A Thinking Reed

Progress, populism and the state

Written by

Lee M.

in

Lately I’ve been thinking about my economic philosophy. Not that I really have anything so grand, mind you, but certain quizzes notwithstanding, I don’t really think I adhere to what we would call economic conservatism.

As I see it, is that concentrations of economic power and the accompanying inequality they foster are genuine problems. Conservatives and libertarians are much too sanguine about the distribution of wealth in societies like ours in my opinion. On the other hand, too much of progressivism and liberalism lends itself to a certain kind of centralized nanny statism.

So, is it possible to curtail concentrations of economic power without concentrating a dangerous amount of power in the state in the process? Apart from the inherent problems of a powerful state, there is the familiar problem of “regulatory capture,” i.e. when the economic interests that are supposedly being regulated end up gaining influence over the agencies that are supposed to be regulating them.

One of my favorite social critics is the late Christopher Lasch. In his book The True and Only Heaven he criticized the prevalent ideology of “progress” – the assumption that more and more people would enjoy a greater measure of prosperity. This ideology has right- and left-wing variants, depending on whether the unfettered market or centralized social engineering is seen as the vehicle for social progress. Lasch thought that, if nothing else, ecological constraints had falsified the ideology of progress. In addition, the capitalism championed by the Right destabilized and eroded communities, while the government paternalism of the Left threatened to make ordinary people wards of the state with their lives being planned by a bevy of bureaucratic “experts.”

Instead Lasch favored what he called “populism.” But this was more of an ideal than a worked out economic or political program. Lasch’s populism valorizes what he considered to be lower-middle-class or “petit bourgeois” values of local community, solidarity, dedication to craft, loyalty and self-denial. In essence, it is an ethic of limits that doesn’t expect ever-expanding wealth and opportunity, but finds satisfaction in concrete attachments to family, neighborhood, honest work, and civic participation.

Lasch’s vision combined a desire for a certain level of economic egalitarianism with a distrust of the state and a commitment to what we might call “traditional values.” But it’s not entirely clear that such a state of affairs is possible (assuming that it’s desirable). Is it possible to ensure a measure of economic independence for working people without an expansive welfare state? Is it, as some have suggested, that it’s the state that makes the concentration of wealth possible through the various subsidies and supports it provides to big business? Is a kind of Jeffersonian agrarianism/populism feasible in the 21st century, or is that just nostalgia?

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2 responses to “Progress, populism and the state”

  1. jack perry

    Is it, as some have suggested, that it’s the state that makes the concentration of wealth possible through the various subsidies and supports it provides to big business?

    Today I accompanied my family while shopping for food, first to Save-A-Lot, then to Wal-Mart, finally to Food Lion. We have no financial need for Save-A-Lot, nor Wal-Mart, and I dislike them. I stand in Wal-Mart, look up at the ceiling, and my heart sinks. I like Food Lion okay, if only because the cashier actually remembers us and talks to us.

    Haven’t bought much from Harris Teeter. It looks nice, but aside from the distance, it costs quite a bit more. That doesn’t bother me at all; on my salary, I can afford it, but my wife, like her friends, is possessed with the idea of saving money at every opportunity. In fact, she heard about Save-A-Lot from a friend of hers whose husband makes at least twice my salary.

    There’s something in our cultural mentality that prizes low cost above all else. I used to like shopping at Wal-Mart, back when they boasted of buying “American so you can, too!” I remember paying twice as much for American-made bedsheets at Wal-Mart than for the Chinese-made ones sitting right next to them. I chose that, and I slept in those bedsheets last night.

    These days, though, I can’t find American-made bedsheets at Wal-Mart, or anywhere else, for that matter. I find it hard to believe that this situation is the result of state subsidies of big business, unless you want to talk about the Chinese state.

    I’ve observed the same thing in European countries; half the so-called “Gucci” handbags hanging from their arms are Chinese knockoffs sold on streetcorners by low-wage Arab or African immigrants. Ordinary Europeans know this, and buy them anyway.

    I think Jeffersonian agrariansim is possible in the 21st century; the Amish seem to be doing quite well at it. People don’t seem to want it, though; most of us prefer our wide-screen TVs, surround-sound stereos, and cable (or satellite) to spending a few hours a day in a garden, and most would rather complain about gasoline at $3/gallon than break out the bike and ride to work on a sunny day, or buy a bus pass.

    Reply
  2. Russell Arben Fox

    Lee,

    Great post. As you can probably guess, the issues you bring up here are very close to my heart; I’ve probably written more about Laschian “populism” and the potential implications of such (in terms of simple living, social justice, popular democracy, etc.) then anything else.

    I call myself a Christian socialist, or a social democrat, but even those are just broad labels to cover what I really think. And what I really think is this: the sort of social goods that make possible healthy communities (decent jobs, reliable schools, etc.) cannot ultimately be supplied by welfare economics, by redistribution. They have to supplied ex ante; they have to arise from the existing, collective capital of particular communities. That means that limits need to be built into the system; it has to be assumed that, at some point, the “economy” or “society” means people who live here or there, not any potential people anywhere, reduced to singularity through the magic of the market. Those limits, in an earlier era, were refied by technological limits, yes, but also by strong moral presumptions that privileged local producers. As the techological barriers of the past have been overcome, the willingness to oblige, limit, expect, even force, economic and cultural actors to be first and foremost participants in their own places has become ever more necessary–but simultaneously, the communitarian or civic will to do such has greatly atrophied. (Hence the criticism of liberalism.) With the result that we live in a leveled society, where people (and economic power) can go anywhere, concentrate anywhere; such liberation benefits many, but it leaves just as many poor and oppressed, and leaves an even greater number alienated from one another, uninterested in self-government and incapable of moral expression, much less moral improvement.

    What do I think should be done? Well, most importantly and intimately, Jack Perry’s right–it’s not necessarily impossible to work out for oneself a Jeffersonian environment, where one can really participate in choices about what to eat and what to buy; by becoming more independent from and aware of the economic structures of the world, one can limit oneself and thereby find greater worth within one’s more enclosed world. So you live more lightly: you don’t eat as much fast food, you grow your own vegetables, you support local industries, etc. But as important as those personal steps are, they aren’t sufficient, because as things stand now, only those with fairly significant economic resources can afford to turn away from the desperate hunt for lower costs. And so I think we need the state to change the way it does certain things, to break up corporations: protect industries, elevate small farmers, redress educational inequities, and so forth. Serious populists and agrarians have always acknowledged the need to influence the state so to protect them from commercial power.

    Of course, what I’m talking about here is a more “authoritarian” state, and therein lies the problem that Lasch identitied. Not necessarily “authoritarianism” itself; Lasch had good as well as critical things to say about the vague authoritarian of the working class. No, the problem is that the state, because it isn’t organic and communal, gets captured by elites, and then its authority becomes invasive, challenging local traditions and presumptions rather than backing them up. Part of the reason why Lasch never liked communitarianism was because he suspected it of always viewing popular traditions as something which can be socially assembled and used (and thus abused) rather then a field that one lives within. I think this was a little unfair of him, but he has a point: explicit “community-building”–including the strategies I mentioned above–is an authoritarian affair that is likely to be condescending and crude, and not really all that different from the kind of anti-traditional, expansionist, progressive utopianism he hated most of all. Trying to “recapture community” can end up concentrating power in unaccountable hands just as easily as any other ideology.

    As you acknowledged, Lasch’s populism didn’t include much of a program. I’m not sure the full range of critique can be contained in any program; without a religious and moral revival (something which Lasch vaguely came to hint at in some of his later writings), it’s just not going to be possible to get enough of the key players in the global economy to turn back to simpler, local, traditional patterns of life so as allow communities to uncoercively transform into sites of participatory sustainability. Lately I’ve been thinking more and more about what mutualism and different kinds of Christian anarchism can offer us. But in the short term, I’m not yet entirely a New Pantagruelist; I think we have to work socially, collectively, to try to midwife this new society, if only so that, when and if it ever actually becomes possible, there will be people around who have some practice in knowing how to make it work.

    That was really an embarrassingly long comment. Sorry.

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