Liberalism 5.0?, Part 2

Last week I posted about Walter Russell Mead's article "The Once and Future Liberalism." There is much in it I like, and I think he is correct when he attributes the political impasse that we are in to a futile argument between "conservatives"--Liberal 4.1 types (i.e., New Deal/Great Society Democrats) and reactionaries-- Liberal 3.0 types, (i.e., 19th Century laissez-faire Tea-party types and Ron Paul Libertarians).

I have made the same argument that the New Deal Democrats are the true conservatives, and that those who seek to dismantle the New Deal compromise between government and markets are reactionaries whose thinking is 19th Century Social Darwinism wrapped in the pop Nietzsheanism of Ayn Rand. And while I like Mead's historical anaylysis, I think he could have made clearer that while the "conservatives" belong at the table, the reactionaries do not.

Our dysfunction derives mostly from Republicans' simplistic understanding about the complexity of the reality that we are trying to manage here. Markets are not going to solve climate change or deal with natural disasters, and markets are not going to solve egregious power and wealth imbalances--and the tyranny that comes with them. While the conditions that gave rise to Liberalism 4.0 and 4.1 are quite different from the conditions we are dealing with now, the basic threat of tyranny from powerful private sector interests continues. I think that what I wrote in a 2006 post about Libertarianism and tyranny still holds

 . . . large, complex societies develop large, complex problems that too often cannot be dealt with exclusively on the local level. And in the world we live in the real threat of tyranny comes not from the political sector, but from the economic. For me the fundamental flaw in Libertarian thinking is its failure to recognize this. Tyranny derives from the abuse of power, and so it follows that the greatest threat to freedom comes from those who have the greatest concentrations of power. Look around you. Does that power lie in the hands of Liberal congressmen and professors? Of course not. It lies with those private-sector factions within American society that have enormous economic power. And the greatest threat to American democracy lies not in the power of big government if it serves the will of the broad electorate, but in the power of big government if it serves the will of those with enormous economic power.

Toward the end of his artlcle Mead says, "Developing a politically successful liberalism 5.0 must start with an understanding of what the people want. Americans may be conflicted, but we are not particularly complicated. In a big-picture sort of way, the American people have a Maslovian hierarchy of needs, and we want our political leaders to meet them all." He goes on to lay out five things Americans want: security, prosperity, freedom and autonomy, and for America to fulfil its global mission, and, lastly, for the first four all to work together. Americans are "looking for more than a set of unrelated policies that accomplish certain discrete goals: They want those policies to proceed from an integrated and accessible vision that meshes with their understanding of traditional American values and concerns." 

This is fine as far as it goes, but should we just accept the old definitions of 'security', etc., as givens we have to work with, or is part of developing a Liberalism 5.0 changing our fundamental understanding about what security, prosperity, freedom/dignity, and national purpose means. That's the real task, not just complaining that Liberalism 4.1 no longer cuts it. And clearly we need to think deep and hard how to redefine them. Mead isn't particularly prescient, so I'm going to lay out some preliminary ideas about what  take my shot at laying out what a Liberalism 5.0 should look like. 

It starts with finding the right balance between the local and the central, the small and the large. Every discussion about  security, prosperity, freedom/dignity, and national purpose starts with a frame regarding our basic assumptions about what these terms mean, and in turn that frame is determined on a macro level by our understanding of how local relates to central, small to big, individual to whole. Our 4.0 v. 3.0 debate is basically an argument that gets nowhere because its basic assumptions about these are so different. 3.0 emphasizes the local and indvidual, and 4.0 the whole and the governmental and economic systems that shape life on the larger systems level.  Subsidiarity has a bias toward the local, but recognizes the necessity for a limited but essential role for the big. 

3.0 is naive about the ways that the individual and the local are interdependent with these largers systems, and they think that society can run just fine without them. They tend to mistake, IMO, bugs for features, and to think that the whole sytem should be blown away, rather than to focus on realistic solutions to real problems.

A lot of what must happen for 5.0 will derive from fundamental changes in our thinking, and that requires cultural change. I'm planning a post on Whole Foods CEO John Mackey's book, Conscious Capitalism. Mackey shares a lot of common ground with libertarian thinking that I oppose, and he has gotten a lot of bad liberal press because of his opposition to Obamacare and his indifference about climate change (sure, the climate is warming, but we'll adapt), but I am very interested in his ideas that capitalism has to redefine its mission as "creating value" and not as "maximizing profit". That's should be a key element in Liberalism 5.0. Whether and how that thinking can supplant Gordon (Greed is Good) Gecko/Rick Santini thinking is an open question, but it's a beginning.

But we are to move forward there must be another fundamental cultural change, which is that collectively we must become less governed by our fears. Prudence, yes; fear, no. I'd argue that almost everything that is dysfunctional in our politics and in our cultural life derives from fears and anxieties that have a soul-constricting effect that makes any kind of creative problem solving an impossibility.

Comments

[Jonathan]

I have two questions.

How does any system of exchanging and distributing material wealth -- past present or future -- produce metaphysical values (beyond social prestige)?

What is the source of fear so great that it clogs our entire cultural life? Perhaps we fear the answer to my first question? It's been called the Age of Anxiety before. . .

Jack, please don't tell me you think the way to end the Age of Anxiety is with "better" capitalism. Creating value is exactly what capitalism does that no other system has ever done as efficiently. If anything, there is too much value in the world now, and it is all too little believed in, because it is too unbelievable.

[Jack Whelan]

Dude, people have got to live. What kind of system do you think can manage that on a massive sustainable scale. Clearly not one where profit maximization is the core value; clearly not one where subsistence is good enough. I'm all for exploring one in which "creating value" is the core mission, because then at least you can talk about what value means, and you can start talking about an developing an innovative economy that serves human needs, not just investor needs.

[JP]

Capitalism's problem is that it can't deal with the tragedy of the commons and that it discounts the future to effectively zero.

[Russ]

JP -- that is *also* the problem with 4.1. 4.1 has a pretty bad track record regarding the Commons.

Jack -- I think you're asserting what should be demonstrated/proven regarding 3.0 and systems integration. Your own links regarding the Governor and the devolution of decision-making to the lowest-possible unit which can make them (eventually, in most cases, the citizen), itself seems to support a synthesis rather than a rejection of these ideas.

[Jack Whelan]

Russ--

See my posts on Localism and Centralization http://afterthefuture.typepad.com/afterthefuture/2013/01/finding-the-balance-between-centralization-and-localism.html,
and the one I posted today on Blue Millennials: http://afterthefuture.typepad.com/afterthefuture/2013/02/blue-millennials-in-red-states.html.

I think some degree of bigness is inevitable. That's our reality now and it's not going to change, no matter what Libertarian theory fantasizes about how things might be. The burden is on Libertarians to prove otherwise. And until I'm persuaded otherwise, I see Libertarians as not contributing positively to the discussion, but just playing the role of nuisance in diverting our attention from the more important conversation we should be having about how to grapple with the challenges that bigness poses.

[Russ Mitchell/Happycrow]

I think that bigness in some arenas is clearly the way it is and will work. Not sure I agree in others -- but I hope you don't think I'm a troll simply because I disagree with you regarding efficacy-vs-scope!

[JP]

Re: The commons.

The commons are only ever going to be appropriately managed by the people who are directly connected to the commons in some fashion.

I'm not claiming that Liberalism 4.1 does any better with the commons than does capitalism.

In fact, I have never thought about Liberalism 4.1 as Liberalism 4.1 until these series of posts.

I was just pointing out the two major problems with capitalism, which were recently discussed by Jeremy Grantham.

[Jack Whelan]

Russ--

I don't understand where you're coming from well enough to make any judgments about you, but if the point you're making is that the government sometimes overreaches, and in doing so undermines efficacy, who could disagree. But defining where that overreach begins is a debate reasonable people can have, i.e., where do you define the limits beyond which there is overreach. That's where the thinking gets fuzzy or simplistically binary and triba, thoughl. And that's why I think subsidiarity provides a conceptual framework that defines a middle ground where that debate can take place.

[Russ Mitchell/Happycrow]

I agree that subsidiarity makes a good framework for debate. We can include libertarians in it by allowing "the citizen" as the lowest level, and then a good-faith discussion should give us an idea what can be done by the individual, what can be public/private partnership/outsourcing, what requires local, county, state, federal levels of government.

My concern would be that subsidiarity may vary from place to place -- there are some cities in Georgia which have outsourced a significant number of city functions and done well. There are other places that have done poorly (thus far, no difference from city halls themselves); but some areas, due to geographic or other constraints, may NEED either public/private partnership, or else NEED serious intervention by the full state government in order to process things effectively.

Seem reasonable so far?

[Russ]

If that appeals to you, Jack, it gives us the ability to let different locales try out their solutions, and ground them in the most non-ideological, pragmatic grounds: aka, "did it work?"

[Jack Whelan]

Russ--

Yes. I think the most appealing thing about subsidiarity is that it will vary from place to place precisely because the people making the decisions know best what their community needs rather than government bureaucracies. Will it always be successful? Will it mean that nobody ever makes mistakes? Will local communities sometimes need an intervention from a higher level of government if they are incompetent, corrupt, or abusive. Of course. But the best thing about subsidiarity is that if you trust people to rule themselves, when a problem arises in a particular community, the intervention is designed so solve the problem in that particular community; it needn't be a system wide intervention.

Subsidiarity, if it were understood, would be the primary rationale to reject the absurd government overreach that we have come to know in both Bush's No Child Left Behind and Obama's Race to the Top. I think it's also the chief rationale to argue against the common core.

But when it comes to economics, I think it's perfectly legit for a subsidiarist to be a Keynesian. I am not opposed to the idea of stimulus spending in a recession. I think the government should have the power to break up the banks "too big to fail" and other monopolies, and in financial crises, particularly those created by markets run amok, to step in to set rules to prevent them from happening again, as well as to help the innocents whose lives were damaged by it. I don't see why financial disasters should be treated any differently than natural disasters or military crises. For me common sense and common decency require it, and it's legitimated by subsidiarity.

[Russ]

Jack,

Agreed all around. Subsidiarity is, in my opinion, where liberal and libertarian meet (Keynesian is another matter, but that's complicated -- Keynes ca. 1924 is *not* Keynes ca. 1940. Just like Hayek, Keynes actively disavowed some of the things he's "credited" for by his erstwhile followers). That said, I don't see a conflict between subsidiarity and Keynesianism, either. While an anarchist would reject the notion of "government as referee," the vast majority of libertarian types have serious problems with top-down diktat, but no problem with the idea of the federal government making sure that the interstate commerce remains fair and free from the "crony capitalism" we tend to see today, which enriches Wall St., but nobody else. "Too big to fail is too big to exist" may offend some of the folks at Forbes, but what you've written here strikes me as very fertile ground for synthesis and future growth of L5.

[Jack Whelan]

I accept the argument that the banks needed to be bailed out to prevent a system wide implosion, but the only explanation for there not being broken up is cronyism. Cronyism is a real problem, but it's largely something that the electorate is complicit with by re-electing people who clearly have been bought. Why Americans tolerate that in their elected representatives is one of the most depressing things about us as a democracy right now.