A Thinking Reed

Category: Liberalism

  • Rights, liberties, and taxation

    A point that I’ve tried to make before, but which may bear repeating since it’s Tax Day: the distinction between “positive” and “negative” rights, or liberty, is largely illusory–or at least not that important. Libertarians sometimes use this distinction to differentiate their position from “welfare” liberals. In the libertarian utopia, rights are guarantees against interference (negative) rather than claims on resources (positive). But this distinction starts to break down once you look closely at it.

    As John Stuart Mill pointed out long ago, a right is essentially a person’s justified claim on society to protect her in the enjoyment of some good. Mill points out that personal security from physical harm or aggression is one of, if not the most, important of such rights since, without it, we can’t do much else. But note that this right, which some might clasify as “negative,” is, in fact, a claim on some portion of society’s resources. It takes resources (money, time, labor) to protect people’s security. Similar points could be made about access to courts, the protection of personal property, etc. So, a “negative” right is no less a claim on resources than a “positive” right.

    So it turns out that the distinction between positive and negative rights is not an especially important one in determining the proper scope of government action. A better criteria might be the importance of the interest protected. Following Mill, we could say that physical safety from harm is one of the most important interests that should be protected by socially provided rights. But equally important–or nearly so–are our interests in having sufficient food, shelter, clothing, health care, educational opportunities, etc. If it’s legitimate to tax people to provide security, protect property rights, and ensure access to courts, why would it be illegitimate to tax for the provision of these other goods?

  • Red Toryism revisited

    Philosopher and political gadfly John Gray has what seems to be a balanced take on Philip Blond’s “Red Toryism,” which has been making waves in politico-theological circles. Blond is an acolyte of John Milbank’s Radical Orthodoxy and an advisor to British Tory leader David Cameron who proposes a program of economic “relocalization” combined with political decentralization and social conservatism as an alternative to liberal permissiveness and capitalist excess. This vision harks back to the neo-medievalist “distributism” of Chesterton and Belloc and, to some minds, represents a third way beyond liberalism and conservatism.

    While granting that Blond is onto something in fingering capitalism and liberalism as responsible, at least in part, for diminshed social cohesion, Gray is skeptical that a “Red Tory” alternative is either feasible or desirable:

    Ours may be a post-secular society (I think so myself) but that is very different from reverting to any version of Christian orthodoxy. Britain today is home to a plurality of religious traditions, ranging from varieties of theism through to the many strands of Hinduism and the godless spirituality of Buddhism. There are also many kinds of agnosticism and scepticism, some indistinguishable from undogmatic versions of faith.

    This rich and interesting diversity is one reason why Blond’s project of reinstating a more unitary culture is so deeply problematic. Today there is no possibility of reaching society-wide agreement on ultimate questions. Happily such agreement is not necessary, nor even desirable. No government can roll back modernity, and none should try. We may be in a mess. But the pluralist society that Britain has become is more hospitable to the good life than the imagined order of an earlier age, which in the end is just one more stifling utopia.

    If anything, Gray’s strictures apply even moreso to the U.S., which has no tradition of an established church and, if anything, less cultural and religious uniformity than Britain. Moreover, it’s hard to see who on the American Right would be the constituency for this anomolous combination of high-church piety, cultural conservatism, and quasi-left-wing economics.

    (I previously wrote about Red Toryism here.)

  • American exceptionalism rightly understood?

    Damon Linker, who I think it’s fair to say, represents a liberalism informed by E.J. Dionne’s three conservative insights, defends a qualified version of American “exceptionalism.” It’s foolish, Linker says, to pretend that the U.S. is a uniquely virtuous nation; our history of barbarism toward indigenous Americans and black slaves and our mischief-making abroad should be enough to disabuse us of that notion. Still, Linker thinks there is a sense in which our country can be seen as exceptional:

    In what sense, then, is America exceptional? In the sense that we believe, in part for religious reasons, but also out of humanistic principle, that the benefits of political liberalism, which our nation achieved first in human history, can and should be enjoyed by every country, and by every person in every country, in the world. This conviction—an almost missionary compulsion to champion liberal-democratic self-government—is what most makes America exceptional. It is the core of our civil religion—and the goal that ought to guide our actions in the world.

    By “political liberalism” Linker doesn’t mean a narrowly liberal agendy, but liberalism broadly understood as the ideological underpinning of our whole form of government:

    Liberalism in this sense is a form of government—one in which political rule is mediated by a series of institutions that seek to limit the powers of the state and maximize individual freedom: constitutional government, an independent judiciary, multiparty elections, universal suffrage, a free press, civilian control of the military and police, a large middle class, a developed consumer economy, and rights to free assembly and worship.

    This is the liberalism that unites most of the Left and much of the Right in this country. The outliers tend to be conservatives who reject a secular government and leftists who reject the market economy (however qualified) and “bourgeois” democracy. These folks represent a distinctly minority view in American politics.

    There are two criticisms one could make of Linker’s argument. The first would be to argue that liberalism as he defines it is actually a bad thing, not a good one. This is what the aforementioned Rightists and Leftists would say. It’s a critique also sometimes voiced by some of our most respected and influential contemporary schools of theology. Postliberalism, Radical Orthodoxy, and other schools of theological thought are highly critical of liberalism and view it more as the source of our contemporary woes than something to be celbrated and exported.

    The second criticism would be that, even if liberalism is good for us, it’s not necessarily a universal good that the U.S. should undertake to spread abroad, whether by “hard” or “soft” means. This view would be shared by non-interventionists on the Right and the Left, as well as certain “realists” who deplore idealism in foreign policy or deny that it can effectively guide a nation’s behavior.

    Personally, I find the second criticism more persuasive than the first. Reactionary, radical, and theological critics of liberalism can score some points about its excesses, but I’ve yet to see any of them provide a persuasive, appealing, and feasible alternative to it.

    The second criticism has more bite, primarily, I think, because Linker, for all his Niebuhrian/Lincolnian realism, seems to underestimate the extent to which laudable ideals can be used to mask and justify unjust policies. A lot of “liberal hawks” jumped on the Iraq war bandwagon in part because the Bush administration used high-flown idealistic rhetoric to justify the war. Moreover, it’s not clear to me that he fully appreciates the contingency of the conditions that might be required for liberalism to flourish. Even confining ourselves to “soft” power, it’s not obvious how one can transplant liberal institutions, habits, and values to soil where they weren’t previously flourishing. And, as Dionne’s conservative would remind us, the delicate web of social habit and custom can be easily torn by even well-meaning attempts to improve it.

    Linker says that we need “intelligence and sobriety about how best to affect liberal change in divergent places at different historical moments” and that a “proper response to [America’s] failures is redoubled resolution to do better, to be smarter, to choose more efficacious means, in the future.” Which is surely true, but the call to “do better” doesn’t tell us how to do it. Doesn’t the fact that idealistic crusades have gone wrong so many times before may indicate that there’s a more systematic problem at work here? In fact, to suggest that all we need is intelligence, sobriety, and resolve may simply perpetuate the politics of the will that characterized the worst misdeeds of our past.

    I’m not sure my disagreement with Linker is really that severe. I don’t doubt that a foreign policy that is sincerely committed to spreading liberal values and also constrained by a realistic assessment of means is preferable to the likely alternatives. But the ever-present danger is that idealistic language will be used to mask brutality, self-interest, and injustice.

  • Defining conservatism down

    E.J. Dionne contrasts angry, pseudo-populist Tea Party-style conservatism with a more humane conservatism that “seeks to preserve the best of what we have.” He recognizes that he may be defining conservatism as little more than a corrective to progressivism rather than a free-standing ideology in its own right, but he maintains that Burkean-Kirkian conservatism is primarily about providing cautionary advice to over-zealous reformers, rather than opposing reform per se.

    At a philosophical level, Dionne may have a point. If conservatism is primarily a set of warnings against overreaching, then it isn’t a political agenda itself so much as a set of constraints on any positive agenda. Any sane liberalism will take note of the fact that policies can have unintended consequences, that ingrained social habits can’t simply be pulled up by the roots without sacrificing certain values, and that it’s not within the power of government to radically change human nature, as Marxists may have imagined.

    But Dionne also surely knows that American conservatism has never been limited to this modest version. Since at least the post-World War II era, conservatism has had a positive agenda of dismantling, or at least radically limiting, the welfare and regulatory state; expanding the national security and military apparatus; and defending “traditional” values against all comers. The relation between this movement and conservatism as Dionne describes it has been tenuous at best. The benign, avuncular conservatism Dionne praises has largely been confined to a handful of intellectuals and writers. Tea Partyism isn’t a radical break with the substance of American conservatism, so much as a particularly unattractive face of it.

  • Needed: better political symbolism

    I’m all for an alternative to the “Tea Party” phenomenon that believes in “promot[ing] civility and inclusiveness in political discourse, engag[ing] the government not as an enemy but as the collective will of the people, [and] push[ing] leaders to enact the progressive change for which 52.9 percent of the country voted in 2008.” But “Coffee Party”? Really? At least “tea party” actually refer to an important, resonant event in our political history, even if Glenn Beck doesn’t seem to realize that Tom Paine believed in progressive taxation and the welfare state.

  • The end of the affair

    The flirtation between liberals and libertarians that arose out of shared anti-Bush animus is over, according to Ed Kilgore. The causes are an economically interventionist Democratic administration and the rightward pull exerted on libertarians by Tea Partyism.

    Not to mention, this Jonathan Chait piece that Kilgore links to seems like the definitive refutation of “liberaltarianism” as a political philosophy. (No ideology with a name that ugly deserves to live anyway.)

  • Free speech and corporate personhood

    I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t make an informed comment on the legal aspects of yesterday’s SCOTUS campaign-finance ruling (though I know plenty of lawyers who are likely disgusted with it, including some former Supreme Court clerks). But what I find wrong with it is that it contradicts the heart of one of the most compelling argument for free speech.

    J.S. Mill, the grand-daddy of liberalism, argued for freedom of speech on many grounds, but one of the most important was that we can only arrive at the truth if all points of view get a vigorous airing. We need to be able to change course, to correct our views, by being exposed to a variety of competing truth-claims. This is an inherent part of what it means to be a human being realizing our nature as what Mill called “progressive beings.” By engaging in dialogue and argument with competing views, we may come to see that we were mistaken, or that we had overlooked part of the truth. At the very least, we’ll be strengthened in our own views by testing them against counter-arguments.

    However, given this view of why free speech matters, the absurdity of treating corporations as “persons” with free speech rights becomes readily apparent. A corporation is not a “progressive being” that can correct its errors and come to a greater comprehension of the truth. It is an entity driven entirely by the profit motive. A corporation will propagate a particular message only to the extent that the message serves that interest: it’s not concerned with the truth.

    You might say by way of rejoinder that it doesn’t matter whether corporations are interested in pursuing the truth. All that matters is that people are exposed to the widest possible range of ideas, regardless of their provenance. But this ignores that fact that, with unlimited corporate political “speech” we are no longer working with the model of a conversation aimed at truth, but with an attempt to overwhelm and drown competing points of view with a sheer volume of ads, propaganda, etc. The ideal of rational discussion is pretty much explicitly repudiated by allowing corporations to flood the airwaves with whatever “truths” best serve their interests. Free speech, by its very nature, presupposes something like reasoned dialogue; that’s what distinguishes it from propaganda, advertising, and similar endeavors, which are not good-faith arguments, but are aimed at bypassing rational dialogue.

    Corporations aren’t persons: they’re money-making enterprises. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but their interests should be subordinated to and circumscribed by those of actual persons.

  • Freedom’s just another word

    In a Reason symposium on libertarianism and culture, Kerry Howley argues that libertarians should be concerned not just with minimizing government coercion, but with critiquing cultural barriers to human freedom. For instance, she points out that a woman trapped in a repressively patriarchal culture, or one that merely reinforces “traditional” gender roles, is hardly capable of fully exercising her freedom.

    I agree with that. (Though I would demure at Ms. Howley’s insistence the the pill, porn, and 600 channels of TV are all on a par as examples of the “power of culture itself to liberate.”) But it’s no less true that someone who’s starving, or doesn’t have adequate access to health care, or doesn’t have clean air to breath or clean water to drink is incapable of fully exercising her freedom. Which is basically why, from J.S. Mill onward, most liberals have rejected laissez-faire in favor of some variety of state-action or welfare liberalism. In other words, valuing freedom is sometimes a good reason not to be a libertarian.

  • “Statism” revisited

    John makes some fair points in his response to this post. In particular, I probably did paint with too broad a brush in characterizing conservatives and libertarians as “mostly deny[ing] that [the environment, health care, etc.] are problems and/or that government has any role in addressing them.”

    At the same time, John is painting what strikes me as a bit too rosy a picture in some cases. For instance, is the mainstream conservative position really to favor carbon taxes instead of cap-and-trade? I think the mainstream conservative position (i.e., the position adhered to by most self-described conservatives) is to favor doing nothing about global warming either because a) it isn’t happening, b) humans aren’t causing it, or c) technology will save us. It’s true that some smart conservatives have made the case that a carbon tax is preferable to cap-and-trade, but I’m unconvinced they’re anything but a tiny minority. (Indeed, it’s usually lefty environmentalists who favor carbon taxes over against cap-and-trade because they don’t like the “trade” part.) I would be delighted to be proven wrong here, though, since it would mean that real progress on this front should be possible.

    That’s not to deny that conservatives do often provide alternative policy proposals for various problems, as John points out, but I still think that “anti-statism” functions as more of an article of faith on the Right than “pro-statism” does on the Left. It’s not uncommon for conservatives to denounce the New Deal and the Great Society in toto, which collectively constitute much of the framework of the regulatory and welfare state. This may be largely rhetorical posturing (though conservatives have put a lot of political muscle behind efforts to “privatize” Social Security among other things), but it is evidence of a particular mindset that instinctively distrusts government efforts to do much more than protect life and property.

    I don’t want to get hung up on a terminological debate, though; I agree with John that “the real debates are over what, in each instance that seems to call for a role for government, the appropriate role will be.” John is a conservative (of some kind or another) and I suppose I’m a liberal (of some kind or another), so we’re likely to disagree about the appropriate role for government in many (though not all) cases, but I’d be much happier to see the debate carried on in those terms.

  • Statism

    “Statism” is a word that obscures more than it clarifies. Conservatives and libertarians tend to use it for any government program they don’t like. But everyone who’s not an anarchist admits the need of a state of some sort. The question is what the appropriate duties of the state are.

    Hence, I don’t find this column by Gene Healy (via John), fretting about the “statism” of the so-called Millenial generation, very persuasive:

    In May, the Center for American Progress released a lengthy survey of polling data on Millennials, concluding that they’re a “Progressive Generation,” eager to increase federal power.

    CAP is the leading Democratic think tank, so it has a vested interest in that conclusion. But they’re on to something. In the last election, 18-to-29 year-olds went for Barack Obama by a 34-point margin.

    The CAP report shows that Gen Y is substantially more likely to support universal health care, labor unions, and education spending than older voters. And other surveys support CAP’s “Progressive Generation” thesis.

    In 2008, the nonpartisan National Election Study asked Americans whether “the free market” or “a strong government” would better handle “today’s complex economic problems.” By a margin of 78 to 22 percent, Millennials opted for “strong government.”

    Kids today are a credulous bunch. The 2007 Pew Political Values survey revealed “a generation gap in cynicism.” Where 62 percent of Americans overall view the federal government as wasteful and inefficient, just 42 percent of young people agree.

    No wonder, then, that GenNext responds to President Obama’s call for “public service,” roughly translated as “a federal paycheck.”

    Here, they differ dramatically from their skeptical “Generation X” predecessors. A 1999 survey asked Gen X college seniors to name their ideal employers; they “filled the entire list with for-profit businesses like Microsoft and Cisco.” What a difference a generation makes. In the same poll today, Gen Y prefers the State Department, Teach for America, and the Peace Corps. That’s a problem for a country built on the entrepreneurial spirit.

    What I think is missing from Healy’s analysis (and, let it be said, I think he’s written some fantastic stuff on executive power) is any distinction between the appropriate functions of the market and the state. No one in the U.S., left, right, or center, thinks we can dispose of the market or yearns to implement a Soviet-style command economy.

    But what many people–not just those naive youngsters–conclude is that the market does not, left to its own devices, magically solve our “complex economic problems.” What exactly is the “free market” solution to the fact that tens of millions of Americans lack health insurance? Or to environmental problems? Or to ensuring an adequate education for all kids? Funny how Microsoft and Cisco haven’t taken care of all this. Would these companies pick up the slack if we axed what Healy calls our “wealth-destroying Social Security system”?

    Conservatives and libertarians are, of course, free to propose solutions to these problems that are more in keeping with their philosophy, but what they mostly do is deny that they are problems and/or that government has any role in addressing them. Liberals, progressives, social democrats, and others, by contrast, see a role for government in stepping into the gaps left by the market. If that’s statism, I’m happy to be counted among the statists.