Liberalism 5.0?

The core institutions, ideas and expectations that shaped American life for the sixty years after the New Deal don’t work anymore. The gaps between the social system we inhabit and the one we now need are becoming so wide that we can no longer paper over them. But even as the failures of the old system become more inescapable and more damaging, our national discourse remains stuck in a bygone age. The end is here, but we can’t quite take it in. --Walter Russell Meade

Last Spring, Walter Russell Mead from Bard College wrote a piece in The American Interest entitled "The Once and Future Liberalism." The first part of the article gives the impression of a standard Libertarian critique of big-government overreach, but he's attempting something more interesting and raises some important questions.

The article is long, so I'll try to summarize his argument here, and then, if I have time this week, I will write some follow-up posts to dig a little deeper into some of the issues he raises. He starts out by describing the history of political liberalism in the Anglo-American world using the Operating System software update metaphor:

Liberalism 1.O: England's Glorious Revolution in 1688. Estabishes a constitutional monarchy and asserts the primacy of parliament over the King. Hobbes and Locke were 1.0 Liberals. Crown-and-altar narrative still essential for national identity

Liberalism 2.O: American Revolution in 1776. Replaces constitutional monarchy of L1.0 with a republic founded on Enlightenment ideas about natural rights. Crown-and-altar narrative and traditions are abolished. Benjamin Franklin starts out as a L1.0 but converts to L2.0. (Limited suffrage. Slavery tolerated.)  

Liberalism 3.0: Manchester Liberalism. "Programs included once unthinkable ideas like universal suffrage, the abolition of slavery, an end to state-enforced monopoly corporations, limited government, free markets at home and free trade abroad. . . . More likely to be evangelical than either 1.0 or 2.0 liberals. . . . believed that capitalism, individual rights and a culture of virtue supported by a tolerant, non-fanatical Protestant Christianity could provide ordered liberty. (They also, by and large, believed in the superiority of the white race, thought that “too much” Jewish influence was bad and believed that Catholic countries could never become effective modern democracies.)"

Liberalism 4.0: Late-19th century's Progressive movement that developed in repsonse to social imbalances created by industrial capitalism. Rises to policy during the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. If an unholy alliance between church and state was the chief threat to liberty for L1.0-3.0, "the rise of huge industrial corporations seized pride of place as a threat to individual liberty; 20th-century, 4.0 liberals began to think about the state as a possible ally to defend individuals from unaccountable private power. The liberalism of Theodore Roosevelt and men like William Allen White was defined by their response to these challenges. Democratic government needed to ensure a level playing field, to fight for basic equality of opportunity."

Liberalism 4.1: In response to Great Depression and WWII, "turn-of-the-century progressivism was revamped and retweaked into liberalism 4.1, the big government, Iron Triangle system [Feds, unions, large corporations] that most Americans think of when they hear the word “liberal” today." 

Mead argues that the whole mentality behind Liberalism 4.1, the mentality that I have been defending on this blog as the "New Deal Compromise" is obsolete:

Today liberalism 4.1, blue liberalism, is increasingly outdated and backward-looking, but in its time it was a genuinely positive attempt to realize old values in new circumstances, and many of its achievements still demand our respect. The driving force shaping the agenda of 4.0 and 4.1 liberals before and after the New Deal were a series of powerful and profound historical developments that changed the world under their feet. The earlier versions of liberal politics had been built in societies that, while beginning to urbanize and industrialize, were still predominantly agricultural. Both Jeffersonian and Jacksonian liberals saw independent small farmers as the basis of American freedom and democracy.

. . . Although socialists and social democrats sometimes made common cause with 4.1 liberals, at bottom, blue liberalism was built as an alternative to socialism rather than an on-ramp for it. With the onset of the Great Depression in particular, most American liberals came to believe that providing benefits like Social Security and unemployment insurance would inoculate American workers against more virulent forms of socialist ideology and attract new immigrants and their children toward the American liberal tradition. It worked. 

. . . Programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps and later the GI Bill, along with the experience of mobilization and rationing during the war, convinced many liberals that government could and should do more than ensure a level playing field, that it could plan, regulate and control well enough to at least bracket a rough equality of economic and social outcomes, not just opportunities. . . . In time, with the advent of the Great Society programs of “the best and the brightest”, liberalism 4.1 became more explicitly redistributionist, and more deeply convinced of the superiority of the technocratic ethos. 

Mead talks about how all the earlier versions of Liberalism--1.0 through 4.1--are inadequate for our situation today, and points to the as yet to be realized "Liberalism 5.0": 

None can serve as the political program for the heirs of the two great revolutions today. We don’t want the constitutional monarchy and Anglican establishment of William III; we don’t want the aristocratic, limited-franchise republic of George Washington; we don’t want the Manchester liberalism of the 1860s; and we don’t want the managerial state that liberals and progressives built in the first two-thirds of the 20th century. That doesn’t mean we should not admire, learn from and build on each of these liberal traditions, but our job today is to synthesize enduring liberal values in a 21st-century liberalism 5.0.

As with earlier versions, liberalism 5.0 must build on the best of what has gone before while making adjustments—radical when necessary, though never gratuitously so—to existing beliefs and institutions. 5.0 liberals must challenge the right of blue [4.1] liberals to own the L-word, seeking both to convince 4.1 liberals to come back to the future and denouncing those who won’t as the blinkered reactionaries and speed bumps they are.

And I agree with him when he says

. . . Many believe that the real ideological contest in America today is between “red” liberalism 3.0 (the more individualistic, laissez-faire, often evangelical kind of liberalism of the 19th century) and the more state-oriented, collectively minded post-World War II 4.1 blue liberalism. Red liberals denounce blue liberals as betrayers of the liberal legacy, as ideology thieves who have taken a philosophy grounded in individual freedom and limited government and turned it into a charter for “big” government. Blue liberals respond that red liberals don’t understand how the complexities of modern life make the outmoded pieties of liberalism 3.0 inadequate to today’s problems. But common to both these positions is the belief that the American debate today is between two versions of the past: the (presumed) free market utopia of the 19th century versus the (presumed) social utopia of the New Deal/Great Society of more recent times. If that were true, this would be a nation of conservatives fighting reactionaries—the status quo of 1970 fighting the status quo of 1880.

I agree that a society dominated by a technocratic ethos is not a good thing, and I am never going to defend government overreach, but the fundamental problem that the early progressives recognized has not gone away: If there is no big government to protect the public interest, a huge, powerful private sector will dominate, and the key players in that sector care only about their own interests, not the public interest. Until the problem of bigness in the private sector is solved, bigness in the public sector is a necessity. Until the disruptive, destablizing effects of market capitalism can be tamed, there must be an adequate way to support the people whose lives have been disrupted and destabilized by it.

If you want to argue that capitalism is so great because it's the most effective wealth engine the world has ever seen, then there have to be mechanisms for distributing that wealth fairly and sanely, and if private market mechanisms fail in that regard, then the public sector must step in to provide the remedy. But if the task now is as Meade puts it to make "a genuinely positive attempt to realize old values in new circumstances," a 5.0 solution cannot be found if the public sector is locked in an ideological argument that pits 4.1 thinking against 3.0 thinking. 

So my argument in defense of the New Deal Compromise is not one that seeks a return to mid-20th Century arrangements--that was then; this is now--but that the New Deal provided for its time a much healthier balance between the interests of the private sector and the public interest that we need to emulate in principle now. This is a balance that was destroyed in the period since 1980, and we saw the destructive impact of this imablance in 2008. Whatever Liberalism 5.0 might be, it must restore this balance. Most of what we think of today as "crisis" derives not from uncontrollable structural changes, but from regressive 3.0 thinking poorly adapted to the real world in which we are living that dominated policy in the first decade of this century.

I would argue that, yes, there are structural issues that we need to deal with, but they could not have been handled worse by the Reagan/Norquist/Cheney resgressive 3.0 mindset. Real problems emerged in the 1970s; the weaknesses of L4.1 were exposed, and the worst possible approach was taken in trying to solve them. A saner approach would have been to make gradual adjustments to 4.1 thinking that might have slowly ratcheted us throught 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, etc., in a more orderly progression toward an eventual 5.0 realignment. Instead we've had reactionaries in the driver's seat dominated by 19th-Century 3.0 thinking. Meade correctly points out that it's a mistake to think that the argument is between 4.1  and 3.0 thinking, but seems not to be willing to point out the obvious, that 3.0 thinking ought not to have a place at the table at all. The real debate should be about finding ways to push basic 4.1 arrangements to be more adaptive to the changing global economic realities. 

Whenever anybody tells you that there is no money for entitlement programs like Medicare, Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, or Medicaid, they are talking ideological nonsense. The fiscal crisis at the federal, state, and local levels was engineered by no-taxes/no regulation ideologues on a mission to destroy the legitimacy of government. There is plenty of room for debate about how to find the right balance between the private and public sectors, but you cannot find that balance with people who think that the government has no legitimate role to play in redressing social and economic imbalances created by private markets. We don't have a resource problem; we have a thinking problem.

Anyway, Meade talks about five things that Americans want from American socieity. When I have a chance, I want to examine them, show where I agree and perhaps lay out a few other things that I think will be necessary for a workable 5.0. 

 

 

Comments

[Jonathan]

I detect two underlying assumptions here. First (I mean logically prior) is that Liberalism in one form or another is the unquestionable model. American society has always embodied a form of liberalism; it must and will do so going forward. The implication (perhaps I read too much between the lines) is that if this were not the case, it would no longer be American and indeed not even "western" in some way. Second, the de facto dependence on Liberalism as a sociopolitical model is premised on the assumption that there is some consensus on what the "public interest" is. I don't know what the public interest is or should be. The usual assumption, because it's the only thing most people can agree on, is that "interest" here means wealth -- and indeed, Jack, you point out that people praise the capitalist order because it's "the most effective wealth engine the world has ever seen." But surely this is a far cry from the natural rights discourse out of which the concept of liberalism first sprang. In other words, I see a conceptual gap, not just a difference of degree, between Mead's L1.0 and all subsequent iterations. What began as a theological and philosophical idea is now discussed almost exclusively in economic terms. Wealth is all. Now, in no corner of our public discourse is there any space to debate how we should define "wealth," and whether, once defined, it should be regarded as an unquestionably good thing (even assuming its equitable distribution). Until that debate has taken place -- in other words, until we have owned up to our materialism -- Liberalism should not, in my opinion, be an unquestioned and automatic rallying cry in this or any country.

[Jonathan]

Woops, that first assumption is supposed to be logically secondary. I thought of a more economical way of saying what I want to say: It is almost impossible not to talk about jobs in this country today. (Even the President can't discuss climate change for two seconds without mentioning jobs.) But it's quite impossible to talk about quality of jobs. Because the only thing we can agree on is that people must work (to generate wealth, etc, not for any more profound, metaphysical reason). We can't agree on what good work is. Quantity we get, quality we don't understand.

In the same publication, American Interest, there was a fascinating piece a while ago (I forget the author now) trying to differentiate civil liberties from other social values and forms usually bound up with the word "liberal", such as democratic government and capitalist economics. I think what I was trying to say above is that, culturally, our discussion and use of the concept "Liberalism" has shifted away from civil liberties and towards ideas of government and economics. And yet this has happened even while we've made great, and perhaps the final, strides in the expansion of civil liberties.

[Jack Whelan]

Liberalism is for me short hand for a complex set of attitudes and ideas that have played a dominant role in shaping the mindset we call modernity. The essential impulse is of rejecting the medieval crown-and-altar complex that dominated during the medieval period, and the drive to find a way of grounding "authority" in something other than tradition, whether it be reason, the popular will, or markets. Whether we like it or hate it, the Liberal complex has dominated our social reality and will continue to do so until something else replaces it.

So I think the 1.0-5.0 scheme is a useful way to think about how the liberal impulse--its ideas and attitudes--have played out over the last 350 years or so.

I don't have a problem with saying what I think is in the public interest, and if I have time this week I'll try to lay that out in another post regarding what I think 5.0 should look like optimally, i.e., what are the ideas and attitudes that I think should emerge to shape our social reality. What I think or say, of course, won't make a difference unless it resonates with what others think and say, and nothing anybody says matters unless it resonates with what I unapologetically call the zeitgeist, which I think of as more than a metaphor.

But whatever impulses drive the move toward a 5.0 paradigm, they will not come out of nowhere. They will develop out of the soil of late modernity. Assuming we avoid catastrophe, there will be new ideas and new impulses; there will be the recovery, rediscovery, or retrieval of old, forgotten impulses, but whatever shape they take in a 5.0 paradigm, they will also be developmentally continuous with the 4.0 paradigm.

I believe in Progress and growth--it defines us as humans, but we have come to think of it in reductionistic materialist terms, so these terms need to be reframed in such a way that it embraces more than just economic development. I suspect that by the end of the century that will have happened, but in the early stages of the 5.0 paradigm, it's not likely that we're ready for a system where economic productivity is going to be divorced from ideas of individual economic self-reliance. Maybe in 6.0.

[JP]

"The essential impulse is of rejecting the medieval crown-and-altar complex that dominated during the medieval period, and the drive to find a way of grounding "authority" in something other than tradition, whether it be reason, the popular will, or markets."

So, we took a society that was grounded in the authority of the historical and particular and tried to replace it with the authority of somewhat incohate abstractions that were grounded in the ideas of philosophers?

Apparently that doesn't work.

We should try something else.

Preferably something that does work and is grounded in something more associated with actual reality.

Although with grounding authority in the markets, we sure can buy and sell lots of stuff!

[Jack Whelan]

But it did work; it was by any materialistic standard a phenomenal success. More people live longer healthier lives than at any time in the history of the world. That's not nothing. The problem lies in that with modernity and the liberal complex, there's a profound meaning deficit. And Liberalism doesn't have the resources to solve that problem--at least not within the limits it has set for itself in version 4.0. I'd argue that versions 1.0-3.0 were pretty sterile in the meaning department as well. They were living off the capital of premodern meaning complexes that hadn't quite died.

[JP]

Of course capitalism (the market) worked. It's a wonderful tool over shorter time periods and is extremely flexible.

However, it just happens to be delusional over the longer time periods because the present has greater value than the future and cannot account for any externalities.

Even as a materialist tool, it fails because the only infinite truly safe energy source we have is the sun.

Here's Jeremy Grantham's 4Q letter (productivity chart on page 6):

http://www.gmo.com/websitecontent/JG_LetterALL_11-12.pdf

The problem is that it was a phenomenal success *because it was some sort of technological/social bubble*.

Malthus wasn't exactly wrong. He was early.

In any event, we've gone into massive materialism overshoot *because* of our meaning deficit.

[Jack Whelan]

Growth is essential for human flourishing. The key is to define what you mean by growth. So I get what the Zero Growth folks are after, but I think it's rhetorically ineffective approach. We need growth and innovation, we just need to redefine what that means for us. Growth ought not to mean just getting wealthier.

Capitalism is what it is. Even Marx recognized it as a positive progressive development. But it's wrong to think that we should just leave it alone and let it do its thing. The challenge, rather, is to harness its robust potentials for innovation in such a way that it serves human needs, not just investor needs.

And as Dan Pink points out in his important book 'Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us", financial rewards just aren't that important when it comes to motivating innovation. A L5.0 social framework will need to work with that basic understanding. More on that another day.

[JP]

"Growth is essential for human flourishing. The key is to define what you mean by growth. So I get what the Zero Growth folks are after, but I think it's rhetorically ineffective approach."

The question is whether we are going to "zero growth" whether we want it or not.

Growth is essential, but the problem is that we've had massive materialistic overexpansion without the corresponding increase in the growth of purpose, so to speak.

I came to this entire analysis because I was interested in investing.

I suppose I ended up where I am because I was looking for meaning/purpose.

[Russ Mitchell/Happycrow]

Jack,

I was referred here by JP, after having written on the same subject. It's a nice article, and I agree with much of it. Here's the part I have a problem with:

"But it did work"

Note the past tense. 4.1-style technocracy always came with a cost -- a large one -- in terms of personal choices and people whose dreams were sacrificed on the altar of progress (the Schechter case being only one of the most dramatic). That was acceptable in the 20th century, because, in fact, it DID work.

It's not working now.

Everywhere one looks, those sections of the country which have most retained that strong counter-balance and ability to exercise counter-private command for which you advocate are precisely those areas which are failing, and failing most rapidly. (In stark contrast to avowedly less heavy-handed but equally liberal areas: California vs. Oregon/Washington is one instructive example -- unless you're in one of the wealthy enclaves, California's schools are now almost as bad as the worst of the Deep South)

I'm not going to argue for 3.0; there was a lot wrong with that. What the Reaganites got right was their return (ironically!) to the Wisconsin Idea -- the Progressive notion of allowing states to flexibly implement solutions, and, as Braindeis put it, and 4.1 holdouts now deride it, to make every state a "laboratory of Democracy." I agree with this, because it's quite clear that we need policy innovation, and that means we're going to have strikeouts on our way to finding a solution (Tennessee's badly-flawed health system, which was repealed, contra that of Massachusetts which formed much of the impetus towards the ACA, would be a good example). The Wisconsin Idea lets us minimize the damage along the way.

My approach is different: the promise of Liberalism 5.0 isn't that the state gets weakened, but that it can be made considerably more nimble -- it can combat imbalance/injustice from the private sector with laser surgery instead of amputation. Application of technology can liberate us both from the threat of monolithic, overpowering private threats, and from the "deadening hand" of outdated and sometimes harmful 4.1-style technocracy.

[Jack Whelan]

Russ--

Nimbleness, yes, and as my advocacy for subsidiarity suggests, always local and private sector solutions first rather than centralized ones. (Did you read my more recent piece on localism/centralization?) But I don't know what you mean by not weakening the state but making it more nimble. Please explain or refer me to something that explains. I'm all for nimbleness, but tell me how your nimbleness model will deal with climate change and with the tendency of private sector actors to aggregate power and wealth.

You spend a lot of time talking about what a mess 4.1 has made of things, but I'm inclined to look at the cause of the mess coming from 3.0 types on a mission to dismantle 4.1 regressively. Move things forward, yes. Make gov't more nimble yes. But don't return us to the era of the Robber Barons, which is where in fact we are because of Reagan's "transformative" leadership couple with compliance from neoliberal (i.e., 3.0) Democrats.

I am really open to any interesting thinking on this, but I'm not seeing a lot of it. I'm seeing a lot of people who think they are cutting edge (Aspen Institute elite types) who are really just providing warmed-up 3.0 thinking. For me one of the most interesting people on the scene right now, imo, is Jerry Brown. Is there anybody you'd point to?