After the Future

Douthat on Democracy

To be clear, the present Democratic Party is absolutely in favor of letting as many people vote as possible. There are no doubts about the mass franchise among liberals, no fears of voter fraud and fewer anxieties than on the right about the pernicious influence of low-information voters.

But when it comes to the work of government, the actual decisions that determine law and policy, liberalism is the heir to its own not exactly democratic tradition — the progressive vision of disinterested experts claiming large swaths of policymaking for their own and walling them off from the vagaries of public opinion, the whims of mere majorities.

This vision — what my colleague Nate Cohn recently called "undemocratic liberalism” — is a pervasive aspect of establishment politics not only in the United States but across the Western world. On question after controverted question, its answer to “Who votes?” is different from its answer to “Who decides?” In one case, the people; in the other, the credentialed experts, the high-level stakeholders and activist groups, the bureaucratic process. (Source)

Douthat is doing his job as the designated cultural conservative at the Times to 'splain conservatism to blinkered liberals. This column on first reading seems kind of silly because the technocratic state isn't a Liberal or Conservative thing; it's a capitalist-elite thing. Capitalist elites don't care about what ordinary people think--except when it's in their interests to manipulate them into believing that what's good for capitalist elites is good for ordinary people. 

When I was actively involved in education politics in Seattle a decade ago, the enemy wasn't Liberals because everybody is Liberal--it was corporate education reform, the kind of reform that wanted to impose its top-down, we-business-elites-know-best, Neoliberal ideology on local educational communities. Neoliberal programs like like Bush's 'No Child Left Behind' and Obama's 'Race to the Top' were equally bad because equally "elite" in their provenance, and equally oppressive in their top-down-ness.

The battle lines were between parents and teachers deciding what was best for their kids rather than the folks "downtown" or the bureaucrats in Olympia. Control ought to lie as close as possible to the people who are affected by decisions--and that should be the rule broken only in egregious situations.

If that means that local schools make minor, stupid decisions, that's a price worth paying. In the Virginia gubernatorial, Liberals should be smart enough not to take the culture-war bait. McAuliffe put his foot in his mouth when he made himself too easy to identify with the top-down, centralized education policy that all engaged parents--Liberals and Conservatives--hate. He should have simply pointed that out that critical race theory isn't taught in the public schools and then moved on. Let the locals remove the thing that doesn't exist.

And if the issue is whether to remove a book or two from the library, let the locals fight it out among themselves. If books are banned, they can easily be found elsewhere and will be all the more attractive to the kids who wound'n't have been motivated to read them otherwise.  

If the Republican Youngkin was running against the Democrat Arne Duncan (Obama's Education Secretary), I'd hold my nose and vote for Duncan because I think that Republicans need to be completely delegitimated until the Cheney/Kinziger wing of the party restores it to sanity. But I understand why so many people have come to despise Democrats of the Duncan ilk. They're what I call Aspen-Institute Democrats. Completely clueless in their Neoliberal arrogance. This is the kind of Liberalism that Anand Giridharadas skewers in Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. They are Liberal in their cultural values, but just as invested in elite control of the system to protect their elite interests as Mitch McConnell. (See Note 1)

I wonder how many Liberal, urban, educated elites in the media and business who watched The Hunger Games and rooted for Katniss and the others from the outer districts realized that everybody in Main Street America sees them as the Capitol elite. The people on Main Street see more of the Stanley Tucci character in establishment Democrats than they see FDR. That's why the ridiculous child-molesting stories stick. And Liberal public intellectuals and policymakers should learn to let people alone in their local communities unless they are doing something that is an egregious abuse of minority rights there. They don't have to impose their prissy, being-right-about-everything on everyone every time.

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Note 1: See Molly Ball's 2017 "On Safari in Trump's America" where she accompanies squishily clueless Neoliberal Third Way Democrats trying to make sense of Trump's America. The naivete and smugness of this "type" of Liberal is something you came up against time and again in the Education Reform wars. There was always this pretense of listening without showing the least aptitude for hearing.  They just know better because they're rich and all the rich people they know thinks as they do. Their epistemological bubble isn't quite as thick as the one that enshrouds the cultural Right, but it's pretty thick. 

Whither Scotland?

People have compared the U.K.-Scotland relationship, in the event of a split, to the United States and Canada, which of course is inexact and even absurd in all kinds of ways. But I will say this: whenever I’ve visited Ottawa and dipped a toe into the Canadian political experience, I’ve always come away impressed with the advantages of national politics on a different scale (however large and diverse in its own right) than the kind of experiment we have going in our increasingly imperial republic. True, those advantages don’t incline me to pick up and move to Vermont and throw in with the Green Mountain state’s separatists, and they don’t incline me, in the end, to desire the dissolution of Great Britain’s successful and rather extraordinary union either. But they do incline me to a greater sympathy for the cause of Scottish independence, a greater understanding for why ruling themselves from Edinburgh might seem preferable to being represented in Westminster, than a tabulation of financial considerations would allow. At the very least, I envy them the chance to cast so significant a vote, and I would find something to admire in either outcome. (Ross Douthat)

I'm not that acquainted with the particulars of Scottish separatism, but if the primary motive is nationalistic, it's silly. On the other hand, I think that more regional autonomy is desirable.

As the globe further centralizes, there will be, paradoxically, more regional autonomy. We already see the outlines of it in the U.S. The center cannot hold, and, really, we shouldn't expect it to. Nevertheless, there are minimal functions that a center should play, and this is the mistake the Scots make if they are hell bent on complete independence. Interdependence is the more desirable future, and that requires a weakened role by the center, but should not obliterate its role completely. 

I consider myself a social democrat, which obviously requires a prominent role for government in the shaping of our society. The change that I've experienced since 2008, especially after seeing the mess the Obama administration has made in its technocratic attempts to reform public school education, is to devolve government more to the local level. A national, one-size-fits-all education policy makes no sense, and certainly the idea of privatizing public education through charters, etc., makes no sense. 

Local or regional control doesn't get rid of the problem of local oligarchies controlling dominating the system, but such oligarchies are easier to deal with on the local level when their depredations become egregious. 

But centralized power is the only power that can effectively deal with issues like multinational corporate predatory behavior, environmental degradation, and it has an important role on the national and international level to play in setting fair labor standards, trade and transportation rules, and lots of other things that need coordination and regulation at a higher level.

Conflicts between the local and the center will always be thorny: Should locals refuse genetically modified produce exported according to rules determined by an international body? Probably. Because the bias should always be toward letting the locals alone, except where they prove themselves outrageously unable or unwilling to solve problems that clearly undermine the greater good. What that greater good means in reality will depend on lots of different, mostly contingent factors. Locals can always find ways to resist centralized regulations when they lose in these conflicts, through boycotts and other means. But such protests are easier to organize on the local level than on a national or international level. 

Concentration of Power

Presents a greater danger to the public good than concentrations of wealth, but where there is concentration of wealth, concentration of power follows. Libertarians get upset with the idea of power concentrated in governments--and that can be a very serious problem--but the real problem in America has always been the way power concentrates in the private sector--in trusts and monopolies. 

Tom Frank explores this theme in a spirited interview with Barry Lynn about the history of anti-trust in America. This is one of the best things  on the way the political economy works in the U.S. I've read on this in a long time. It does a great job of pulling together a lot of fragments of things we all kind of know, but fuzzily.

There are so many good passages in it I don't know which to excerpt here, so I'll just pick this one from near the end. [Frank is in the bold; Lynn normal text]:

When I wrote about the Tea Party movement, I said, if Democrats are looking around for something from their own tradition that might defuse the Tea Party—actually there’s no evidence that they were looking around for a way to defuse the Tea Party movement. Had they been looking around for a way to defuse the Tea Party movement, this issue seemed like an obvious thing to me. Start talking about antitrust. Because these Tea Party guys are small business people, like you said; they’re very worried about the power of bigness—why not throw it out there? If you’re Barack Obama, why not do it? You’d stop this movement in its tracks. You might even win some of them over.

When it comes to the political economy, both parties are run by the same people.

So we’ve finally come to the biggest duopoly of them all. This is not like Procter & Gamble vs. Unilever or something.

They tell us we’re members of the blue team, or members of the red team, and that these colors really matter. But when it comes to political economy, when it comes to issues of actual distribution of power, both the blue party and the red party do pretty much exactly the same. One of the more disappointing aspects of President Obama is that, as a candidate, he was great on antitrust. One of the reasons Barack Obama is president is because he went to Iowa as a candidate and said he was going to fix antitrust, and take on the giant agro-industrial companies. That’s one of the main reasons he beat Hillary in the Iowa caucus in early ’08.

That’s great.

If you were in Iowa, it was like, “Gee, this guy is for real.”

Well, what happened?

Well, he won Iowa!

I know, but did he fix it?

Well, after he won Iowa and leveraged that into winning the presidency, he actually—I will give President Obama credit on this, he tried. For one year, he tried. In 2010, Christine Varney, who was his antitrust enforcer, and Eric Holder, who is his Attorney General, and Tom Vilsack, his Secretary of Agriculture, they held five hearings around the country, in which they gathered evidence of abuse by giant companies, and made promises to farmers that they would fix the agriculture markets in the United States.

That’s fantastic. And what happened?

Well… The powers made clear that this was not acceptable.

Come on, what do you mean by that? You mean, he didn’t follow through, he didn’t do it.

He didn’t do it. After the Democrats got clobbered in the 2010 midterms, the White House entirely abandoned the effort.

Okay but, this might have been the thing that could have saved their ass, if they had played it right, is what I’m thinking, if they had really made a big deal out of it.

Well yes, but I’m really not sure how comfortable they were with the idea of antimonopoly in the first place. In almost every other sector of the political economy, they never did a thing ever to stop concentration. If anything, as in banking, they have simply sped it along. I mean, when they walked into office, they had the perfect bad merger to reject, the merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation. Here we had two companies that people really disliked, and yet the Obama team gave the deal an easy pass.

This is the most maddening thing about the two-party system, is now we’re in this situation where, there’s this weird dynamic for the last couple decades now where the Republicans are driving, driving, driving farther to the right, and Democrats, liberals, who are the bearers of the tradition you’re talking about, are afraid to take a stand on anything for fear that if they make any wrong step these right-wingers will get in. And you’ve basically got a two party system that everyone can see is broken. How do we ditch this monopoly?

Well, part of the reason that liberals have such a hard time is that we still share a party with real corporatists, people whose basic thinking about economics traces back to Teddy Roosevelt Progressivism rather than Brandeisian or Jeffersonian democracy. We’ve got a lot of old-fashioned “small d” democrats, “small r” republicans in our party, people who believe in community based democracy and industrial liberty. That’s probably the great bulk of us, probably 90% of the members of the Democratic party believe in a Jeffersonian, Wilsonian, Brandeisian political economics. And that’s probably true for the majority of Republicans too. But then in our party you have this overlay of the old-fashioned Progressives, of people who still really believe that the main thing we should aim at is efficiency, and these people wield real power in the party. And then in the Republican Party you’ve got a leadership controlled by a weird amalgam of straight up feudalists and insane libertarians, who live entirely in a realm of theory and myth, and who also say that the main thing we should aim at is efficiency.

"When it comes to the political economy, both parties are run by the same people." And as I've been arguing here for years, the only thing that separates Democrats from Republicans are cultural or tribal identity issues. Liberals and progressive have essentially let the Democrats give away the country to the 1% because the people they elect to serve the interests of the 1% are cosmopolitians who are politically correct on abortion, gay rights, and guns. 

I found interesting and learned from the discussion in the interview in the difference in approaches taken by two wings of the Progressive movement represented by Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and which came to a head in the election of 1912. Roosevelt wanted to allow concentrations of power in a monopolies or duopolies so long as they were closely regulated by the government. Wilson, in the Jeffersonian/Jacksonian tradition, wanted to break  up all concentrations of power. The 'overlay of old-fashioned Progressives' that Lynn refers to in the excerpt are heirs of the Teddy Roosevelt approach--good government technocrats, for the most part, who were interested in efficiencies of scale. 

The problem, of course, is that in both approaches the government has to be powerful enough and to have the will to keep the private sector in check. But it has become clear that the Roosevelt approach creates the greater danger, because it requires the will and the stamina to hold the wolf by the ears. Once the will to regulate has been weakened, the wolf can and will turn the tables and as we have seen, it has been feasting on the carcase of our dysfunctional democracy for the last 30 years. Better to find some way to make sure the wolves never get to big and that they spend most of their time fighting with one another. 

So since Reagan came in an let the wolves run wild, there's been no force inside or outside government with the will or the strength to try to get them back on some kind of leash or into cages where they belong. That's our predicament right now, and it's pretty difficult to see how to get out of it. The only solution, of course, is a revival of the Jeffersonian/Wilsonian approach and the will to break up the concentrations of power, starting with the banks, that have developed since 1980. Does anybody really believe that this is high on the list of priorities for Hillary Clinton? 

 

Ukraine and the West

The Beltway hawks want to defeat Putin, depicted as a new Hitler by Hillary Clinton, to punish the Russian leader who put a stop to the oligarch looting spree of the 1990s that had sent Russia into a death spiral. Their dream: humiliating Putin, setting off “freedom” demonstrations in Moscow, perhaps a civil war to bring Putin down.

Why, one must ask, is this an American interest? Why would we want chaos in a state which possesses 8,000 nuclear weapons? If the neocons and neoliberals got their way and Putin is defeated and falls, who then assumes power? Or does Russia break into warring fiefdoms with various warlords vying for control? And in this scenario, who, if anyone, commands Moscow’s nuclear arsenal? Is this really the future—with all its attendant uncertainty, desperation, and humiliation—Americans want to see? Truly it is hard to imagine anything more stupid or shortsighted.

I don't talk a lot about foreign policy because it doesn't interest me that much. Monitoring what's going on is about as interesting as reading the police blotter in the local newspaper. It's simply a matter of different gangs fighting with one another to improve their territory and market share. Nationalist sentiment is nothing more than wearing gang colors. It's primitive and uninteresting, but unfortunately, you have to deal with it if you live in a neighborhood controlled by gangs, and we all do. 

So when it comes to foreign policy, we shouldn't look at our own US policy as motivated by anything differently than defending its market share. I honestly believe that at this time in our national development we are collectively incapable of anything better than enlightened self interest. I doubt we are even capable of the enlightened part. Whenever the US gets idealistic about foreign policy, it almost always makes things far worse, especially for the people we insist we want to help. We are collectively incapable of doing the right thing, even if it's clear what the right thing is to do, and usually it's not. Never trust anyone who professes to be an idealist in foreign policy; he is either a charlatan or a dangerous fool. The bottom line is that our shrewder gang leaders realize that they don't have any market share in this part of the world to protect, and that they should leave it alone. It's not noble, but it's sane, and when genuine nobility is not a possibility, sanity should be embraced.

So I am all for the Ukraine getting a higher level of self-determination than it had under the Russian puppet Yanukovych, but maybe the price for getting it is the Ukraine's giving up the Crimea--and, though possible, less likely--some of its eastern borderlands occupied mostly by Russian gangsters. It's a decent tradeoff--give up territory inhabited mostly by people who don't wear your colors in exchange for control over your own still extensive territory.

That's what the terms of the negotiations should be about now, but I doubt that's how the Ukrainians see it. Too bad. Regardless, it's, first, the Ukraine's business, and, second, the European Union's, and the US role should be simply to stand on the sidelines and support any decision these parties come up with that promises sanity, stability, and as much self determination for the concerned parties as seems practicable given the political realities. 

We're approaching the centenary of the beginning of WWI. It started because a Serbian gangster took out a rival Austrian capo. The Austrian gang moved to retaliate, and the Russians mobilized to protect its market share in the Balkans, and this started the chain reaction that led to thirty years that were among the most horrific in European if not world history. It should have stayed between Austria and Russia without everyone else getting in the act. It may have led to disaster for one or the other, but it would have been a limited disaster. The same goes here. 

Putin is a silly, strutting gamecock, but while he's a threat to his immediate neighbors, he's not a threat to world order. Not even remotely in the way that a major military conflict in this region would be. That's why it's important for the West not to listen to our own strutting gamecocks like McCain, Graham, NRO, and the gangsters on FOX. These fools are nuisances that need to be prudently managed and contained, but not to be taken more seriously than they deserve. 

Douthat on the Leftist Pope

But the church’s social teaching is no less an official teaching for allowing room for disagreement on its policy implications. And for Catholics who pride themselves on fidelity to Rome, the burden is on them — on us — to explain why a worldview that inspires left-leaning papal rhetoric also allows for right-of-center conclusions.

That explanation rests, I think, on three ideas. First, that when it comes to lifting the poor out of poverty, global capitalism, faults and all, has a better track record by far than any other system or approach.

Second, that Catholic social teaching, properly understood, emphasizes both solidarity and subsidiarity — that is, a small-c conservative preference for local efforts over national ones, voluntarism over bureaucracy.

Third, that on recent evidence, the most expansive welfare states can crowd out what Christianity considers the most basic human goods — by lowering birthrates, discouraging private charity and restricting the church’s freedom to minister in subtle but increasingly consequential ways. (Source)

This Catholic case for limited government, however, is not a case for the Ayn Randian temptation inherent to a capitalism-friendly politics. There is no Catholic warrant for valorizing entrepreneurs at the expense of ordinary workers, or for dismissing all regulation as unnecessary and all redistribution as immoral.

Regarding number one: Capitalism has never had a productivity or innovation problem, but it has always had a very serious distribution problem. Its productivity has made some people very rich, its innovation disruptive to traditional societies, their values, and ways of life often immerserating them. GDP per capita is a poor way to measure wealth. Free-market capitalism as it has evolved, especially since the last half of the 19th century, has created new kinds of poverty and slavishness that simply did not exist before.

Regarding number two: I mostly agree; there should always be a bias for the local and voluntary. But subisidiarity also recognizes that the Feds have a responsibility to intervene when the locals are incompetent, incapable, or unwilling to deal with problems that negatively affect its citizens on the local level. The Feds did the right thing when Eisenhower sent the troops into Little Rock, and they should have done a better job when Katrina hit New Orleans. If the Feds were serious about improving educational achievement, they wouldn't be pushing on local communities ridiculous top down policies like No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and the Common Core. They would be finding ways to intervene to mitigate the toxic effects of poverty in the lives of children who grow up in it.

And this brings us to the last of his points, so regarding number three: Does Douthat really think that the U.S. is any in danger of becoming one of the most expansive of welfare states? As for crowding out, please. I understand the point, but we're not living in stable ante-bellum communities where everyone knows who you are and when a stranger arrives in town it's a big event.

Conservatives get all nostalgic in their complaining about how bureaucracies have replaced face-to-face relationships, but that's the price of number one: the disruptive, innovative power of capitalism. I don't like bureacracies either, and as I suggest in my response to number two, there are places I think the Feds should keep their noses out of. But the scale of the social and economic disruptions that follow from number one is not "subtle". It requires by the logic of number two that it intervene to do the mitigating welfare work of number three. And the huge scale of the problems, alas, requires bureacracies whose scale is equal to the suffering. There's still plenty of room for the churches and other local voluntary organizations so that they need not feel subtly or grossly crowded out. But they are not competent alone to deal with the huge scale of the problems modern market capitalism has created. 

The pope gets this, and Douthat, good Catholic that he is, won't go all Rush Limbaugh on him. He wants to find the middle ground, and good for him. And he's right that there isn't anything substantively different in what Francis is teaching that contrasts with his predecessors. His is, rather, a matter of emphasis. And it is a matter of a pope  embracing a prophetic role, his papal bully pulpit, but this time as one who speaks as the first pope from the southern hemisphere, and who knows concretely the kind of suffering that follows from Douthat's abstract neoliberalism. 

 

Technocratic v. Humanistic Education 2

I wrote on this theme here, but this kid really gets it:

See also Patrick Denneen's eloquent speech at Notre Dame against the Common Core. Key grafs:

I began by suggesting that it was in the very absence of any national standard for education, and the strong tradition of local control of education, that we could perceive, in fact, a pervasive historical commitment to the aspiration of republican self-government. Because humans in their social and political communities are various, it was understood by our Founders that the way that these educational purposes to be achieved would be various, and so the commitment to local control of education was not born of a resignation in the absence of a strong central government, but a positive embrace of variety and multiplicity. Because there is likely to be debate and disagreement in a pluralistic society over the nature of our civic ends and the nature of a good character, it was understood that only in more local circumstances could the highest aspirations of education be pursued, even if that would be various and multiple. In our modern insistence to standardize and equalize, we necessarily discard any higher aspiration of education’s end in an embrace of a widely-secured agreement about lower, debased ends: an education based upon a lowest common-denominator, “career-readiness.” Our civilization thus shows its ultimate commitments through how it educates its young—that we think them incapable of anything higher than being workers in a deracinated globalized economic system, neither citizens nor, in the fullest sense, humans.

At the same time, we condemn ourselves, betraying our ancient faith in our own ability to educate and cultivate our young, handing over our final and most basic liberty to a distant power. Contained in the very act of handing over the education of our young is the self-indictment of a decaying Republic, a future feared by, among others, Tocqueville, as a possible path that America might take, since it is one that all republics heretofore have taken, and is an inevitability once a people has lost the taste and the art of ruling themselves.

 

Seattle's Two Most Interesting Elections

Washington State has 100% mail-in ballots, so it takes a while to find out who wins in close elections. Sue Peters and Kshama Sawant were in such close elections, and both won. Neither ran as Democrats in a Democrats-dominated town--they ran to the left of the Dem establishment and won despite all the money that establishment poured into the establishment candidates' campaigns. It gives one hope that money isn't everything, at least on the local level where opinions are formed by actually seeing and hearing the candidates in person. 

Peters ran as an independent for school board on an anti-corporate education reform platform, and Sawant ran as a socialist on a raise the minimum wage to $15/hr platform. Both are super smart, articulate women, and they really deserved to win, but who'd a thought they would. Both were long shots even in September. Seattle is a well-informed, progressive town by American standards, especially on cultural issues, but it's bit by the Neoliberal bug when it comes to economic issues. That comes from the techy and entrepreneurial types, the Microsoft millionaires, the Jeff Bezoses and Howard Schultz's who lean pro-business libertarian. No need to put the neanderthals in Boeing even in that group. 

Salon did an interview piece with Sawant here, and in a way it's unfortunate that she's calling herself a socialist because she's just talking common sense, and regardless of her success here, I doubt the socialist party is going to get much traction. But maybe I'm wrong. She's not anti business. She just recognizes that as productive as capitalism is, it has a very serious distribution problem. If it takes a socialist in office to do something about that, more power to her.

And here's a HuffPo piece Peters wrote a few years ago that represents where she's coming from, which is where I'm coming from on education issues, and it's why I ran for school board (and lost) in another district two years ago. 

I don't want to make too much of this, but both these elections make me hopeful that rank-and-file Democrats are beginning to make distinctions  between corporate Democrats (liberal on cultural issues, but pro 1% on economic issues) and candidates who represent rank-and-file interests.

 

Local vs. Central

Interesting discussion on Corey Robin's blog about the problems related to both, especially in the comments. 

There is always the problem of the particulars of any time and any place. That's why my bias toward the local is quite clear that often those tyrannized by local mafias need to have some way of appealing for outside intervention for help. That's where the principle of subsidiarity comes in. Eisenhower was right when he sent in the National Guard to Little Rock. 

But there's always a price to be paid if you can't or won't settle things on your own. If you are Milan calling in France to help you with your squabble with Naples, chances are that France isn't going to go home later, and you find yourself dealing with a worse problem. Everything depends on the motives of the big guy you call in to intervene. It's almost always better to get the job done yourself. 

The mistake to take from the Federal interventions in the 60s and 70s was to accept the interventionist role as normative. The Left in this country has failed on the local level where the Right has mostly succeeded in Red States, where they have essentially purged moderate Republicans. The local then becomes a feeder system into the federal system creating the kind of dismantlement of protections enjoyed by earlier generations.

The battle first has to be won on the local level. I also recognize that once the battle is won there, then you have the ground prepared for the restoration of federal protections taken away and the introduction of protections not yet offered.  But I want to see the initiatives coming from below. The chances, for instance, of a single-payer health care system being introduced in Washington State where I live are far more likely than ever seeing one introduced on the national level. If it succeeds locally, it will in time be adopted elsewhere, and then it will be easier to effect some kind of national policy. The Beltway is not a place to expect innovation. The best we can hope for from those who go there is a belated reactiveness. 

The will to power and corruption cannot be eliminated. The question is at what level is it easier to contain and manage. 

Little Fish Fighting Big Ones

There is something admirable about the local autonomy enjoyed, for instance, by the patchwork of city states that composed the northern Italian Peninsula during the Renaissance. Not so desirable was their continuous, pointless fighting among themselves, and in the end their weakness in defending their autonomy against the centralized powers France, Spain, and Austria who moved in and took away their autonomy. Better if they were able to overcome their divisiveness, to get organized and to develop for themselves a balance between local autonomy and centralized coordination. They didn't, so they and countries like Poland who couldn't get it together, find themselves partitioned and gobbled up by the big boys.

Because little fish get eaten by the big ones, local autonomous communities need to organize/centralize themselves to defend their autonomy. This is my basic critique of movements like Occupy. They are very conscious of the will to power and the iron law of oligarchy, and identify it with any kind of centralized authority structure. I understand their concerns, but the challenge is to find an accountable, centralized structure that strikes the right balance between the need for centralized coordination and local autonomy and decision making. It's very hard to do, but getting gobbled up is what happens if you don't.

Mutually Assured Destruction prevents the great powers from going to war with one another, so I think we will see 'will to power' in American and other societies shifting from the military to the economic spheres, and we will see the primary focus of the security state moving away from concerns about external threats from hostile states to internal threats from stateless subversives waging asymmetric campaigns of sabotage. The Bush administration's response to 9/11 was absurd because it misconstrued the threat and response to it in military rather than police terms. With the revelations of the extent of the NSA surveillance program, we're seeing how far we have come in moving toward the police state.  

I'm not all that clear how this is going to play out over the next several years, but two observations. First, as the authoritarian police state in China becomes more like the US in adopting neoliberal economic policies, the U.S. will become more like China in adopting authoritarian police-state policies. China's embrace of state capitalism gives it the advantage in any kind of economic warfare with the U.S. because it has the more centralized model.The US will gradually realize that it will have to adapt.  

Second, in the meanwhile, it looks as though the US government is gradually transforming into the appendage of competing economic warlords. As such, government will function more as corporate security services in the locales in which they operate. These warlords will use regional governments and their high-tech surveillance and security infrastructure to keep the workers docile and dependent. We're not there yet, but we appear to be transitioning into something like this. 

If this is the direction in which we are headed, the NSA and other government surveillance systems are not a problem because of their potential abuse by politicians, but because of their potential abuse by the corporate powers these politicians serve. If Snowden, a man who works in the private sector, has access to the information that he does, who's to say that others haven't been using the same information for other extra-legal purposes. Why would we assume that that no one is? 

It no longer matters much what is technically legal or illegal, because these corporations are writing their own laws, and even if they break laws, who is there to hold them accountable?  If there is no power (or will) to make laws in the public interest and to enforce them, it doesn't matter what's legal or illegal regarding abuses of power. If government continues to evolve into a mere appendage of the big corporations, we should have no expectation that anyone powerful is accountable to the public. The law will be used exclusively to keep the public in line. 

Finding the Balance between Centralization and Localism II

The euro zone faces the same choice as the Holy Roman Empire and American patriots of old: how to overcome discredited forms of confederation. Rather than digging themselves into a deeper recession and democratic deficit through austerity measures, the states in the common currency need to form a full and mighty union on Anglo-American lines. They must create a strong executive presidency elected by popular vote across the euro zone, a truly empowered house of citizens elected according to population and a senate representing the regions. . . . 

This is the only framework that will endow the euro zone with the democratic legitimacy to reassure the bond markets, underpin the implementation of good financial governance across the entire union and defend its interests and values on the world stage.

More than 200 years ago, the choice was between the Holy Roman Empire and Britain. The Americans opted wisely and prospered; the Germans continued to muddle through only to see their empire extinguished. History thus holds out both a great opportunity and a terrible warning for the euro zoners. (Brendan Simms, "The Ghosts of Europe Past", NYT, 6/10)

I wonder, rather, whether the old Hapsburg Empire isn't the better model. The fight between Prussia and Austria during the 18th and 19th Century was won eventually by the more homogenous, centralized, and militaristic state. As, especially toward the end, Austria played whack-a-mole with one nationalist insurgency after another, the Prussians were consolidating the northern German states into a superpower, and one that got a crazy kaiser in the 1890s that led them into WWI and a crazier fuehrer in 1933 that led them into WWII. Give me a Hapsburg any day over a Hohenzollerin.  

But that was then and this is now. It's hard to imagine the kind of balance-of-power military game played in Europe over the couple of hundred years before WWII being played out among the new great global powers in the coming century. Mutually Assured Destruction forces the game to be played on another board, one where the weapons are economic not militaristic. So I suppose there is a kind of inevitable logic in the EU becoming a stronger, more centralized and economically integrated state if it wants to play its role as a great power in the global game with the US, China, and the other emerging economies.

But I'm skeptical. It's at a disadvantage that neither the US nor Germany coped with to the same degree. The "United States of Europe" will be a lot like the old Holy Roman Empire, a confederation of states with very strong and very diverse local identities, and which will want to guard its autonomy and sovreignty jealously. If it was hard for an emperor to rule, will it be any easier for a democratically elected USE government? 

And as the world becomes economically more integrated and as multinational corporations homogenize everything, there is likely to be intense backlash along the lines of what we're seeing in Istanbul right now. There will be ongoing reistance by locals irked by the efforts of technocrats trying to realize their abstract, centralizing, power-consolidating fantasies. There will be levels of resistance and fragmentation  in inverse proportion to the intensity of efforts by a technocratic elite to consolidate and homogenize. Isn't that what we're seeing in the US? Isn't that the driving force behind the Tea Party and its resistance to what it sees as Federal technocratic overreach? And who's to say they're wrong? Not me.

The challenge lies in that in a complex, globalizing world there have to be central institutions that coordinate efforts to deal with the big issues I talked about the other day. The market and the uncoordinated efforts of individuals and groups aren't going to solve problems associated with climate change, for instance, and neither are they going to solve or even mitigate problems of economic injustice. These are issues where the rules have to be developed and enforced with some degree of centralized legal authority.

So some balance between local autonomy and centralized rules enforcement has to be struck. Barring some kind of singularity or another, It might take another two hundred years to get there, but that's what has to happen. And it will probably look a lot like the Holy Roman Empire of old--not with its imperial, crown-and-altar trappings, but in its balance between local autonomy and a legal framework enforced by a central authority with broadly accepted legitimacy.

See also  Finding the Balance between Centralization and Localism I.

Quote of the Day: David Brooks

Since the New Deal, we have become accustomed to seeing American politics as an ever-concentrated national enterprise. But the sclerosis of the federal system will inevitably produce a reversal, as regions fill the void.

The happiest people these days are those who leave Washington and get elected mayor or governor. The most frustrated people are people who were mayor and governor and get elected to the Senate. They end each day knowing they were busy. They’re just not sure they accomplished anything. (Source)

When he's right, he's right. I honestly don't know why anybody, except for prestige reasons, would want to be a US senator or congressman.

In the early days of the republic the federal job was the low-prestige job, and the local job was the more coveted. Why? Because what mattered was your state identity, your face-to-face relationships, your local reputation. Nobody knew or much cared what you were doing in Washington. The run-up to the Civil War and the subsequent growth of mass media changed all that, but I think it would be a healthy thing if the current paralysis in Washington forces things to come full circle. 

Is there something intrinsically more boring about local issues, or is it just that they seem intrinsically less important because they are local? Sure, there are critical things that need to be dealt with on the national and global level--trade, climate change, wealth distribution, labor practices, disaster relief, and some other things that are not presently front of mind. These issues have enormous impacts on our lives lived on the local level, but is there any reason why any of us should care that Chris Christie is unnecessarily spending $10 million on a special election in NJ?  Yet, that's what the cable networks are full of. Christie is NJ's problem; he's not anyone else's yet.

The question to ask is where your focus of attention and your engagement should lie. Where is it likely to have the most impact? What are the distractions, and what are the things that matter? Don't focus on abstractions; fight for the particular in the concrete circumstances of your life. This is more of an admonition to myself, I suppose. It's not something I do terribly well. 

 

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.

****

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.]

Governing Principles for the Development of Local Humanistic Learning Communities

Jonathan in an interesting response to my post last week about Humanistic vs. Technocratic Education suggests that I might be surreptitiously introducing my own social engineering scheme. I don't think so, but I'm willing to get more specific about the guiding principles that I think will make easier--no guarantees--a more humanistic approach. And always when it comes to policy, the devil is in the details. 

First--A bias toward de-centralization. Parents and teachers know what their kids need; bureaucrats do not. Our first instinct should be to trust concrete, living, local communities and to their capacity for decision making. Does this guarantee that every school will deliver a quality education to every kid? No, and I do think where there are egregious failures, interventions will be required, but that's something that should be determined within the framework defined by item 2.

Second--An insistence on democratic accountability. Democracy means that an engaged citizenry deliberates and decides what is in the best interest of the community. People decide, not markets.  Charters are not the answer. On the other hand. Elected school boards set local policies, not mayors, governors, legislatures, or foundations. Decision making should be as close as possible to the people who will be most affected by them. 

Third--A commitment to equity, and this means developing and funding aggressive, effective programs inside and outside the school building that mitigate the negative consequences of child poverty. The market is not going to solve this problem, and school alone cannot solve this problem. It will be solved only when we as a society commit ourselves to solving it. The funding part of this is the primary role for the state to play, not in dictating programs, curriculum, and standards. There should be a bias toward funding locally initiated programmatic solutions unless there is a history of corruption and incompetence in a particular troubled community. I don't want to make this sound easy. But no solution, humanistic or technocratic, is going to deliver results quickly. It's more important that a realistic framework for a solution be developed than just flailing and throwing money at these thorny, deeply engrained historical and cultural problems. 

Fourth--A long-term plan to improve teacher quality and professionalism. We want to attract the best people and retain them. That means paying them at a level commensurate with their education and professionalism, but it also means, making fundamental changes in the way teachers are recruited and trained for careers in the classroom. It means developing more effective ways of enhancing professional development and collaborative support among teachers. The current evaluation and accountability systems are useless and counterproductive. They are doing more to chase good teachers out of our classroom than to weed out the bad teachers who shouldn't be in them in the first place.

You can't make anything happen; you can only argue for and work for what you think is best and trust that while in the short run people often make stupid, shortsighted mistakes, in the long run they learn from those mistakes and choose what is better. Right now we're in a kind of stupid stage. People have very little sense for the big picture or the common good, and so are inclined to make, parochial, shortsighted decisions. I think that this is in large degree due to a lack of high-quality alternatives that most people can agree on. In the long run that will change, but in the short run we can only do what we can do to prepare the ground for something new to grow. 

 

Zombie Traditionalism I

Liberation fever is not new; it's at the heart of the Modern impulse. It started with the Reformation, progressed through the Enlightenment, and ultimately manifested in the liberation movements of our own era. The modern spirit from its earliest manifestation has always been a movement to shuck off the constraints of the traditional premodern social system. The black liberation movement, the women's liberation movement, and now the gay liberation movement are all perfectly consistent within this fundamental liberationist logic of modernity.

They are all assaults on traditional constraints. And conservative establishment resistance to the demands of blacks, women, or gays has always been rooted in arguments to preserve traditional social forms and traditional morality. And these arguments were also always accompanied by predictions of social chaos if these groups were given what they asked for. But in the modern era traditional logic always loses to modern logic sooner or later. The custom ("the way we have always done things around here") argument always loses to the rights argument when basic fairness is at stake. And the fairness' argument should defeat the 'custom' argument.

But here's where it gets tricky, because many people on the right think that the culture's surrendering to the demands of blacks, women, and gays is directly responsible for the destruction of the traditional American way of life. They are not. On the surface there might seem to be some merit to this argument, but traditional America was already dead by the time any of these movements got any traction, and the liberationist left didn't kill it. Free-market, consumer capitalism did.

Consumer capitalism is the end result of another kind of liberation movement whose origins lie in the sixteenth century and are linked the emergence of the Protestant bourgeoisie as a driving force in science, politics, and commerce. This new class wanted to be free of the stultifying constraints of state-centered mercantilism. They pushed for the laissez-faire approach that would let the market dictate the direction of the economy instead of the king dictating it. The new class gradually won that fight, and in the late 1700s the enormous economic energies that produced the industrial revolution were released. And during the 1800s we saw the enormous growth of industrial capitalism and with it a ravaging of traditional social arrangements as the economic center of gravity shifted from the manor to the factory.

The American Civil War pitted the new modern forces of industrial capitalism against the forces that shaped a tradition-centered agricultural, hierarchical society. Traditional forces sooner or later always lose to the forces of modernity, but that doesn't mean that the traditionalists go down without a good fight. The Southern Confederacy showed a ferocity in defense of its culture and mores that ultimately proved futile. The recent Tom Cruise film, The Last Samurai, explores this same theme of a soulful traditionalism losing to the relentless, machine-powered forces of the new industrial state in Japan of the 1870s. The same dynamic is working now in the Middle East.

But even as late as the 1890s about 90% of Americans still derived their livelihood from farming and agriculture-related businesses. And traditional American culture was rocked by economic turmoil in agriculture that eventually led to the destructito of the family farm as the basic institution in which traditional values thrived in a genuine way. And a formidable political counterbalance to the soul-deadening encroachments of industrial capitalism came from rural America where Populism became a political force in the 1890s.

The rest of the culture benefited from the continuity of American traditionalism in the rural heartland. Whatever else may have been going on in the cities or the factories, the heartland was there as a kind of ballast for a few decades more. But living American traditionalism was destroyed by first the ravages of the Great Depression in the 1930s and the mechanization of agriculture in the 1950s, which led to the capital-intensive agriculture that gradually killed off the family farm. Without the family farm, there is no institution that preserves the genuine living American traditionalism of which I speak.

Traditions need thriving, living institutions and a way of life through which the tradition is passed from generation to generation. The death of the family farm and the traditional way of life associated with it is the main cause of the the death of a living American traditionalism. People like Wendell Berry and other Agrarians have tried to keep that tradition alive, but it's a largely futile effort, and yet a kind of not-quite-dead form of traditionalism still lingers in the red, mostly rural red districts throughout the country. I'm not saying people there don't lead decent, thoughtful, virtuous lives, but they don't do it because they are traditionalists, and they don't do it any better than urban Americans. Both rural and urban Americans are living in a world turned upside down since 1860, and I just reject the idea that rural Americans are somehow more authentic as custodians of living American traditional values. 

Preserving this kind of traditionalism in America is like the Irish trying to preserve Gaelic language. It's more of head trip than the preservation of something still living. It doesn't really live because there is no natural habitat to support it. Sure people talk about traditional values, but the point I'm trying to make is that these are zombie traditional values. They no longer inhere in a living tradition or thriving cultural habitat. The traditionalism of movement conservatives manifests in twitching, wraithe-like cultural forms and values that might provide a sense of order and meaning, but are themselves soulless.

Living tradition is in sherds in America. It was shattered by the spirit of consumer capitalism. It has been replaced by the kind of zombie traditionalism that typifies the right-wing Wal-Mart mentality, a company that spouts traditional values while at the same time destroying the habitat of small, family-owned businesses in which those values thrived.  And, yes, we need to pick up some of the pieces and use them to assemble something new, but this idea that we must preserve a traditional way of life in America is like a traditional East Indian father who insists that his Americanized daughter marry the husband of his choice when she's in love with someone else. Arranged marriages can work in a cultural habitat in which the whole society supports it, but they can't in modern and postmodern cultures where the individual and his or her freedom, for better or worse, is the paramount cultural value. More on the freedom theme in Zombie Traditionalism II