Tiassa
03-01-10, 12:36 PM
Michael Sandel (http://www.democracyjournal.org/article.php?ID=6731) for Democracy:
Imagine a president, or a presidential candidate, taking on Wall Street in blunt language such as this: “We have been dreading all along the time when the combined power of high finance would be greater than the power of the government. Have we come to a time when the president of the United States or any man who wishes to be the president must doff his cap in the presence of this high finance, and say, ‘You are our inevitable master, but we will see how we can make the best of it’?”
Or this: “The supreme political task of our day is to drive the special interests out of our public life.”
Or this: “Through new uses of corporations, banks, and securities,” a privileged economic elite has “reached out for control over government itself,” rendering political equality “meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group [has] concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor—other people’s lives.”
Today, mainstream commentators and editorial writers would disparage such talk as irresponsible populist rhetoric. But American political leaders have not always been as deferential toward economic power as they are expected to be today. The statements quoted above were not made by far-out radicals, but by Woodrow Wilson (1912), Theodore Roosevelt (1910), and Franklin D. Roosevelt (1936).
Sandel asserts an historical narrative that tracks the transformation of liberalism and American society in the twentieth century: Where once people worried about what Justice Brandeis called "the curse of bigness", they spoke of democracy; these days, we speak of economy.
... Brandeis had a different worry. For him, the “curse of bigness” was not about systemic risk in financial markets; it was about democracy itself. If corporations, trusts, and banks had too much power, he argued, they would control the government and deprive ordinary citizens of a meaningful voice in political affairs. This fundamental idea was central to the liberalism of Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, and FDR. As a result, from the Progressive era to the New Deal, liberals debated how best to assert democratic control over economic power.
During the second half of the twentieth century, the focus of liberalism changed. Liberals stopped regarding bigness as a curse, and they made their peace with concentrated economic power. The agenda of postwar American liberalism was set out by FDR in 1944, when he called for an “economic bill of rights.” True individual freedom required more than the political rights enumerated in the Constitution, he argued. Under modern conditions, it also required basic social and economic rights, including “the right to a useful and remunerative job . . . the right of every family to a decent home, the right to adequate medical care . . . the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment” and “the right to a good education.”
Unlike the anti-bigness liberalism of the progressive era and early New Deal, the social-welfare liberalism of FDR in 1944 is recognizable as the liberalism of our time. The great liberal causes of the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s—civil rights, Medicare and Medicaid, racial and gender equality, federal support for education, a more generous welfare state—were about using government to provide equal opportunity and a social safety net, not about using government to rein in the political influence of big banks and corporations.
(ibid)
What Sandel notes of Roosevelt is nothing more than than a nearly prophetic vision of how society works. In the years since, Americans have become ever more guarded about what scraps of those asserted rights they have. Upsetting the bigness of economic institutions could imperil people's "useful" jobs, or—as we have seen—lose their homes or medical care. Our educational system is widely denounced as something approaching dysfunction, and in the last two years the spectres of "old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment" have risen to loom large over the land.
And where people would not protest injustice for the alleged indignity of sounding like a Commie or granola, we now see many pretending they are ready to revolt, not because the system is leading toward a seemingly inevitable bad ending, but rather because they accept the fear of rocking certain boats.
This is the appeal of greed:
Social-welfare liberalism seems a more practical doctrine than the anti-bigness version of earlier progressives. It is hard to imagine how to break up the large financial institutions and corporations that dominate modern economic life. And yet I believe it’s a mistake for contemporary liberals to give up on the old progressive project of exerting democratic control over economic institutions. In fact, it’s a mistake that has backfired on the Obama presidency. The initial reluctance of Barack Obama and his economic advisers to take a tougher line on the banks has led to a populist backlash that now threatens his agenda.
(ibid)
What seems curious about Sandel's assessment is that the populist backlash would seek to empower large corporations (e.g., insurance companies, banks). Even stranger is that the period of transformation he considers is also marked by increasingly explicit demands based in religious rhetoric that defy the religious paradigm; Americans rejected the Book of Acts by the Cold War, yet stamped a theocratic motto on their currency as an affirmation of Chrisitan faith.
In this sense, what Sandel overlooks is the liberal failure to challenge the basic conflicts of human nature. As he reviews a history that includes Milton Friedman, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan, he considers more what liberals actually did than what they failed to do. That "market relations are not necessarily free" in an alleged free market is a complex idea, and one easily challenged by superstition, fear, and sound-bite. And, to a certain degree, Sandel understates the result:
... the terms of political argument had subtly changed. Conservative opponents of the welfare state had become the critics of bigness, and liberals the defenders of it.
This shift changed the shape of American politics. In moments when Americans feel disempowered, victims of forces beyond their control, conservatives have become more adept than liberals at tapping the mood of populist anger and frustration—even while siding with corporate and financial interests. Consider this: Which American presidential candidate called for “an end to giantism, for a return to the human scale—the scale that human beings can understand and cope with . . . the locally owned factory, the small businessman, who personally deals with his customers and stands behind his product, the farm and consumer cooperative, the town or neighborhood bank that invests in the community, the union local”?
The words could have been spoken by Brandeis or Woodrow Wilson. But that was Ronald Reagan, campaigning for president in 1976.
But the end result of the liberal failure to account for the transformation is clear: "By the end of the twentieth century," Sandel asserts, "liberalism had lost its capacity to inspire." And, indeed, the greatest disenchantment with the Democratic Party—the nearest thing to a viable political institution liberalism has in American society—is that they have become bland, technocratic appeasers of superstition.
Which brings us to Obama. In his 2008 campaign, Obama did not offer a new definition of liberal or progressive politics. But he did succeed in stirring a civic idealism and hope not seen in American politics since the short-lived campaign of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Obama’s capacity to inspire was more than a measure of his rhetorical gifts. He galvanized the electorate because he articulated a politics of moral and civic aspiration that went beyond the policy-driven, technocratic politics to which recent Democratic candidates had been prone.
Obama departed from the liberalism of his day in two respects. First, liberals in recent decades have been wary of moral and spiritual discourse in politics, seeing it as a recipe for intolerance and coercion. But Obama rightly argued that, from the abolitionists to Dorothy Day to Martin Luther King, reformers have long brought moral and religious themes to bear in politics; it was folly for progressives to desist from moral and spiritual language, and to cede to the religious right the most potent sources of political argument. Second, thanks to his background as a community organizer, Obama brought to his campaign a civic sensibility that recalled an older tradition of political reform. According to this tradition, democratic politics is not only about policies and legislation; it’s about mobilizing citizens to claim a meaningful voice in self-government. It requires solidarity among the participants—in neighborhoods, congregations, unions, and other local settings—and usually involves a struggle with entrenched economic interests. For a time at least, the Obama campaign mobilized a movement for change.
(ibid)
But thought and feeling are two separate issues. People may have felt the hope, but many are having trouble comprehending the translation.
In his first year in office, Obama found it difficult to translate the civic energy and idealism he inspired as a candidate into a new progressive vision or a distinctive way of governing. Faced with the exigencies of the financial crisis, he appointed economic advisors whose views had more in common with Wall Street bankers and hedge fund managers than with Brandeis, Wilson, and FDR; some had even promoted the deregulation that led to the crisis. When bailouts and bonuses prompted widespread public outrage, his administration treated populist anger as a force to be placated and contained rather than as a legitimate response to the unaccountable power amassed by the financial industry, and the easy terms on which the government had bailed it out. To his credit, Obama pressed ahead with the attempt to achieve universal health care—the biggest piece of unfinished business of postwar American liberalism. But the effort was stymied by two forces that the old, anti-bigness progressives would have understood: first, the power of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries; and second, populist backlash and lingering anger over the bailout.
The Tea Party movement that rallied against Obama’s health-care reform was about more than health care. It was a protest against big government, the bailout, and a political system that ignores the concerns of ordinary people. Liberals, committed to greater opportunity for people of modest means, find it perverse that populist anger be directed against health-care reform and big government, rather than against Wall Street and the insurance companies. But when liberalism gave up on the project of holding economic power to democratic account, it opened itself up to this paradox ....
.... The success of his presidency now depends on reviving the civic idealism his campaign inspired and mobilizing it to bring economic power to account. Obama has spoken of the unfinished work of America’s experiment in self-government. The financial crisis he inherited can be an occasion to reassert democratic control over the economic forces that govern our lives. If Obama can rise to that challenge, he will reshape the political landscape and redefine the meaning of liberalism in our time.
(ibid)
Sandel's outlook, obviously, is not crystal-perfect, but it is certainly a more intelligent consideration of the state of things than what passes in the common discourse.
Who gains, and who loses, by raising the standard of discourse? There are, of course, many possible answers, including that we all gain, and that we all lose.
Obama's woes testify to the challenges facing genuine liberalism in the United States. In the face of scary superstition, the more subtle and complex arguments are often forgotten or ignored.
It may seem elitist, but compared to superficial accusations of betrayal, forfeiture, and socialist, white-slaving deviltry, our society would benefit greatly from elevating the public discourse out of the gutter. One of the reasons liberals reject so many conservative indictments of Obama, Democrats, or liberalism in general, is that the accusations are childish. Media and political discourse set the example for the public conversation, and presently those institutions are endorsing low rhetoric, brainless conspiracy theory, hapless melodrama, and anything else that might win ratings or a few cheers from the base. I can't believe that any remotely successful politician thinks their one-liners or idiotic distortions of rhetoric actually win them converts from the other side; what they're playing for is new voters, and much as a cigarette company needs new smokers, the lower the rhetorical bar, the better it is for the short-term political consideration of winning votes.
Beneath the scandals, hatred, and capitalistic ruthlessness of our political drama, a fascinating story is playing out, the American tale. And, some days, if people feel stung by rejection, it might not be simple partisanship. It may well be that even an insufficient criticism attempted in a responsible voice carries far more weight, and offers more tools to work with, than the petty bullshit coming from America's right wing and allegedly centrist obsession.
Liberalism itself needs to regroup, balance its political ledgers, and start shedding its centrist tendency. After all, centrism these days endorses torture, paranoia, greed, and bigotry. America, America, God shed His Grace on thee!
Or maybe God really is dead.
Or maybe, just maybe, we have squandered our liberty in order to dig a hole so that we can perpetually complain.
Liberalism has a long task in front of it, and whether or not American liberals are up to the challenge is yet unknown. The spectrum between the revolutionary left and liberal centrism is riddled with absorption lines, blank spaces representing where idea and principle have been blotted out by political elements and considerations with vested interest in what colors of freedom and prosperity shine between the shining seas.
In other words, Sandel does not represent anything conlcusive, but he could, on this occasion, mark a starting point.
____________________
Notes:
Sandel, Michael. "Obama and Civic Idealism". Democracy. Issue #15. Winter, 2010. DemocracyJournal.com. March 1, 2010. http://www.democracyjournal.org/article.php?ID=6731
Imagine a president, or a presidential candidate, taking on Wall Street in blunt language such as this: “We have been dreading all along the time when the combined power of high finance would be greater than the power of the government. Have we come to a time when the president of the United States or any man who wishes to be the president must doff his cap in the presence of this high finance, and say, ‘You are our inevitable master, but we will see how we can make the best of it’?”
Or this: “The supreme political task of our day is to drive the special interests out of our public life.”
Or this: “Through new uses of corporations, banks, and securities,” a privileged economic elite has “reached out for control over government itself,” rendering political equality “meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group [has] concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor—other people’s lives.”
Today, mainstream commentators and editorial writers would disparage such talk as irresponsible populist rhetoric. But American political leaders have not always been as deferential toward economic power as they are expected to be today. The statements quoted above were not made by far-out radicals, but by Woodrow Wilson (1912), Theodore Roosevelt (1910), and Franklin D. Roosevelt (1936).
Sandel asserts an historical narrative that tracks the transformation of liberalism and American society in the twentieth century: Where once people worried about what Justice Brandeis called "the curse of bigness", they spoke of democracy; these days, we speak of economy.
... Brandeis had a different worry. For him, the “curse of bigness” was not about systemic risk in financial markets; it was about democracy itself. If corporations, trusts, and banks had too much power, he argued, they would control the government and deprive ordinary citizens of a meaningful voice in political affairs. This fundamental idea was central to the liberalism of Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, and FDR. As a result, from the Progressive era to the New Deal, liberals debated how best to assert democratic control over economic power.
During the second half of the twentieth century, the focus of liberalism changed. Liberals stopped regarding bigness as a curse, and they made their peace with concentrated economic power. The agenda of postwar American liberalism was set out by FDR in 1944, when he called for an “economic bill of rights.” True individual freedom required more than the political rights enumerated in the Constitution, he argued. Under modern conditions, it also required basic social and economic rights, including “the right to a useful and remunerative job . . . the right of every family to a decent home, the right to adequate medical care . . . the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment” and “the right to a good education.”
Unlike the anti-bigness liberalism of the progressive era and early New Deal, the social-welfare liberalism of FDR in 1944 is recognizable as the liberalism of our time. The great liberal causes of the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s—civil rights, Medicare and Medicaid, racial and gender equality, federal support for education, a more generous welfare state—were about using government to provide equal opportunity and a social safety net, not about using government to rein in the political influence of big banks and corporations.
(ibid)
What Sandel notes of Roosevelt is nothing more than than a nearly prophetic vision of how society works. In the years since, Americans have become ever more guarded about what scraps of those asserted rights they have. Upsetting the bigness of economic institutions could imperil people's "useful" jobs, or—as we have seen—lose their homes or medical care. Our educational system is widely denounced as something approaching dysfunction, and in the last two years the spectres of "old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment" have risen to loom large over the land.
And where people would not protest injustice for the alleged indignity of sounding like a Commie or granola, we now see many pretending they are ready to revolt, not because the system is leading toward a seemingly inevitable bad ending, but rather because they accept the fear of rocking certain boats.
This is the appeal of greed:
Social-welfare liberalism seems a more practical doctrine than the anti-bigness version of earlier progressives. It is hard to imagine how to break up the large financial institutions and corporations that dominate modern economic life. And yet I believe it’s a mistake for contemporary liberals to give up on the old progressive project of exerting democratic control over economic institutions. In fact, it’s a mistake that has backfired on the Obama presidency. The initial reluctance of Barack Obama and his economic advisers to take a tougher line on the banks has led to a populist backlash that now threatens his agenda.
(ibid)
What seems curious about Sandel's assessment is that the populist backlash would seek to empower large corporations (e.g., insurance companies, banks). Even stranger is that the period of transformation he considers is also marked by increasingly explicit demands based in religious rhetoric that defy the religious paradigm; Americans rejected the Book of Acts by the Cold War, yet stamped a theocratic motto on their currency as an affirmation of Chrisitan faith.
In this sense, what Sandel overlooks is the liberal failure to challenge the basic conflicts of human nature. As he reviews a history that includes Milton Friedman, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan, he considers more what liberals actually did than what they failed to do. That "market relations are not necessarily free" in an alleged free market is a complex idea, and one easily challenged by superstition, fear, and sound-bite. And, to a certain degree, Sandel understates the result:
... the terms of political argument had subtly changed. Conservative opponents of the welfare state had become the critics of bigness, and liberals the defenders of it.
This shift changed the shape of American politics. In moments when Americans feel disempowered, victims of forces beyond their control, conservatives have become more adept than liberals at tapping the mood of populist anger and frustration—even while siding with corporate and financial interests. Consider this: Which American presidential candidate called for “an end to giantism, for a return to the human scale—the scale that human beings can understand and cope with . . . the locally owned factory, the small businessman, who personally deals with his customers and stands behind his product, the farm and consumer cooperative, the town or neighborhood bank that invests in the community, the union local”?
The words could have been spoken by Brandeis or Woodrow Wilson. But that was Ronald Reagan, campaigning for president in 1976.
But the end result of the liberal failure to account for the transformation is clear: "By the end of the twentieth century," Sandel asserts, "liberalism had lost its capacity to inspire." And, indeed, the greatest disenchantment with the Democratic Party—the nearest thing to a viable political institution liberalism has in American society—is that they have become bland, technocratic appeasers of superstition.
Which brings us to Obama. In his 2008 campaign, Obama did not offer a new definition of liberal or progressive politics. But he did succeed in stirring a civic idealism and hope not seen in American politics since the short-lived campaign of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Obama’s capacity to inspire was more than a measure of his rhetorical gifts. He galvanized the electorate because he articulated a politics of moral and civic aspiration that went beyond the policy-driven, technocratic politics to which recent Democratic candidates had been prone.
Obama departed from the liberalism of his day in two respects. First, liberals in recent decades have been wary of moral and spiritual discourse in politics, seeing it as a recipe for intolerance and coercion. But Obama rightly argued that, from the abolitionists to Dorothy Day to Martin Luther King, reformers have long brought moral and religious themes to bear in politics; it was folly for progressives to desist from moral and spiritual language, and to cede to the religious right the most potent sources of political argument. Second, thanks to his background as a community organizer, Obama brought to his campaign a civic sensibility that recalled an older tradition of political reform. According to this tradition, democratic politics is not only about policies and legislation; it’s about mobilizing citizens to claim a meaningful voice in self-government. It requires solidarity among the participants—in neighborhoods, congregations, unions, and other local settings—and usually involves a struggle with entrenched economic interests. For a time at least, the Obama campaign mobilized a movement for change.
(ibid)
But thought and feeling are two separate issues. People may have felt the hope, but many are having trouble comprehending the translation.
In his first year in office, Obama found it difficult to translate the civic energy and idealism he inspired as a candidate into a new progressive vision or a distinctive way of governing. Faced with the exigencies of the financial crisis, he appointed economic advisors whose views had more in common with Wall Street bankers and hedge fund managers than with Brandeis, Wilson, and FDR; some had even promoted the deregulation that led to the crisis. When bailouts and bonuses prompted widespread public outrage, his administration treated populist anger as a force to be placated and contained rather than as a legitimate response to the unaccountable power amassed by the financial industry, and the easy terms on which the government had bailed it out. To his credit, Obama pressed ahead with the attempt to achieve universal health care—the biggest piece of unfinished business of postwar American liberalism. But the effort was stymied by two forces that the old, anti-bigness progressives would have understood: first, the power of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries; and second, populist backlash and lingering anger over the bailout.
The Tea Party movement that rallied against Obama’s health-care reform was about more than health care. It was a protest against big government, the bailout, and a political system that ignores the concerns of ordinary people. Liberals, committed to greater opportunity for people of modest means, find it perverse that populist anger be directed against health-care reform and big government, rather than against Wall Street and the insurance companies. But when liberalism gave up on the project of holding economic power to democratic account, it opened itself up to this paradox ....
.... The success of his presidency now depends on reviving the civic idealism his campaign inspired and mobilizing it to bring economic power to account. Obama has spoken of the unfinished work of America’s experiment in self-government. The financial crisis he inherited can be an occasion to reassert democratic control over the economic forces that govern our lives. If Obama can rise to that challenge, he will reshape the political landscape and redefine the meaning of liberalism in our time.
(ibid)
Sandel's outlook, obviously, is not crystal-perfect, but it is certainly a more intelligent consideration of the state of things than what passes in the common discourse.
Who gains, and who loses, by raising the standard of discourse? There are, of course, many possible answers, including that we all gain, and that we all lose.
Obama's woes testify to the challenges facing genuine liberalism in the United States. In the face of scary superstition, the more subtle and complex arguments are often forgotten or ignored.
It may seem elitist, but compared to superficial accusations of betrayal, forfeiture, and socialist, white-slaving deviltry, our society would benefit greatly from elevating the public discourse out of the gutter. One of the reasons liberals reject so many conservative indictments of Obama, Democrats, or liberalism in general, is that the accusations are childish. Media and political discourse set the example for the public conversation, and presently those institutions are endorsing low rhetoric, brainless conspiracy theory, hapless melodrama, and anything else that might win ratings or a few cheers from the base. I can't believe that any remotely successful politician thinks their one-liners or idiotic distortions of rhetoric actually win them converts from the other side; what they're playing for is new voters, and much as a cigarette company needs new smokers, the lower the rhetorical bar, the better it is for the short-term political consideration of winning votes.
Beneath the scandals, hatred, and capitalistic ruthlessness of our political drama, a fascinating story is playing out, the American tale. And, some days, if people feel stung by rejection, it might not be simple partisanship. It may well be that even an insufficient criticism attempted in a responsible voice carries far more weight, and offers more tools to work with, than the petty bullshit coming from America's right wing and allegedly centrist obsession.
Liberalism itself needs to regroup, balance its political ledgers, and start shedding its centrist tendency. After all, centrism these days endorses torture, paranoia, greed, and bigotry. America, America, God shed His Grace on thee!
Or maybe God really is dead.
Or maybe, just maybe, we have squandered our liberty in order to dig a hole so that we can perpetually complain.
Liberalism has a long task in front of it, and whether or not American liberals are up to the challenge is yet unknown. The spectrum between the revolutionary left and liberal centrism is riddled with absorption lines, blank spaces representing where idea and principle have been blotted out by political elements and considerations with vested interest in what colors of freedom and prosperity shine between the shining seas.
In other words, Sandel does not represent anything conlcusive, but he could, on this occasion, mark a starting point.
____________________
Notes:
Sandel, Michael. "Obama and Civic Idealism". Democracy. Issue #15. Winter, 2010. DemocracyJournal.com. March 1, 2010. http://www.democracyjournal.org/article.php?ID=6731