Liberals, Neoliberals, and Saints

Last week, the big conversation amongst politics and political theory blogs was an argument over neoliberalism, begun by Henry Farrell here, continued by Matt Yglesias here, and sprawling outward to include all sorts of commentary (see here, here, and here for a start). The gist of the argument, as I see it anyway, is an old one that touches on all sorts of concerns many of us who consider ourselves on the left have: what, if anything, can be done to give socialist and/or populist and/or radical democratic policy options a greater chance of electoral success, when a lot of the best, most thoughtful, and most successful liberal thinking in the country--of which Yglesias is but one example--remains resolutely in the "neoliberal" box, in which the claimed egalitarian potential of monetarily guided market growth and indirect subsidies via tax breaks are preferable to the class-based perspective exemplified by union power, rising and minimum wages, expanded welfare, and job protection? This is a concern not simply because of some old Marxist argument which suggests that every success egalitarian reformers have in making a little bit of peace with capitalism makes real egalitarian reform of our society and economy less likely, but because those reforms are, many of us on the left claim, not sustainable in themselves, and become more and more beholden to corporate sensibilities and interests with every electoral iteration. (The current legal and political arguments over the Affordable Care Act and the debt ceiling are only the most recent bit of evidence which arguable supports the left's argument.) Hence, the difference between "leftism" (which, whatever its particulars, is fundamentally concerned with gaining equal access to society's pie for all, and the historic and economic structures which make it such divisions difficult to achieve) and "neoliberalism" (which, however one chooses to explain it, is fundamentally convinced that attacking structures is mostly useless and often counterproductive, especially in comparison with simply working with capitalism to increase relative size of the poor and middle-class's slices of pie) is a political difference, with the former insisting that good politics has to be about organizing alternatives to and opposition to the current structures of society, and the latter insisting that good politics involves technocratic mastery of, and a consistently compromising approach to, the current social structure.

I freely grant that talking about organizing alternatives and opposition drives many a smart and decent egalitarian batty, because the efforts seems so repetitive and pointless. Far better, perhaps, as Tim Burke suggested (and then suggested again, in a response to me), to adopt a kind of "sociocultural libertarianism" in which you opt-out of most of these debates over reform. We should accept that there's always going to be so many different metrics for measuring success in any policy debate that it's wrong to make a fetish of any one of them, that there's no solution that'll fully achieve one's stated goals (particularly because there's no way of achieving any of those goals without releasing, as Tim wonderfully put it, "a lot of extremely rivalrous visions of praxis, with varying degrees of improbability and/or undesirability", into the room), and that if all that means you lose any given policy argument (like over the Affordable Care Act, or over the debt ceiling), you might as well just accept it, make something satisfactory out of it, wait until next season, and quit using the loss as a pretext for arguing that there's still that one thing you haven't tried yet that'll solve all your problems.

It would be unfair to call Tim's call to "chill out" a bourgeois, neoliberal call, because it really isn't...but it does share some elements with it, and I think he'd admit to that. "Satisficing" in the context of our present socio-economic structure is, in a sense, very much what the neoliberal, Ygelsias position entails: it means asking what can be done with our present liberal capitalist modernity that has done most of us (or at least most of us who hang out on the internet) a fair amount of good, and not day-dreaming about some plan that will suddenly make the leftist, structure-challenging approach to reform politically viable. What neoliberalism assumes, as Ygelsias apparently assumes as well (though perhaps this is unfair to him as well), is that liberalism is what we've got, and so why not be content with technocratically "nudging" it (as Henry observes in another follow-up post) as best we can?

It's here that I think a post from Noah Millman (a post which brought out comments from some much-missed bloggers like Pithlord) is directly on point:

The broad point is: alternatives to neoliberalism won’t be as liberal. They will be less-likely to prioritize efficiency. They will also be less-likely to prioritize positive-sum solutions. They will also be less-likely to prioritize basic fairness or democratic principles or whatever else. They will assign a higher priority to increasing the economic and political power of the people they are trying to represent (or their designated representatives).

I think this is a vital observation, because much of the left, in confronting this frustrating reality, often handicap themselves, I feel, because of their determination to remain liberals. And if your primary concern is equality...well, why should you be? Obviously there is good reason to be liberal in the broad, original sense--to be open-minded and respectful of difference and appreciative of individual rights and concerns. But the construct of liberalism, much less neoliberalism, with its bone-deep commitment to fairness and efficiency and individualism and neutrality and elite (as opposed to populist or radical) democratic procedures? Is that really the best model to follow if one's hope is to engender social democratic challenges to the prevailing, unequal structures of society? Perhaps one of the reasons we on the left often find ourselves frustrated is because we're too often taking many of our talking points from people uninterested in examining radical alternatives that take us away from the assumptions of liberal modernity.

This month's issue of The Atlantic contained two review essays which exemplify this attitude: one by Caitlin Flanagan on Cesar Chavez, the other by Christopher Hitchens on Mohandas Gandhi. Flanagan's story is somewhat sympathetic to Chavez, or at least reluctant in its condemnation of him, but perhaps all the more damning because of that; Hitchens attack on Gandhi, by contrast, is almost predictable. But what is most predictable in both pieces is how little use both authors see--especially in Flanagan's case, as she looks back as a globalized member of the American elite at her family's one-time Berkeley-liberal infatuation with the United Farm Workers when she was a child--for anyone who approaches issues of justice and equality from anything other than a technocratic, melioratic, redistributive approach. For Chavez, his attempt to push forward efforts on behalf on exploited workers meant making use of not only the union-organizing lessons of the Wobblies but also a "mystical Roman Catholicism" which led Chavez to make hunger strikes, peregrinations complete with crucifixes, and celebratory Masses part of his campaign. In Flanagan's view, his determination to pursue equality in this devout and "hard way"--her words can barely hide her rueful smile at how "the mighty Berkeley Co-op," where she once worked fundraisers for the UFW, and where "shoppers (each one a part owner) went in to buy no-frills, honestly purveyed, and often unappealing food", has been replaced by a Whole Foods chain store--is what best accounts for his ultimate susceptibility to cult-thinking, paranoia, and irrelevance. "Like most '60s radicals...[Chavez] vastly overestimated the appeal of hard times an simple living...as everyone from the Symbionese Liberation Army to the Black Panthers would discover, nobody actually wants to be poor". Hitchens, as one might expect, takes Gandhi's opposition to modern complexity and meritocracy even further, suggesting that his campaign to free India from British rule really has more in common with the reactionary attitude of Wahhabism and Islamic fundamentalism generally, than anything that can be called humane. Dismissing the idea that justice and equality can be rooted in what he labels (invoking again his well-known attacks on Mother Teresa, attacks which I think are actually quite persuasive...just not in the way Hitchens supposes) "redemption by self-abnegation", he concludes that Gandhi's vision for India revealed him to be a "friend of poverty" rather than a friend to the poor, and moreover reveals him to be a believer in what he caustically calls the "grotesque" and "conceited" notion that "the meek should inherit the Earth".

What do these articles, or the examples of Chavez and Gandhi for that matter, have to do with the argument about liberalism, neoliberalism, and the left? Perhaps only this: as a long-time reader (and really, an admirer) of Matt Ygelsias, I'm fairly confident that his opinions about Chavez and Gandhi would be substantially the same as those Flanagan and Hitchens laid out...and he wouldn't be alone amongst those pundits and economists and lawyers who have developed the monetarist, nudging, neoliberal approach to increasing egalitarianism in finding a lot of sympathy with those views. Chavez and Gandhi were, well, saints--meaning people who are, as George Orwell famously put it, "anti-human" and "judged guilty until proven innocent", and if there's anything which liberalism in all its varieties prides itself on being, it's human--grounded in the human experience, addressing the needs and wants of the human individual, taking seriously solely that which pertains to the human being present before you. That's a powerful and important force for equality...but it's not the only one, and not necessarily the best one, especially if you open you eyes to historical, structural forces (one of which might very well be sin) which makes it very difficult, if not impossible, for the solitary individual before you, whatever rights she may possess, to be able to equally enjoy the goods of society. Taking on those unequal structures requires a perception and conviction which very well can--and I think, more often than not, usually does--incorporate elements of the liberal, even technocratic, idea: after all, why wouldn't one want to make use of tax credits and hidden subsidies if that serves to accomplish one's immediate ends? But a serious--call it "utopian," if you will, in the spirit of Erik Olin Wright's excellent book--effort to actually empower the meek in their places and in their lives (as opposed to promising job retraining and college loans to help them join the elite)...well, that's going to require structural work, and structural work will require a comprehensive vision of some sort. Liberalism alone can't get you there.

The power and appeal of liberal modernity it obvious, and as a consequence late capitalism probably isn't going anywhere, at least not anytime soon. The problem--for us on the left, and for everyone else--is what follows when some assume that, because it's not going anywhere, there is little reason to imagine anything beyond it, and it is just too-frustrating-to-be-worth-it to attempt to argue for a way of believing, acting, organizing, and sacrificing which it might at the structures of capitalism, and point in a different, more equal direction beyond it. Some will always assume that, of course; not everyone is going to find anything remotely appealing about saints. But I would hope that there will always be some believers attempting to articulate something a little bit more comprehensive, and perhaps even keep alive some of the means (most particularly unions, but there are others as well) by which those more comprehensive, structural challenges can make a political dent in the system.. It's a way to keep up leftward pressure on the neoliberals, at any rate.

Harry Brighouse Nails It

One of the smartest bloggers I know, a committed leftist but--as anyone familiar with his views on social issues like abortion or education knows--hardly a committed ideologue, puts it all in perspective:

I have given a lot of thought over a life to the various arguments about the value of unions, of public sector unions in particular (which, as I’ve said [before], do indeed engage in rent-seeking). This is just not the time for further exploration of that....[W]e are involved in the political fight of our lives, and those of us who have considered and well informed (and, yes, even nuanced) opinions are, at the moment, devoting ourselves to building a political movement that can shift things so that more of the gains of future growth go to the people who actually produce it, and less to those who enjoy the rents that they have sought through contributing to the coffers of politicians who cut taxes, hate the state, and seek to undermine public institutions for the sake of increasing the profits of, well, their rent seekers.

Theses on Unions, Wisconsin, and Other Things

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

So last night, the Republicans in the Wisconsin state senate passed the bill which Governor Scott Walker has made the cornerstone of his new administration: stripping collective bargaining rights from most of the public employee unions of the state (the police and firefighters were exempt). They did this, despite the absence of the Democrats needed to form a quorum, by stripping from the bill all spending or fiscal matters--in other words, reducing the bill to the plain contest over political power which I and many others said it was weeks ago.

What will come next is anyone's guess. Thousands are gathering in Madison for perhaps the largest demonstration yet. The polls show that Governor Walker and the local Republicans have taken a beating for attacking the rights of school teachers and other public employees. This fight over unions has mobilized certain voters to high levels of activism; recall election drives against state politicians are underway, and one against Governor Walker himself probably isn't too far distant. It's tense, it's infuriating, it's exciting, it's dramatic...one might say, it's politics. That's Ezra Klein's view, anyway:

It seems to me that the system worked. Democrats were able to slow the process down and convince both voters in Wisconsin and the national media that there was something beyond business as usual happening in Madison. National and state polls show they were successful in that effort. Walker and the Senate Republicans ignored the Democrats’ attempts at compromise and ignored the public turning against them and decided to pass the legislation anyway.

That was their prerogative, and now it’s up to the voters to decide whether to recall the eight Senate Republicans who are eligible for judgment this year, and to defeat Walker and the other Republicans in a year or two, when they become vulnerable to a recall election. That’s how representative democracy, for better or worse, works. The representatives can make unpopular decisions, but the voters can punish them for it. I thought that during the health-care debate, and I think that now--though I would be interested to see whether any of the conservative voices who were shocked and appalled by President Obama’s decision to ignore public opinion and finish health-care reform using the reconciliation process are calling for Walker’s head today. If not, I think they need to ask themselves what makes this case different.

I suppose I'm mostly with Ezra here--I can talk at length about how I'd like to see our political system take a more populist, participatory, parliamentary form, but in the end I concur: elections matter, majorities matter, the stability of the system matters (though I'll admit that I've become a lot friendlier to the idea of recall elections than I was back in 2003, despite still wishing we could reform our system more fundamentally, rather than adding various often-easily-hijacked-by-outside-interests reforming corrections on to it). Still, all that being said, there is still the matter of these anecdotes aplenty, all observing that Walker and the Wisconsin GOP presented a false face during the 2010 elections, never hinting that they believed addressing the states budget crisis would require to turn on what many call "The Wisconsin Idea". And that, I think, is a point where we can talk about differences, where we can talk about whether or not an action--this action by the Wisconsin GOP in particularly--truly is "democratic," truly does respect the wishes of a community, a state, a people, to govern themselves as they understand themselves. For the Wisconsin understanding is, historically at least, deeply tied up with assumptions about egalitarianism and the public good. Whatever the power (or lack thereof) of the case which President Obama and the Democrats made to the American people for national health care reform, it greatly pales beside the associative power which unions have in the Badger State. Christopher Phelps put it this way:

Madison is a capital city filled with public employees who take pride in the knowledge that Wisconsin was, in 1959, the first state to recognize public workers' collective-bargaining rights. The Wisconsin Idea--a classroom staple of the very schoolteachers whose labor rights are now threatened--has been given new life by the multitudes chanting, "This is what democracy looks like." Those who have been peopling ("occupying" is not quite the right word) the Wisconsin Capitol represent a remarkable diversity of professions and callings: corrections officers, graduate teaching assistants, letter carriers, carpenters, steelworkers, and students....In an equally arresting development, many school-board and county officials, although they might have been expected to welcome the prospect of weakened unions, have warned that the governor's proposed dismantling of labor rights might mean a return to the disruption of basic services from strikes, as happened often in the era before collective bargaining....When Madison teachers called a "sick out," a judge declined to issue an injunction against them on the basis that they were not violating their contractual obligation not to strike because they made no demands upon the school district and were instead protesting before the state government. Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, promised when visiting Madison that on whatever day the measure is signed into law, "We will be in the streets."

When I wrote about this conflict before, I wrote about it, at least in part, from my position as a conflicted, compromised localist--and that's still my position. But my position is a populist and socialist one too. Achieving the kind of economic democracy, the kind of community integrity, the kind of equality and solidarity, that I'd like to see may be impossible (may, in fact, be utopian)...but to whatever degree it may be possible, it necessitates challenging those socio-economic presumptions which insist that serving the interests of corporations engaged in trade and investment, and the needs of banks and bondholders who establish the terms of those investments--in short, the imperatives of a mostly unregulated ever-expanding (and, therefore, ever-disrupting) marketplace--must take priority. Are unions a good tool for making such a challenge?

Front Porch Republic ended up hosting a strong exchange on this topic, as did Salon's War Room blog, as did The League of Ordinary Gentlemen. Kevin Carson's contribution to the latter is must reading, for anyone--whether their inclinations lean communitarian (like mine) or libertarian (like his)--concerned about the requirements of economic independence and democracy. Basically he's strongly pro-union, but he makes that case while pointing out that unions have, for decades (he takes it back to the Wagner Act; I would take it back even further, to the end of the Progressive era and the eclipse of the IWW--and its model of direct action in support of workplace democracy--by other union organizations, one's less caught up in early 20th-century struggles with communism), been partners in making certain industrial capitalism maintained its stability and predictability. Collective bargaining agreements, the heart of the (for now) failed campaign in Wisconsin, are important, but not as important as unions could be were laws (and, perhaps, social and economic expectations) changed so as to allow them the operate a mutually supporting, networked guilds, capable of more direct (and less predictable) actions against firms and other economic actors that disrupt community life. But all that kind of talk--"community life" and the rest--can sound quaint when one is faced with losing the ability to bargain with one's employer over wages and working conditions. It was those things, and the political processes that enable workers to be equal partners in the determination of them, which lay at the heart of the "Wisconsin Idea," an undeniably Progressive vision which sought to streamline and reform and make fairer capitalism, not radically challenge it.

James Matthew Wilson's thoughtful post at FPR is, I think, basically uncomfortable with unions, but primarily because he seems them as representing a kind of delusion, a characteristically American unwillingness to recognize that budgets, like everything else, must operate within limits. He allowed, though, when pressed by comments from me and others, that the same can be said of Governor Walker and Wisconsin GOP leaders: to present the removal of right for public employees to unionize and negotiate, a right which Wisconsin pioneered a half-century ago, as a fiscal correction necessary to resolving the state's budget woes...while also passing a budget which grants large tax breaks and business incentives which cut into the state's revenue, is, at the least, a little questionable. Could Walker make the case that, in following the economic imperatives of late capitalism--namely, luring national and international money to the state, in the form of businesses that will create jobs and turn profits--he is concerned with the "common good" of Wisconsin? That he is being the responsible one? Perhaps...but responsible to whom? This is a struggle that runs through much of the localist project, and it is not an easy one to resolve: what if it is the culture of a place, the will of a people (and the massive demonstrations in Madison have to be at least one demonstration of just what that culture or idea may be), is such that they are truly attached, in the fullest, most civic sense of the word, to compromises which the more radical among us disdain? Look at the blog Milwaukee Rising, pointed out to me by a fine FPR commenter; the author is no automatic friend of unions, and in fact recognizes them as anything but an oppressed minority voice in Wisconsin--yet also recognizes that what they are fighting for is part of the fabric of the state, connected to democratic traditions like the Open Meetings (something every believer in local government ought to support!), and basically central to the character of the state. That certainly doesn't mean they shouldn't or couldn't be reformed (as labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein observes, it's really not so much the collective bargaining itself which matters, as the simple fact of having structures that bring workers together, to recognize their common interests, express solidarity amongst themselves, and form "countervailing forces" to challenge those in positions of economic authority and power). It only means that, if one wishes to get all classically republican, and point out that unions partake of a system which presumes that portions of the whole will invariably be set against itself (a criticism which I reluctantly have to agree with), then one ought to accept 1) that wholly non-capitalist options should always be on the table, and 2) that if there are communities of people who have embraced one progressive-liberal response to the problems of capitalism, and made it so much their own it's barely noticed until a politician tries to take it all away--which seems to be as good a description of the situation in Wisconsin today as any--then one ought, if one is a localist, to accept and embrace and work with and through it. The least democratic, least communitarian, least localist thing, it's seems to me, would be to assume that the union-defenders of Wisconsin don't know what they want, assume they aren't doing this themselves (an assumption which, if posed, could be just as easily extended to Governor Walker himself), or assume that what they want is wrong, because the rules laid down the bankers and bondholders and corporations cannot possibly be lived within any other way.

Is the Wisconsin way a legitimate one? Michael Lind argued that unions represent just one of several strands of capitalism-reforming egalitarianism, and probably not the best either. Lind would prefer what he calls "social democracy"--a ground-floor of "universal, contributory social insurance programs," rather than a patchwork of contracts providing wages and benefits sufficient for maintaining a family and a neighborhood (assuming the union lets you in the door). A response to him from Matthew Dimick points out the social insurance programs--like Social Security, for one--are invariably limited in their redistributive power, and become skewed in absolute terms towards the middle and upper-classes in society; the only way to keep the project of real economic equality politically feasible is to minimize the felt costs of universal social insurance programs, and that means lessening "pre-tax, pre-transfer inequality," so that redistribution does not present such an obvious target. What can do that? The bargaining power of unions, he says. But Lind is doubtful--the increasing inequalities in American life, the ones which make all acts of economic redistribution suspicious, because so costly and obvious, to those in the middle and upper classes, is not, he thinks, something unions can do much about; the real scourge is a libertarian ethic, which has left the financial center unregulated, and the borders open:

The growth of American CEO salaries, extreme as it is in international comparison, has been dwarfed by the explosion of compensation to elites in the financial sector. The bonanzas reaped by the tycoons of finance result from the deregulation of the financial industry by the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, combined with the socialization of the costs incurred by "too big to fail" financial firms. Vast fortunes have been made in finance by individuals who are allowed to keep the profits from highly-leveraged gambling, while their losses are absorbed by the taxpayers. If the financial industry in the U.S. had continued to be a tightly regulated utility, then elite bankers would never have become vastly richer than ordinary business executives. Pre-tax inequality in the U.S. would have been much reduced, unions or no unions....

While the top of the labor market in the U.S. has blown off, the bottom has fallen out at the same time. The decline of labor unions is one factor--but again, only one. Another factor has been mass immigration. With a few exceptions, like the late Barbara Jordan, most liberals refuse to admit that mass immigration by disproportionately poor and uneducated workers in the last generation has had anything to do with reducing wages for janitors, construction workers and nursing home aides....Mass immigration can harm unionization in two ways: directly, by providing an ever-growing pool of non-union "scabs" to replace workers who seek to unionize, and indirectly, by increasing divisions among workers along non-economic lines that increase the difficulty of collaboration. For two decades now, some utopian progressives have claimed that it is possible to reconcile mass immigration with increased unionization by unionizing both natives and immigrants. In theory anything is possible but in practice private sector union membership has continued to crumble in the face of mass immigration.

Lind's doubts are shared by some of those libertarians as well; Jason Kuznicki, a smart and realistic libertarian thinker (I wonder why he hasn't joined up with Bleeding Heart Libertarians yet?), makes some similar observations:

[I]t’s far from clear that labor unions can correct the specific type of inequality that we face today. CEO compensation is huge, yes, but the super-rich are not merely or even primarily CEOs these days. Instead, they’re generally in finance. How do you go on strike against an investment banker? Who exactly is he oppressing? Against the management of a steel mill, a union would be the right tool for the job. Here? I’m not convinced....I’m not denying that finance is capturing a larger and larger share of wealth. It certainly appears to be. The problem is that financiers don’t face a discrete class of disfavored people who can easily self-identify and organize to demand, through some workable mechanism, their fair share of the pie.

In reading these reasonable points--with which I'm pretty strongly tempted to agree whole-heartedly--I am struck my two points. First, that they presume, without any real question, that the structures of global capitalism--specifically, the financial institutions which generate the excess liquid capital that investors and businesspeople make use of--have enabled certain individuals to enrich themselves enormously, to the detriment of general equality and thus the health of the body politic. Second, that they throw up their hands when confronted by such structures; Lind would prefer these institutions be treated as a "tightly regulated utility," and Jason imagines that "higher marginal tax rates" ought to be in out future, but neither contemplate trying to find an alternative to, or a means of operating without, such inequality-generating, and hence equality and solidarity-destroying, global structures in the first place....especially since developing such alternative, non-global, more localized, ways of conducting transactions and fulfilling social and economic needs would likely go hand in hand with addressing the second significant cause of pre-tax, pre-transfer inequality in the United States which Lind mentioned: namely, a porous border that benefits (sometimes) many thousands of undocumented workers every year, and lines the pockets (always) of many cut-rate, highly profitable corporations every year, but doesn't do much at all for the general community, the nation, in between. I suppose it actually doesn't surprise to not see this connection made by Jason, as I assume our cultural perspectives are too far apart for him to make the leap from his libertarian position to my communitarian, democratic socialist one, however much we may agree on the problem of inequality. But I am surprised that Lind doesn't make it. Perhaps he's too much of a nationalist to recognize that some ideas worth fighting for aren't country-wide; they may be particular to a state. They may be found, for instance, in Wisconsin.

A confession: I've been to Wisconsin only twice. Went to a national high school debate tournament held in Eau Claire back in 1985, and I went to an international conference to J.G. Herder in Madison a few years ago. So truly, I don't know the state at all. But I know the legacy of Bob La Follette, and I know that, if I'm going to be caught between radical visions of decentralism and economic reform, and a corporate liberalism which is satisfied with mitigating capitalism where and when it may, then I like La Follette's determination to weave the best compromise he could into the social fabric; to make his vision--much of which apparently became second-nature to the socio-economic expectations and preferences of most Wisconsinites until this very day. That's not going to create the perfect localist, or populist, or socialist community. But it'd create a pretty fine state. So as long as there are unions who seem to be capable, whatever their overall conceptual limitations, for fighting for that idea, for fighting for that state, then I'll support them--I'll support Wisconsin. Sure hope Governor Walker doesn't trash the place any further.

A Thought for Nate on Unions

My post on Friday came late to a debate that, on the ground at least, appears to be winding down, or at least is shifting to a different terrain--it seems unlikely that a mobilization that brought up to 100,000 people out on the streets of Madison on Saturday (and tens of thousands more in demonstrations which occurred in state capitols all around the country in support of them) will be able to keep up such intensity. Unless, of course, the stuff floating around you hear about a general strike in Wisconsin comes to fruition; that would kick things up another level. But for now, one quick additional thought.

Nate Oman, a law professor at William and Mary, is one of the smartest people I know, and my proof of this is the many times he has hammered me over basic issues of economics in our many political and religious arguments over the years. Nate's basically a fan of markets, and thus basically unfriendly to unions. But he respects the ideas and history they represent, as laid out in this fine column which was published over the weekend. A highlight:

Labor law and anti-discrimination law regulate the workplace in fundamentally different ways. Anti-discrimination laws treat workers in isolation, protecting them against mistreatment on the basis of race, religion, gender, and--in some jurisdictions--sexual orientation. It holds up the ideal of an individual judged wholly independent of any accidents of birth or identity. Labor law, in contrast, creates associations of workers, often using mild coercion, and forces management to bargain with the associations. In contrast to the individualism of anti-discrimination laws, labor law envisions an ideal marketplace in which every worker is embedded in an association that both regulates his behavior and protects his interests.

Anti-discrimination law reflects a basically Protestant view of the moral universe, while labor law reflects a basically Catholic view of the moral universe. For Martin Luther every individual came alone before the throne of God, stripped of the mediating influences of tradition, community, or priesthoods, seeking mercy for his exposed and sinful soul....In contrast to Protestantism, Catholicism accepts the legitimacy of tradition in defining identity and insists that spiritual life requires participation in the "community of the saints"....Labor law reflects this communal vision of human identity and human flourishing.

This is a simplistic and even somewhat reductive explanation, as Nate would be the first to admit, but it's also insightful. As he succinctly the details the differences between the approaches taken by civil rights protesters in the 1960s, emerging most prominently from Protestant Baptist and African Methodist denominations, and those taken by labor forces, most of which found their greatest strength in the immigrant Catholic communities and leadership of the early 20th century, it makes sense to suggest that the different legal thinking at work in Wisconsin (many conservatives are happy to attack collective bargaining, but have no interest in going as far as Rand Paul and attacking the Civil Rights Act) reflects a difference, at least in part, in our civil religion: most of us, and most of our institutions and organizations, are more Protestant than Catholic, more individualistic than communitarian, and thus there is less public cost associated with attacking anything that speaks of people in terms of group or class or community interests, as opposed to something that speaks of individual rights.

I would ask Nate one question though, one which his own argument opens up about Wisconsin--namely, if this reasoning is correct, then shouldn't attacking corporations, vilifying and challenging and undermining the advantages which their collective associations of capital, built around plainly fictitious "persons," have enabled them to gain in the marketplace, be a lot easier? Of course, there is plenty out there on the level of rhetoric which romanticizes the entrepreneurial individual going up against the big corporate guns...but when you look at where weight lies in our economy (easy answer: look where the bulk of bailout dollars went), it really does seem that corporate entities enjoy plenty of advantages. Why doesn't our civil religion granted that same benefit of the doubt to unions? Corporations are, of course, in their basic organization, no more foreign to "using mild coercion" in the service of pulling together their constituent parts, than unions are. They are collective, in other words, or rather, "Catholic." Yet our presumably Protestant resistance to such doesn't seem to have the same effect. The answer, I suspect is obvious: deep religious explanations only go so far, especially when they are up against structural forces which shape and privilege the holders of capital in their presentation of themselves as friends of the individual economic actor. Or, as the joke making the rounds on Facebook today puts it: "A unionized employee, a Tea Party member & a corporate CEO are sitting at a table. In the middle is a plate with a dozen cookies on it. The CEO reaches out & takes 11 of the cookies, then says to the Tea Party member 'look out for that union guy, he wants a piece of your cookie.'" That's about the size of it, or so it seems to me.

A (Compromised) Localist Looks at Wisconsin

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Wow--I've let almost all of February go by without any substantial blogging. A hiatus indeed, I guess. But still, I shouldn't let the month end without saying at least something about what is happening in Wisconsin--especially considering that in the early hours of this morning, the Wisconsin Assembly passed the "Budget Repair Bill" which tens of thousands of protesters have spent the better part of two weeks demonstrating against. It's a bill that, should the Wisconsin Senate approve it (which it can't under present rules so long as enough Democratic senators stay in hiding, robbing the Senate of the quorum needed to vote), and should Governor Scott Walker sign it (which he, of course, would in an instant; it's his bill, after all) would, among other things, significantly cripple the power of most public employee unions in the state.

Given that the unions being targeted by this bill have long since signaled that they'd be willing to accept the cuts and budget reforms that the governor and Wisconsin Republican legislators are looking for, it has become fairly clear that this struggle is fundamentally about political power, not fiscal realities, however important they may be. It is a question about whose power over our economic landscape is to be respected, and to what degree. It places on one side the bondholders and bankers and CEOs who ultimately (and, perhaps, legitimately) demand a certain level of unregulated austerity if making investments and expenditures is to continue to appear appealing to them, or the workers and homeowners and citizens on whose behalf those programs and regulations--despite their admittedly often less-than-stellar track record--were designed:

The deal Wisconsin made with its state employees was simple: Accept lower wages than you could get in the private sector now in return for better pensions and health-care benefits when you retire. Now Walker wants to renege on that deal. Rather than stiff the banks, in other words, he wants to stiff the teachers--but the crucial twist he's added, the one that's sent tens of thousands of workers into the streets, is that he wants to make sure they can't fight back once he does it.

The reason you can't stiff bondholders is that they can make a state or country regret reneging on the deals they've made. They can increase borrowing costs far into the future, slowing economic growth and, through the resulting economic pain, throwing politicians out of office. That gives them power. An ordinary teacher does not have access to such artillery. Unless, of course, she's part of a union.

There are, to be sure, plenty of reasons to be concerned about the power of public employee unions--they can, like all other large organizations, become self-interested and corrupt, and thus stifle the productive actions of individuals and communities concerned with achieving common goods. The same can be said, of course, about all unions, in the same way the same can be said about all business and corporations, all school boards and church committees, all bureaucracies and agencies. But some say that public employee unions are an especially troubling case; that because their ultimate employer is technically themselves, and all the rest of us--everyone who pays taxes, in other words--public employee unions face a unique moral hazard, a very specific incentive to capture votes rather than negotiate, and thus act like an institutionalized political party within the bureaucracy of the state, rather than a "countervailing power" within the open market. Trade unions are a classic example of just such a power, and at least potentially a highly democratic example as well: organizing individual workers into a force which corporations, who enjoy the benefits of capital (and thus also the political power which an electoral system open to massive donations, never more so than now), would have to reckon with.

Does that logic fall apart with public employee unions? Many prominent opponents of the power of large corporations, including the father of the New Deal himself, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, thought so; the Wagner Act was about empowering the workers at private firms to demand respect from business owners, not enabling government employees to do the same. But perhaps all the changes in the American economy over the past three generations--some for good, many for worse--have changed this calculation as well. Manufacturing jobs have disappeared, as the country has grown wealthier and the technology making it possible for businesses to move their work to poorer (and thus, for them, more profitable) parts of the world has proliferated. Much of our country's economic lifeblood is now tied up in service and information-related jobs, in health and education and sanitation and livability and public spaces and environmental resources. Many of those jobs have been, from the beginning, rightly considered a public--that is, a government--responsibility, rather than a private one; many others have been moved, over the decades, from corporate hands to public ones (and some, to be sure, have also been moved back again). And that presents the question of whether people who hold those jobs, whether at the local or state or federal level, ought to be able to organize, to bargain collectively, to strike if necessary--to act as their own "countervailing power" against the government (which arguably has long been dominated by corporate and Wall Street interests, whether the Democrats or the Republicans were in control, anyway) that employees them. (See more on this issue here.)

For folks like myself, folks attracted to the ideas of local power and economic democracy, the fact these demonstrations have erupted in Wisconsin is significant. Robert "Fighting Bob" La Follette led Wisconsin as a U.S. representative and senator, as its governor, and as a presidential candidate for years. He was very much a Progressive, and for perhaps most who identify themselves as localists or decentralists today, the Progressives were the worst kind of bureaucratic busybodies. But the fact remains that the causes which he fought for and against--against imperialism and powerful corporate trusts and child labor, for civil liberties and union protection and municipal independence--are very much part of the foundation upon which most of whatever real respect for "place" which has survived in the mostly urbanized, mostly interconnected America of today was originally built. (The union protesters and their sympathizers in Wisconsin absolutely recognize this fact; Governor Walker is, perhaps, trying to pass that historical reality over.) Intact neighborhoods, family-supporting wages, local authority: there were, of course, many components to all these--stronger churches and civic organizations being one, a less acquisitive and individualistic social and economic mentality in the first part of the last century being another--but one would have to engage in a great deal of historical revisionism to claim that the laws which protected and empowered unions, the laws which guaranteed the rights or workers or organize and make demands and negotiate with those in power, didn't play a huge role as well.

One might hope that, in a different socio-economic world, local democracy and economic independence wouldn't depend upon defending, as I believe at the present moment they must be, something as potentially troubling as public employee unions. Christopher Lasch noted years ago the inevitable difficulties for and the dangerous backlash against any truly authentic community populism which comes when the efforts to empower workers through trade unions result in the emergence of "Big Labor." Libertarian-minded individuals, who presumably ought to favor the freedom of association which unions at least potentially represent, tend to see the current argument (especially the argument involving public employee unions), as ambiguous at best: clearly unions are an important weapon in the arsenal of individuals and communities seeking to protect themselves as the powers of capital and corporations, but the strategies and structures of today's unions leave much to be desired--among other things, they set aside any more radical (populist or distributist or socialist) critique of the contemporary capitalism, in favor of a never-ending (and, in a world where globalized neoliberalism is dominant, mostly losing) battle over wages and living conditions. Some smart observers suggest that unions have outlived whatever usefulness they may have once had in terms of making a more equal and more empowered America, and that other strategies are now called for.

For myself, I see a continuation of the same tension that has been, to my mind, front and center throughout this ongoing crisis in global finance capitalism, and all the ways in which most of us--as workers and homeowners and voters and farmers and teachers and citizens--are implicated in it: what kind of compromises with the system should we make? How far should those compromises go? What kind of economic or political tools should we employ in those compromises? Or the present system--a system of large and perhaps systematically polarized and paralyzed governments, of corporate powers which are perhaps constitutionally incapable of considering questions of democracy and community when tabulating their bottom lines, of resource depletion, of credit-and-debt-dependent economies, of globalization and dislocation and consumption on a massive scale--so worthless or so near collapse as to make any attempt to reform or work through or within it pointless? I'm not able to resolve that tension; perhaps none of us can, until the crisis of peak oil, or some other crisis, renders the issue moot. But until then, I know what I believe in: I believe that the capitalist market, for all the good it produces (and it produces a lot), makes inevitable a distribution of power between employers and employed which is unequal--and that inequality, invariably, will work against the long-term flourishing of families and neighborhoods and communities within which the employed, those without independent access to politically-empowering and protecting wealth, dwell. Unions are certainly not a perfect tool for addressing this imbalance of power; they are often a defective tool, in fact. But they remain a tool, and one worth defending. For all the caveats and concerns we may have about the proper way to consider relations between business and government and labor at the present time, I would hope no localist worth his or her salt would blithely agree with those who would wave "larger fiscal realities" to distract us while they take that tool away.

If Capitalism Has Gone Global, Can Socialism Go Local?

I picked up this book at professional conference in Toronto last year, and read it on the plane ride home. It was a quick read, and a striking one: here was the last book by the late G.A. Cohen--who was by all accounts about as learned and witty a Marxist as you're ever likely to find--laying out a clear, concise, and (I thought, anyway) persuasive case for socialism which didn't appeal to Marx in any serious way at all. Since that time, there has been some fine discussions of the book, and Cohen's legacy overall, on the blogs (particularly over at Crooked Timber; see here and here), and deservedly so. In moving away from a materialist and Marxist justification for socialism, and turning instead to the question of what the development of a socialist ethos might involve, Cohen did something important: he implicitly called attention to the communitarian, democratic, anarchist, and localist aspects of the socialist egalitarian argument, aspects which are often forgotten by sympathizers and critics alike.

I'm using the book this year in an upper-level theory class on capitalism, socialism, and localism. A couple of months ago I gave a lecture to the local chapter of the DSA with the above title, using Cohen's book as a centerpiece; I did much the same thing a few weeks later, when I discussed the book with some folks at a local coffee house. Several people have asked me to put the basics of the lecture and discussion down in written form; well, here it is.

*****

G.A. Cohen was born in 1941 in Montreal, the child of immigrants from Eastern Europe, and grew up in an environment characterized most thoroughly by two things: secular Judaism, and orthodox Marxism. Cohen attended communist day camps, learned communist songs, and looked forward to the inevitable revolution the way sincere evangelical children are raised to look forward to the second coming of Christ. As he grew older, and became more aware of and wise regarding the world around him, he codified his beliefs, beginning most centrally with his passionate commitment to equality. He recognized that there were others besides convinced communists--namely, Christians--who also believed in equality, but he could not take their beliefs seriously: partly because he observed that believing all humankind were brothers and sisters and children of God didn't seem to necessarily translate into much actual change in the living conditions of those human beings here on earth, but mostly because he was convinced that concerning oneself with people's beliefs--talking about equality as the product of an ethos, in other words--was a waste of time; after all, Marxist historical determinism made it clear that the collapse of capitalism and a socialist revolution were inevitable.

That conviction of his eventually fell by the wayside. Cohen, by the last couple of decades of his life, no longer accepted Marx's historical materialist account of capitalist development, and no longer assumed that the immiseration of the proletariat and the subsequent revolution that would culminate in communism was inevitable. But he remained fiercely committed to equality--and moreover, professionally found himself engaged in extensive arguments with various liberals and egalitarians over just what kind of equality is possible in the modern world of markets. In the context of this argument, Cohen found himself, sometimes surprising, essentially affirming the Christian line which he had dismissed as a child: that the beliefs and behavior of people along egalitarian lines--the development of an egalitarian ethos, in other words--was essential to the realization of any kind of equality, socialist or otherwise.

In staking out this claim, Cohen was--at least as I read him--taking sides within the split that emerged amongst those socialists who rejected the course which Lenin and others took Marxist thought in at the beginning of the 20th century. While Cohen may have been raised in an environment which supported various Stalinists and other apologists for the Soviet Union, by the time he was a mature scholar his socialist convictions were strongly democratic. This meant, however, he was faced with an historical choice, one which Sheri Berman expressed this way:

One democratic faction believed that Marx may have been wrong about the imminence of capitalism’s collapse, but was basically right in arguing that capitalism could not persist indefinitely. Its internal contradictions and human costs, they felt, were so great that it would ultimately give way to something fundamentally different and better—hence the purpose of the left was to hasten this transition. Another faction rejected the view that capitalism was bound to collapse in the foreseeable future and believed that in the meantime it was both possible and desirable to take advantage of its upsides while addressing its downsides. Rather than working to transcend capitalism, therefore, they favored a strategy built on encouraging its immense productive capacities, reaping the benefits, and deploying them for progressive ends.

Cohen, to the end, was simply unwilling to countenance greater capitalist inequality in the name of "tak[ing] advantage of its upsides." Hence his long and critical engagement with the arguments of John Rawls, which, among other things, posit the justice of an arrangement whereby the most talented and the hardest working among us enjoy the bulk of the fruits of their labors--thereby encouraging them to be ever more productive--but are subject to some level of redistributive taxation...which, because of the large amount of taxes so generated, not to mention the many jobs which those talented, hard-working individuals created, would enable the least well-off to experience real improvement in their lives. Cohen--who, it should be noted, had immense respect for Rawls and his liberal-egalitarian/social-democratic arguments, comparing his philosophical work at one time to both Plato and Hobbes in importance--was only willing to call such an arrangement, perhaps, "sensible"; it could never be considered just. And this reveals another important element to Cohen's thinking about equality: that community--a community which, following the ideals contained in Marx's "On The Jewish Question," is only enabled when "individual man...has recognized and organized his own powers as social powers so that social force is not longer separated from him" (Karl Marx, Selected Writings, p. 21)--is crucial to equality: a state of affairs where things are made more equal by the (perhaps coerced) generosity of the rich towards the poor does little or nothing to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor; it creates no solidarity between them. And, contrary to the social democratic or liberal egalitarian argument, Cohen, at least, was convinced that equality without solidarity, without something felt between people, was barely worth the name "equality" at all.

Which brings us around to Why Not Socialism?, which itself begins, not with Marx, but with a camping trip. Cohen, it is manifestly clear from the text, was probably never much of a camper. Still, his basic observations--about how fishing, cooking, and cleaning up duties are distributed during such a trip, for example--ring true: the activity of a camping trip is profoundly socialist, in the sense that there is little or no bargaining for position, little or no renting out of one's property or talents, that "norms of equality and reciprocity" are taken from granted...and that, indeed, to the extent that any of the above do not hold, it "contradict[s] the spirit of the trip" (p. 5). Cohen then proceeds to codify the "spirit of the trip," which he does through two principles: that of equality, and that of community. The former leads into, and becomes part of, the latter. Cohen rejects absolute communism, and recognizes that individual liberty and the vagaries of democracy will, of course, result in certain inequalities; however, of the sorts of inequality which a socialist arrangement, which he defines as "radical equality of opportunity" (p. 12), admits to, only a few will be tolerable. First, "variety of preference and choice across lifestyle options means that some people will have more goods of a certain sort than others do" (p. 25)--but that is unproblematic, because such individual choice (one camper awakes earlier than another to go enjoy a sunrise, while another gets to sleep in), in following individual preference, conveys no real social power. But then comes the possibility of regrettable or unlucky preferences (the camper who slept in missed a once-in-a-lifetime, worldview-transforming sunrise); such inequalities are problematic because they can accumulate, and in the aggregate can generate ever deeper divisions between individuals (the campers who caught the worldview-transforming sunrise have an increased capacity for work and increased wisdom, meaning they are able to more efficiently bring their own children those remote, difficult to access spots where they also can see world-transforming sunrises, etc.). Obviously, what Cohen is talking about here is how economic and social advantages can be passed down along individual lines, opening up new opportunities for select individuals, bypassing society as a whole entirely. And this is not acceptable--even if not, strictly speaking, "in-egalitarian," since none of it arose from necessarily unequal social designs, but might well have resulted simply from option luck--because it makes impossible socialist community:

"Community" can mean many things, but the requirements of community that is central here is that people care about, and, where necessary and possible, care for, one another, and, too, care that they care about one another. There are two modes of communal caring that I want to discuss here. The first is the mode that curbs some of the inequalities that may result from socialist equality of opportunity. The second mode of communal caring is not strictly required for equality, but it is nevertheless of supreme importance in the socialist conception. We cannot enjoy full community, you and I, if you make, and keep, say, ten times as much money as I do, because my life will then labor under challenges that you will never face, challenges that you could help me cope with, but do not, because you keep your money....So, to return to the camping trip, suppose that we eat pretty meagerly, but you have your special high-grade fish pond, which you got neither by inheritance nor by chicanery nor as a result of the brute (that is, nonoption) luck of your superior exploratory talent, but as a result of an absolutely innocent option luck that no one can impugn from the point of view of justice: you got it through a lottery that we all entered. Then, even so, even though there is no injustice here, your luck cuts you off from our common life, and the ideal of community condemns that, and therefore also condemns any such lottery (pp. 34-35, 37-38).

Cohen's argument thus focuses our attention on the need for communal solidarity, for a common life, as a concomitant to equality. But this brings up some at least two crucial questions, which Cohen, to his credit, forthrightly acknowledges: is such community in fact desirable, and is it in fact feasible? As for desire, Cohen--appealing, to my mind, anyway--falls back on the pure ethos he was instructed in as a child, though he didn't recognize it as such at the time: "I continue to find appealing the sentiment of a left-wing song that I learned in my childhood, which begins as follows: 'If we should consider each other, a neighbor, a friend, or a brother, it could be a wonderful, wonderful world, it could be a wonderful world'" (p. 51). As for feasibility, the responses multiply and become more difficult--because, of course, modern states are not voluntary groups of campers, and thus differ in both nature and telos. Absent Marx's historical materialist justification for the emergence of socialism, what kind of argument or arrangement could be made which would assert the feasibility of socialism on a the scale of the nation-state? Cohen runs through several possibilities, insisting all the while that "the principal problem that faces the socialist ideal is that we do not know how to design the machinery that would make it run...our problem is a problem of design," rather than selfishness (pp. 57-58). He does also allow that the design problem may be insoluble, but that doesn't stop him for trying.

For many people, this seems simply utopian...and a consideration of utopianism, interestingly, is where we should turn to move Cohen's argument beyond the point where he was able to bring it. Socialist movements have been associated, both positively and negatively, with utopian thought ever since the mid-19th-century...and of course, in the pre-Marxian history of socialist thinking, you find it being advocated for religious and "utopian"--that is, explicitly ethos-based--reasons for centuries; socialist practice and different kinds of collectivist and/or intentional communities were, for most of Western history, almost invariably connected. However, around the beginning of that split amongst democratic (non-Leninist) socialist thinkers mentioned earlier, you also saw a strong push by different socialist parties and organizations against any taint of the utopian or the communal. Democratic socialism, in the hands of such early advocates as Sidney Webb, "included a determined lack of sympathy for proposals which sought the 'regeneration of mankind' by means of establishing 'little Utopias'," as David Leopold has argued. He went on:

[Webb] drew an interesting distinction between two strategies for the growth of socialism--one "horizontal," the other "vertical"....The communal strategy is characterized as a "horizontal" one, where by the "whole faith" is adopted by "a partial community" in the hope and expectation that individual communal success will lead to replication, and the eventual incorporation of the wider society. For Webb, the empirical record of intentional communities confirmed that the "horizontal" strategy was doomed to failure. He observed that the majority of communities failed, and, in the case of the rare few that might prosper, there was no subsequent evidence of the promised growth and expansion of socialism throughout society. However, in Webb's view, the communal strategy was not only unsuccessful, it was also undesirable....By turning their backs on "machine industry" in order to engage in "spade husbandry"--the allusion is to Robert Owen's stubborn and longstanding belief in the superiority of spade cultivation over that of the plough--communitarians should be seen as abandoning both the modern world and the majority who live in it....[By contrast,] the Fabians embraced a "vertical" gradualism initially involving "the partial adoption of their faith by the whole community." The resulting evidence of success would lead society as a whole to adopt ever more socialistic institutions....No country, he explained, having "nationalized or municipalized any industry has ever retraced its steps or reversed its action" (Leopold, "Socialism and (the Rejection of) Utopia," Journal of Political Ideologies, October 2007, pp. 224-5).

Of course, the Fabian Society is not the whole history and destiny of democratic socialism--but still, it is worth pondering the fact that Cohen, in beginning his defense of socialism by talking about a camping trip, never thinks to consider that his own approach to considering the feasibility of socialism--especially a socialism whose justice is affirmed through an appeal to ethical considerations of equality and community, rather than a historical, Marxist foundation--might be limited to the same sort of parameters Webb insisted upon. For that matter, the great majority of liberal egalitarians and social democrats are similarly so limited: witness the intra-left discourse which has taken place over the past year over the health care debate, in which slowly but surely the great majority of those who pushed and agitated for single-payer, for a public option, for anything more aggressively socialist, have nonetheless come around, however reluctantly, to supporting the president's plan, because it is better than nothing and because it is a foot in the door. Introduce something socialist, however minimal, to the public at large, and watch the people come recognize its worth and embrace it, is the argument. The evidence from the history of Social Security or Medicare seems to support Webb's "partial faith-whole community" approach, as opposed to the "whole faith-partial community" approach which he dismissed.

Obviously, it's not as though all socialist eggs are to be placed in the same basket; one can pursue, or at least accept as legitimate, both approaches simultaneously, especially given that they will almost certainly operate on different cultural and socio-economic levels at different times. And it is just as obvious that Webb's exhortation of continued, inexorable nationalization is a difficult one to take seriously in this day. So, perhaps, what we have in the end is the sense that the socialist project, to be feasible, cannot simply look at what minimal ways it can effectively extend its principles, as valuable as they are, to the whole community--meaning the whole state, the state being, for at least the time being, the central operating component and primary locus of any and all recognition of (and sometimes, even, organization of) socio-economic power. Despite the undeniable successes of that approach, the socialist project must also look at Webb's derided "whole faith-partial community" approach--the instantiation of equality and community in its fullest in camping trips and devotional communities and small-scale businesses and neighborhood organizations and anywhere else where a belief in a particular ethos can, itself, have real world results. More than a few democratic socialists (and fellow travelers) have recognized this; The Nation recently ran a whole series on "Reimagining Socialism," and one of the consistent themes expressed throughout was that unions, co-ops, farmers markets, and the like are where the real, practical future of socialist ideals lay: that socialism, in other words, must go democratic and ecological and, above all, local. Yes, it must address the issues of unregulated finance and industry and the dominance of corporations and commidification in the way in which citizens pursue their health and preferred lives, and it must insist and pursue as best as possible ways of design which can promote the public ownership and distribution of goods...but it must also go to those arenas of association--camping trips, where all is governed, quite sensibly, by assumptions of reciprocity and equality--where social power is truly not a dividing presence between persons. (Yes, even if that does mean associating occasionally with those bothersome, Robert Owen-type Luddites and farmers.) Because it is there, rather than in the purely economic, transactional, national sphere of the modern state, where the real point of a socialist ethos is most clear.

E.F Schumacher, long ago, said it best, as well or, perhaps, even better than G.A. Cohen did:

There are no ‘final solutions’ to this kind of problem. There is only a living solution achieved day by day on a basis of a clear recognition that both opposites are valid. Ownership, whether public or private, is merely an element of framework. It does not by itself settle the kind of objectives to be pursued within the framework....What is at stake is not economics but culture; not the standard of living but the quality of life. Economics and the standard of living can just as well be looked after by a capitalist system, moderated by a bit of planning and redistributive taxation. But culture and, generally, the quality of life, van now only be debased by such a system. Socialists should insist on using the nationalized industries [or, I would, any kind of "partial faith-whole communtiy" scheme of public regulation or ownership] not simply to out-capitalize the capitalists--an attempt in which they may or may not succeed--but to evolve a more democratic and dignified system of industrial administration, a more humane employment of machinery, and a more intelligent utilization of the fruits of human ingenuity and effort. If they can do that, they have the future in their hands. If they cannot, they have nothing to offer that is worthy of the sweat of free-born men.

Some would argue, it should be noted, that Cohen's egalitarian and communitarian beliefs--his whole ethical approach to socialism--is no more respecting of "free-born men" than the orthodox, revolution-awaiting communism he used to embrace was; Andrew Sabl, years ago, famously attacked Cohen's determination to articulate a "project of social unity" as failing to "appreciate how a real liberal thinks." That kerfluffle was one of the earliest blog debates I ever involved myself in, and I wouldn't make the comments I made then in the same way today, but my basic concern is the same: that Cohen is right to see equality and community as necessarily linked, and he needs to be able to appreciate community as something other than a necessity for justice--something that also emerges, organically, from historically and locally practiced relationships and reciprocation. Cohen's camping trip goes along way towards that appreciation...as well as perhaps proving, if one wants to incorporate Sabl's terms into Cohen's argument, why liberals never go camping. My conservative father, who taught his kids well the borderline-socialist principles of Scouting on many a fondly remembered family camping trip, would be pleased to hear that. I hope Cohen, in his ethical and arguably illiberal way, would be as well.

Education, Equality and Sam's Club Socialists

There's a great deal that could be said about, and argued with, regarding the points made in Ross Douthat's short post on the Republican and Democratic coalitions today, and the long and reflective post Rod Dreher wrote about education yesterday, but I'll just focus as succinctly as I can (ha!) on a small place where they overlap. Here's Ross digesting some data that had been crunched over at the National Review:

[T]he GOP is now a working-class party (with class defined by education and culture more than income, just to be clear; there are plenty of skilled craftsmen who make more money than teachers and journalists and academics), and that it needs to start acting like one if it's going to rebuild its shattered majority.

And here's Rod, thinking through the possibilities of justice in a world where the "romanticism" of universal education and equality are dying away, to be replaced with, presumably, a world dominated by the meritocratic empowerment of the rootless and ambitious:

Personally, I don't see anything wrong with designing an educational system that recognizes plainly that all people are not equally gifted. As I've said before here, in the Netherlands, social attitudes are very egalitarian, but the Dutch see no value in pretending that everybody is equally intelligent, or intelligent in the same ways. They test kids and put them on one of three different tracks, depending on their capabilities. Kids who are not cut out for college-level work are not expected to do college-prep work in high school; rather, they prepare for vocational and trade work. Why is this bad? (N.B., the Dutch welfare-state economy redistributes material rewards in a more egalitarian manner, taking the edge off social differences)....

It is surely better to live in truth than dwell in the therapeutic fiction that all kids are capable of being above average in school, or that everyone should go to college. [Christopher] Lasch would no doubt disagree, but I don't believe that everyone in a given locality should go to the same schools, or sit in the same classrooms, if they aren't capable of doing the work. We need a system of education that's more based on the needs and capabilities of actual people....Let's agree that the idea of sending nuclear physicists out to work in the soybean fields is insane, and, in turn, that keeping a boy who has the potential to be a nuclear physicist down on the farm out of a sense of tradition is also pretty unjust. Let's also agree that an educational system that denies real and substantial differences between human beings is a sham....And finally, let's agree--well, you may not agree, but this is what I think--that the meritocratic system and its assumptions are great destroyers of institutions and customs that we need for human thriving.

How can these positions be reconciled? Through taxes? Quota systems doling out special privileges based on class, race or other criteria? Agreeing to live with a certain amount of injustice and inefficiency for the sake of helping those less genetically gifted save face (and which forces the genetically gifted to realize that their advances depend largely on unearned merit, via the genetic lottery)? Paying higher salaries to men and women who earn their living with their strong backs and nimble fingers? (Didn't unions do that, once upon a time, before we turned on them?) If socialism is not only unjust, but a foolish way to organize one's society and economy, does that imply that pure capitalist meritocracy is the most just, smartest way to organize one's society and economy? And if not, where is the compromise to be struck?

As I said, much that could be--and should be!--argued with here. Rod is, I think, a little too easily swayed by the kind of meritocratic (and libertarian) individualism which dresses itself up with I.Q. testing data or school test scores and presents itself as an old-fashioned conservative "realism" dumping cold water on supposedly irresponsible liberal efforts to "deny" nature or the family--the kind of conservative strategy Charles Murray has specialized in for years--but at least he's smart enough to recognize the underlying philosophy, and be wary of its dangers. Lasch--who had extremely harsh things to say about our therapeutic culture--was not a fan of the ideal of universal public schooling because he subscribed to a dreamy "educational romanticism" which Murray easily mocks; rather, he embraced it because he believed in "equality" as a political--a classically republican, a populist and communitarian--ideal necessary for American democracy to work. We need to be able to learn how to share power, to share sovereignty, within our localities and within this nation, if true self-government is going to succeed, and schooling is an essential part of that. Obviously, this doesn't mean equal in the sense of "equally intelligent, or intelligent in the same ways"; it means equality in much more limited, much more specific and concrete, and therefore (I think, anyway) much more practical and valuable sense. It means recognizing that education is, first and foremost, a kind of socialization, and therefore pertinent to citizenship (there's a reason why Brown vs. Board of Education was arguably the most essential step in the development of civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s). Our problem--ok, ok, one of our many problems--is that education for a great many people in our late-modern, late-capitalist world has become overwhelmingly tied not to citizenship, not to building affection or social trust or even basic vocational capabilities, but to enabling the middle and upper-classes to pass along tickets to the perpetuation of their class, their cultural and educational niche. Which is what brings us around to Ross's (debatable, but still worth considering) point: that today's "conservative" party--whatever that means--is a party that increasingly draws a fair number of its voters from those who either have not, or at least have not fully, taken advantage of this particular meritocratic privilege encoded in our society. Which means that, if "conservatism" (again, however defined) is going to find a political home in America's (ridiculous, but that's an argument for another day) two-party system, then the Republicans need to find some way to reach out to those (obviously, overwhelmingly white) voters who--for reasons of family or religion or genetic failure or meritocratic competition or personal choice--have dissented from or failed to ascend to some of those privileged places society. (Obviously, we're not simply talking about money here; we're talking about the particular slots reserved for the "new class", the "mandarins", the "symbolic analysts", the professionals (and bloggers?) that dominate the culture in our media-saturated world...though given the way families pass along advantages to their children, relative monetary success is pretty much a given here as well.)

So, let's cut to the chase: we have an social and economic environment in America today which is undermining the ideal of public education, one of the great egalitarian social inventions of twentieth century, in part because that invention has often foolishly embraced a notion of "equality" that can be easily derided and attacked, and therefore it has come to be seen by many as an institution that either doesn't work, doesn't actually serve or respect the real talents and real needs of the people who support it with their taxes, or both. What is to be done? In the short run, perhaps dozens of different things, some no doubt more or less effective or economical or plausible than others. In the long run, as I see it, only one thing matters: helping people realize that "conservative" interests--by which I mean, most simply, those interests grounded in the limits and rhythms of community and tradition and family and locality, those interests which point out (whether they realize it or not) that real social justice and equality involves getting over or beyond or past class, rather than the liberal dream of lifting all people up to the same one--are not at all well-served by Murray's "libertarian realism," however nicely tough-minded it may sound. Rather they are served by...well, I suspect by at least some of the sort of things Ross and Riehan Salam have been working out for years, some of the things which Rod says you can see in Amsterdam, and which I've observed about Sweden. Things that many conservatives would denounce as "socialist," though that's what they are--legislation involving child and health-leave policies, health care access, different forms of trade and job protection, empowered unions, family-friendly salaries, and more. These are all things that might prevent economic and cultural differences from hardening into social and political ones, thus making it more likely that better, more respectful, more local, but still essentially egalitarian projects like public schools might someday be treated as more than a passing (or dying) fad by the American people.

The likelihood that the Republican party will start drawing out from the inchoate and disorganized self-identifying conservative population of America a bunch Sam's Club socialists is about as likely as my hopes that the Democratic party will suddenly turn into a home for a bunch of populist Christian democratic "left conservatives," I know. But hey, a man can dream.

Can a Populist Shop at Wal-Mart?

I've been meaning to write a post with this title for a pretty long time. We lived in Arkansas for three years, from 2002 to 2005, and during that time we did probably 80% of our grocery shopping at Wal-Mart. There was a Kroger in town, but we rarely went there, as we couldn't feed ourselves and three kids on our budget at their prices. (Things have improved a little since then.) The city of Jonesboro was surrounded by farms, but they were almost without exception huge cotton, rice, and soybean operations; homegrown vegetables or fruits were hard to come by on the eastern, Mississippi Delta-side of the state. As for locally produced fresh meat, there was little of it. And so, we shopped at Wal-Mart--it had low prices, and it had what we needed. And, of course, they were everywhere: it was Arkansas, after all. (Melissa used to joke that shopping at Wal-Mart was justified because we actually lived in the state where the Sam Walton's corporation is based, and so we were supporting the tax base...though actually Wal-Mart doesn't exactly shower a lot of money around anywhere besides their little corner of the state around Bentonville.)

So anyway, why am I writing this piece now? Because Rod "Crunchy Con" Dreher put together for the Dallas Morning News a package of Wal-Mart editorials a couple of weeks back, and they touched all the bases. First there was Stephen Bainbridge's take, which directs the whole debate over Wal-Mart, wages, market centralization, community impact, and so forth, towards what he thinks is most important: the question over what Wal-Mart's real relationship to the free market is. His conclusion is that "Wal-Mart [is] not...a rugged free-market capitalist [operation], but [is] a leading recipient of corporate welfare." Which isn't exactly a new point, but one that warrants emphasis nonetheless: if you don't like some of the broader consequences of the arrival of a Wal-Mart in your vacinity, then it's good to know that those consequences are mostly made possible by economic development subsidies--subsidies that, one hopes at least, can be debated and even voted down democratically, thus giving communities some collective power to counter the Wal-Mart hegemon.

But Bainbridge's argument reflects his perspective on most things economic: he thinks deviations from the free operation of the market, while sometimes justifiable, are items of concern simply on their own. And that automatically grants a kind of normative authority to the operations of the marketplace that I don't agree with. I see another question here: not how or to what degree Wal-Mart benefits or abuses the marketplace, but how we are to think about what happens in the marketplace in the first place. Obviously, lots of people shop at Wal-Mart; we did, for three years straight. Is the fact that they (and we still today, sometimes) shop there itself an argument that Wal-Mart, whatever its other sins from either a Republican or Democratic take on what a market-based economy ought to look like (with folks like Bainbridge calling it "a creature of big government" and others like Barbara Ehrenreich attacking it for its low wages and union-busting), is providing the people with a genuine good? Or can something be popular and still not, well, populist?

George F. Will, in his contribution, clearly takes the first option. After detailing at length the low prices, economic productivity, and job creation which Wal-Mart's business strategy has made possible, he concludes by claiming that the criticism of Wal-Mart by liberal pundits and politicians is all about elitism:

Liberals think their campaign against Wal-Mart is a way of introducing the subject of class into America's political argument, and they are more correct than they understand. Their campaign is liberalism as condescension. It is a philosophic repugnance toward markets because consumer sovereignty results in the masses making messes. Liberals, aghast, see the choices Americans make with their dollars and their ballots, and they announce--yes, announce--that Americans are sorely in need of more supervision by...liberals. Before they went on their bender of indignation about Wal-Mart (customers per week: 127 million), liberals had drummed McDonald's (customers per week: 175 million) out of civilized society because it is making us fat, or something. So, what next? Which preferences of ordinary Americans will liberals, in their role as national scolds, next disapprove? Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet?

Will used to be capable of writing thoughtful meditations on conservatism and what it means to "conserve" arguably elite values in an atmosphere of liberal freedom (including, you guessed it, consumer freedom); now, he's mostly a hack, though admittedly one who can still write well. But even this isn't a particularly good effort. There's a couple of snarks packed into that conclusion of his that are just begging to be smacked down. Liberals (foolishly?) drive McDonald's "out of civilized society" (I had no idea we'd been so successful...) because it makes Americans fat, "or something"? With Fast Food Nation a bestseller (and a pretty good, if somewhat confused, book too), Supersize Me a hit film, and everyone and their dog (including Republican presidential hopeful Governor Mike Huckabee of Arkansas) realizing that obesity is a major health problem in the U.S. and that fast food is a major contributor to the problem, Will here is relying on an attack that even Rush Limbaugh would consider a Golden Oldie. But even cutting Will that much slack won't do; in actuality, making the above argument also pretty much undermines his conservative bona fides entirely, as Caleb Stegall makes clear:

Arguments from preference for, say, complete sexual freedom, unlimited abortion license and illicit drug use have never been very convincing to conservatives. Instead of asking what conditions most Americans prefer, postwar conservatives have traditionally asked the more important question: What conditions will make common Americans free--free not just to pursue their baser appetites, but to fashion an independent and virtuous life?

Now, I suppose Will could argue that base eating habits aren't an obstacle to developing civic virtue, and maybe he'd even have a point (G.K. Chesterton was fat, after all!). But of course, this is an argument about Wal-Mart, and Will has just defended it on the basis of base popular preference; hardly a conservative perspective. So much for him. But, unfortunately, not so much for his argument. Because if you're a populist and a communitarian--as I am, for the most part--then taking seriously the preferences of a community is not incompatible with my claimed worldview; it is, on the contrary, close to the heart of it. So, the question is (finally) asked: should populists like Wal-Mart? Should they shop there?

I am forever having to deal with people who are convinced that populism is majoritarianism, pure and simple. Any and every demogogue who promises to attack an elite (any elite) and deliver some good (any good) to the majority of the people (which people? it rarely matters) is called a "populist," which of course just drags the label through the mud. Hugo Chavez, Ross Perot, Huey Long: all these power-hungry types get thrown into the same pot, the contents of which then get stirred around and splashed all over those of us trying to articulate a populist political revival. And to a degree we have to take it, because an authentic populism probably always will have a touch (or maybe more than a touch) of "do what the plain people tell you to do" rhetoric about it. Christopher Lasch, who came around to calling himself a populist in the end, argued that one had to accept (not uncritically, but not without some sympathy either) that a kind of "working-class authoritarianism"--as Seymour Martin Lipset defined it--is bound to be associated with any attempt to develop a responsibly and morally majoritarian society. (I tried to argue this point in a long post on Ralph Nader and John Paul II--yes, I put them together--way back here.) But the emphasis there is on a politics that is "reponsibly" and "morally" majoritarian: that is, a politics that is trying to deliver moral reponsibility into the hands of as many people as possible. Obviously, this does not mean always doing whatever the polls say; it's not even necessarily always anti-elitist (assuming those elites emerge out of communities whose residents can genuinely see themselves in their representatives and leaders, and address them as members and equals within the community). Its only real measurement is in the democratic empowerment of the people; their ability as citizens to socially and culturally and economically define and manage their polity. And, not to put too fine a point on it, the presence of an economic behometh like Wal-Mart removes much productive responsibility from peoples' lives. It streamlines and minimizes economic life within a community to such a degree that locals can no longer exercise as much collective control over what kind of life they want to live. Giving the people back greater and greater choices in terms of consumables is admittedly valuable, especially when you're dealing with a situation (like in America today) where the rich get richer and set a pace (a social and cultural as well as economic pace) that the poor and the midle-class can barely keep up with. Wal-Mart wouldn't have taken off in the first place if it hadn't put in place production and delivery chains that could get a lot of previously unavailable consumer goods to poor and isolated Southern and Midwestern towns. Still, the trade off--from local authority to consumer freedom--isn't worth it. Caleb explains:

One of the primary conditions of freedom is a widespread distribution of capital, both economic and cultural. This accounts for conservatives' long-standing skepticism and mistrust of centralized and concentrated enclaves of money and power with their tendencies toward societal management at every level. The oppressive effect of the management elites is essentially the same whether those elites sit in the board room, the judicial chamber, the legislative halls or the Oval Office. [Hence,] the sheer size and power of Wal-Mart ought to make any conservative wince. A private entity the size of the U.S. military with the economic clout of the Federal Reserve is no friend to liberty.

What is this "liberty" Caleb is talking about? Liberals of a certain stripe might consider it "positive liberty," in the sense praised by T.H. Green and attacked by Isaiah Berlin; the freedom to do something, the liberty that comes through empowerment and a communitarian, organic vision of society. Clearly the parallels between Caleb's argument and those theoretical constructs are there, and worth pursuing. But a better parallel might be the "ordered liberty" that was accepted as an ideal by thinkers as different as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (and arguably Hannah Arendt): a citizen achieves freedom by situating him or herself within, and working to maintain, ordered arenas of free action wherein he or she can take productive responsibility for themselves and their situation. Freedom means shaping your own choices, not merely being able to make choices, however many options there may be out there.

Caleb follows up his above comment by writing:

In contemporary America, this presumption toward freedom may no longer be valid, as Mr. Will makes clear. The lower middle classes and nearly everyone else, for that matter, really do love Wal-Mart and are quite happy to sell their American birthright of independence and self-sufficiency for a bowl of processed--but cheap!--soup. This is the challenge facing the new populists of the right: how to advocate and promote the free and sturdy democratic qualities of the common man--qualities that made America great--when the common man has apparently turned his back on those virtues?

My answer to the question in the title of this post arises from my instinctual response to Caleb here: that the "populists on the right" he mentions have the best kind of conservative notions, but perhaps not the best grasp of what it means to conserve something. I'll be the first to agree that civic virtue ain't what it needs to be in America today. But I would also suggest that--even allowing for all I said above about the trade-off from self-sufficient liberty to consumer sovereignty--the sources of order and authority that make virtuous choices possible don't always have to be the same. Simply put, there really are some good reasons we are more mobile and less rooted today, and there really are some good things that have come from it; and not just liberal goods, but truly communitarian ones as well. Not all populists can see this--and, of course, one doesn't want to settle for a facile and Pollyannish reading of our situation today...but nonethless perhaps the left conservative approach might make some headway towards drawing out virtue at the present moment in a way some other populisms cannot.

In a world where comparative advantage and global trade and urbanization and specialization have done their work, a world where the ability to live a wholly self-sufficient life has been rendered often incompatible with the demands of information-based economies, a world where farms are shrinking and unions are on the run and guilds are almost wholly a thing of the past, something like a Wal-Mart is probably necessary if we are not to condemn a good portion of any given population (such as those outside of metropolitan centers or who lack sufficient incomes, or both) to deprivation. So sure, you can shop at Wal-Mart (in truth, it's not like Kroger operates on manifestly different principles either). But our responsibility at the present moment--besides our obvious and primary one to doing what's best for our families and communities--is to figure out ways to limit the Wal-Marts of the world, discipline them and fit them into a new "order" wherein citizens can find themselves to be more than consumers. This might sound like simply an appeal to the sort of liberal egalitarian regulations which Bainbridge's column suggested as legitimate. The populist response to Wal-Mart (and the WTO, and Clear Channel, and...) which I'm imagining will involve some of that, surely. But it'll also have to involve something more, something that will have to involve a rethinking (though not necessarily a complete change) of our estimation of the nation-state and of progressive movements within them.

But now I'm hearkening towards those long promised posts of mine on populism and progressivism again. I'm sure I'll get to them eventually. Hopefully they'll be shorter than this one.