Morison
& Commager crowned this praise of FDR by placing
his full-page portrait by Douglas Chandor in the
front of their second volume. There he stood, erect
and benignly commanding, the perfect model of a
modern world statesman.
"Conservative"
critics during my college years insisted on seeing
political links between New Deal liberals and
ideologues of the socialist and communist left. But I
paid them scant attention. In 1954, the Army-McCarthy
hearings finally showed that Wisconsin Senator Joe
McCarthy’s anti-communist campaign was a wild
exaggeration. With his censure by his peers, people
no longer could facilely link New Deal liberals with
socialists and communists. This simply confirmed for
me that the New Deal was what my boyhood perceptions
had told me it was—a great popular movement that
renewed hope and a sense of justice for ordinary
people like my family and our blue-collar neighbors.
Nevertheless,
by 1956 the powerful consensus in mainstream America
behind our wartime military leader Dwight Eisenhower
overcame my youthful biases. I forsook my college
political choice in 1952, Adlai Stevenson, to vote
for Eisenhower’s reelection. But in doing so I
had no sense of repudiating the New Deal.
America’s total mobilization in World War II had
set a model for national endeavor that persisted in
public imagination after 1945. The popularity of
"General" Eisenhower through the 1950s said
something about America’s willingness to
continue following a strong leader toward post-war
prosperity. My vote for him in a small way symbolized
a broad if naïve belief that the economy, like the
military in WWII, would succeed through wise and
decisive direction from the top. To be sure, the
Republicans said that they stood for laissez-faire
economics and governing principles that ran against
the aggressive use of public authority popularized by
the New Deal. But such was the temper of the times
that these economic and political doctrines did not
seem to threaten the "liberal" shift in the
nation that began in 1933.
The New Deal
could look like a helter-skelter improvisation by a
master politician—and by his Democratic
heirs--bent on winning and keeping power at any cost,
unburdened by a foolish consistency. But I could not
begin to see it that way until decades later, when
another master politician--Ronald Reagan--newly
energized the American political right. Streams of
conservative ideology bubbling up from the springs of
Goldwaterism and elsewhere in years following the
Eisenhower compromise fed the Reagan revolution.
Because Reagan’s familiar celluloid persona
screened out the starkness of his right-wing
politics, I still was slow to understand the full
significance of his revolutionary agenda. I had to
live through the anomalies of the first Bush and the
self-centered pragmatics of Clinton before paying
real attention.
With the
ideological machismo that Bush II unveiled to the
nation after 9-11-01, shaped by the denizens of the
Project for the New American Century and ideological
conservatives at think tanks such as the American
Enterprise Institute, I finally could look back on
the Reagan revolution with greater clarity. It had
repudiated not only the New Deal but also
Eisenhower’s soft non-ideological comfort with
public solutions to societal issues in the aftermath
of WWII.
But that
very belated clarification was only a beginning. It
did not initially allow me to come to grips with Bush
II’s weird winning of the White House. Nor did
it help me to understand his surprisingly focused
ambition to move America still farther away from what
I had imagined it to be through the prism of the New
Deal.
The Bush II
administration began with a protagonist who, to me,
resembled a figure out of comic opera, a near-buffoon
planted in power by a cabal of ideological justices.
After more than two years, empowered by the obsessive
hunger of Americans for security after 9-11, it looks
like a serious challenge to my personal sense of the
nation.
All
political thought may be personal; but politics
transcends the personal no less than the local. It
provides the score for whatever music we, the
American public, are capable of producing together.
The strange new music now rising over amber fields of
grain and alabaster cities demands that I listen with
a new critical awareness to what it signifies.
After a
lifetime, Bush II and his "neoconservative"
masterminds finally have pushed me to wonder more
seriously than ever about American political thinking
and its impact on actions in the real political
world. At issue, I realize, are my long-time personal
leanings, which developed out of youthful political
impressions in the 1930s of lives in jeopardy and in
need of help from a caring nation.
But my
current concern, I hope, goes beyond the merely
personal fancies of political imagination. It
reflects my growing conviction that America under the
Bush II administration has embarked on a mistaken
course that violates not just personal biases but the
deepest interests of the nation. The policies of Bush
II, it seems to me, are jeopardizing the long-term
quality of our national life; and they are
squandering the potential power of the US to nurture
comity and cooperation in a fractious world driven
together by globalization and its diabolical
underside, terrorism. And clearly Bush II is doing
this at this writing with public support whose
breadth I find baffling.
Perhaps if I
reconsider liberalism, conservatism, and its
contemporary "neoconservative" variant, I
will be better able to allow New Deal liberalism its
deserved rest. In the process, I may find a
conceptual tool or two that will allow me to begin
imagining a political future that will contradict or
at least modify the Bush II program; I may begin to
glimpse new political categories fitting for the new
times.
AN AMERICAN
PAST THAT IS NO MORE
Here I might
as well simply stipulate that the New Deal liberalism
that animated my personal view of politics from an
early age is indeed only a romanticized backdrop from
an American past that is no more. It emerged as a
response to the industrial structure of America when
the segments of our modern civilization could
effectively come under superordinate governmental
suasion. That hierarchical and highly visible
structure metamorphosed under the pressure of
information technology, speeded-up systems of
production and exchange, and, finally, the
globalization of finance as well as production,
together with its consequent pressure on our own
culture and those of others around the world. Along
with the metamorphosis of late capitalism and its
attendant culture came an inevitable challenge to the
effectiveness of government as the New Deal had
defined and used it. Mounting that challenge
successfully was Reagan. Supporting it were
ideologically sensitized people who saw in
"conservatism" a corrective to New Dealism
and a positive program for reforming government. They
also saw a need and a way to reinvigorate the
national culture with an individualistic ethos that
appeared to have been lost when "big
government" (as they saw it) eviscerated the
American soul. They found allies for this in a
resurgent evangelical Christian movement unafraid of
direct political involvement.
In an almost
perverse semantic maneuver, New Dealers originally
had taken possession of the classic term
"liberal." Liberal goals in the New Deal
context were, above all, humane goals. They above all
expressed the classic liberal values of equity
(justice free of bias according to natural law) and equality
(the inherent equivalency of human beings
as such). If these were liberal values, then programs
that would advance them would be liberal programs.
The use of government to advance equity and equality
and to impede inequity and inequality thus had to be
the liberal use of government.
From the
liberal position, an unemployed worker looked like a
person being deprived of basic justice, of a fair
chance to live a decent life. It was no accident that
the immigrant families of my neighborhood were
largely New Deal supporters. They saw the New Deal
proffering programs to help them make it
economically; more important, perhaps, they saw it
doing so because of its allegiance to the values of
equity and equality. Justice for the lowly
blue-collar worker translated into the chance to get
ahead as a human being—to be no less valuable
than the big shots. Government programs designed to
bring about such justice drew their support.
But, of
course, New Deal government programs aiming at equity
and equality could appear to be at odds with a
different "liberal" principle, derived from
Adam Smith, 19th century
"liberal" theorists, notably John Stuart
Mill, and their 20th century
followers. That principle asserted the power of
unrestrained markets to assure freedom for
individuals to get ahead with their God-given talents
and without orders from government to stay in a
secure but limited groove. As
"conservatives" moved center stage in the
larger transition from industrial to postmodern
society, they asserted ever more aggressively this
old-time "liberal" view that big government
programs did not enhance the human values of equity
and equality; rather, they ran counter to those
values by tying people to a bureaucratic culture that
gave them no incentive to achieve. It put them on the
road to serfdom, as Friedrich Hayek had warned.
"Conservatives,"
in the last thirty years or so more commonly tagged
"neoconservatives," complemented this old
"liberal" anti-government rhetoric with an
increasingly strident celebration of private-sector
competition. Privatization came to be their cure-all
for the governmental excesses and failures that
emerged from the New Deal era, even in monopolistic
domains such as public utilities. The Bush II goal of
privatizing Social Security—that hallowed
centerpiece and survivor of the New Deal--best
symbolized the extent to which neoconservatives want
to go to bury New Deal liberalism.
There are
semantic ironies in all this. New Deal liberals were
not liberals in the way the original nineteenth
century liberals were liberal. Yes, they espoused the
values of equity and equality, and they did not
repudiate capitalism; but their willingness to
control people and social processes through
government somewhat gainsaid what they professed.
The new
Reagan conservatives were not conservatives but
liberals of the nineteenth-century school. They
supported individual freedom through a free-market
economy and the withdrawal wherever possible of
government from direct support of human need. They
put their trust in the operation of impersonal forces
that in the long run would yield the best possible
benefit for the maximum number of persons. The
suffering that would inevitably result for some
persons would be the price of freedom for the larger
society; it would be a lesser price in the aggregate
than the "serfdom" fostered by New Deal
controls over society through government.
The new
conservatives, at the same time, were less than
conservative in a Burkean sense. That is, they lacked
a cautious attitude toward change, born of respect
for the way people in the past coped with similar
situations. From the days of Goldwater in the 1960s,
they had been developing a clear programmatic vision
of free markets and smaller government. When they
combined this vision with the sense of certainty
derived from evangelical belief, they had little
cause for restraint. They were highly motivated to
seize political power as forthrightly as possible and
force change through the legislature as rapidly as
possible. Witness Bush II.
Semantic
difficulties surrounding "liberal,"
"conservative," and
"neoconservative" usages suggest the
complex genealogy of modern and now postmodern
political experience in the West. That complex
genealogy casts my old personal political prejudices
into sharp profile and perhaps charitably confers on
them a quaint curiosity. Vastly more important, it
urges me not to worry too much about overused terms.
The old left ("liberal") and old right
("conservative") that defined politics in
the high industrial moment of modernism when I was
young, whatever they meant, yield inadequate light
for describing the political dynamics of this moment
that lies beyond modernism (however you name it).
Urged on by
my mounting worries over the long-term ill effects of
Bush II on the quality of American life in the age of
terrorism, I am trying to look again at my old
political understandings, which have depended so much
on merely personal experience over the last half
century. As I read thinkers old and new, I am looking
for fresh formulations that might begin to answer the
harsh voices of the party now in power. I am looking
for political concepts that could re-introduce the
goals of equity and equality without tying them to
industrial-age programs that would poorly fit in the
postmodern (postindustrial) setting. This is less a
disciplined study than it is a resolve to read and
reflect more purposefully and, it may be,
objectively.
In my senior
years, perhaps I am finally pulling myself out of the
personal soup of politics. The conditions that shaped
my political sensibility, after all, have
metamorphosed. I have little personal stake in the
current conditions, out of which a future politics,
for better or worse, will grow after I am gone.
Perhaps the shape of tomorrow's operable ideology in
America will make itself evident to me objectively if
I work hard enough to see it.
LIBERALISM
IN THE STYLE OF GENERATION X
Meanwhile,
however, current reading reinforces my impression
that people still forge their political positions
from experiences in their formative years. Young
Jedediah Purdy, a voice of Generation X, offers a
useful example.
Some might
argue that Baby Boomers led America into the
political smog by their youthful excesses in the
1960s. They made it hard, some might say, to see the
political future with clarity and purpose; with their
politics of feeling, they set the stage for
America’s disillusionment with the idea of a
public interest. If Purdy’s parents are at all
representative, however, their Boomer values,
transferred to and modulated by their son, call for
affirmation and hope for the future.
The Purdys
left the East Coast urban scene in the 1970s to raise
Jedediah in rural West Virginia. They home-schooled
him through his early education and then sent him to
the public high school and on to Harvard. On their
farm, they apparently pursued self-reliance and
taught him and his sister to connect to the
"common things" of human existence and to
learn from doing as well as from reading. Purdy
learned that he could relate seriously to his parents
and other adults; he failed to learn that Americans
typically attain adulthood by opposing what their
parents represent. He learned the importance of trust
among people of any age. He learned that trust
depends on the responsible use of words. He learned
that, if we care about the common things of
life—as opposed to verbal abstractions about
life—then, as he said in his first book, For
Common Things, "We must in honesty
hazard some hope in their defense." (xxi)
With such an
upbringing courtesy of his Boomer parents, Purdy
could not adopt the ironic attitude that prevailed
both in sophisticated intellectual circles and in the
mass media (represented for him by Seinfeld).
The avoidance of responsible commitment to a
definable reality was too much for him to buy.
So, he threw
his little book up against the postmodernist temper.
It opposed the devaluation of hard reality, the
"problematization" of the language that
tried to deal with reality, and the impulse to put
authentic experience under a wet blanket of ironic
ambiguity. He challenged acquiescence to an
ever-proliferating technology that promised to remake
humanity—at least its surface--with every
amazing breakthrough. He pleaded for a renewed sense
of public responsibility toward "the
commons." The commons he defined as three
interrelated ecologies: "interpersonal, moral
ecology," "a broad social ecology"
(that is, politics and civic life), and "the
natural world." (185-189) The glue holding these
ecologies together for him was love for what we value
in our common experience. "Slow, unceasing
work" for the common things would turn
irony—the postmodernist stance—on its head.
(207) Life would be real again and earnest.
Much in
Purdy’s thinking would seem to have prepared him
to adopt the fundamentalist evangelicalism that
predominates among American "conservatives"
by the millions who found their leader in George W.
Bush. (Some of them, according to Nicholas Kristof in
the New York Times, believe that
God’s hand itself led the Supreme Court to
resolve the 2000 election in favor of Bush.) Purdy
resembles Christian fundamentalists in opposing the
ironic skepticism and superficiality that many
Americans adopt as they cope with the uncertainties
of postmodern experience. But Purdy's upbringing and
his Ivy League experience prepared him instead to
express a brand of "liberalism" that would
work in a secularized world.
The
timely relevance of Purdy’s youthful rebellion
against postmodernist irony did not save him from
biting criticism. Caleb Crain’s 1999 review of For
Common Things in Salon.com
found his "fresh-faced" philosophical
posturing "way, way out" of its depth. His
argument was "treacly and disorganized"; he
confused Thoreau with Emerson. Crain saw Purdy’s
earnestness as a "sly disingenuous manipulative
pseudo-sincerity." Purdy’s peachy-creamy
persona also came in for guffaws in a satire by Todd
Pruzan, Jedediah
in Love.
The narrator and Jedediah are cruising "The
Strip" in Las Vegas with a couple of bimbos.
Jedediah’s squeaky clean values play out at the
craps table, where he always wins—virtue
rewarded.
Fair enough.
But after acknowledging his beginner’s
shortcomings and pretensions, I think that Purdy
remains an informative touchstone for thinking about
the political needs of our times. He represents a new
generation rising to the political challenge of an
ever-evolving nation in its own way, based on its own
moment of American experience.
In his
second book, Being America,
Purdy offered up a special blend of Gen-X liberalism.
It seemed to avoid the classic left-right oppositions
that made such a mish-mash of the labels
"liberal" and "conservative" that
I described above. In postmodern fashion, he reached
into the archeological remains of both doctrines and
made a political pastiche that addressed the present
and sought to equip the future. He made no pretense
of finding coherence or consistency with the American
historical categories that bog down a mind such as
mine formed in the New Deal 1930s.
The essence
of Purdy liberalism emerging from Being
America is "principled
skepticism," a term he draws from Judge Learned
Hand. (70) Purdy liberals are clear about their core
values: "individual dignity, political equality,
and abhorrence of cruelty." (67) But those very
values make them unwilling to judge or act too
quickly in a given situation. If you act too quickly
and confidently on your moral clarity, you risk
"moral arrogance, which courts violence."
(67) (Critics of the Bush II administration would nod
knowingly at that.) This careful concern makes Purdy
liberals wary of authority; they want it hedged in by
laws and rules protecting opinion, property, and
person. (67)
Temperamentally,
Purdy liberals don’t want to impose their
customs and beliefs on other people. (68) They are
able to forget past wrongs in a spirit of toleration
and thus avoid extremes of resentment and revenge.
(68-9) They want to exercise independent judgment;
they resist easy reliance on the judgment of
established authority. (69) They have a lively sense
of justice that insists on fairness for people of any
stripe; they want wrongdoers to redress the harm they
do. (69-70)
Purdy
liberals acknowledge that their core values and their
temperament create political contradictions when put
into practice. They are not hung up on foolish
consistency. They believe that people seeking a
political program "of flawless consistency"
do more harm than those, like themselves, who can
tolerate dissatisfaction with the imperfect state of
things. (70-71) Even Adam Smith, the saint of
laissez-faire capitalism, in Purdy's reading, was
cautious about his own theory of efficient markets.
Fearing its disruptive effect on traditional
communities, he advanced it as a practical strategy
for his times but not as a theoretical law for all
times. (72)
Purdy
liberalism, as we find it in Being America,
remains consistent with the Gen-X
perspective of a rural West Virginia boyhood
described in For Common Things.
In both books, Purdy resisted the tendency to reduce
worldly experience to abstractions in the form of
symbolic simulations or oversimplified ideological
formulas. Standing against Enlightenment claims to
universal civilization, he planted his feet firmly in
our postmodern moment at the dawn of the new
millennium. But that did not lead him to quietism or
desperate passivity. He insisted that politics could
deal with a real world, one wound at a time. His is a
concrete world, lacking in the symmetries, harmonies,
and ultimate betrayals of universalistic theory.
Purdy
liberalism does not pretend to liberate us from our
capacity for violence and destruction. Instead, it
insists that we "live in history,"
accepting our condition and doing what we can
politically to "prevent the worst things that
people do to one another." (301-302)
I can hear
the hawks of Fox News and The
Weekly Standard, on reading such a
description of liberalism, chortling,
"See—we told you so." Put the fate of
the nation in such hands, they would say, and the US
will sink into wimphood. Our leaders will wring their
hands and wonder how to act. They'll worry about
hurting others’ feelings. They'll cave in to
terrorists' demands. With bleeding hearts, they'll
run up federal spending on do-good domestic programs
that will harm the national economy.
But in
condemning Purdy liberalism, neoconservatives would
also be condemning a strain of classic conservatism
usually associated with Edmund Burke. Be cautious of
grandly inclusive (revolutionary) solutions; trust
what our predecessors learned about right and wrong
from their specific experiences and passed on to us.
Protect people against the excesses of political
passion by cautiously respecting the existing legal
order, however imperfect it may be.
Alas, the
semantic game that confuses "liberal" and
"conservative" that I tried to circumvent
pulls me in again. To engage it, I turn to another
person whose political thinking was strongly colored
by his personal experience.
REVISITING
AN OLD-TIME LIBERAL
Friedrich A.
Hayek (1899-1992) in the 1940s and 1950s raised a
loud objection to the political tide of the times.
That tide was pulling governments inexorably toward
state-controlled planning and away from the free
market processes that had flourished in the
nineteenth century, before World War I. Hayek
believed that the movement toward collectivization
characterized not just German National Socialism,
Soviet communism, Italian fascism, and Japanese
imperialism; it also characterized the democratic
countries of Western Europe that adopted socialist
programs and planning agendas such as those advanced
by Keynes. And to a degree it was true of New Deal
America.
Hayek argued
in The Road to Serfdom that
individual freedom--the central value of
modernity—inevitably declined when a political
system asserted the supremacy of a single purpose
"to which the whole society must be entirely and
permanently subordinated." (206) Economic
planning could not help but impose such a single
purpose. It put a nation on a slippery slope that led
ultimately to the destruction of individual freedom.
Nations everywhere in the developed world, he
observed, were somewhere on the road to
totalitarianism, even Western democracies. That
doomed their citizens to serfdom sooner or later in
service to an omnipotent state.
Hayek's
personal journey gave passion to his argument. He had
been reared as a boy in pre-World War I Vienna,
before the war destroyed the economic conditions that
Europe had developed in the enterprising spirit of
the nineteenth century. His career as a scholar
unfolded in the turbulent political and economic
climate of the 1920s, before Hitler seized power and
Hayek's native Austria disappeared. Hayek left Vienna
for London a year or so before the Nazis took over in
Germany. He became a British citizen in 1938.
Because of
his personal ties to Austria and Germany, Hayek was
especially sensitive to the disastrous effect of the
totalitarian regime of the Nazis on the freedom of
the individual. In The Road to Serfdom,
he advanced Nazism as the paradigm of generic
totalitarianism everywhere. When he saw the movement
toward nationalization taking place in his adopted
country, England, toward the end of World War II, he
feared that here too individuals would ultimately
sacrifice their freedom on the altar of socialist
planning. He saw the "arbitrary administrative
coercion" of the socialist system destroying the
rule of law that protected the individual's freedom.
(xviii) Hayek was charitable toward the social
democrats of England. They would not intentionally
lead their countrymen into serfdom. In spite of
themselves, however, their allegiance to centralized
economic planning, he believed, would lead them
inexorably to destroy the freedom of individuals to
choose their course in life. Over time the very
character of the people would change; they would
acquiesce in the non-competitive collectivist system
and lose their individual initiative. They would
cease to value individual liberty. (xiv)
Hayek wrote The
Road to Serfdom in 1944 because he wanted
the English to avoid the disastrous path that Germans
and Austrians earlier had taken. By the time he
republished the book in America in 1956, Hayek could
look back and observe that "hot socialism"
in Europe had peaked by 1948 (though he claimed small
credit for this development [viii]). But the post-war
Welfare State had risen to replace outright
socialism; and, to his mind, it posed no less a
long-term threat to individual freedom, both in
Europe and in the United States. (ix) It was that
concern that motivated him to republish The
Road to Serfdom in the US. He had moved
from England to the US in 1950 for a professorial
position at the University of Chicago, where he
stayed until 1962. (Encyclopedia Britannica)
Hayek
observed that the prevailing political climate in the
US at that time was what Americans called liberal. In
his 1948 book of essays on literature and society, The
Liberal Imagination, Lionel Trilling,
one of the bright stars among the post-war New York
intellectuals, had written of it this way:
In
the United States at this time liberalism is not
only the dominant but even the sole intellectual
tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays
there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in
general circulation….[T]he conservative
impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with
some isolated ecclesiastical exceptions, express
themselves in ideas but only in action or in
irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble
ideas. (vii)
I do not
know whether Trilling knew of or cared about
Hayek’s writings on individual freedom and
collectivism. Working within the prevailing liberal
intellectual climate in post-war New York, Trilling
criticized its tendency toward rational organization,
selection, and abstraction, at the expense of emotion
and the imagination. (xi) His mission was to
reconcile these two opposing forces within liberalism
by reasserting the importance of imaginative
"complexity and difficulty" and qualifying
liberalism's impulse toward the
"simplicity" of rational organization.
Hayek, if he knew of or cared about Trilling’s
work, might have sensed its compatibility with his
own. The economic planning that Hayek opposed clearly
exemplified the bureaucratic tendency that Trilling
saw and resisted in the liberalism of his day.
Indeed,
Hayek would have rejected any suggestion that his
ideas were "conservative" ideas. He would
have wrestled with Trilling for ownership of the idea
of "liberalism." In his foreword to the
1956 American edition of The Road to
Serfdom, Hayek squared off against the
highjacking of the term "liberal" by the
American left. It is worth quoting the passage in
full, because what he said half a century ago helps
to clear the semantic air even today:
I use
throughout the term "liberal" in the
original, nineteenth-century sense in which it is
still current in Britain. In current American
usage it often means very nearly the opposite of
this. It has been part of the camouflage of
leftish movements in this country, helped by the
muddleheadedness of many who really believe in
liberty, that "liberal" has come to
mean the advocacy of almost every kind of
government control. I am still puzzled why those
in the United States who truly believe in liberty
should have allowed the left to appropriate this
almost indispensable term but should even have
assisted by beginning to use it themselves as a
term of opprobrium. This seems to be particularly
regrettable because of the consequent tendency of
many true liberals to describe themselves as
conservatives. (xi)
Hayek
elaborated on this theme in a postscript to his 1960
book, The Constitution of Liberty. He
titled it, "Why I am not a conservative."
(397-411) What he says about conservatives and
classic nineteenth-century liberals like himself
helps us to understand that today’s
neoconservatives espouse a mixture of political
notions out of the past. It helps us also to
understand why today’s self-proclaimed liberals,
such as young Purdy, might proceed with greater
clarity if they traced the genealogy of their
politics with greater care.
Hayek was
not a conservative, as he understood the term,
because conservatives lacked political principles or
programs. They merely stood against political and
social change. As change inevitably occurred, their
only recourse was to yield as grudgingly as possible
to the direction of events being determined by
others. They were unable to present an opposing
argument. In the 1950s and 1960s, that meant that
conservatives were yielding slowly to the inexorable
movement toward the collectivization that he saw as
the nemesis of individual liberty. His
characterization of conservatism might have come from
the pen of Lionel Trilling:
Conservatism
fears new ideas because it has no distinctive
principles of its own to oppose to them; and, by
its distrust of theory and its lack of
imagination concerning anything except that which
experience has already proved, it deprives itself
of the weapons needed in the struggle of ideas.
(404)
Liberals, by
contrast, believed in "the long-range power of
ideas." They accepted the idea of progress and
remained open to new knowledge and new solutions.
(404)
In Hayek's
view, conservatives feared that social forces would
get out of control. They combined this fear with an
inordinate "fondness for authority" and
thoughtless ignorance of economic forces, which, of
course, he believed were benign. (400) Indeed, he
believed that conservatives distrusted all abstract
theories and general principles such as those found
in economics. (401) Hence, they fell back on a trust
in authority simply because it existed. That
predisposed them to accept "coercion or
arbitrary power so long as it is used for…the
right purposes." (401) They hoped for wise and
good rulers who came from their own ranks and thought
like themselves. They resisted democracy because they
feared that it would install the wrong leaders.
Hayek
connected this critique of the intellectual aridity
of conservatives to his condemnation of their
"hostility to internationalism" and
"proneness to a strident nationalism."
(405) They leaned without much thought toward a sense
of national superiority and outspoken imperialism.
(406)
Having
enumerated the shortcomings of conservatives, Hayek
turned to a consideration of liberals. Hayek liberals
did not expect that politics and society could be
totally ordered on rational grounds. They respected
the limits of understanding; they would not impose
their beliefs on others. (407) Hayek liberals in this
respect resembled Purdy liberals.
Because of
its uses and misuses, Hayek said that the term
"liberal" was now unsatisfactory as a label
for the classic idea with which he associated
himself. In the US especially, its adoption by the
New Deal made an old Continental liberal like himself
quite uncomfortable. He toyed with the idea of
reviving the "Old Whig" label to describe
his political position, the essence of which was
opposition to "all arbitrary power." (410)
With its roots in the English revolution of 1688 and
its flower in the ensuing century of political
enlightenment, it seemed to him like the right name
for a movement in support of liberty, which opposed
"overrationalistic, nationalistic, and
socialistic influences." (409) But he
acknowledged that the term "Whiggism" would
have a hard time flying in the contemporary realm of
practical politics. (409)
Hayek
concluded his essay with the belief that labels would
not matter in the US so much anyway; here,
conservatives supporting the status quo were
supporting a status quo that already was liberal (or
Whiggish) in the classic sense. The foundations of
the Republic were in themselves liberal/Whiggish.
Hayek worried more about Europe, where conservatives
"had already accepted a large part of the
collectivist creed." (410) Hayek anticipated by
twenty years the Thatcher revolution in England and
the Reagan revolution in the US when he wrote in 1960
of the need for aggressive change in the increasingly
collectivist structure of the nations:
In a
world where the chief need is once more, as it
was at the beginning of the nineteenth century,
to free the process of spontaneous growth from
the obstacles and encumbrances that human folly
has erected, [the political philosopher’s]
hopes must rest on persuading and gaining the
support of those who by disposition are
"progressives," those who/…are at
least willing to examine critically the existing
and to change it wherever necessary. (410-411)
BUSH II IS
OUT OF STEP WITH HAYEK
Political
labels are no less important to our discourse today
than they were in Hayek’s day. More important,
however, is the substantive difference between the
politics of the Bush II administration and its
opponents. I am ending this essay with some thoughts
about that difference in the light of what Purdy and
Hayek have said. But to skirt around the semantic fog
surrounding "conservative" and
"liberal" labels, I am going to refer to
"neoconservatives" and
"anti-neoconservatives." (One might argue
that anti-neoconservatives should mount a campaign to
repossess the term "liberal" by touting
their traditional virtues and by showing that
neoconservatives are anything but conservative. But
that's an argument for another time and place.)
Neoconservatism
narrowly defined, according to one source, developed
when Old Leftists of the 1950s (e.g., Irving Kristol,
father of Weekly Standard editor
William Kristol; Irving Howe; Daniel Bell, Norman
Podhoretz) became disillusioned with the policies of
the Soviet Union. They opposed the anti-Vietnam
politics of the New Left and became advocates of a
tough US position against international communism.
They supported the military build-up under Ronald
Reagan. Jeane Kirkpatrick, Richard Perle, and the
like came to advocate a preemptive, unilateralist
diplomatic stance backed by a superior military
force.
Their
emphasis on international politics seems to
differentiate the early neoconservatives somewhat
from conservatives interested mainly in a
traditionalist social agenda and laissez-faire
economic policies. But that original international
priority of neoconservatives has been cobbled
together with social and economic policy positions to
become the Bush II program. See
one historical account
of the neoconservative movement out of the Old Left.
Whatever the
details of its origins and development in American
usage, "neoconservatism" as a label
helpfully differentiates the current right from the
conservatism of Eisenhower and the fearful,
unprincipled conservatism described by Hayek.
My greatest
concern about neoconservatives in the Bush II
administration is their unbridled aggressiveness in
pushing through an ideologically narrow and rigid
program, both domestically and internationally. In
this they decidedly lack the passivity of
conservatives described by Hayek. They may look like
Hayek liberals in their belief that a competitive
free market system will confer the most benefit on
our society. Like Hayek, they resist the intrusion of
governmental direction of social and economic
programs. They assert that these policy positions
grow from their love of individual liberty, and in
this they appear to be in accord with Hayek.
As we watch
Bush II policies play out, however, we see an
appalling indifference to the social, environmental,
and economic consequences of their aggressive and
single-minded approach. As I write, a support program
for the mentally ill in Montgomery County is closing
for lack of funds. The EPA has just authorized the
emission of industrial wastes that will worsen the
air. These are just two examples readily at hand to
illustrate the decline of quality in America’s
public life in scores of ways under Bush II. We can
expect that the only response to mounting concerns
such as these from Bush II will be rhetorical and
political, not substantive. We have seen how Bush II
spins the truth about programs into Orwellian knots,
and this doubtless will continue. As states reel in
fiscal crisis and federal agencies loosen controls,
Bush II appears to believe that the declining general
welfare somehow is not its fault or its problem.
In this it
differs even from Hayek, one of the oracles of its
ideology. His view of minimum government in The
Road to Serfdom differed in important
details from Bush II’s purist abhorrence of
government (except its goal of an an ever-expanding
military) and celebration of privatization in any
field. While his book was a polemic against economic
planning by central governments, Hayek conceded that
planning of a kind was necessary. States, he
conceded, had to act outside the market system to
provide limited security to citizens. Hayek believed
that "some minimum of food, shelter, and
clothing, sufficient to preserve health and the
capacity to work, can be assured to everybody"
in a competitive system. (120) He believed that there
might be inevitable monopolies in "railways,
road and air transport, or the supply of gas and
electricity." (197) He approved of the American
practice of allowing such monopolies to remain
privately owned but subject to "strong state
control." (198)
Moreover,
Hayek was not ideologically averse to laws
controlling the methods of production, as long as
they did not impose price controls or apply unevenly
(37):
To
prohibit the use of certain poisonous substances
or to require special precautions in their use,
to limit working hours or to require certain
sanitary arrangements, is fully compatible with
the preservation of competition. (37)
Hayek even
allowed for "an extensive system of social
services—so long as the organization of these
services is not designed in such a way as to make
competition ineffective over wide fields." (37)
LAISSEZ-FAIRE
VS. EQUITY & EQUALITY
A look into
Hayek reveals that the present-day neoconservative
and liberal programs both emerge from lengthy and
complicated lines of development within the broader
history of Western modernity. Both those lines, it
turns out, lead back to a common ground in the 17th
and 18th centuries in
England. The English located in unimpeded economic
enterprise the source of the individual freedom that
took center stage in their vision of modernity. And,
as an essential condition for freedom, they elevated
the rule of law—the necessary condition for the
classic values of equity and equality—to
paramount status. Classical liberalism combined these
two principles, laissez-faire in economic activity
and equity and equality in society, into a grand
vision for human progress.
One way to
describe the difference between neoconservativism and
its opposing ideology is to say that neoconservatism
emphasizes the principle of laissez-faire, while the
opposing ideology emphasizes the principle of equity
and equality in society. This difference in emphasis
leads to a substantial difference in programs.
Neoconservatives value operational rules in economics
(and in other social activities as well) that will
"automatically" produce the best possible
social good for the most people. This is a
mechanistic view of social process; it allows
neoconservatives to be indifferent to the specific
outcomes of endeavor under the rules. Protect the
rules and whatever follows will be the best we can
do.
Their
opponents give higher value to the social quality as
such that results from human endeavor; they favor
operational rules that will directly advance the
quality of the society in particular ways, even if
they have to modify the "automatic" rules
of free-market competition. Equity and equality in
the culture to them are more important than
laissez-faire.
The
principle of laissez-faire in economics and the
principle of equity and equality in society are not
mutually exclusive in the Western political tradition
that we trace back to early modern England. One
without the other is only half a political loaf. The
difference between the parties historically has been
one of emphasis, not of doctrinaire exclusion of one
principle and single-minded worship of the other.
Today,
however, neoconservatives differ from their
"liberal" (in the Hayek sense) forebears in
the disproportionate emphasis they give to the
"automatic" rules of free-market
competition and their relative indifference to the
principle of equity and equality in society. In their
exercise of government in the Bush II administration,
they are misreading and misapplying the political
tradition of which they claim to be custodians.
Instead of a broad "liberal" (in the Hayek
sense) program, they have a narrowly ideological
agenda that makes them look excessively
mean-spirited.
For one
thing, it justifies in their minds their massive tax
cuts that will hobble the public welfare for the
foreseeable future and favor the already favored. It
allows them to sweep the principle of equity and
equality into the corner; there, they offer only a
voluntary "compassionate conservative"
program of social aid that has turned out to be a
marginalized charade. It comforts them as they
eagerly restrict civil liberties, ostensibly to
combat terrorists, and as they take extraordinary
measures to manipulate public opinion through the
media. It moves them to reduce federal government in
every possible way and push government toward the
states—to decentralize. This shift of governance
is having devastating effects on state programs and
budgets, but the Bush II administration appears to
feel little responsibility for that. At every
level—federal, state, and local—Bush people
devalue government action wherever they see an
opening for alternative private action.
Neoconservatives
say they want to prevent government from interfering
with the freedom of individuals. Yet, paradoxically,
their traditionalist social agenda, largely
reflecting resurgent evangelical Christian
convictions, leads them to seek legislation and
judicial decisions that would decrease rather than
expand individual freedom. This is one manifestation
of incoherence in neoconservative policies; I point
to another and more sweeping one below.
Current
neoconservatives differ from their
"liberal" (in the Hayek sense) forebears in
another way when they turn to international affairs.
They are pursuing a unilateral, interventionist role
in the world, enabled by a powerful military machine
and legitimated by the need to protect the US against
post-9-11 terrorism. In this, their roots in the
original neoconservative movement of Old Leftists
clearly show. The swing of our "big stick"
is winning the US an "imperialist" image
worldwide and substantially changing our national
posture toward the international community. Indeed,
it is making it questionable whether we even
acknowledge that there is such a thing as an
international community.
Hayek
undoubtedly would disapprove of Bush II's
antagonistic behavior on the international stage,
even if he could grant that the US has to show that
it does not take 9-11, or the threat of another,
lying down. Hayek found that socialist planners,
rather than laissez-faire capitalists, were most
likely to have "nationalist and imperialist
propensities." (Serfdom,
143) For Hayek, this propensity grew out of an
ethical flaw in the collectivist nations of the 1930s
and 1940s. They were willing to glorify their own
power at the expense of "the rights of small
nations." (Serfdom, 144) He
opposed an international economic plan that would
mandate national priorities and products. (Serfdom,
231-232) But he believed that in a post-World War II
international system, a new minimalist political
authority should be set up to prevent any one nation
from trying to limit the free economic activity of
all nations. He would not have had an easy time, I
assume, agreeing with the US decision to change the
regime in Iraq militarily and to decide for Iraq how
its oil resources should be disposed.
With its
aggressive international project for "the new
American century," Bush II is compelled to
centralize and expand military authority in
Washington. Its initiatives against terrorists
at home, flowing from Washington agencies under the
new euphemistically named Patriot Act, intensify that
centripetal pull toward the center.
That pull
runs counter to the push in Bush II's conduct of
domestic affairs. Bush II's domestic agenda
generates a centrifugal force that pushes power away
from the Washington center and disperses it outward
to the states. As a result of this pull-push
contradiction, Bush II is creating growing
governmental incoherence.
AN
ANTI-NEOCONSERVATIVE ALTERNATIVE
This
incoherence ought to pose a large target for
anti-neoconservatives in the 2004 presidential race.
But of course anti-neoconservatives cannot hope to
defeat Bush II on a merely negative argument. They
must offer an attractive and convincing alternative
vision of government. They ought to be able to pin
such a vision to the founding principles of
liberalism traced above, though they might avoid
using the "liberal" label, misused and
misunderstood as it is. They ought to reaffirm the
central tenet of our political tradition—the
freedom of all individuals, not just a privileged
few. They ought to reaffirm that a robust competitive
free-market system is an essential guarantor of such
freedom. But they ought to reassert the importance of
that necessary and complementary companion principle
of classic liberalism, equity and equality in
society. That ought to lead them to rescind major
portions of the discriminatory tax cuts that Bush II
pushed through under the pretext of stimulating the
economy.
Rescinding
the Bush II tax policies would have two restorative
effects. First, it would reduce the massive national
debt projected for the future. That would help
restore confidence in the long-term stability of
domestic and international markets; that should help
the economy to move out of its long slump. Second, it
would enable an anti-neoconservative administration
to put issues of equity and equality back on the
legislative table. Bush II has resisted any
legislation that would expend funds for such purposes
(on grounds that the deficit that it created leaves
no funds available for such legislation).
By
reasserting the importance of equity and equality in
society, anti-neoconservatives also would be able to
argue against the ambitious restrictions of civil
liberties undertaken by Bush II, led by Attorney
General John Ashcroft. They would be able to argue
against the imposition of specific regulations on
social behavior, such as those restricting abortion
and those allowing religious expression in government
venues. They would be able to reintroduce regulations
over environmentally hazardous materials and
practices—without destroying the even-handed
competition required by classic liberalism.
Anti-neoconservatives
in the international field could appeal to the common
foundation of Western political liberalism for an
immediate change of attitude and program. As Hayek
argued, some sort of rule of law ought to be sought
to prevent nations from seeking to "plan"
their way to global prosperity at the expense of
others. Bush II's haughty stance toward the United
Nations and toward major members runs counter to such
a vision, with or without the additional stress
created by post-9-11 terrorist threats. Bush II made
the decision to change the regime in Iraq because it
believed that an American-style democratic system
could be fashioned affordably for the post-Saddam
nation. The hubris of that simplistic belief blinded
the Bush people to the complexity and legitimacy to
be found in another culture. Their painful discovery
of their blindness is going forward at this writing
as the religious and ethnic tensions of Iraq heat up
and put American occupying forces in serious
harm’s way every day.
Neoconservatives,
especially their loudmouth media cheerleaders, enjoy
condemning their opponents as indecisive and wimpish;
for them, Bush's "bring 'em on" taunt was
right on. True, an anti-neoconservative
administration would have been less certain of its
ability to prescribe fast and affordable solutions
for Iraqis through direct unilateral American action.
As the US slowly settles in for a culturally
complicated guerilla war in a "post-war"
Iraq, however, even neoconservatives might begin to
think that there was a more diplomatic alternative to
Bush II's rush to war.
An
anti-neoconservative alternative would have lacked
the machismo that Americans seemed to enjoy in the
brief days of outright battle. It might have evoked
fears that we were going to equivocate in the face of
terrorism as we equivocated during the Clinton years.
On the other hand, the principle of liberalism that
underlies Purdy's "principled skepticism"
might in the long run have taken us farther toward
effective Middle East policy. If we had not been so
wall-eyed certain of what the outcome of our
unilateral adventurism would be, we might now be
orchestrating a less destructive though slower change
in Iraq. I am referring here less to specific
alternative policy options than to an alternative
attitude. I turn again to Hayek for scripture:
"[I]n
some respects the liberal is fundamentally a
skeptic—but it seems to require a certain /
degree of diffidence to let others seek their
happiness in their own fashion and to adhere
consistently to that tolerance which is an
essential characteristic of liberalism." ("Why
I am not a conservative," 406-407)
With greater
tolerance of other nations in the UN and greater
humility toward cultural differences, an
anti-neoconservative administration would have
labored longer and harder for an international
consensus on containing and changing Iraq. This would
have allowed it to remain more narrowly focused on
fighting the international infrastructure of al
Qaeda. It would not have squandered the good will of
many nations sympathetic to Americans on 9-11. It
would not have run the risk of turning Iraq itself
into a new stage for freshly outraged Muslims.
All these
anti-neoconservative positions would have been
consistent with the classic posture of liberalism as
we learn about it through Hayek and see it manifested
in the political ruminations of young Jedediah Purdy.
The issue is
not whether the nation should follow a party that
thinks it is "liberal" or a party that
thinks it is newly "conservative." The
issue is whether the nation can regain a balanced
sense of itself in 2004 with fresh political
imagination by reaching into the rich heritage of
ideas that inspires both our major political camps.
end
BOOKS
REFERRED TO IN THIS ESSAY
3
September 2003; last modified 8 September 2003
Copyright © 2003 Richard P. Richter
