After the Future

Finding the Balance between Centralization and Localism I

I was listening to something the other day, and the guy was making a point I had never considered.  Empires for the most part, whether ancient or modern, are not particularly intrusive regarding local cultures and customs. Empires more often than not live with local cultural pluralism so long as locals pay their taxes and fulfill their military obligations to the empire. The upside is that the local nation in effect outsources its military defense, and like Japan after WWII, it can direct all its energies into economic or cultural development. The downside is that the local nation loses a degree of sovereignty and control, especially when it comes to foreign policy, and it has to live with the humiliation of its military defeat. Honor and glory can only be found in the service of the empire, not in the service of one's own nation, unless it’s in an insurgency against the empire. But empires are not typically extraordinarily repressive of their local client states as long as they promise not to revolt; nation states are often far more violently repressive of their minorities.

When people get nationalist fever, then the liquidations begin.  When the British Empire collapsed, Hindus who lived relatively peaceably in India for centuries with Muslims go into ethnic cleansing mode. When the teetering Ottoman empire finally collapsed during WWI, the Greeks and other Balkan Christians kicked out all the Muslims, and then the Muslims who returned to Turkey in turn kicked out the Christians, and a million and a half Armenians wind up dead. Empires are brutal, and will ruthlessly suppress anyone who resists them militarily, but they are not into genocidal mass murder. That kind of thing is done by the locals to one another.

Nationalists and fanatical ideologues suffer from a form of collective mental illness, and it's primarily the disease of the right. Nationalism is a pathological fantasy that gives people a sense of belonging to something that is an abstraction rather than a lived concrete experience. It's rooted in our day in the disintegration of concrete local cultures and customs destroyed mainly by the creative-destructive dynamics of modernity, not the least of which is consumer capitalism.

Modernity creates anomic, alienated, isolated, deracinated humans who suffer identity loss and who then seek to recover identity in a collective, which more often than not is the Nation, usually defined by language, religion, and nativist jingoism. People who don't feel a need for the Nation to define their identities tend to be more cosmopolitan and tolerant.  Empires tend toward cosmopolitanism; nation states toward jingoism and ideological fanaticism. More murder and mayhem has been done within states by its own citizens to its citizens than has ever been done by imperial aggression. Mao, Pol Pot, Suharto, and Stalin killed more of their own people than their external enemies. 

The power of the nation state is far more intrusive, meddling, and violent than the power of the typical empire. Imperial powers are not interested in micromanaging their local subjects. Empires are cosmopolitan; nation states are more likely to demand homogenization than far-flung empires. DeGaulle famously said, "How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?" Well, I guess it depends on what degree of micromanaging your idea of governing requires. If you're into top-down micromanaging according to an ideological or racist script, yeah, that kind of diversity and local chaos is a problem.

But empires are too big to care about local chaos so long as it doesn't threaten to undermine the basic framework for order they have established. Nationalists chafe at having to live within a framework that they cannot control, but such frameworks can exist while allowing for a lot of local freedom within them. And that's my point.  I'm not arguing for empire, but this discussion of the organizing impulses that animate empires as contrasted with nation states to which I was listening helped me to see that the greater the distance between the local communities and the power center, the more freedom enjoyed by the locals.

So there are different kinds of centralization, and some are better and others worse, and the better kind is the one more distanced from life as it's lived on the local level. And if we have to live with varying degrees of centralization, which is clearly our future, the argument we should be having does not lie in whether centralization is good or bad (markets vs. socialism) but about what kinds of centralization are better and worse. I would argue that the best kind of centralization is the one that provides a basic framework for order and peace, but which allows the maximum amount of freedom and diversity in the political and economic spheres at the local level where people live. We tend to think that centralization and homogenization go together, but homogenization is more the agenda of nation states than it is the impulse at the super state level.

So, no, I'm not making an argument for imperial aggression or for the desirability a la Niall Ferguson for a Pax Americana, but I am making an argument that certain kinds of centralization are more desirable than others, and that we should be clear which poses the greatest danger to individual freedoms. Those on the ideological right in this country are kissing cousins with the kind of nationalism that wants to homogenize and purge out what is in their view impure and un-American. This impulse is at the heart of movement conservatism, and, sure, not every movement conservative is as crazy as Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh, but their careers depend on feeding off this kind of ideological, hyper-nationalist longing for lost identity.

Movement conservatism is more closely aligned with this nationalist impulse for homogeneity than it is aligned with the principled anti-statist desire to limit the scope of government. Quite the opposite. Movement conservatives don't have a problem with government intruding into the lives of people so long as it aligns with and enforces their particular homogenizing, jingoist vision of what it means to be a true American. Coulter wrote a book entitled Treason, and whether or not she's completely serious, she's playing on the widely held belief among movement conservatives that people with liberal, cosmopolitan attitudes are America-haters and traitors. Only movement conservatives are true Americans. Movement conservatives don't hate government; they hate a government that promotes cosmopolitan tolerance and respect for pluralism. They want to replace that with a government that promotes no such thing.

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For years now I've been arguing that if Americans could embrace a subsidiarist model, it would reduce the polarization that structures the left/right debate about whether markets or the government should be the dominant influence in shaping social and economic policy. I’ve also argued that with the New Deal we began living with a subsidiarist model, even if most Americans wouldn't call it that.

But the whole Reaganite, right-wing backlash used cultural resentments and the confusion following the turmoil of the sixties and seventies as a way to de-legitimize New Deal subsidiarity (the Tom Frank argument), and the result finally is the social economic disaster we now have on our hands. And now Obama, as he tries to restore subsidiarity as a remedy for the mess perpetrated by Reaganites and their neo-Liberal collaborators (e.g., Bill Clinton and the DLC wing of the Democrat party), we find these ridiculous assertions about Obama being a socialist, because from the point of view of the Reaganite right, if you're not a market fundamentalist, you're a socialist--there's no middle ground.

Subsidiarity defines that middle ground. A subsidiarist is against top-downism, but recognizes that some problems have a scale and complexity that cannot be handled at the local level or by unregulated markets, and that there are some things that are best handled at higher levels of organization. It's just common sense, and anybody who can take off his market fundamentalism goggles for even a moment can see it. It's a good thing that there is a FAA and that each city doesn't have its own rules and regulations regarding air traffic. It's a good thing that local communities organize and fund their own emergency and rescue operations, but it's also a good thing that there's a FEMA to step in to help when a major disaster overwhelms the capacity of locals to cope with it. It's a good thing that regional cultures and subcultures and religious groups are allowed to flourish without intrusion from central governments, but it's also a good thing that when the basic human rights of minorities within those subcultures are abused that the central government will protect them if the local government won't. It's a good thing that doctors and hospitals can make their own judgments about the care of their patients without the government telling them what to do, but it's a bad thing that insurance companies do.

I'm not going to put in my two cents for single-payer health care in this post. It's not without it's problems and limitations, but if you understood it, you'd see that it allows for the greatest amount of freedom for the most people. It's like the empire idea--a framework is setup by a central authority, and then there's a lot of freedom on the local level for doctors and patients to interact. But it's a moot point now.

Centralization is something we already live with as a necessity, and we will continue to live with it--to oppose it as a matter of principle is ridiculous. The point I want to make today is that the centralization of certain social functions is desirable in complex societies, and that the only solution to certain kinds of problems lies at higher levels of organization. We can debate which problems are best attacked that way as we go along. 

But because centralization is necessary, it does not mean that life on the local level needs to be homogenized or totalized by some would-be Stalin, Mao, Castro, or name your socialist villain; it does not mean that every form of centralization is a movement toward creating the Big Brother monster who will try to control every aspect of our lives. Centralization cannot work unless the officials elected at the central level are held accountable and govern by consent according to subsidiarist principles. The question is not whether centralization is good, but what kind is good--what kind serves the common good, and what kind oversteps its rightful jurisdiction. It's not either/or.

We need to find the kind of balance that allows for flourishing subcultures within a larger framework that guarantees certain basic rights. As the decades pass, this kind of framework will be increasingly global. There will have to be a global fair labor and wage guidelines. There will have to be global regulation for financial markets. There will have to be global rules for pollution and energy use. There will have to be global adjudication of national disputes without resorting to the gang violence we accept today as war making. But despite our fears, centralization doesn't have to be dictatorial if we can understand it as primarily providing a framework, not imposing its homogenizing will.

Tyranny is more of a local phenomenon than the agenda of very large central governments, which have enough to deal with without micromanaging at the local level. I'm not saying that large centralizing governments don't overstep or can't overstep--we've seen egregious violations in the last decade--but real, existential tyranny and the violence that comes with it is more commonly experienced at the local levels--with bosses in the workplace, with oligarchical cliques in local communities, with abusive parents and spouses. Yes, we have to be vigilant that the central government not overstep. Yes, we must do everything we can to preserve a space of freedom immune from government control in which the dynamism, vitality, and creativity at the bottom is society's center of gravity. But I would argue that a certain coordinating and organizational function at the top, if envisioned and implemented correctly according to subsidiarist principles, would provide the basic frameworks that would enable people and subcultures at the bottom to flourish.

It's inevitable that we will have to live with greater degrees of centralization as the global system evolves, but the more remote the center is from the life lived on the local level, the more unlikely it will be intrusive. You can micromanage a relatively small nation state like France, Sweden, or Germany; but the larger and more culturally complex the area governed, the harder to micromanage, and the easier it is for locals to resist on issues that are not central to the functioning of the centralized system.

Tyranny in the world's experience of it over the centuries has been a relatively local phenomenon. Would-be Saurons need to be resisted, but even if they succeed in making life miserable for everyone subjected to his rule, he will ultimately fail. The idea here, then, is that fears about one-world government, etc., are grounded in projecting local tyrannies onto a global screen, and that such fears are unlikely to be realized in any sustainable way. The two most ambitious recent attempts at totalitarianism centralization were unsustainable, and the larger and more complex the system, the less likely that any such regime could be imposed, or if imposed, sustained.

[Ed. A version of this post originally appeared in March 2009 entitled Centralization and Subsidiarity. I am reposting it here because its somewhat topical because of Jerry Brown's pointing to subsidiarity in his state of the state speech last week, and because it provides a framework for things I want to say following up on the post I wrote last week about Liberalism 5.0.]

Conservatives Backing away from Ed Reform . . .

. . .leaving Liberal Democrats holding the bag:

Conservative and liberal "reformers" were joined at the hip in supporting top down mandates by the Obama administration that put NCLB-type testing on steroids. Now, presumably, conservatives will step back at let the Democrats take the full blame for Race to the Top, School Improvement Grants, and other coercive policies that by "any fair accounting, got way out ahead of practice."

Conservative Kathleen Porter-Magee is a former teacher who has long shown a willingness to balance her allies' ideological presuppositions with facts on the ground. She attributes the failure of "reformers" to their "group think," and worries that their feelings of misguided certainty may drive them to an educational "Bay of Pigs." She says the true believers in test-driven accountability have suffered from:

• a feeling of moral superiority among group members;
• collective rationalization, where members discount warnings or fail to rethink assumptions;
• overly negative and stereotypical views of the groups "enemies"
• and censorship of dissenting opinion--either via self-censorship or direct pressure put on those who disagree. If the unions or the most vocal anti-reformers were against it, it must be a good idea.

Kathleen Porter-Magee even questions the fundamental assumption that the only cure for our dysfunctional school systems is rapid transformational change. She agrees that "Time is of the essence, but moving quickly at the expense of smart decisions and effective policies is worse than doing nothing at all.

Part of the reason, I fear, that conservative reformers can be more honest than their liberal counterparts is that they, alone, have an exit strategy. Conservatives can conclude that they tried to work within "the status quo," and learned that public schools are irredeemable. They can then move, supposedly in sorrow, to the next logical step - privatization."  (Source)

Privatization has always been the end game. 

See also Michelle Malkin dissing the common core, an important reform goal. I mostly have to agree with her. The Obama administration is just plain butt ugly wrong in its top-down education policy. 

 

Garry Wills on the South

After the Crimson Tide’s big win over Notre Dame on January 7th, a Web site called Real Southern Men explained the significance in terms of regional defiance: “Football matters here, because it is symbolic of the fight we all fight. Winning matters here, because it is symbolic of the victories we all seek. Trophies matter here, because they are symbolic of the respect we deserve but so rarely receive.” That defiance is a sure sign, like Governor Rick Perry’s loose talk of Texas seceding, that Southernization has run its course.--George Packer

Wills was born in Georgia and has lots of relatives there. He said he grew up preferring his southern relatives to his northern ones, but here, Wills reflecting on George Packer's "Southern Discomfort" in the New Yorker from which the quote above, writes about his mixed feelings about the South:

The South escaped one of the worst character traits of America, its sappy optimism, its weakness of positive thinking. The North puffed confidently into the future, Panglossian about progress, always bound to win. But the South had lost. It knew there was an America that could be defeated. That made it capable of facing tragedy, as many in America were not. This improved its literature, but impoverished other things. Yet poverty did not make the South helpless. In fact, straitened circumstances made it readier to grab what it could get. In its long bargain with the Democratic party, for instance, it not only fended off attacks on its Jim Crow remnant of the Old Confederacy, but gamed the big government system through canny old codgers in Washington—the chairmen of the major congressional committees, who sluiced needed assistance to the South during the Great Depression.

Under the tattered robes of Miss Havisham were hidden the preying hands of the Artful Dodger. Southerners were not really trapped in the past, since they were always scheming to get out of the trap. They were defeated but not dumb. . . . 

So, Wills wonders, why has its political leadership become so dumb?

Humans should always cling to what is good about their heritage, but that depends on being able to separate what is good from what is bad. It is noble to oppose mindless change, so long as that does not commit you to rejecting change itself. The South defeats its own cause when it cannot discriminate between the good and the evil in its past, or pretends that the latter does not linger on into the present: Some in the South deny that the legacy of slavery exists at all in our time. The best South, exemplified by the writers listed above, never lost sight of that fact. Where are the writers of that stature today in the Tea Party South?

Then he tells a story about his beloved, warm-hearted Irish Catholic grandmother:

She told me not to hold change between my lips while groping for a pocket to put it in—“That might have been in a nigger’s mouth.” Once, when she took me to Mass, she walked out of the church when a black priest came out to celebrate. I wondered why, since she would sit and eat with a black woman who helped her with housework. “It is the dignity—I would not let him take the Lord in his hands.”

Tradition dies hard, hardest among those who cannot admit to the toll it has taken on them. That is why the worst aspects of the South are resurfacing under Obama’s presidency. It is the dignity. That a black should have not merely rights but prominence, authority, and even awe—that is what many Southerners cannot stomach. They would let him ride on the bus, or get into Ivy League schools. But he must be kept from the altar; he cannot perform the secular equivalent of taking the Lord in his hands. It is the dignity.

I think it's hard for non-southerners to understand how deep that sense of white identity goes, and how the indignity of defeat during the Civil War made the retrieval of their dignity dependent on keeping blacks in their place. It's not even something most of them can think about in any sensible way. It's in the air native white southerners breathe and in the water they drink. But I don't think the psychology is much more complicated than the father fired from the mill slapping his ten-year old for no good reason, and then the child turns and kicks his dog. If you can't hit back at those who can hurt you, you turn and hit those who can't. 

It's how the powerless make themselves feel powerful. It's how people who feel that they are nobody can get some fleeting sense that they are in fact somebody, that they have an identity. Having some sense of one's power is a prerequisite for having any sense of one's dignity. It's why terrorists blow themselves and others up; it's why kids take guns into schools and start shooting anyone who's there. But in the South it's a kind of collective neurosis rooted in the psychology of victimization and toxic resentment. It's a resentment of the sanctimonious northern elites who inflicted this indignity on them, but also a resentment they direct toward those whom they must see as their inferiors if they are to maintain even a rudimentary sense of their own dignity.

So why has the southern poltiical class become so dumb? I think it's because there's a correlation between helplessness and dumbness, between the level of toxic resentment and the willingness to cut off your nose to spite your face. Southerners, the dumb ones anyway, have become trapped in the past, and I believe, have come to feel even more helpless as it becomes clear to them that they are being left behind by history, and so they're not going down without dragging as many as they can with them. 

Related articles

Les Miserables, Lincoln, Zero Dark Thirty, et al.

Dumb America

George Packer: The Political Isolation of the American South

Lessig on Broken Government

 

Filibusted

Guess what? Harry Reid and the feckless Senate Democrats caved on fiibuster reform. A necessary move to un-paralyze government has been shrugged off. Who'd a thunk?Why? The excuse given is that Democrats will want it back when they are in the minority. Maybe that's about 10% of it. The other 90% is explained by Scott Lemieux:

The larger problem, however, is that even for senators who understand the history of the filibuster and its inherently reactionary effects, the filibuster represents a disjuncture between the interests of progressives as a whole and the individual interests of Democratic senators. Collectively, the filibuster makes it harder to advance policy goals. But on an individual level, the filibuster and the Senate’s other arcane minority-empowering procedures give senators far more power than ordinary members of a typical Democratic legislature (including the House of Representatives). This helps to explain why even relatively liberal senior members tend to be more reluctant to abandon the filibuster than newer Democratic senators; once you get used to power, it’s hard to give it up.

Our contemporary senators are true to senatorial form. Like the senators of the late Roman Republic, the prevailing ethos in the U.S. Senate is  "Let the country go to hell, so long as my interests are promoted." 

Put this side by side with the Amgen scandal that the New York Times broke in which Democrat Max Baucus (remember him from the ACA drama?) and Republicans Orrin Hatch and Mitch McConnell, and it reinforces your worst stereotypes about how the Senate operates. 

Ravitch Thought Experiment

Diane Ravitch today:

Suppose you wanted to destroy public education.

Suppose you wanted to make it so unpleasant to be a teacher or a student in a public school that everyone began to long for a way out. What would you do?

Let’s see. You would subject kids to tests repeatedly to the point that their parents complained bitterly. You would take away art and music, maybe physical education too, to make more time for testing. You would open a few charters, which would scoop up the best students, the strivers, and exclude the troublemakers. You would leave the public schools as refuges for the kids rejected or unwanted by the charters. Wouldn’t it be likely that all the motivated parents would clamor for a way to get their kids out too? Then there would be charters for the “good” kids and the public schools would be the dumping grounds.

Do the same for teachers but in different ways. Threaten them with termination if they don’t comply. Tell them their experience and education don’t count. Tell them their quality will depend on their students’ test scores. Watch their spirits droop as their best students leave for charter schools. Be sure to put non-educators in charge and lecture them regularly about how they are responsible if any child should fail. Snap the whip to keep them on their toes. Never treat them as professionals but as lazy time-servers who need constant reminders of their inadequacy.

In time, public education would be stigmatized and avoided by all who could get away. Is this where Race to the Top is going?

So you might say, why would anyone want to do that? What's the motivation? I don't know, why would anybody want to destroy Medicare or Social Security?

Corporate education reform is brought to you by the same people who are telling you that everything "public" is bad for you. It's brought to you by libertarian and neoliberal market ideologues who think that the only voting with one pocketbook is the only voting that has any real legitimacy, and that the democratic process is bunk. And as we've seen in the Senate, these people are doing whatever it takes to make their fantasy of ineffective government a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I understand that issues surrounding public education are complex and confusing. If you're not paying a lot of attention, it's easy to accept the basic media narrative about "failing schools" and "ineffective teachers", many of the so-called reform ideas might seem reasonable. What's wrong with charters? Why shouldn't parents have a choice? What's wrong with holding teacher's accountable? What's wrong with testing kids. How else are we going to find out if they are learning?

Well, of course, there's nothing wrong with choice, accountability, and assessments, but there are ways to promote those that also support the basic health of public education, and there are ways to do it that profoundly undermine public education. And corporate reform--as it is embodied in Race to the Top and its Republican predecessor, No Child Left Behind, are clearly designed to undermine it. 

I think that the irony of neoliberal market ideology is that it presents itself as 21st century thinking when in fact it is 19th century thinking. It's not Liberalism 5.0; it's Liberalism 3.0. The corporate reformers are trying to turn our schools into industrial age factories, not into the kind of place that prepare kids for the world that will require them to be nimble and adaptive learners.

 

Gov. Jerry Brown's State of the State

Is Jerry Brown the model for Liberalism 5.0?

Every once in a while a major politician shocks by actually speaking in a way that politicians rarely speak, i.e., in a way that suggests that he really "gets it". What are the chances considering all the filters that prevent such people from seeing things other than the way the power establishment they inhabit presents things to them.

I've always found Brown to be an intriguing figure, but I don't live in California, and I can't say I've been paying much attention, but the education section in his State of the State Adress earlier today is something I could have written for him. Here's the relevant section, but the whole speech is worth reading:

The laws that are in fashion demand tightly constrained curricula and reams of accountability data. All the better if it requires quiz-bits of information, regurgitated at regular intervals and stored in vast computers. Performance metrics, of course, are invoked like talismans. Distant authorities crack the whip, demanding quantitative measures and a stark, single number to encapsulate the precise achievement level of every child.

We seem to think that education is a thing--like a vaccine--that can be designed from afar and simply injected into our children. But as the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats said, "Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire."

This year, as you consider new education laws, I ask you to consider the principle of Subsidiarity. Subsidiarity is the idea that a central authority should only perform those tasks which cannot be performed at a more immediate or local level. In other words, higher or more remote levels of government, like the state, should render assistance to local school districts, but always respect their primary jurisdiction and the dignity and freedom of teachers and students.

Subsidiarity is offended when distant authorities prescribe in minute detail what is taught, how it is taught and how it is to be measured. I would prefer to trust our teachers who are in the classroom each day, doing the real work - lighting fires in young minds.

My 2013 Budget Summary lays out the case for cutting categorical programs and putting maximum authority and discretion back at the local level--with school boards. I am asking you to approve a brand new Local Control Funding Formula which would distribute supplemental funds -- over an extended period of time -- to school districts based on the real world problems they face. This formula recognizes the fact that a child in a family making $20,000 a year or speaking a language different from English or living in a foster home requires more help. Equal treatment for children in unequal situations is not justice.

With respect to higher education, cost pressures are relentless and many students cannot get the classes they need. A half million fewer students this year enrolled in the community colleges than in 2008. Graduation in four years is the exception and transition from one segment to the other is difficult. The University of California, the Cal State system and the community colleges are all working on this. The key here is thoughtful change, working with the faculty and the college presidents. But tuition increases are not the answer. I will not let the students become the default financiers of our colleges and universities.

BTW, my jaw almost hit the ground when he brought in 'subsidiarity'. It's something I've written frequently about here, but have never heard an elected politician talk about. Here's a post I wrote about subsidiarity  when I was running for School Board in 2011.

Pushing Back against Technocratic Groupthink in Public Schools

Anthony Cody at Education Week:

The trouble with Groupthink, as Janis points out, is that it can be disastrously wrong. Once we get swept up into this momentum, and more and more of our values and livelihoods hinge on this set of beliefs, it becomes harder and harder to break away. And with this particular set of ideas, we are, as a nation, building a huge technological infrastructure of curriculum, instructional tools, assessments and data systems, based on this absolute diehard belief that test performance will drive learning to new heights. Those of us who have voiced skepticism are called Luddites or worse.

What eventually happens in cases like this is that the systems collapse, because reality will not support the endless optimism of the believers. The bubble always bursts, sooner or later. The NCLB [Obama's No Child Left Behind] testing bubble should have burst several years ago, and probably would have done so had not the billionaire technocrats intervened with the Common Core testing bailout. Now it looks like we are in for a few more years of glorious predictions of the wonderful equitable outcomes the latest and greatest testing technology will deliver, until it doesn't. But in the meantime, our public schools continue to be undermined, and resources continue to be diverted away from classrooms and into the testing/data infrastructure. 

From my post last August, Humanistic or Technocratic Education?:

So then, what of technocracy and why is it a problem that should concern us? What are the characteristics of the technocratic mindset that pose such a serious threat to the soulful human? The technocratic mindset feels at home in governmental, corporate, and foundation bureaucracies. It is procedure oriented and lacks practical wisdom or adaptability to the unforseen or the uncontrolable. 

Large organizations are hierarchical, and they attract ambitious people who seek to climb to the top. It recruits the best and brightest, but filters out anyone who would challenge its narrowly defined assumptions. The people who succeed in rising into positions of leadership are Hi-IQ, very articulate, and have been promoted precisely because of their aggressiveness and confidence in promoting the technocracy's mission. Their success within the paramaters defined by the technocracy's mission has reinforced their self-perception as the best and the brightest, and this breeds in them a we-know-better arrogance, and so they are too often contemptuous at worst, patronizing at best, of anyone who disagrees with them, especially if they are "soft" humanistic types.

Technocracies as systems are very uncomfortable with what they cannot control or predict. They therefore see the lively, eccentric, and unpredictable as irrelevant or as a problem to be eliminated. It revels in the general, and is allergic to the concrete and particular. It cares about the abstract and quantitative and regards the qualitative as soft, unmeasurable, and thus trivial. As McGilchrist points out, it lives within a rigid template of reality, in its own mirror world, and anything that doesn't fit gets chopped off. 

And so technocratic projects are always naively, if not cynically, "data driven". Naive because technocrats don't understand the limitations of the impoverished interpretive framework they use to find meaning in the data, and they don't understand how irrational interests shape their supposedly rational methods. They are cynical when they know their interpretations of the data are arbitrary or manipulated to serve predetermined agendas. While the present themselves as "impatient optimists", they too often develop elaborate and fundamentally wrongheaded, if not delusional, strategies to change the world for the better by some limited metric of their own contrivance, and in doing so too often create even bigger messes than the one they hoped to clean up. 

Standardized testing is something that works to meet bureaucrats' needs, not the needs of students and teachers. Teachers are intrinsically motivated. The best among them are exemplars of the kind of people that Dan Pink describes as high-concept, high-touch. What they do best cannot be measured or evaluated by some technocrat's metric. And the technocrats are so obsessed with getting rid of the worst-performing teachers that they are making it impossible for the best teachers to do what they do best.

There's an interesting thing happening in Seattle. Teachers at Garfield High School, with the support of teachers throughout the district, are at long last saying No to standardized testing. And it's been getting some national attention.There's a support rally at the School District HQ this afternoon, and word is CNN is going to be there. This will be interesting to see how it plays out.

 

 

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. 

 

 

The End of History and the Bourgeois Type

Because we live in an age that is dominated by bourgeois values and the bourgeois worldview, we assume that this is the way it will always be. Francis Fukuyama, echoing Hegel, asks whether becoming bourgeois isn't the whole goal (end) of history--the bourgeois as the pinnacle of human development. Well, I hope not. Neither really does Fukuyama.

There is much to commend in the bourgeois as the type who replaced the courtier aristocrat as the modern age supplanted the medieval. But the bourgeois has become a degraded type now very similar in moral stature to the degraded aristocrat of the 17th Century. The bourgeois has become increasingly the Last Man who is interested only in his gadgets and his bread and circuses. Nazism, for instance, was among other things born of a kind of revulsion with the degraded bourgeois, and its appeal lay in its enshrinement of the older ideal embodied in the Aryan warrior as the national type. That longing for a more noble, pre-bourgeois past is the key to the emotional appeal of fascism.

We look now at Hitler and Mussolini as clowns, each in his own way a joke whom it is hard to believe now any one took seriously in their day. But if we are to learn anything from that experience, it’s most important to understand what made fascism so attractive to so many people. The resurgence of fascism is quite possible even in countries like the U.S., because the conditions that gave rise to it—namely, the spiritual vacuum created by the dissolution of modern rationalist optimism, still define the cultural mood of the contemporary West.

We have lost faith in the ideals of Enlightenment humanism and with nothing having taken its place, we have defaulted to the bourgeois Last Man, the man who is incapable of transcendent aspiration. Enlightenment ideals still shape our world to some extent, but they won't stand up to pressure. They didn't stand up in Germany, which was a great creative center for the development and propagation of Enlightenment rationalism, and we are deluding ourselves if we think that we Americans are strong enough to stand up to the kind of pressure we're likely to face in the coming decades. 

Fascism is not something that presents itself in obvious ways. It sneaks up on you, and the next thing you know the country is electing someone like Hitler--someone everyone underestimates at first, someone the establishment elite thinks it can control. The Germans who voted for him didn't think he was an evil guy. And if it happens in America someday, the Americans who vote to put such a one in office won't think so either. He'll be a good Christian. He will appeal to everyone for whom patriotism isn't a word you enclose in scare quotes.

We wonder how in retrospect brilliant minds like Martin Heidegger and Ezra Pound could have fallen for fascist rhetoric and could have bought into its twisted vision. But for them, and for so many others, the attraction lay not so much in what fascism affirmed, but in what it rejected—modernity and its Last Man mediocrity. We look in hindsight at Heidegger and Pound and regard them as morally deficient for their fascism, but what attracted them to fascism was not its brutality, but rather its hatred for modernity and its business culture, and the hollow, flat-souled, overly cerebral human type it created. Fascism is a way of looking for transcendence in all the wrong places, i.e., in the past. But the argument of this blog from the beginning is that it can only be sanely sought in the future--an Absolute Future, to use Karl Rahner's language for it. There lies the end of history, after the future.

Sure, it’s easy in retrospect to condemn fascism because now we know the horrors it perpetrated. But our dismissal of fascism has become so automatic, so thoughtless, especially among our editorialists and other keepers of the bourgeois faith, that there is very little understanding about what makes it so attractive, especially to young people.

Fascism is best understood as a primitivistic, anti-modern movement that attracted people with its romanticism of a return to the purity of its warrior tribal origins. Fascism was a celebration of the bold, audacious will to power--an adolescent preoccupation, perhaps, but no less dangerous for that. It’s a lot easier to imagine a boy idolizing a gallant warrior, even if he’s an outlaw—even if he’s a Nazi storm trooper--than to imagine him doing the same for a shrewd investment banker. The first is a romantic anti-establishment hero. The second is a greedy, calculating villain.

If you are a dyed-in-the-wool bourgeois, it’s extremely difficult to understand the appeal of the National Rifle Association exactly for this reason. Owning a gun, like piercing one’s tongue, is an effective way to say I’m not one of those empty corporate or bureaucratic suits who has no real idea who he is or what he stands for except to measure his life by his corporate promotions and trophy wives. “I own a gun,” says the NRA redneck. “I am a hunter warrior--don’t mess with me. Just try taking my gun away, you gutless bureaucrat. Make my day.”

My point here is not to justify fascism or the NRA mentality, but to try to understand its pervasive and persistent appeal. It goes back to a longing to assert ourselves as a people of valor by showing that we are willing to refuse craven self-interest, and to gallantly risk all for an honorable cause. We don’t look at Nazis that way, but that’s how they looked at themselves. We don’t look at Islamic terrorists that way, but that’s how they look at themselves. And all of our action movies celebrate the same pose. We admire the gallant risk taker, the man with guts, not the sweet guy who wants everybody to be safe and happy.

It’s all regressive and nostalgic, especially now since real warfare in the twentieth century has offered little possibility for gallantry from the mindless mechanical slaughter in the trenches during WWI to the bureaucratic futility of Vietnam to the drone warfare in the Mideast. The warrior has evolved into the technician, and the technician is a classic bourgeois. Perhaps that's another reason we went into Iraq--Americans needed to prove to themselves they still had the guts to fight on the ground.

There is still some residue of the gallant warrior in some of our sports figures, but that image and our ability to admire them as warrior heroes has been compromised by their bourgeoisification as millionaire businessmen, too often more concerned with their contracts and endorsement deals than with the good of the team, or loyalty to a city and its fans. It's rare for any of them to display the idea of honor in the old-fashioned sense. That’s why we have such feeling now for icons such as Joe DiMaggio, Lou Gehrig, Jackie Robinson. They had “class”; they were each aristocrats in the old-fashioned sense, and among our contemporaries Michael Jordan is the only one who comes close to what they represented then to the culture at large. (Cal Ripken displayed something else, more of a lunchpail, blue-collar stolidity. I don't think of him as an aristocratic warrior.)

So it’s understandable that many spirited people loathe what the bourgeois has come to symbolize and feel a compelling need to define their own lives and identities over against the bourgeois image. They have to find some way to act out to prove it to themselves. Some do it by demonstrating against the WTO or the World Bank. Some by joining a fight club, others by risking their lives in extreme sports, others by piercings and tatoos.  All of these behaviors are ways to rebel against the soulless, prosperity- and security-obsessed, slavish Last Man degradation of the bourgeois as a type that emerged in the commercial technological era. They are all ways of saying that is not me. But a No is not a Yes. Finding something to say Yes to is the real challenge. 

The security-minded bourgeois type is not the end of history; he's simply a more or less harmless placeholder until a forward-looking transcendence-seeker can emerge as a new cultural type. But while we wait for him and her to take their place as effective historical actors, we have to protect ourselves against the damage those who look to the past for their transcendence can do. There is no future in nostalgia, at least not one that any sane person would want to live in.