A Thinking Reed

Category: Liberalism

  • Silly season

    I haven’t been following the Republican primaries all that closely–partly because it’s too depressing, but also in part because I’ve been convinced virtually from the get-go that Mitt Romney will ultimately be the nominee. Nevertheless, what’s apparent even to the casual observer is that the G.O.P. intends to rerun the playbook they used in the 2008 election by attempting to brand Barack Obama as fundamentally un-American.

    Romney thinks Obama wants to turn America into a “European-style welfare state”; Newt Gingrich is convinced (or wants to convince us) that the president is a “Saul Alinsky radical.” Obama, we’re told, intends to preside over the United States’ “decline” into a second-tier power, relinquishing our status as the global hegemon.

    If this was unconvincing as an attack on candidate Obama in 2008–and the voters seemed to agree that it was–how much less convincing is it against President Obama in 2012? After all, the Obama Administration’s first term has, if anything, confirmed the hopes (or suspicions) of those of us who always saw Obama as essentially a center-left pragmatist, if an unusually charismatic and eloquent one. From the economics of “austerity-lite” to the killing of Osama bin Laden and the escalation of the war in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, Obama has rarely strayed from the centrist playbook, for better or worse (and in my view it’s been a little bit of both).

    I guess what I find so dispiriting about this is that it’s virtually impossible to have a good-faith debate about the problems facing the country when one party is attacking what amounts to a fantasy version of the current occupant of the Oval Office. Moreover, when the president is perpetually under the burden to prove that he’s not a “radical” or “socialist,” genuinely liberal or progressive ideas become that much more marginalized. Come to think of it, maybe that’s the point.

  • What would it mean for progressives to “support” Ron Paul?

    There’s been a bit of back and forth recently in the left/progressive blogosphere about whether people who meet that particular description should “support” libertarian Texas Republican congressman Ron Paul’s candidacy for president. Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald, and others have expressed varying degrees of support for Paul’s candidacy, noting that his stances on civil liberties and foreign intervention and war-making are arguably to the “left” of President Obama’s.

    Others have countered that Paul is a social reactionary who lent his name to (and profited handsomely from) a series of newsletters in the 90s that trafficked in racist and other inflammatory language as part of a “redneck outreach” strategy among self-described “paleo” libertarians and conservatives. Paul is furthermore a libertarian of a peculiar sort: one who would devolve much of the power of the federal government to the states, a move whose likely effect on individual liberty is debatable at best.

    I’m neither a libertarian nor do I have much street cred as a “progressive.” But what I wonder is: what’s at stake in these arguments? What sort of “support” do Greenwald, et al. have in mind? Are they proposing that progressives, who one assumes are mostly registered Democrats, re-register en masse to vote in the Republican primary? Or that they should vote for Paul in the general election were he to get the GOP nomination?

    What I think needs to be kept in mind here is that Ron Paul is very, very unlikely to win the nomination and why this is the case. It’s because, among other things, his stances on issues where he is appealing to the likes of Sullivan and Greenwald, are precisely where he is most at variance with the modern Republican party and the conservative movement. The Republican Party and the conservative movement, recall, are largely a fusion of economic, social, and national-defense conservatives. And I agree with the longstanding thesis of Jim Henley that, contrary to popular belief, these factions are not really “in tension” with one another to any great degree. These three varieties of conservatives are, if not identical, largely in sympathy with one another. Among conservatives of whatever stripe, free-marketeerism, cultural conservatism, and military hawkishness are seen as mutually reinforcing. Paul’s eccentric blend of isolationism, decentralization, Austrian economics, and social conservatism are out of sync with what remains the overwhelming conservative consensus.

    So it remains unclear what sort of support a progressive or liberal is supposed to offer Paul’s candidacy. Is it that they (we?) should commend Paul for promoting certain perspectives (e.g., a critique of American interventionism) that fall largely outside of the bipartisan mainstream? Liberals can certainly do that without voting for him. But beyond this, what else is “supporting” Paul supposed to mean apart from wishing (and working?) for the success of his candidacy? Are liberals supposed to support (e.g., give money to or vote for) a candidate who opposes every facet of the regulatory and welfare state going back to the 19th century on the minuscule chance that he’ll win the presidency and dismantle the American empire? This seems like an odd allocation of resources for liberals to make. A better use of those resources would seem to be to try to move the Democratic Party–which after all already has a large progressive constituency–in a more progressive direction.

    UPDATE: Kevin Drum makes a similar argument, focusing more on what he calls Paul’s “crackpot” ideology:

    Bottom line: Ron Paul is not merely a “flawed messenger” for these views. He’s an absolutely toxic, far-right, crackpot messenger for these views. This is, granted, not Mussolini-made-the-trains-run-on-time levels of toxic, but still: if you truly support civil liberties at home and non-interventionism abroad, you should run, not walk, as fast as you can to keep your distance from Ron Paul. He’s not the first or only person opposed to pre-emptive wars, after all, and his occasional denouncements of interventionism are hardly making this a hot topic of conversation among the masses. In fact, to the extent that his foreign policy views aren’t simply being ignored, I’d guess that the only thing he’s accomplishing is to make non-interventionism even more of a fringe view in American politics than it already is. Crackpots don’t make good messengers.

    Now, if you literally think that Ron Paul’s views on drugs and national security are so important that they outweigh all of this — multiple decades of unmitigated crackpottery, cynical fear-mongering, and attitudes toward social welfare so retrograde they make Rick Perry look progressive — and if you’ve somehow convinced yourself that non-interventionism has no other significant voices except Ron Paul — well, if that’s the case, then maybe you should be happy to count Paul as an ally. But the truth is that you don’t need to. Ron Paul is not a major candidate for president. He’s never even been a significant presence as a congressman. In a couple of months he’ll disappear back into the obscurity he so richly deserves. So why get in bed with him? All you’ll do is wake up in March with a mountain of fleas. Find other allies. Make your arguments without bothering to mention him. And remember: Ron Paul has never once done any of his causes any good. There’s a good reason for that.

  • “In the struggle between ‘labor’ and ‘capital,’ capital has basically won.”

    I haven’t blogged about the ongoing “Occupy Wall Street” (and other) protests, but I did want to share a couple of recent pieces that I found helpful for putting them in context.

    Using a plethora of charts, this post at Business Insider lays out about as clearly as you could ask the problems with how our economic system is currently functioning. Or more accurately, how it’s failing to function for many, if not most, of the people in the country.

    The problem in a nutshell is this: Inequality in this country has hit a level that has been seen only once in the nation’s history, and unemployment has reached a level that has been seen only once since the Great Depression. And, at the same time, corporate profits are at a record high.

    In other words, in the never-ending tug-of-war between “labor” and “capital,” there has rarely—if ever—been a time when “capital” was so clearly winning.

    Read the whole thing, as they say.

    On a related note, here’s economist and author of The End of Poverty Jeffrey Sachs making a similar argument: “Occupy Wall Street and the Demand for Economic Justice.”

    There’s been a bit of hand-wringing among respectable liberals over the fact that the Occupy Wall Street protesters include–horrors!–anarchists, socialists, and other radicals who’d rather scrap American capitalism than reform it. But every protest movement has had its share of radicals–the anti-war and civil rights movements certainly did. And at its best, American radicalism has had a creative and fermenting effect on American liberalism. Radicalism without liberalism may stray into utopianism, but liberalism without radicalism is apt to become a complacent defender of the status quo.

  • Libertarianism and the politics of human frailty

    Jim Henley, who’s long been one of my favorite bloggers, has been writing a really interesting series of posts touching on aspects of his defection from libertarianism toward a more liberal/social-democratic politics. In his most recent post, Jim wonders if libertarianism is “an inevitably temporary political outlook.” He notes that many people seem to “outgrow” libertarianism as they age or have kids, or when some other particular circumstance seems to call for deviation from the True Faith, even if they still call themselves libertarians (e.g., pro-war libertarians, pro-welfare-state libertarians). He goes on to admit that part of what moved him away from it was a realization of the concrete effects that some of the policies he’d formerly advocated–Social Security privatization in his case–would have on his family and families less well off than his once they seemed to enjoy some real chance of being enacted.

    I was never a “professional” or even semi-professional libertarian, but I did identify with libertarianism for much of my mid-20s. I read Nozick, Friedman, Sowell, Hayek, Mises, Rothbard, etc., and even penned a handful of articles for some libertarian websites. I think that, like Jim, my disaffection was partly intellectual and partly personal. On the intellectual side, I came to see the logical endpoint of libertarianism as a society in which your status is ultimately determined by your ability to pay. In the anarcho-capitalist utopia, for example, people’s rights are supposed to be secured by competing private protection agencies, which presumably operate according to the profit motive. Consequently, anyone unable to pay their way is at the mercy of others. Conversely, the most compelling case for a robust government is precisely the protection of the interests of the weak, and a leveling of the playing field between the weak and the strong. Moreover, the intellectual foundations of rights-based libertarianism (Lockean views of property rights, a strong distinction between “positive” and “negative” freedom, etc.) revealed themselves to be much shakier than I thought.

    On the more personal side, I had to admit that most of the (modest) success I’ve enjoyed in life wouldn’t have been possible without the support of many of the public institutions that libertarians scorn. My family weathered the storms of Reaganomics partly through the benefit of public assistance; after that, my father was disabled by an accident at work, and our family survived through a combination of worker’s compensation and Social Security benefits; I went to public schools and public universities, partly with the assistance of government-guaranteed student loans and Pell grants. How could I consistently advocate the dismantling of these institutions that had made my life possible? A society without them would be meaner, less equal, and less just than one with them–or so I now believe.

    As I’ve gotten older and started a family, my political views have been more informed by what I like to think is a greater appreciation for human frailty. People are not, in general, rugged individualists, including those who think they are. Each one of us is just one accident or piece of bad luck away from becoming utterly dependent on others. The idea that you could tear down the institutions that we’ve built for collective support–rickety and ad hoc though they are–without causing a lot of human suffering is not remotely plausible. And the view that private institutions would spontaneously arise to take their place strikes me as naive.

    But at the same time, because of that very fragility, I’ve become more tolerant of human difference and diversity. I’m less convinced than ever that there’s one “right” way to live which can be prescribed for everybody.* As often as not, people are simply making the best they can of whatever hand nature/society/luck has dealt them. Parenting is a good example: there is no end of advice on how to raise the “perfect” kid (however you define that); but in practice, you end up just muddling through a great deal, hoping not to damge your kids too much in the process. Trying to impose a one-size-fits-all model onto human life is likely to do more damage than good. A welfare-liberalism that respects pluralism best approximates the politics appropriate to such a view.
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    *This isn’t moral relativism, but rather an admission that there can be a variety of legitimate forms of life or “experiments in living,” to use J.S. Mill’s phrase.

  • What you see is what you get

    Parts of the Internet are abuzz with some dumb comments made by filmmaker and lefty gadfly Michael Moore about Presdient Obama “governing like a white guy.”

    The racist nature of these comments aside, what continues to surprise me is how many people apparently thought they were electing a wild-eyed liberal when they voted for Obama. An entire minin-genre of writing has been dedicated to this “Obama betrayed us” lament. It’s surprising because anyone who paid attention to Obama’s speeches, voting record, books, etc. prior to the election would’ve realized that he’s essentially now what he always has been: a moderate, center-left pragmatist.

    To be more specific, Obama appears to share the values or goals of many liberals, but he’s also committed to the path of cautious, incremental reform. Health care reform is a good example: despite overheated conservative rhetoric, the Affordable Care Act was actually an attempt to provide relatively modest, technocratic tweaks to the existing health insurance system. It was emphatically not a wholesale overhaul of the system, much less a “government takeover.”

    That’s not to say that the President should be above criticism–far from it! But it’s helpful to keep in mind that Obama is governing pretty much as expected–if you actually see him for who he is, not who liberals wish he was.

    UPDATE: It’s probably bad blog form to quote yourself, but to illustrate my point, here are a few things I wrote during the months leading up to the 2008 election and shortly thereafter (some of which, I humbly add, have been borne out by subsequent events):

    Jan. 5, 2008 “I have so far been less impressed by Obama than some of my friends; his vaunted oratory which seemed to promise to magically transport us to a post-partisan, post-race, post-conflict happy land always struck me as so much hot air.”

    Sept. 12, 2008 “I personally find Obama’s backpedaling on FISA and his disinclination to challenge head-on the Bush/GOP paradigm for foreign policy the most troubling. It’s also clear to me that Obama just doesn’t share my views on, say, the scope of U.S. interventionism.”

    Oct. 8, 2008 “If anything, my worry about Obama is that he’ll be too pragmatic, too prone to compromise, and too beholden to the Washington bipartisan consensus on a host of matters.”

    Dec. 30, 2008 “Obama has given little indication that he dissents in any radical way from the US consensus on foreign policy.”

    Now, if even I could see at the time that Barack Obama was essentially a center-left moderate, how come Michael Moore, et al. persist in this “We voted for a liberal gut-fighter, but he turned out to be a conciliatory, deal-making moderate” line?

  • The varieties of leftism and the social democracy of fear

    I linked below to this great post by Russell Arben Fox, which is in turn a riff on this post from Crooked Timber’s Chris Bertram. The original post identified four streams of left-wing politics and mused about what direction the European left should go in. Russell takes Bertram’s typology and applies it to the U.S. He notes a similar set of groupings:

    –The neoliberal technocratic left: This is basically the mainstream of the Democratic Party. Its basic tenets are managed economic growth and sufficient redistribution to ensure a relative degree of equality. In the U.S. neoliberals are distinguished from older (paleo?) liberals by their greater embrace of market capitalism and relative skepticism toward old-school big government welfare programs, nationalization, regulation, etc. Post-Reagan Democrats we might say.

    –The populist/nationalist left: This is a group that isn’t really represented among the political and pundit class, but could potentially have a significant grass-roots support. This would be, I think, your classic pro-union/working-class coalition. This is a group that is sometimes alienated from the first group in virtue of both its greater mistrust of capitalism and its greater degree of social conservatism. As Russell points out, these days populism and nationalism are more commonly found on the Right and almost inextricably bound up with anti-immigrant sentiment.

    –The eco-left: Russell identifies this with a sort of free-floating mélange of Greens, anarchists, localists, pacifists, and other independent-minded lefties. In outlook it’s generally decentralist and participatory, both localist and cosmopolitan, small-d democratic, and small-l libertarian. These are the kind of people who tend to make up activist movements and local movements for change outside official political channels.

    –The old/hard left: Pro-socialist if not outright communist, this version of the left has a pretty marginal presence in American life. Although, as Russell notes, democratic socialists like Michael Harrington have had a significant (and generally salutary) effect on the broader stream of American liberalism.

    In my heart of hearts I probably would identify most with what Russell calls the “eco-left,” although I have significant sympathies with the pro-union outlook of the populists. (Like Russell, I don’t think these are necessarily mutually exclusive.) My ideal polity would probably be a lot more decentralized, pacifistic, small scale, green/agrarian, localist, participatory, and small-l libertarian than the current U.S. However, like a lot of people in the broadly left-of-center camp, in practice I support and vote for neoliberal Democrats (like, say, Barack Obama) who, when you really break it down, I don’t have all that much in common with ideologically.

    Partly this is pragmatism, but I also think it has to do with the fact that I’ve become more tempered in my localist and libertarian sympathies. I’ve become more convinced of the need–at least for the foreseeable future–for the national government to play a significant role in ensuring basic entitlements, a robust social safety net, and a strong regulatory state. Partly this is because calls for “local control,” “decentralization” and the like are often covers for eviscerating the safety net and the regulatory state. But also it’s because I’m not sure what entity apart from the national government is actually capable of putting some kind of democratic fetters on industry and capital and curtailing the abuse of private power. I’m definitely interested in thinking about ways of balancing the public good with private power that don’t rely on an overweening and bureaucratic state and that are more democratic, localist, and participatory. But at the same time, when pillars of the post-New Deal welfare state are under increasing attack, which threatens the already tenuous position of some of the most vulnerable citizens in our society, it seems urgent to muster at least two cheers for big government liberalism. This is largely the spirit of what the late social thinker Tony Judt called “the social democracy of fear“:

    If social democracy has a future, it will be as a social democracy of fear. Rather than seeking to restore a language of optimistic progress, we should begin by reacquainting ourselves with the recent past. The first task of radical dissenters today is to remind their audience of the achievements of the twentieth century, along with the likely consequences of our heedless rush to dismantle them.

    The left, to be quite blunt about it, has something to conserve. It is the right that has inherited the ambitious modernist urge to destroy and innovate in the name of a universal project. Social democrats, characteristically modest in style and ambition, need to speak more assertively of past gains. The rise of the social service state, the century-long construction of a public sector whose goods and services illustrate and promote our collective identity and common purposes, the institution of welfare as a matter of right and its provision as a social duty: these were no mean accomplishments.

  • Friday Links

    –Marvin on the Presbyterian Church’s decision to allow congregations to call non-celibate gay and lesbian pastors.

    –Libraries are part of the social safety net.

    –“I hated vegans too, but now I am one.”

    –On anti-Semites and philo-Semites.

    –Mark Bittman asks, “Why bother with meat?”

    –Jesus and eco-theology.

    –Jeremy discusses Herbert McCabe and Gerhard Forde on the Atonement.

    –Your commute is killing you.

    –Rowan Williams’ Ascension Day sermon: “The friends of Jesus are called … to offer themselves as signs of God in the world.”

    –Grist’s “great places” series continues with two posts on the industrial food system and its alternatives.

    –Keith Ward on his recent book More than Matter?

    –Russell Arben Fox on the Left in America.

    –The Cheers challenge. My wife and I have already been rewatching the entire series. We’re on season 6 now, which replaces Shelley Long’s Diane with Kirstie Alley’s Rebecca. It’s one of my all-time favorite shows, although the earlier seasons are probably the best ones.

    –Ozzy’s first two solo albums, which are generally considered classics, have gotten the deluxe reissue treatment. Here’s a review.

  • Friday links

    –Ta-Nehisi Coates on Moby-Dick.

    –Amy-Jill Levine: “A Critique of Recent Christian Statements on Israel”

    –From Jeremy at Don’t Be Hasty: Why the church can’t take the place of the welfare state.

    –A discussion of “summer spirituality” with Fr. James Martin, S.J., author of The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything.

    –A review of Keith Ward’s recent book More than Matter?

    —Lady Gaga: “Iron Maiden changed my life.”

    –Grist’s David Roberts has been writing a series on “great places” as a reorienting focus for progressive politics: see the first installments here, here, and here. Also see this reflection from Ned Resnikoff.

    –Four different demo versions of Metallica’s early tune “Hit the Lights” (with some, ahem, interesting vocal experimentation by a young James Hetfield).

  • Friday Links

    –With the death of bin Laden, the U.S. has accomplished the aims that justified the war in Afghanistan. Time to leave.

    –An interview with “eco-economist” Herman Daly: Rethinking growth.

    –A primer on Christian nonviolence.

    –The collapse of the “progressive Christian” big tent?

    –The Presbyterian Church (USA) voted to allow non-celibate gay and lesbians to serve as clergy. Support for the change came from some surprising places. And see this article from theologian Eugene Robinson on how same-sex couples can image the faithfulness of God.

    –Catholic theologians and other teachers take Speaker of the House John Boehner to task on the GOP’s budget priorities. More here.

    –Theologian Roger Olson on how “inerrancy” became a litmus test for evangelicalism.

    –The Obama administration is trying to figure out how to continue the war in Libya without congressional authorization.

    –An interview with historian Adam Hoschchild on the World War I pacifist movement.

    –Lord Vader announces the death of Obi-Wan Kenobi.

  • Friday Links

    –A challenge to libertarians on the coecivene power of private entities.

    –A.O. Scott on superhero movies as a Ponzi scheme.

    –Richard Beck of Experimental Theology on why he blogs.

    –A political typology quiz from the Pew Research Center. (I scored as a “solid libera.l” Although I’d take issue with the way some of the choices were presented.)

    –An end to “bad guys.”

    –Def Leppard’s Hysteria and the changing meaning of having a “number 1” album.

    –The folks at the Moral Mindfield have been blogging on the ethical implications of killing bin Laden, from a variety of perspectives.

    –Ta-Nehisi Coates on Abraham Lincoln and slavery.

    –Marvin had a good post earlier this week on the death of bin Laden and Christian pacifism.

    –Christopher has a post on problems with the language of “inclusion” and “exclusion” in the church.

    –I don’t always agree with Glenn Greenwald, but I’m glad he’s out there asking the questions he asks. He’s been blogging up a storm this week on the circumstances surrounding bin Laden’s death.

    –Brandon has a concise summary of the history behind Cinco de Mayo.

    ADDED LATER: How do you feed 10 billion people? By eating less meat for starters.