A Thinking Reed

Category: Liberalism

  • Left and Right: the prospects for liberty*

    John is wondering how committed “the Left” is to civil liberties given that Barack Obama is largely getting a free pass on his deviations, while Bob Barr, a genuinely pro-civil liberties candidate, is being ignored. Meanwhile, in reviewing Bill Kauffman’s latest, W. James Antle III seriously questions whether “there is still such a thing as an anti-war right.”

    I’m not any kind of doctrinaire libertarian, but on the issues of civil liberties, executive power, and war I’m in their corner. So, naturally, the question arises which party is better for “liberty,” broadly conceived as this bundle of issues. (If, as Randolph Bourne said, “war is the health of the state,” it makes sense to me treat these together.)

    Given the last 8 years, most people would probably say that on the whole the Right is worse, and the Left better on these issues. After all, the Bush administration has pursued preventive war, an expanded national security state, unchecked executive power, and harsh interrogation procedures (that’s “torture” to you and me) with very little dissent from its supporters on the Right. And the grassroots Left, if not the official Democratic Party apparatus, has been quite vocal in its opposition to most, if not all, of this.

    Yet we shouldn’t underestimate how the turning wheel of fortune might change things. Expanded discretionary power seems much less threatening when your guy’s wielding it. And let’s not forget how forgiving, or at least muted, much of the Left was during the Clinton administration, despite its generally poor record on civil liberties (not to mention its sharp tack to the Right on economic issues). Add to that the long record of executive power-grabbing and war-making by Democratic presidents, the undeniable charisma of Barack Obama, and the feverish devotion he inspires in some people, and you could have a recipe for a a kinder, gentler version (at best) of Bushism.

    All that said, I think Antle is right and John is perhaps overly optimistic that there remains on the Right a principled core of anti-war and pro-liberty sentiment. Checking government power just doesn’t seem to be what motivates the conservative masses anymore, if it ever was. Red-meat culture war issues like gay marriage and immigration, liberal bashing, and apocalyptic fear of the great Islamic Other are, best as I can tell, far closer to the pulsing heart of contemporary conservatism. (Hence my growing alienation from it over the last 8 years.) However much antipathy for President Obama a right-wing opposition might have, my bet is that it’s far more likely to zero in on this stuff.
    —————————————————–
    *Yes, I’m burnishing my libertarian street cred by stealing a title from Murray Rothbard.

  • The limits of Berryism

    A couple of liberal bloggers point out, apropos of the AmCon interview with Michael Pollan (see here for my ramblings), that Wendell Berry is, in fact, not a liberal. Rather, his criticisms of big agriculture, big business, and big government are rooted in a basically traditionalist worldview. I take it that’s why unconventional conservatives and traditionalists of various stripes like him.

    I will admit to having only limited interest in Berry, which will no doubt destroy any crunchy cred I may have had. While he definitely scores some points in his criticism of the national security state/global capitalism/industrial food nexus, I don’t find his positive vision nearly as captivating as others seem to. Maybe it’s because I’ve never thought that the solution to the ills of modernity and the shortcomings of liberalism should – or could – involve their wholesale repudiation. And Berry seems to me to come close to this.

  • The green revolution that wasn’t

    The libertarian-liberal quasi fusionist blog The Art of the Possible is rapidly becoming a must-read. And I’m not just saying that because my favorite libertarian blogger Jim Henley linked to one of my posts there. Maybe it’s also because of my own warring inner liberal and libertarian.

    Case in point: where else would you find this exhaustive revisionist account of the “green revolution” written from a distinctly radical, anti-statist perspective, courtesy of Kevin Carson?

    I think I may be coming around the the John Schwenkler view that what we really need is a hands-off policy in agriculture to create a level playing field and see if organic farming can deliver the goods.

  • John Milbank and “red toryism”

    This short piece from arch-Radical Orthodoxist John Milbank has generated a bit of buzz in the theologican blogosphere. Milbank seems to be calling for a socially conservative/economically leftist (or perhaps agrarian/distributist is a better description) “Red Toryism” to combat the hegemony of what he deems a failed neoliberalism (i.e. social liberalism plus relatively unregulated corporate capitalism or what Europeans call liberalism and Americans know as conservatism):

    Jackie Ashley (This fight really matters, May 19) reveals the bizarre bankruptcy of the current British left. By every traditional radical criterion New Labour has failed: it has presided over a large increase in economic inequality and an entrenchment of poverty, while it has actively promoted the destruction of civil rights, authoritarian interference in education and medicine, and an excessively punitive approach to crime. But never mind all that, says Jackie Ashley and her ilk: on what crucially matters – the extending of supposed biosexual freedom and the licensing of Faustian excesses of science – it is on the side of “progress”.

    Yet it is arguably just this construal of left versus right which is most novel and questionable. Is it really so obvious that permitting children to be born without fathers is progressive, or even liberal and feminist? Behind the media facade, more subtle debates over these sorts of issue do not necessarily follow obvious political or religious versus secular divides. The reality is that, after the sell-out to extreme capitalism, the left seeks ideological alibis in the shape of hostility to religion, to the family, to high culture and to the role of principled elites.

    An older left had more sense of the qualified goods of these things and the way they can work to allow a greater economic equality and the democratisation of excellence. Now many of us are beginning to realise that old socialists should talk with traditionalist Tories. In the face of the secret alliance of cultural with economic liberalism, we need now to invent a new sort of politics which links egalitarianism to the pursuit of objective values and virtues: a “traditionalist socialism” or a “red Toryism”. After all, what counts as radical is not the new, but the good.

    On the one hand, the article Milbank is responding to is virtually a shrill parody of go-go liberalism that allows for absolutely no limits on exploiting human embryos for scientific and medical purposes, and sees the dark specter of theocracy (especially Catholic) in any opposition to unbridled Brave New Worldism. Her article reads like a mirror version of some conservative writing you get over here: forget about war, poverty, the criminal justice system, etc. – it’s all about abortion!

    Still, Milbank’s “new sort of politics” strikes some odd notes. For instance, what is he referring to by “hostility to religion, to the family, to high culture and to the role of principled elites”? Sounds a bit like “traditional values” boilerplate we get a lot of from Bill Bennett types. Moreover, and granting that what I don’t know about British politics could fill a library, who is the constituency supposed to be for this rather odd amalgam of religious traditionalism, culutral elitism, and economic egalitarianism?

    I actually see some kind of social conservatism/economic liberalism combination having more promise here, but that’s partly because our version of social conservatism tends to be much more populist (see: Huckabee, Mike) and thus has a natural constituency. By contrast, an elitist, aristocratic conservatism combined with economic anti-capitalism has usually been the preserve of intellectuals (Coleridge comes to mind) and often seems to involve a rather dreamy picture of sturdy traditionalist yeoman farmers and artisans happily tending their fields and workshops. Appealing as that is in some ways, it’s hard to see it gathering much of a following on either side of the Atlantic.

    For what it’s worth, the one really interesting recent example of genuine Red Toryism that I can think of is the Canadian philosopher George Grant, who was a Christian Platonist, an economic egalitarian, a sometimes-anarchist, a staunch opponent of war and empire, and a Jacques Ellul-style technophobe. But again, not exactly the basis for a mass political movement. The American political thinker Christopher Lasch also has some affinities with this outlook. While I think both can make valuable contributions to a sound political perspective (especially when it comes to criticizing the excesses of liberalism), I’m not convinced they can provide the whole package.

  • Paleos, Obama, Right, and Left

    Surprisingly, two debates have largely occupied the newly live American Conservative blog: one about what exactly constitutes “paleoconservatism” and one about whether conservatives should support Barack Obama for president. The two debates are intertwined in that several of the TAC writers seem uncertain whether paleos should continue to think of themselves as a dissident minority within the conservative movement, or whether, under present conditions, their ideas might get more traction on the Left.

    At the risk of oversimplifying, what sets “paleoism” apart from much mainstream conservatism can be boiled down to three positions: they’re restrictionist on immigration, protectionist on trade, and anti-interventionist in foreign affairs. At the other end of the conservative spectrum, neoconservatives generally take the opposite position on all three issues.

    On the Left, though, at least two of the pillars of paleoism can gain a respectful hearing. The apparently resurgent left wing of the Democratic Party is definitely more hostile to free trade and military interventionism than the centrist-DLC wing of the party that was dominant during the 90s. Immigration restriction is a harder sell, but even here some on the Left are receptive to restrictionist arguments for labor and/or environmental reasons.

    For example, Herman Daly and John Cobb, an economist and a theologian who are, by any definition, on the Left, advocate protectionism, anti-interventionism, and reduced immigration. Their reasons are largely environmental, but also social justice-oriented (see here for my review of their book For the Common Good). Obviously, paleocons would have disagreements with them on other issues, but to the extent that these issues drive the paleo outlook, a potential Left-Right alliance is discernible.

    The connecting thread of paleoconservatism is a kind of particularistic nationalism that takes the nation-state to be the most important political unit, and one that is in danger of being dissolved by unchecked immigration, global capitalism, promiscuous interventionism, and supranational governments-in-embryo like the WTO. So, much of the paleo program is dedicated to resisting this erosion of national sovereignty. While the Left casts a much more jaundiced eye on nationalist sentiment (though there are exceptions), I think the Left’s concern for democracy can, at times result in remarkably similar policy preferences. Left-wing criticisms of NAFTA and the WTO, for instance, are often couched in terms of those institutions’ anti-democratic nature. It’s not too much of a leap, then, to connect national sovereignty and democratic self-determination.

    For many the key issue, of course, is the war. Most of the writers at TAC express skepticism that Obama is any kind of consistent anti-interventionist. Where they seem to differ among themselves is over how likely Obama actually is to extricate us from Iraq, and how likely he is to start further wars. Some TACers see Obama as essentially a globalist Wilsonian interventionist who would take America into varous do-good interventions around the world.

    Obviously no one can predict what a president will do once in office with any great ceratainty, particularly in foreign affairs where the president has a much freer hand. But my hunch is that extricating us from Iraq, attempting to root out al-Qaeda from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area, and dealing with Iran would provide plenty to keep President Obama busy and prevent him from, say, invading Sudan.

    Now, some of the TAC writers are just frankly opposed to Obama’s views on key domestic issues: the welfare state, health care, abortion, etc. (I have some differences with him here too.) So the question for Obama-leaning conservatives becomes twofold: how likely do you think Obama is to actually end the war in Iraq, and is the issue of the war important enough to override disagreement on other issues?

    I sit much looser to any self-definition as a “conservative” (and was, despite my anti-Iraq war views never a “paleo” per se) than do the professional conservatives over at TAC, but, for me, the war issue, combined with the broader issues of executive aggrandizement, civil liberties, and abuse of power is more than sufficient to justify rooting (and probably voting) for Obama. But, more broadly, seeing the virtual implosion of the GOP and organized conservatism over the course of the Bush presidency has spurred a reevaluation of a lot of the conservative views I once held.

    I used to think it was desirable to salvage a kind of “conservatism rightly understood” from the wreckage of Bushism, but that seems a lot less important now. For instance, it’s become pretty clear to me that global warming is a very serious issue, possibly even a catastrophic one, that will require the sustained attention of the next president and Congress. Is this a “conservative” or a “liberal” position? In the US it’s de facto a liberal position, because organized conservatism still essentially doesn’t recognize it as a problem and is forced to resort to increasingly implausible conspiracy theories about socialist climate scientists in cahoots with Al Gore who want to take away your car.

    Likewise with the war. I think there was a “conservative” argument to be made against it, but the more important question is whether there was a fundamentally moral and prudential case to be made against it. I don’t know if conservatism has been betraying its essence in falling down on these two huge issues, but I just don’t have enough invested in the survival of “conservatism” to worry too much about it.

    There will likely always be a “liberal” and a “conservative” party in the U.S., even if their definitions change over time. Right now the “conservative” party still stands for a cavalier attitude to war, environmental protection, and economic justice, even if the positions it takes aren’t necessarily for good conservative reasons (it’s hard not to think, for instance, that Russell Kirk would be aghast at contemporary conservatism; and I think someone like Wendell Berry has as good a claim to being a conservatism as anyone). Whether or not more conservatives will find themselves migrating to the Left will be interesting to see.

  • The Keystone State and the nomination

    It may just be a quirk of this drawn-out primary season, but as a native of the great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, I’m happy to see some attention finally being paid to the state’s political complexity.

    Here’s a NY Times piece about Barack Obama trying to learn to speak Pennsylvanian by bringing his celestial rhetoric down to the earthy reality as experienced by blue-collar industrial workers (or, more to the point, former industrial workers). Obama has been traveling the state with Senator Bob Casey, Jr., son of the late Governor Robert Casey, who, famously, fell out with the Clintons over abortion during the 92 election.

    This piece from CBS news does a pretty good job dispelling the caricature of PA as “Pittsburgh on one end, Philadelphia on the other, and Alabam in the middle” (a cliche, as the article points out, that can be traced to a characterization offered by the ragin’ Cajun James Carville). The idea of liberal big cities swimming in a sea of red-state conservatism is a vast oversimplification. Indeed, as the piece points out, the Philly suburbs are one of the last preserves of that fast-disappearing species the Rockefeller Republican, while the PA heartland, including many small once-industrial towns, is full of socially and culturally conservative blue-collar workers who would hardly fit in at a meeting of the Club for Growth.

    In fact, the split between Bob Casey, Sr. and Bill Clinton, which in most accounts is invariably painted as the “conservative” Casey versus the “liberal” Clinton, is in many ways almost the opposite. While Bill Clinton was moving the Democratic Party to the right on nearly every major issue (crime, welfare, trade, foreign policy), Casey was an unapologetic New Deal liberal who crafted a statewide health insurance program for children. However, Casey also believed that the Democrats’ mission of protecting the most vulnerable members of society should extend to the unborn, which, in our typical political narrative, forever brands him as a “conservative.”

    Wheter “Casey Democrats” will turn out for Obama remains to be seen, but it’s still nice for PA to have its moment in the sun.

  • Art of the Possible

    This won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but there’s a new multiple-author blog exploring the potential for alliances between liberals and libertarians that features, among other folks, one-man mutualism publishing house (and occassional ATR commenter) Kevin Carson.

    The blog is here: The Art of the Possible

  • Making room for religious law?

    There’s been a lot of blogospheric hubabaloo about this rather dry and academic lecture given by Rowan Williams on the possibility of recognizing, in some official fashion, religious legal jurisdictions within a pluralistic society. What was reported as the Archbishop appeasing Islamic extremists is, in reality, a nuanced exploration of some significant issues in the philosophy and theology of law.

    In fact, Williams’ lecture is an interesting discussion of some of the issues we’ve been batting around here, specifically the question of how particular religious identities can be expressed within a pluralistic and secular state. What Williams is exploring is the possibility that, for certain specified matters, religious believers could choose to “opt-in” to legal (or quasi-legal) arrangements based in religious principle. Which sounds to me like a form of religiously-based arbitration.

    The emphasis here is on the need to recognize that society is composed not just of individuals, but of a plurality of groups, each with their own particular identity. And that each person has plural identities in being both a citizen of the state and a member of one or more group within society. To allow people to opt-in to certain particular legal or quasi-legal frameworks is part of recognizing the reality of religious and other identities and the claims they make upon their adherents. So, a Muslim might choose to have certain issues relating to marriage or finances adjudicated by an Islamic “court” within the broader framework of the law of the state.

    Rowan is careful to note that there are potential pitfalls in making sure that all people have their rights as citizens secured and that coercion and abuse are avoided. He is insistent that there be a prior guarantee of equality before the law and a baseline morality for all citizens. And this is where his lecture seems most germane to the issues we’ve been hashing out. He sees the role of the law as “a mechanism whereby any human participant in a society is protected against the loss of certain elementary liberties of self-determination and guaranteed the freedom to demand reasons for any actions on the part of others for actions and policies that infringe self-determination.” In other words, the authority of particular communities over their members is limited by recognition of an essential shared human dignity.

    It is not to claim that specific community understandings are ‘superseded’ by this universal principle, rather to claim that they all need to be undergirded by it. The rule of law is – and this may sound rather counterintuitive – a way of honouring what in the human constitution is not captured by any one form of corporate belonging or any particular history, even though the human constitution never exists without those other determinations. Our need, as Raymond Plant has well expressed it, is for the construction of ‘a moral framework which could expand outside the boundaries of particular narratives while, at the same time, respecting the narratives as the cultural contexts in which the language [of common dignity and mutually intelligible commitments to work for certain common moral priorities] is learned and taught’ (Politics, Theology and History, 2001, pp.357-8).

    This is similar to what I’ve been calling “chastened” liberalism: it upholds the irreducible importance of self-determination and the need for a sphere of free action for the individual, but it also respects the reality of “thick” communities. It refrains from trying to loosen their bonds more than is necessary to ensure an essential measure of justice and freedom for each person as well as a kind of modus vivendi or negotiated peace between different communities within a society. This would be in contrast to a more universalizing or “crusading” liberalism that upholds a single form of life as the best for every person: the free-wheeling, unattached, cosmopolitan individual.

    Now, It’s not entirely clear to me how much freedom Rowan envisions people having “over against any and every actual system of social life.” For instance, if I can opt-in to a more restrictive religious law, can I also opt-out again? In other words, exactly how much authority does he envision ceding to religious communities? Is it possible to give communities a significant degree of autonomy while still upholding the principle that whether or not to belong to such a community is a matter of individual choice? This is, I think, the more reasonable version of the concern raised, somewhat hysterically, in some quarters by Rowan’s speech. I recommend reading the whole thing, though it is a bit dense in places.

  • Obama: left-libertarian?

    Interesting view, but I think it’s a bit of a stretch.

  • More thoughts on Obama

    I was maybe excessively churlish about Barack Obama in this post. All things considered, I think an Obama candidacy (as opposed to a Clinton candidacy) would be a good thing. His positions on climate change and energy policy in particular strike me as among the best in the field, and that’s no small matter. I do wish we’d have gotten more specifics on foreign policy differences between the Democratic candidates, but from what little I’ve been able to glean, Obama’s foreign policy would be to the “left” of Hillary Clinton’s (though probably still much further to the “right” than I’d like).

    Still, the thing that continues to bug me about Obama is the way people respond to him, as though he can personally “heal our divisions” or elevate us to a new level of virtue. This is not a role that the executive in a constitutional system governing free people ought to play. One of the besetting problems of our age is that the president is invested with entirely too much power and authority, as if he were the embodiment of a Rousseauean “general will.” I don’t think that Barack Obama would abuse executive power to the extent that George Bush has, but the habit of seeing the president as our “leader” (much less the leader of the world) can only encourage servility and make tyranny that much more likely.

    UPDATE: Christopher has some good thoughts here: “[Obama] is preparing us to take up our responsibilities individually and communally to face the hard work at hand. Ironically, what some are worried about as a form of messianism, actually relocates the power to make change within each one and all of us.” That’s an important distinction, and it’s possible I’m misreading the Obama phenomenon. Still, it’s also a subtle distinction and one that can easily get lost in the enthusiasm for getting “our guy” elected.