements in the 1920s and, for that matter, long after. Both states were creatures of the same historical moment that produced Kansas, but they haven't remained within the gravitational field of "free labor" or of Populism. A good comparative question would be, Why not? And the answer would begin with two words: Minneapolis and Milwaukee.

(3) How did the conservatives win the heart of America? The subtitle of the book would suggest that they did, they have, it's over. Quite apart from the fact that these conservatives didn't have to work real hard in Kansas (see [2] above), the question remains because Frank himself admits over and over that THE RIGHT ALWAYS LOSES on cultural issues (se pp. 6, 101, 121-25, 141, 206-08, 241). If they're always LOSING on the cultural issues, even in Kansas, how is it possible that they "won the heart of America"?

More to come.

What's the Matter With Thomas Frank?

2004-09-01T08:43:00.000-07:00

Around here the NY Times is the local paper, but it still carries a lot of ideological, and, truth be told, intellectual weight. So when three of its regular columnists (Dowd, Ehrenreich--OK, she's just a guest columnist--and Kristof) cite Tom Frank's new book as "brilliant," "important," etc., you gotta go buy the thing and figure out what's happening at the paper of record.

So I did, and I guess the charge of liberal media bias is correct. And come to think of it, if I'm right to say (1) that contemporary liberalism is a big tent that still contains socialism but also (2) that liberalism is still the political mainstream (see Michael Moore's piece yesterday [8/31] in USA Today), why wouldn't the media be biased in favor of liberals? From this standpoint, conservatives of every kind have a hell of a long way to go. But not according to Thomas Frank.

His book, What's the Matter With Kansas? is subtitled "How Conservatives Won the Heart of America" (Henry Holt, 2004). It is yet another sneering critique of the "cultural Left"--the academic Left, that is, which seems incapable of addressing economic issues in terms that allow for class consciousness and organization. It's designed as a critique of those conservatives in Kansas and elsewhere who use cultural issues as the stalking horse for economic programs that free capitalists from any constraints; but the real villain here is the cultural studies crowd, which allegedly ignores "material realities." We already know this villain from books and essays by Richard Rorty, Todd Gitlin, Martha Nussbaum, Alan Sokal, et al., and by now we can recite the argument in our sleep.

It goes like this. If only the Left would stop talking about identity politics and promoting cultural politics--if only it would start talking about "economic arrangements" and class privilege rather than babbling about "new social movements" and their supposedly subversive manipulation of consumer culture, why, it would kick ass. At any rate it would protect the livelihoods and neighborhoods of working people, and would, in turn, receive their votes. As it is, these people vote disproportionately for the conservatives who destroy their unions, their jobs, their cities, and their farms by cutting taxes and empowering businessmen.

But why do they cast these "self-denying" votes, as Frank calls them? Because the conservatives narrate the recent past as social decadence and moral catastrophe, and promise to reverse this decline by appeal to the traditional bulwarks of bourgeois society, particularly church and family, but also by using government to enforce certain "family values." In doing so, they address the working people who feel that they have been somehow left behind by the sudden transformation of the global economy and, more importantly, by the cultural revolution of our time. (By the way, Left Behind, the apocalyptic serial novel, sells millions among the same crowd that votes for the conservatives who keep citing "family values" as their moral-political compass. Duh. It depicts a world of decent, hard-working doubters and sinners who are left behind when the righteous and the innocent are taken up to heaven by Jesus; it is a world of pain ruled by the devil and his decadent minions, but it is a world still redeemable by those who have to stay in their callings and put in their time on earth. Seems to me that we should be reading it closely if we want to understand the fears--and hopes--of the red states.) But the conservatives can only look backward to a set of traditions that is moribund at best. They have nothing to say about the future of, say, work, not to mention the global economy. All they have to offer are nostalgic nostrums. We can do better.

But they--the conservatives--win elections, don't they? How to explain this sad fact? False consciousness, baby. Working people don't know their own interests, get it? As the esteemed Molly Ivins says in her blurb for the Frank book, "many Americans have decided to vote against their own economic and political interests." Hmm. Barbara Ehrenreich's blurb goes further: "delusion" is what's the matter with Kansas. Frank himself is no less frank. On page one he asks, "How could so many people get it wrong?" His answer amplifies Ivins: "People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about."

OK, EVERYBODY's deluded, at least when it comes to politics--except us intellectual types, of course, who have no "material interests" and thus stand safely above the fray we describe. This idea, this notion of false consciousness for them (but not us), is so primitive as to be laughable, but there it is. Tom Frank rehabilitates the most vulgar Marxism, and significant contributors to The Nation and The New York Times get all giddy.

Let me tell you just how primitive Frank's methods and ideas are (and then we'll take up Louis Menand's latest attempt at political commentary in The New Yorker, where he decides that Philip Converse had the last word on "mass belief systems" and voting behavior, thus ignoring the most important political scientists of the 20th century: V.O. Key, E.E. Schattschneider, Walter Dean Burnham, Robert Dahl, and Charles Lindblom).

To begin with, the bizzare notion of false consciousness. It requires a god's-eye view of the world, the kind of "objectivity" no working historian, bartender, journalist, or janitor can subscribe to. Whose consciousness is not false--that is, not partial, provisional, incomplete? Kenneth Burke said it best: "Every insight contains a certain blindness." Even the insights of the educated, Tom. The teleological vision at work here is preposterous: the working class, goddamn it, is not doing what it was supposed to, so we get to blame it for the lack of political progress.

Turn that vision into the inane question asked by the ignorant Sombart in 1904: Why is there no socialism in the US? Well, the appointed tasks of the revolution have not been fulfilled by the, er, right people, or party, or, class. Well, OK, let's get even more Leninist about it: the Left hasn't done its job. "By dropping the class language that once distinguished the [Democrats] sharply from Republicans, they have left themselves vulnerable to cultural wedge issues like guns and abortion and the rest whose hallucinatory appeal would ordinarily be far overshadowed by material concerns." (245)

Notice the cause and effect sequence assumed here: Democrats wouldn't be vulnerable to the cultural stuff if they had stuck to the language and programs of the New Deal ("By all rights the people in Wichita and Shawnee and Garden City should be flocking to the party of Roosevelt, not deserting it.") But notice also the other foregone conclusion built into the same formulation: the category of class has political priority no matter what, no matter when. Why? Shouldn't this remind us of Mike Gold scolding V. F. Calverton and Kenneth Burke, among others, in the 1930s? What makes this category the regulative principle of social organization, the necessary foundation of political struggle, and the obvious insignia of intellectual seriousness? Isn't the capital-labor relation itself a historical artifact? Hasn't the salience of class in political discourse declined insofar as a post-industrial society has emerged? The working class as traditionally defined by social scientists and trade unions stopped growing in the US (as elsewhere) a long time ago. Why should we assume it is still the key to the political future?

More to the point, how and why should we assume, as Frank does, that political progress is purchased by excluding "business rationality" and the "business community" as such from the movement for reform? (see pp. 128-29, 132-33, 176-78, and passim) Isn't socialism a cross-class construction, like its predecessors (republicanism, liberalism, capitalism) from the 18th and 19th centuries? The working class, however defined, has no exclusive option on reform, or, for that matter, on socialism. Nor does the capitalist class, however superannuated, have an exclusive option on reaction, or, for that matter, on capitalism. No one wants "free markets" or the end of the welfare state except certain outspoken and well-funded radicals on the right. They are opposed by wealthy liberal businessmen and foundations as well as trade unions and progressive organizations.

Social origins do not determine political allegiances. By the same token, social standing does not determine economic interests. You'd think we'd have figured this out by now. OK, you'd think Tom Frank and his blurbers would have. But no, they insist that they know what your interests are--again, because they're above the fray--and if you don't agree with them, why, you're deluded, not them. Ye gods, it's back to Mike Gold's doppelganger: Christopher Caudwell has risen from the dead after all.

It gets worse. Frank's book has convinced me that our intellectual infatuation with Populism, which is an interesting story in its own right, has become downright dangerous. We seem unable to understand that what was once radical--say, the Populism of the 1890s--is now reactionary. But that's in the next installment.

The Lateness of Capitalism, Part 2

2004-08-23T10:02:00.000-07:00

In short, capitalism is clearly not the only form of market society in human history. So it is not to be understood as the function of "the" market, the profit motive, or the entrepreneurial persuasion--all three can exist, and have existed, in the absence of capitalism, as both Marx and Weber insisted. What distinguishes capitalism from other modes of production is NOT that the distribution of private property determines the distribution of income. Think of every "pre-capitalist economic formation," as the dreaded Eric Hobsbawm once titled an excerpt from Marx's Grundrisse: people owned things, and what they owned shaped everything else, no matter how deeply a "gift economy" had taken root. And please don't cite William Cronon and Richard White and Patricia Limerick and Colin Calloway, or Marcel Mauss and Lewis Hyde, for that matter--all I'm saying is (1) that private property precedes capitalism, and (2) that effective ownership of certain resources (you can't give it away unless others agree that it's yours to give) is a trans-historical determinant of social status. NOR is it that the circulation of commodities becomes a means to the accumulation of private fortunes: commodities precede capitalism by a long shot, no matter what we may believe about the idyll of the medieval world, and will outlast this mode of production by another millennium at least. NOR is it that merchants and middlemen prey on real producers; they do, course, but we know they've been doing it since the 9th century BC--this definition of capitalism lasts because it is the paranoid inversion of the American dream and the popular source of a labor theory of value which tells us that "property is theft."

No, capitalism is distinguished by the fact that wage labor, or rather "abstract social labor," comes to characterize work as such, and to define the larger social relations of goods production. Accordingly, class supersedes or at least regulates other, inherited principles of social organization (kinship, estate, etc.) because commodity production and the capital-labor relation come to contain or determine more and more social relations as such.

So conceived, capitalism is a complex market society that permits and requires a market in labor as well as goods. Capitalism exists when labor-power, the capacity to produce value through work, becomes a commodity, when its value can be exprsseed in monetary terms, and when the allocation of labor-power acording to market criteria becomes commonplace. Capitalism exists when people can assume that the production of value through work, the alienation of their labor-power, is the condition of their receipt of a wage, an income, which in turn gives them access to share of those goods available for purchase--that is, when people start to assume that consumption is authorized by prior acts of production, not the customary claims of superior social standing (when markets could be construed as the site of rationality or objectivity because they semed to be governed by anonymous laws of supply and demand). But this assumption did not, and could not become commonplace until the 19th century, with the breakdown of household economies and the consequent extrusion of goods production from the home. We may note in passing that this assumption did not and could not survive the Great Depression; since then the idea that consumption of goods is authorized by prior acts of production has become quaint at best, except among ideologues of both Left and Right.

Thus capitalism cannot emerge from the constraints of a simple market (bourgeois) society unless wage laborers and their allies establish clear limits on the scope of the commodity form--unless they can specify and enforce a meaningful distinction between the value of their labor-time and the value of their lives. In the absence of this distinction, as philosophers, labor leaders, and abolitionists in the Atlantic world noted, workers are slaves. That is why the most effective critics of the antebellum South denounced slaveholders for treating human beings as if they were commodities to be bought and sold, "soul by soul," but also welcomed what we call the "market revolution" as evidence of moral progress and noticed no irony or contradiction in their position--David Brion Davis and Eugene Genovese notwithstanding--because there was none.

More to come. But shoot, Jim, the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" should tell us that unless we engage the demagogues, they'll carry the day. Josh Marshall is all tied up today because he doesn't want us to acknowledge the unavoidable fact that in Boston, salute and all, Kerry made his Vietnam bio the rationale for his candidacy and his presidency. He made the personal political because he figured that, in this race, the credentials have become Cold War as the key question devolves into--what kind of person do you want holding that big stick? He can't now say, "Get Back to the Issues," as in the new ad. He forfeited that ground by pre-empting the predicted Bush personal-is-political strategy. Maybe he can make his way back home, but the only way to do so is to fight his way through the autobiographical tangle he created. Ugh.

Because we could

2004-08-20T10:55:00.000-07:00

Now that this site is linked to smirkingchimp.com (check it out, it has all sorts of useful anti-Bush stuff, and it's a whole lot funnier than talkingpointsmemo.com, although you gotta love Joshua Micah Marshall), I'm trying to be, you know, more punchy, less lengthy. So here's yet another op-ed avoided by the major media outlets. But there's more to follow on the Lateness of Capitalism, of course.

We Did It Because We Could

Every justification of the war in Iraq offered before 2004 has now been discredited or still awaits verification—-save one. We now know that Iraq posed no imminent threat to the national security of the United States. For we know that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, and that he never collaborated with Al Qaeda in terrorist projects aimed at the U.S. We also know that a resolution of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has not been promoted by the war in Iraq-—the road to Jerusalem won’t go through Baghdad, and the Arab dominoes won't be falling into place in our lifetime. Finally, we know that the “clash of civilizations” between Islamic jihadists and secular modernists has been exacerbated, not pacified, and not even addressed, by the deployment of American military power in the Middle East.
What’s left of the case for war? We cannot yet know that Iraq will become a democratic state capable of inspiring and supporting reformers in the region—and even if we could, what follows? That democracy flows from the barrel of a gun? That might makes right?
The only remaining justification for this war is that we have displaced and captured a brutal dictator. We admit that the reasons once offered for waging war in Iraq have turned out to be specious or unverifiable, but we conclude that no one can argue with the resulting regime change. Saddam is gone, who can complain about that?
There are two fundamental flaws in this belated bit of bait and switch. First, it obscures the simple fact that everyone except Saddam’s loyalists wanted regime change in Iraq. Those of us who opposed the war did not by our opposition signify support for the Baathist Party. And those of us who approved the war wanted regime change because we believed that Saddam’s WMD posed an immediate threat to the security of the region, the U.S., and the world. Or because we believed that Saddam was not an immediate threat to anyone, but that in the long run, his strident brand of Stalinism would require much more than mere containment. The question for all of us, left to right, was not whether to press for regime change, but how to do so. What means were both feasible and necessary?
The second flaw in the bait and switch rationale is that it comes dangerously close to claiming that “the end justifies the means.” This dictum is peculiarly poisonous to a political culture that purports to be democratic. For in a democracy, the means are the ends, and vice versa. The rule of law, for example, is the means by which we inscribe the principle of equality in our culture-—no one is “above the law,” we insist—-but it is also an end in itself, because it makes persuasion, not coercion, the ideal of political discourse. Abraham Lincoln said it best: “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.”
If the military means used to displace Saddam were not necessary-—not proportionate to the purpose and the occasion-—then the end now in view is no more justifiable than the means. Furthermore, if the means included misleading claims about the nature of the threat from Saddam, abuse of executive privilege and public powers, encouragement to torture Iraqi citizens, and repeated attempts both to exempt the U.S. from international law and to free the president from the constraints of the Constitution, then the end now in view is no less tainted than these means.
To admit that the only remaining justification of the war in Iraq is retrospective—-hey, how do you like that, for once we got rid of a bad guy!-—is to admit that we went to war under false pretenses. Many people have already recovered from this admission by saying, “Yes, it was a mistake to go to war, but something good came of it—-maybe the end does justify the means.” Alas, this is still not a justification. It is explanation without contrition: We did it because we could.

The Lateness of Capitalism, Part 1

2004-08-19T07:38:00.000-07:00

I've not yet finished the new wave of books on American Empire, which was to be the next topic in The Next Republic. Clearly William Appleman Williams has had a profound effect on recent thinking and writing about imperialism (see, e.g., Andrew Bacevich's bracing, debunking book of the same title as Neil Smith's gargantuan study of Isaiah Bowman)--at least we can all now live with the juxtaposition of the two words. Well, OK, John Lewis Gaddis and Niall Ferguson go further than that: they want us to get all comfortable with Empire. Their reasons are different than those offered by the Project for a New American Century crowd (Kristol, Wolfowitz, Perle, Rumsfeld, Cheney, et al.), but they nonetheless permit a political and intellectual posture that is foreign to the post-imperial purposes and principles of American foreign policy in the 20th century. For the original architects of American empire, ca. 1898-1919, assumed that it was a provisional means to larger ends, that is, a device by which imperialism as such could eventually be adjourned. Until very late in the 20th century, when the end of the Cold War opened up new lines of historical and strategic inquiry, U.S. foreign policy-makers typically made the same assumption. Gaddis, Ferguson, and, it seems, contemporary policy-makers assume something else. That change of assumptions is the key to understanding both the continuity between Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II, AND the radical departure proposed and enacted by the latter. More later, when I finish that pile of books. See you in Central Park on the 29th, in any case.

Meanwhile, however, I want to talk about the "lateness" of capitalism, in two senses. First, as a way of emphasizing its transience, its brevity, and second, as a way of suggesting that at this moment in history, it may be more appropriate to discuss the decomposition of capitalism than to mourn the death of socialism. Please note that in this space socialism does not mean the abolition of the market, that is, the eradication of civil society, by the state, as in the communist and fascist experiments of the 120th century; here socialism instead appears as the heir to liberalism (pace Bernstein) because, like liberalism, it specifies society as the site of self-discovery and self-government as against the polis and political action. Which is to say as against the communitarians who keep citing classical republicanism as the only possible model of politics as such.
Most of what I have to say is part of a larger complaint about the periodization and characterization of capitalism found in Jameson's Postmodernism, Hardt & Negri's Empire, and in several books from the other shore, including Mandelbaum's Ideas that Conquered the World, de Soto's Mystery of Capital, Zakaria's Future of Freedom, Lindsey's Against the Dead Hand--and on and on.
Let's start at the front end, as it were. No matter whose position you take for granted, whether Marx or Weber or Polanyi, you know that capitalism arrived very late on the scene of civilization. You also know that, according to the the canonical social historians of our time (Thompson, Rude, Hobsbawm, Davis, Gutman, Montgomery, and their myriad students), the working class, that unique product of capitalism, doesn't take shape until very late in the 18th century, even at the cutting edges of western civilization; in the U.S., for example, it happens much later than that, beginning in the 1830s and 40s. In the Anglo-American world, the farthest outpost of bourgeois society, the category of class does not become the regulative principle of social organization and political discourse until the 19th century. Perhaps that is why the OED's first recorded reference to "capitalism" occurs in 1854--in a novel (by Thackery).
I am suggesting of course that the creation of a world market or "system" in the 16th and 17th centuries is not the evidence of the rise of capitalism, and so I am siding with Polanyi and Weber as against Marx and Dobb (although we will return to and retrieve the latter in what follows). But shoot, Marx is, as always, more ambiguous than that--see Kerr ed. of Capital Vol. I, p. 189 n. 1: "The capitalist epoch is therefore characterized by this, that labour-power takes in the eyes of the labourer himself the form of a commodity which is his property; his labour consequently becomes wage labour. On the other hand, it is only from this moment that the produce of labour universally becomes a commodity."
The creation of a world market was indeed the dawn of modern bourgeois society and the heyday of merchant capital. But bourgeois society is NOT the same thing as capitalism--see my Radical History Review piece on Genovese and comments following, esp. the trenchant critique by James Oakes--and merchant capital is, practically speaking, a trans-historical phenomenon that flourished in the Hellenistic world as well as under late feudalism, and that invariably opposed what Marx called he "revolutionary road" to industrial capitalism.
Most simple market (or "proto-industrial") societies, of which bourgeois society is the enduring prototype, did not make the transition to capitalism in the early modern period. Witness the remarkable lateness of capitalism in Western Civilization--that is, in Germany, Italy, France, oh, and North America. When these simple market, proto-indusrial societies did make this transition in the 19th century, it was the result of manic state-building, of extraordinary political upheaval and innovation: the Bismarckian Leviathan, the Risorgimento, the French "revolutions" of 1830, 1848, 1870, and, meanwhile, the Civil War and Reconstruction in these once disunited states. The Russian reforms of the 1860s and after compose, I think, a separate case, although they did consolidate the Tsarist state by making it the agent of modernization. The Populists (in Russia) were wrong--Lenin and the "legal Marxists" of the 1890s were right to claim that the development of capitalism was specific to the late-19th century, that it accelerated with the adpotion of the gold standard in 1894, and that it could not have happened if serfdom had not been abolished in 1861.
Again, the creation of a world market or "system" 350-odd years ago did not signify and did not cause the emergence of capitalism. In most of Europe, esp. east of the Elbe, and in all of the Americas, it created an insatiable demand NOT for "free labor"--that is wage labor--but for an IMMOBILIZED labor force, for a second serdom in Eastern Europe and for indentured servitude and finally chattel slavery in the Western Hemisphere. Logically at least, it should follow that the "globalization" of our time does not signify the triumph of capitalism ansd will not cause the triumph of freedom in the world.
More to follow.

Belated Mission Statement

2004-08-13T10:49:00.000-07:00

Here is a kind of mission statement I wrote a month ago, when I thought my friend Mike Merrill and I were launching the same boat. Then he went and got himself a new job as Dean at Empire State College, in NYC, and got way too busy. Hence the apparently royal "we" in what follows. Yesterday I filled out the Profile part of the blogspot.com site because I noticed in reviewing the settings that 32 people had visited that part of it. I guess the personal is still political. Just ask our humorless vice-president, who "felt better" after telling Patrick Leahy to fuck off on the floor of the Senate. Or our governor here in beautiful New Jersey (the anecdotal evidence so far suggests that McGreevey has a lot of sympathy and support, and I haven't bee talking to academics about it). The shit will fly once the sexual harassment suit is filed. Can't wait to hear largest Limbaugh weigh in on this.

The Next Republic: An Irregular Journal of Politics and Letters

In the United States of the early 20th century, dozens of “little magazines” suddenly appeared to address the questions raised by the coming of corporate-industrial modernity, and to compete, accordingly, with the established journals of opinion. Most of these magazines folded quickly (as The Freeman and The New Review did), but they almost always left their mark. Some of them (like The Masses) lasted long enough to shape cultural criticism into the 1920s and 30s, either as a usable past or in new incarnations (like The New Masses). And one of them, The New Republic, a magazine founded in 1914 by Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, and Walter Weyl, has survived to this day.
The “little magazines” of our time are the web-based journals and blogs we all visit, print, and discuss as part of our everyday routine. Like their predecessors from a century ago, they take advantage of new technologies and new reading publics (we call them “segments” or “niches”). Like their predecessors, they are often animated by a muckraking attitude that occasionally veers toward outright paranoia regarding the powers that be (whatever they may be). Like their predecessors, they are a lot more readable and a lot more fun than the established journals of opinion—such as the strangely stodgy New Republic—because they have no bottom line, only ideal readers.
Our foray into this old but new genre is The Next Republic: An Irregular Journal of Politics and Letters, a little magazine that will avoid a paranoid style until it becomes rational. We hope the connotations of our title are clear--we want to compete with the established journals of opinion like the other TNR, and we assume we can do that only by addressing the questions they can’t, or won’t, acknowledge. But we’re realists. We also have day jobs.
Let us deconstruct the title of our venture as a way of explaining its premises and purposes. Like Croly, Lippmann, Weyl, and their cohorts and competitors, we think this culture, this society, this polity, reached a verge in the 90s, and we want to know what comes next in the new century. We’re not in the business of prediction. Instead, we want to think about the future, but we know we can’t do that without historical knowledge and perspective. We live forward but we understand backward, as Kierkegaard put it. So we’re interested in reconciling previous truth and novel fact because we think that’s the intellectual condition of designating, and creating, what comes next.
The republic we have in mind is a political order that presupposes a certain citizenry. It looks backward in the sense that we admire the revolutionary force of classical republicanism (especially as it informed the American Revolution and subsequent struggles for justice), but it faces forward in the sense that we want to detach our political and intellectual agendas from the gravitational pull of the polis—from the idea that we discover ourselves only in political action, only by removing ourselves from the idiocies of private life and consumer culture. We don’t want Americans to renounce the pleasures and possibilities of consumer culture because we don’t believe that this renunciation would make them more attentive or virtuous citizens. Besides, we also believe that the culture of consumption has been good for the majority of workers, and for that matter the majority of Americans. If you disagree with us, ask your grandparents, and stay tuned—we’ll have a lot to say about this topic.
The next republic we have in mind enlists what late-19th century Americans called “economic republicanism”—that is, socialism. We want to discuss socialism as an order of events as well as an order of ideas. So we won’t be equating it with the Soviet or Chinese or Cuban attempts to abolish the market and command civil society, and we won’t be reducing it to Marxist-Leninist doctrine. Instead, we will be trying to demonstrate that socialism is a species of market society, that it happened right here in River City--yes, in the United States--and that it still shapes our political expectations because it’s more than high-minded compassion. We will acknowledge, accordingly, that socialism has taken many political forms in the past, and that certain of these forms (for example, fascism) are incompatible with democracy. By the same token, however, we will want to define democracy as something more than a function of “free markets” and majority rule, in the egregiously ahistorical manner of Michael Mandelbaum, Fareed Zakaria, Thomas Friedman, and other neo-liberal celebrities.
The Next Republic will be an irregular journal because its periodical character is subject to the schedules of its creators and (eventually) its contributors. We have no idea when the thing will appear, in other words. But we want you to look for it. There is another connotation of “irregular” we will be remarking with regularity, however, and that flows from the history of socialist politics and polemics in the 20th century. We are “revisionists” in the sense Lenin meant when he banished Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky, among others, from the ranks of the real revolutionaries. But we will resisting the notion that socialism is somehow monolithic, in theory or practice, and so we will be resisting the notion that there is an inert socialist truth to which all the faithful must adhere. In short, we don’t like the “revisionist” label, but we welcome the intellectual possibilities of accepting and arguing about it.
We call The Next Republic a journal of Politics and Letters for three reasons. First, we want to recall Raymond Williams’s “little magazine” of the same title, which was a short-lived but successful effort to extricate literary criticism and political analysis from the standards of “socialist realism” (it was the distant echo of V. F. Calverton’s Modern Quarterly, but it had more immediate consequences). Second, we want to foreground the origins, manifestations, and results of cultural politics. We think this domain of political expression and movement has been overlooked except by those who want to lament its salience. Third, we aim to make reviews of books, articles, op-eds, etc., an integral part of the conversation we want to start and, with luck, to continue. Like all the blogs we admire, we’ll be “sampling” our sources—with the consistent kind of “professional failure” Gramsci conjured when comparing medieval copyists to workers on the Ford assembly line, we’ll be transforming what we read by repetition.
So, here’s to it. If you play a sport, go ahead. You commit yourself, and then you see.

liberalism and social democracy

2004-08-10T09:44:00.000-07:00

If my specification of modern liberalism is correct, in principle and practice (see post 8/9/04), why do bombastic ninnies like Robert Bork, Ann Coulter, and Sean Hannity--this guy is the only possible lead in the film biography of Oliver North because he has those beautiful wet eyelashes that blink so sincerely when the empty head just above is derailed by an unscripted and unanswerable question--believe that it is a traitorous doctrine designed to undermine American values? What's so objectionable? Bork of course believes that "liberalism" has already scuttled American culture (see Slouching Toward Gomorrah [1996], just reissued); the other two are optimists of the will even though they both concede that they're NOT winning the culture wars. But why are they so agitated? And why doesn't someone--how about John Edwards?--embrace the label on the grounds that the Right is right? That is, on the grounds that liberals are winning the fight for the hearts and minds of America because the majority of Americans is, in fact, liberal. Newt Gingrich understood this fact because he read the NORC polls of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, which indicated that a MAJORITY of those Americans who identified themselves AS CONSERVATIVES wanted more public spending on health and education. Shoot, so did Al Gore, and he won the last presidential election. Why don't liberals get it?
A good answer, dear reader--yes, so far, I can count you on one finger--is to be found in Irving Kristol's book of 1978, Two Cheers for Capitalism. I'm a big fan of reading the opposition (A. Lincoln pioneered this procedure with his scrapbook of pro-slavery writings), partly because I've learned over the years that if you can incorporate your opponents' arguments, you're more likely to shake their faith and convince innocent bystanders. That said, I'm not so sure that the senior Kristol is the opposition. Even though it's a collection of occasional essays written for The Wall Street Journal and The Public Interest betwen 1970 and 1977, Two Cheers is still worth reading for three reasons.
First, Kristol understands that CORPORATE capitalism is a social formation still in need of both explanation and justification. His periodization of capitalism is much more sophisticated and insightful than that of most historians, economists, sociologists, et al., including the Marxoids among them (and I count myself among them), because he has been able to learn from the findings of his socialist friend Daniel Bell, in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973) and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976). Kristol's worries about the moral legitimacy of corporate capitalism are deeply informed by this historical periodization. And these worries are not cancelled by "the end of history" apparently transacted in the fall of the Soviet Union and its satellites.
Second, Kristol is able to trace the mindless worship of "free markets" and "economic liberty," which now passes for intellectual rigor in debates about tax codes and rates, to the philosophical idiocies and deformities of Friedrich von Hayek. In doing so, he also makes passing fun of Milton Friedman, another icon of the so-called neo-conservatives. Kristol, writing in the mid-to-late 1970s, wondered if there were a retort to the New Left's indictment of capitalism--he assumed the Left had already won the ideological struggle--which was both theoretically sound and practically actionable. When he turned to Hayek, he was more than a little dismayed to find no solace, no help, no nothing. For Hayek argued that a free society was not necessarily a just society, indeed that any attempt to make the former into the latter was destined to failure because there are no criteria by which the "rules of 'social justice' can be assessed." Kristol bravely and honestly notes that Hayek "is opposing a free society to a just society," and goes on to ask, "But can men live in a free society if they have no reason to believe that it is also a just society?" His answer places him in what I would call a liberal position: "I do not think so." Here is his peroration: "So I conclude, despite Professor Hayek's ingenious analysis, that men cannot accept the historical accidents of the marketplace--seen merely as accidents--as the basis for an enduring and legitimate entitlement to power, privilege, and property."
Third, and most germane to the topic at hand, Kristol explains that liberalism did change its address in the 1960s, becoming something more akin to European socialism and/or social democracy than the liberalism he still admires as the source of liberty in the modern western world. He says this throughout the book, but nowhere more pointedly than in the preface and in the chapter entitled "On Conservatism and Capitalism." Here is a sample from that chapter: "The institutions which conservatives wish to preserve are, and for two centuries were called, liberal institutions, i.e., institutions which maximize personal liberty vis-a-vis a state, a church, or an offical ideology. On the other hand, the severest critics of these institutions--those who wish to enlarge the scope of governmental authority indefinitely, so as to achieve even greater equality at the expense of liberty--are today commonly called 'liberals.' It would certainly help to clarify matters if they were called, with greater propriety and accuracy, 'socialist' or 'neo-socialists.' And yet we are oddly relectant to be so candid."
Yes we are. Nail on the head, I'd say. In the United States, today's liberals are yesterday's socialists, or, OK, social democrats. They're not revolutionaries, but so what? The ferocity of the culture wars, and the enchanting idiocy of someone as demented as Ann Coulter, can be explained by Kristol's nomenclatural puzzlement: We're still fighting about socialism and capitalism, only we have a new vocabulary, and the so-called conservatives are really liberals fighting a rear-guard action against the forces of darkness who mean "socialist" when they say--or don't say--"liberal."
Which is also a way of saying that socialism is still very much with us. But it's only the Right that seems to have noticed. The Left still believes it wanders in the political wilderness. Hmm.

Liberalism

2004-08-09T11:22:00.000-07:00

Here's a speech I wrote for Kerry--not that he asked--when the primaries were still going on. Sent it to the usual suspects, NY Times, et al., as an op-ed, but no takers. It summarizes the content of liberalism as I understand it, but it doesn't address the question of why everyone except senators from Massachusetts wants to flee the label. For an answer to that vexed question, Irving Kristol, of all people, is the most helpful interlocutor--and I am not referring to his (in)famous remark defining conservatives as liberals mugged by reality. I'll explain next time with citations from his 1978 book, Two Cheers for Capitalism.

What John Kerry Should Say When Asked If He’s a Liberal

By James Livingston

In the last Democratic debate, John Kerry ducked the question when asked if he is a liberal. Here’s what he should say the next time he’s asked:

You know, the label of “liberal” doesn’t quite fit me in these strange times. Unlike George W. Bush, I’m profoundly conservative in several important respects. Unlike Bush, I don’t want to amend the Constitution for political purposes, I want to preserve and protect it. Unlike Bush, I don’t want to privatize Social Security, I want to sustain it. Unlike Bush, I don’t want to abolish the federal income tax--see the Economic Report of the President 2002—-I want to simplify it. And unlike Bush, I don’t want to repudiate the principles of 20th-century U.S. foreign policy, I want to reinvigorate them. He’s the radical on these issues, not me.
So I’ll accept the liberal label if you’ll let me explain what it means to me, and to those Americans who don’t take Rush Limbaugh’s word for it. I have four fundamental beliefs.
First, I believe in the founding principle of American politics—the sovereignty of the people, not the government, not the party. Like liberals since Adam Smith and James Madison, I believe in the supremacy of society over the state.
Second, I believe in individualism. I mean that our opportunities and identities should not be determined by the class or the race or the gender—or the country—we were born into. Those opportunities and identities should instead be the result of our talents, skills, and efforts. But some of us may need extra help in developing our skills, and joining the mainstream of American society, because in the past we’ve been excluded from certain places, jobs, and schools.
Third, I believe in pluralism. Democracy is not just a political system. Liberty and equality for everyone means that certain groups should be able to represent themselves in society, far from the halls of Congress, before and after the next election. For example, working people must be able to express their individual preferences through their votes, but they should also be able to represent their collective interests through their trade unions. So should every group that can plausibly assert a collective interest.
Fourth, I believe in reform. I believe in our ability to make progress, to foster economic growth and to meet social needs, by combining private initiative and public policy. Market forces and government power are not the terms of an either/or choice. They can and should be harnessed together for the common good.
Allow me to get historical. By my definition of liberalism, there are almost no “conservative” statesmen worth remembering from the 20th century—probably because as a people and a culture, we Americans are too restless to stand pat, too ambitious to settle for what the past has bequeathed us. From Herbert Hoover to Jimmy Carter, there’s not one certifiably “conservative” president. Hoover didn’t believe in “free markets” any more than FDR did, although both shared my commitment to balanced federal budgets. None of these presidents, from Hoover to Carter, embraced the “conservative” label because all of them were heirs to the Progressive tradition invented in the early 20th century by Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. And all of them, from Hoover to Carter, sought reform in the most liberal sense imaginable.
By my definition, even Ronald Reagan looks pretty liberal. In terms of rhetoric and policy, he’s closer to William Howard Taft, who feared what we call “big government,” than to Teddy Roosevelt, who wanted the state to closely supervise the market. But all three of these presidents could accept my liberal label. So could Reagan’s immediate successors, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. And so could the overwhelming majority of Americans.
The exception to the rule of liberalism before, during, and after Reagan is George W. Bush. But he’s no more “conservative” than Tom DeLay is. This Bush is a radical—he wants to escape the past, and he’s got a plan.
I’m a liberal, and I’m more conservative than he is. Go figure.

James Livingston is Professor of History at Rutgers University. His most recent book is Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy: Rethinking the Politics of American History (Routledge, 2001). He is writing a book on American thought and culture at the end of the 20th century.
living@rci.rutgers.edu
jameslivingston49@hotmail.com

Liberals and the Left

2004-08-05T11:07:00.000-07:00

What is liberalism, anyway? Why do politicians of every kind, left to right, run from what usd to merely a label, a category of politics as usual? Answers later.