II. Liberal Principles at Home
Ever since the right launched its campaign to demonize the term, liberals have been worrying about their philosophical principles. When asked during the Democrats’ You Tube debate, Hillary Clinton suggested that liberalism fell from grace, because it became the party of “big government.” She’d call herself a “Progressive,” just like those virtuous old farmers taking on the railroads in 1880. Democrats can do better. I’m no Bill Galston, and it’s always easier to tear others’ ideas down than to come up with principles of your own, but just to get the discussion going, here are some thoughts for openers.
FIRST PRINCIPLE: People Are Political Animals
In last week’s post I reported that the metaphysical grounding of the conservative revival was, as founding father Frank Meyer, put it, “politics is based on the individual not the collective.” This core principle must rest on some commitment to the primacy of the individual aspects of the human condition – separate bodies, silent thought, etc. Otherwise it would be completely arbitrary, right?
The assumption of individualism has been so heavily promoted in the years of the conservative revival that it has all but obliterated competing metaphysical contentions.Ignoring the siren song of conservative dichotomies, what if neither the individual nor the collective, but, rather, the political is primary? Humans also have the capacity for speech and reason. Having these capacities, people can live in communities. So the driving image is not Hobbes’ physically and psychologically separate men springing up, as he said, like mushrooms after a rain. It is Aristotle’s human, raised in a family, ruling in a family, and then the families joining in a polity for the sake of a good, self-sufficient life. Plato put it another way in the Crito: that the polis nourishes its members to life and is the source of their civic education. So the first liberal principle is that politics is based on the political, not the individual.
Aside from the deafening roar of the conservative resurgence, why should this sound strange? The image of the family reminds us that man did not, in fact, spring up like a mushroom after the rain. Instead, as feminist political thinkers remind us, they are of woman born and would not have survived even to pee into the pond, or whatever that Lockean metaphor means, alone. (“It’s your money?” Try eating your money.) So even if individualism is a part of personhood, only decades of ideology have swept all other human characteristics from the field. It is time to look at humans whole again.
True, the family metaphor for politics originally invoked an unjust institution, the classical family. Aristotle accepted without question the right of men to rule their families (aristocratically, not tyrannically, the little darling), and that unjust foundation gave all arguments from patriarchy a bad name. So when Hobbes came along to challenge the family metaphor, it felt like liberation. And in many ways, it was. That’s why we call it liberalism, more properly, “classical liberalism.”
But when classical liberals tossed Aristotle’s political animal out with the unjust patriarchal family and the patriarchal monarchy, something crucial was lost. Man was still a political animal. And governance still has to come from somewhere. Indeed, as Hobbes, the consummate realist, saw it, absent other institutions, the strong rule. Secular, democratic governments are the antithesis of the hereditary monarchies. Why have conservatives gotten away with suggesting that anything -- the market, the family, the church – is better than being governed by our own elected governments? (David Brooks, who is obviously following this discussion, suggested in the Times last Friday that we go back to the philosophy of the English landed aristocracy.) Worse than demonizing the word “liberal,” conservatives made the word “politician” into a dirty word and “Washington” a dirty place. Here’s a tactic for the principle: Every time a conservative puts scare quotes around the word politicians, the Democrats need to call them on it immediately.
SECOND PRINCIPLE: POLITICAL ALTRUISM
The revival of the principle of a communal life got a big boost, as I have said elsewhere, when anti-government individualism turned out to be inadequate to the inequality and harrowing working conditions created by the Industrial Revolution. At that point thinkers like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill developed the western secular philosophy we call utilitarianism. In utilitarianism, people are understood not as all different and separate but as similar and equal, capable of feeling pleasure and pain. These understandings give rise to some moral obligation to reduce the pain and maximize the pleasure of other humans and to a kind of egalitarianism. Most social programs, from workers’ pensions in the Nineteenth Century to health care after World War II, were the products of this “big government” egalitarianism. It’s the redistribution, stupid.
In modern discourse, Princeton University’s Peter Singer has done the most to argue for the morality of a robust redistribution of wealth. As Singer put it recently, the moral claim is that “Other things being equal . . . we should redistribute from the rich to the poor until the marginal welfare loss to the rich equals the marginal welfare gain to the poor.” Singer quickly admits to the limits of morality: “But of course, if humans need incentives to make them productive, other things are not equal. So when we plan social policies, we must take account of human nature as it is, not as we might wish it to be.”
No one is suggesting we live in Singer’s World. Here’s the crucial difference: conservatives elevate the inevitable claims of selfish human nature to the level of secular political morality itself. (What their churches require is a subject for another day.) Liberals accept the selfish as a constraint on political morality. We ask: how much, not how little, altruism can the secular, representative, accountable polity require?
In the give and take that this serial presentation the good people at TPMCafe allowed, a consistent theme of the comments was that all philosophical principles be abandoned in favor of the particular. Here’s an example from one of the many commenters: “Again, I don't think that liberals prefer the collective over the individual . . . The difference between conservatives and liberals in this area is a willingness to address problems. Conservatives appear willing to allow problems to continue while liberals are more willing to try to do something about it. It's not that liberals are concerned about the collective, it is that when a problem affects people, they are more likely to at least think about whether the problem should be solved. It has nothing to do with whether the collective is the central political unit or not -- it's just that most problems affect a lot of people.”
The commenter – and he or she is not alone – misses the crucial change that decades of conservative moralizing has wrought in American politics. The conservative philosophy of moral individualism makes ignoring the “problems that affect a lot of people” the moral course to follow. Regardless of how many people the problems affect, where is the commenter’s “solution” to come from if “It’s your money?” Taxation is no better than theft. And if you think this is all, as David Brooks would say, “airy fairy” philosophy, then why do the Republicans call all health care proposals “socialized medicine,” as if the magic word “socialism” itself were enough to doom the most appealing scheme? Because redistribution is, to them, immoral. Even if everyone around you is sick, it’s your money, remember?
Truman was probably right, as another commenter suggested, that Republican-voting laborers are ungrateful morons. His 1948 speech gave me a Matter-With-Kansas insatiable longing for the time when an American politician could just call the Republicans “the money changers [in] the temple.” But the time is long past when redistributive agendas were automatically accepted as the moral course. Maybe individualism is now so embedded in the culture that nothing can be done. But if liberals have any hope of achieving the many policies that have filled our manifesto since we glimpsed the promised land in 2006, we must hope this is not true and that we can change the assumptions by arguing for our principles.
Here’s an argument that tries to hit the area between Singer’s idealism and the Republicans’ moral abdication. Believing people are political animals, modern American liberals believe in a robust moral obligation to other Americans, as members of a common political community (more about the rest of the world next week). Like Plato’s and Aristotle’s polities, Americans share a set of political institutions and a political history and tradition, which have, over the centuries, protected our productive enterprises from theft and fraud, and given us a civic education in such values as self-government, tolerance, egalitarianism and self-determination. We share a common culture and a common market. Even with globalization and the internet, Americans are more like each other, on the whole, than we are unlike or like the citizens of other nations. When some of us are slaves, say, to jobs we hate, because we cannot live without the health care, we vote like slaves, exactly what the founders correctly feared.
In another example, when the common political process fails to protect some citizens’ economic security and dignity, they may use it to impose other, less desirable, agendas on others. Pace Thomas Frank, there’s nothing the matter with Kansas. Those family values voters were just trying to make themselves felt somewhere. Maybe they had given up hope that the Democrats could add much to their secular well-being. So there are reasons for the political community both to require and to bound a robust altruism.
There are other arguments for political altruism. The principle rests on the political understanding that too much inequality leads to civil war. More recently, people have also come to support collective action because there are some goods, like climate control, which cannot be achieved efficiently -- or at all -- without it. These are additional arguments, but they are not a substitute for moral principles. Remember the losing candidate Dukakis and “it’s not about ideology, it’s about competence?” Liberalism, like conservatism, is not neutral. Liberalism ultimately rests on a deep idea of what people are like. Like the conservatives’ separate, indifferent citizens, liberals’ similar, linked citizens provide answers to policy questions embarked on a think, but common political enterprise. Everyone’s talking about the obvious example, health care. But the point is that no one can know what is coming. That’s why we need our principles.
Pace Robert Frank, there’s nothing the matter with Kansas.
You're not the first person to make this mistake, but I do believe you mean Thomas Frank.
October 7, 2007 11:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
That was a fine, provocative post, both in freely admitting to being a liberal and in relating it to longstanding philosophical traditions. A few politicians (and you name Clinton) might emulate it. However, I hope I'm not taking things too far off track by commenting on the use of philosophers.
First, I'd be careful of lumping Plato with Aristotle's view of civic virtue. It's hard to find a philosopher as opposed to democracy and as aligned in practice with the tyrants of his day. It'd take more space to consider how his philosophical writings relate to these personal and political views.
Second, a very fine comment on your first post defended Locke, and I have to agree with it. It's way off to align him so neatly with Hobbes as some kind of classical liberalism we wish to outgrow. Hobbes is too conservative for that and Locke too liberal for it, in the modern sense. His influence on the framers and thus a conception of society we'd accept is obvious. The repetition of the Hobbes/Locke split in Nozick and Rawls is also obvious, suggesting again that contract theories are hardly illiberal. (Scanlon also has one, and Ackerman's political philosophy relates closely to it.)
Third, there are many approaches to contemporary ethics besides utilitarianism. Some, like Nussbaum's, look back to classical philosophies (Plato, Aristotle, and others as well) for a conception of a good person in pursuit of happiness. Some, in the tradition of Kant, look to the nature of a good act (what one should or should not do, so-called deontological approaches), and the "shoulds" suggest obligation beyond oneself from the start. Some, like utilitarians, are concerns for a good outcome. Still others are contract theorists, and the trend as in epistemology has been to various pluralisms (such as Walzer) or holisms (most eloquently Williams and McIntyre), either way without appeal to axioms or foundations. What stands out, in fact, is just how wacko libertarianism would be without its political utility to America's ruling class.
Last, of these, I'd hate to single out Singer for another reason. He's perhaps not individualist in pointing to obligations. But he's certainly got an atomistic view of society, as nothing more than the sum of its elements. It also precludes appeals to notions of family or community. You'd starve your child if you could thus save two children in the Third World. (Another utilitarian philosopher, Unger, insists on the radicalism of this.) One could temper this, as there is a variant of utilitarianism which judges the utillity of rules as opposed to single acts, and a rule that appeals to family might work out better in the end for practical reasons. But still, it's not likely to define liberalism.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
October 8, 2007 12:27 AM | Reply | Permalink
arrgh, and I know Robert Frank's work much better and the pathway is just unstoppable apparently. thank you. I'll fix it right away.
October 8, 2007 1:53 AM | Reply | Permalink
"His 1948 speech gave me a Matter-With-Kansas insatiable longing for the time when an American politician could just call the Republicans “the money changers [in] the temple.” But the time is long past when redistributive agendas were automatically accepted as the moral course. Maybe individualism is now so embedded in the culture that nothing can be done. But if liberals have any hope of achieving the many policies that have filled our manifesto since we glimpsed the promised land in 2006, we must hope this is not true and that we can change the assumptions by arguing for our principles."
Respectfully, the time has not passed where a politician can call the Republican looters of the treasury the money changers in the temple at all! Now is precisely the time! We must not only argue, but we must fight for our principles. And I do mean fight. The whole problem is not that times and arguments have changed. The dynamics of our collective problems are remarkably similar. The problem is and has been that far too many of the cowardly poltroons we call Democratic elected officials and their enablers in Washington, our state capitols and elsewhere stopped doing it because they were afraid to do so. Why? Because the big, bad, mean Republicans might call them names or even worse they might call them "liberals." You can't fight anybody if your cowering in the corner hoping you don't get hurt. They were and are too chicken to fight for the principles we had and still have. We need leaders who are willing to fight for our common beliefs and there are such people out there. Unfortunately, the chickens are still ruling the roost.
The argument for a fundamental rethinking, exploration and/or development of a new set of principles is an unnecessary intellectual detour on the road back to political power for the forces of modernity, progress and liberalism. On the political battlefield there simply is no room for the luxury of this sort of parlor game. Our principles are clear and always have been. They are essentially unchanged by time. There is no need to alter or redo or rethink them or anything of the kind. There is no need to argue on behalf of political altruism. We need only to make the argument to the people that we must effectively address the problems we face and show them that doing what needs to be done works. Republicans not only won't do that but they have now definitively proven they are incompetent to do so. In fact, the whole "let's determine what our philosophy is" approach is a fatal political flaw for liberal resurgence. There's been far too much of this sort of political navel gazing the past 30-40 years and consequently we never get off the mark. Such a focus diverts attention away from actually doing anything about the problems we need to make progress on so that our candidates and spokespeople can say to voters something along th lines of the following:
"Look at what we've done/our approach has done for you, your family, and your community! We are all the stronger for it regardless of the fact that the wealthy and priveleged don't like it. And look at what they have done too. We welcome the comparison. No, we insist upon it.
The extremist conservatives call anything that makes progress for anyone other than themselves "socialism." And please take note folks that their paid spokesmen in the Republican Party and in their "think tanks"---the front men for the wealthy elitists---say that anything that makes the rich man pay his fair share is socialism too. They say that anything that makes the rich man pay his fair share for the public good is taking away his incentive to work. But when they want to rob the middle class and workers of this country to pay for tax cuts for the rich man or their corporate tax breaks and write-offs it's providing incentives for productivity. For too long they have gotten away with this shell game that picks the pocket of the average family to fatten the the already swollen wallets of those bursting with riches.
But those who serve as the mouthpieces of the greedy rich have a point about one thing and that is that we do already have socialism in this country my friends. That's right! Republican style socialism we just don't call it that, but it's high time we started to. What's that you ask? It is socialism for the rich and not for you. It's socialism for the powerful but not for your kids or your neighbors kids either. It's socialism for the multinational corporations who have no allegiance to this great land or our people, but whose sole allegiance is to their own bottom line as they export our jobs, abandon and destabilize our communities and still they stand their with their hands out looking for more special favors from the government. It's shameful, but they are shameless. Yes, we maintain socialism for the multinationals but not for the small and medium sized businesses of your city or your state who are patriotic, who do not outsource their jobs overseas and who generate more new jobs and prosperity than the major corporations that feed at the public trough daily.
While your wages have stagnated for the last 30 years of Republican dominated government, the very few at the top of the economic pyramid have taken all the profits realized from your increased productivity for themselves! And what do we have to show for it? Our economy no longer produces the kinds of jobs our people need to support our families and many of our best manufacturing jobs have gone overseas--not because our workers can't compete, the American worker remains the most productive worker the world has ever known, but because the wealthy men calling the shots can make larger profits for themselves by paying nearly slave wages to desperate workers in third world countries who work twice as long for less than half as much than an American and who may or may not produce a safe, quality product to be sold the the American consumer.
Due to extremist conservative Republicans our reputation as the respected leader of the free world, loved by millions all over the globe as the defender of freedom and beacon of liberty lays in tatters. While the nation's public schools have been starved for funds, student test scores have declined and our young people are not being adequately prepared for the global economic competition they are faced with when they leave school. Meanwhile, the rich and poweful have grown fat on ever larger tax cuts. While your health insurance premiums (if you're lucky enough to have health insurance) have grown more and more expensive, Republican misrule has enabled the insurance companies, like parasites, to engorge themselves with record profits year after year that are a central cause in making our medical care nearly unaffordable. It's not that we can't afford medical care friends! We cannot afford both adequate medical care and to keep the insurance and drug companies profits growing at a record pace. No ther nation's people in the industrialized world has to support both a medical system for it's people AND a rapacious insurance industry that serves only itself and does nothing to enhance the health of the people or the care they receive. It is time we have a national health insurance policy as Harry Truman called for decades ago. We have waited too long and we will wait no longer!
The Republican Party has also led our nation into a disasterous war justified by a mountain of lies that has now taken the lives of thousands of our bravest young men and women as well as tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens who didn't have to die and who did nothing to harm our country. This was a war of choice, not a war of necessity. They invaded Iraq for oil plain and simple: we all know their denials are nothing but more lies! Our party strongly believes that we must always be prepared to defend our country but that never again should we ask the young men and women who defend us to sacrifice their lives for oil. And all the while, the Republicans have led the nation down this disasterous path, our actual enemies have gone free even though they have known where they are! This is inexcusable. The Democratic Party will bring Bin Laden and his henchmen to justice and we will not rest until that job is done.
During the last seven years of Republican misrule they have wrecked our government and taken us from having the largest surplus in our history to having the largest debt any nation on earth has had in the history of the world! Why do we have this enormous debt? Tax cuts and other welfare for the rich--that's why! Corruption and incompetence too! Due to the Republican practice of neglecting the responsibilities of government in order to serve special interests, we now have increased poverty and crime in our communities. The families of CEO's make more than ever while the average family makes less. They have wrecked our medical and educational systems and with their rotten judgement they have nearly wrecked our army in a war fought to protect oil companies profits instead of protecting the citizens of the United States! Instead of destroying Bin Laden and his henchmen who are the very real known enemies of America they have wasted years and nearly a trillion dollars on an extremist fantasy that America's military might can dominate the world! Americans don't want to dominate the world or establish an empire like those of old. We never have. Our people have always believed that America represents a new order of the ages. Our country is not simply the Rome of modern times. We know that military might is not the strongest force on earth. Americans want what they have always wanted which is to live their lives own free in a free nation that is prosperous, healthy, and filled with opportunity.
The time has come for our people to put a stop to Republican misrule and the conservtive extremisim they believe in. We can put America back on track, we can restore our reputation around the globe and secure our economic future and that of our children and grandchildren. Our brightest days do lay ahead if we do what is necessary to make those bright days a reality. There is only one way to do it and there is only one party that can or will do it. The Republican Party is the party of pessimism and it always has been. They cannot be trusted to build a strong foundation for our future because their pessimism and lack of faith in humanity can only build us the foundation for a prison of less opportunity, growing ineqaulity and prosperity for the few at the expense of the many. Democrats will help build a foundation for our future as they always have, that will produce more opporunity, more prosperity and more freedom for all our citizens.
Democrats have always been the party of optimism and responsibility. We must face our responsibilites together and do what Americans have always done best which is to pull together. We must have a can do attitude about the problems we face and do what is necessary to solve them, even if that sometimes requires some sacrifice. To build this great nation into what it has become, the generations who came before us sacrificed for themselves, but also for us. We believe that today's Americans are also prepared to make sacrifices to improve our lives and yes, for those who will come after us. Yes, Americans remain prepared to ask themselves what they can do for their country. There's no question that this nation has the capacity to do whatever it chooses to do, but we must have the right leadership and we cannot allow the greed of the few to keep us from achieving these things for the good of the many.
The only political party that has ever made headway on the nation's problems for the average man and woman in America and for their families is the Democratic Party. It's time to get back on track and move the country forward again before it is too late. After years of effort conservative extremists, both secular and religious, have seized control of the Republican Party and taken us on a course we may not be able to reverse if we do not change course now. But we don't need to be driven over the edge by them. No! We can reject their foolish extremism, their incompetence and corruption and return to our real values, to our real national character and purpose. Now, let's vote them out and put a government in place that can and will address the issues of today and tomorrow honestly, with competence and without the graft and cronyism that has hurt our nation so badly these past seven years especially.
We cannot remedy and fix all the problems created by Republican misrule over the past generation overnight, so we must be patient and work hard together to repair the damage they have caused. While we are engaged in this work we cannot allow the conservative extremists to distract us with their chicken little calls about the sky falling every time we make an effort to address the nation's problems effectively. We must remain focused on our goals and united as we move toward reaching them. The time has come to get to work friends, so let's pull together and make our nation what we all want it to be: free, prosperous and at peace."
That's the kind of talk we need the American people to hear from our political leaders IMHO. My apologies if it doesn't cover every issue and problem. I wrote it only to serve as an example here in the spur of the moment. This doesn't require us to rethink anything other than our decision to retreat and shrink from the tried and true principles we have always professed. It doesn't require us to deny what we know is right. It only requires some courage and committment to fight vigorously for the principles we all already share, we all already believe in and we all know are right.
What we need to do, more than anything else, is to ensure that our candidates take these arguments to the people in language they understand and feel comfortable with and that they refuse to apologize for these positions and/or the principles that underlie them. We do that and we win. We do it not and we will continue to limp along in the pergatory of timid me-tooism that will lead to more decline at home and disaster abroad. I don't see how candidates like Senator Clinton, who is but one particularly glaring example, can be both a centrist (aka Republican Lite) and a good Democrat which is to say: a liberal. If our leaders and candidates continue to be afraid of being Democrats for real as opposed to DINO's we simply cannot retake the reigns of government and put the country back on track. Likewise, we cannot achieve this goal if we are tied up debating our philosophy and/or principles. Let us make the case we already know needs to be made. Let us do it with confidence and by talking straight with the people. The people will respond as they always have when we have had the courage and fortitude to make our case.
October 8, 2007 2:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
Individuals are so deeply exalted that corporations want to be individuals too. Ironically, it was railroad lawyers who first sought Constitutional personhood for their corporations, and we've been living with the consequences of that 19'th century error ever since.
And the consequences are extreme. Wal Mart is the moral equivalent of little Timmy next door, and your minimum wage increase is just like telling little Timmy he can't mow your lawn for 5 bucks. Why do you hate little Timmy?
Banking regulations to prevent the next financial bubble, and usury laws to reign in the worst abuses of payday lenders and credit card loan sharks, will be thwarted on the basis that it would interfere with "lenders' rights." Citibank is just like your father-in-law, you see.
Insofar as corporations are NOT individuals, and we need to stop treating them as if they were, maybe this individualism has its uses after all. Turn it on its head.
October 8, 2007 3:04 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm not sure that we should give away an individual-based philosophy here. You've been talking almost solely about economic matters here, but there are other issues, such as social freedom, which I consider more important and which can't be dealt with unless we agree that our system is based on the rights of individuals.
Social conservatives use similar arguments, for example, when they want to say that it effects them if somebody curses on television or if two homosexuals get married.
To me, liberalism should hold that an individuals social freedoms are paramount. But I don't see how you get there if you don't put the individual first.
thosethingswesay.blogspot.com
October 8, 2007 3:19 AM | Reply | Permalink
I am thoroughly puzzled about the purported connection between liberalism and the "first principle" that people are political animals.
The claim that human beings are political animals has usually been taken to mean that political behavior of some kind is part of human nature; that human beings have innate dispositions toward sociality, cooperation, community-building, etc., and have innate capacities and competencies that contribute to the satisfaction of these dispositions, the most obvious being language.
This is a fascinating subject, but it has little it itself to do with liberalism. Most varieties of liberalism are compatible with both robust doctrines of innate sociality and minimalist doctrines of innate sociality. Defenders of the claim that human beings are political animals have differed greatly about the kinds of political communities human beings are capable of forming and for which they are best suited, and also in their moral assessments of the values these various kinds of political community promote.
However, if one is determined to associate views about innate sociality with particular political traditions, one would have to say that it is the liberal tradition that has tended to be most hostile to the claim that human beings are political animals. Much of the liberal tradition has tended to downplay innate sociality and focus instead on the extent to which political communities, institutions and the arts of social living are human inventions devised by reasoned self-interest. Even where liberalism has not been hostile to claims of innate sociality, it has tended to be suspicious of such claims. That is because of the historical contingency that such claims were often brought forward in the past as part of arguments for certain traditional, illiberal forms of government. But this is just an historical contingency. In a historical situation in which liberal governments were long-established and long-prevailing, then traditionalists and innatists would probably end up falling more toward the side of liberalism than illiberalism.
"Modern liberalism" (through a bizarre semantic evolution of the term "liberalism") is sometimes thought to be characterized by a belief in the need for vigorous and activist government. Modern liberals might hold that the best kinds of life of which human beings are capable require energetic and activist government - at least by comparison with the forms of government endorsed by their libertarian opponents (now bizarrely termed "conservatives"). But how much government it would be a good thing to have has little to do with whether and to what extent human beings are political animals.
So the claim that people are political animals is also not very closely related to the questions of whether political behavior is a good thing, and whether the formation of certain kinds of political communities and governments is conducive to the good of human beings. Even people like Hobbes, who can be read as a asserting that human beings are naturally solitary or apolitical, obviously thought that political communities were good things, and that it was necessary for human beings to form these communities to save themselves from the misery of their condition in their solitary state.
I also don't think there is any logical or natural connection between liberalism and one's attitude toward Washington. This should be obvious. Even if one takes liberalism to have something to do with a generically pro-government attitude, surely even liberals are capable of believing particular governments and the political cultures of particular capital cities are very bad. I've really come to have a very negative view of the political culture of Washington, which has become a central headquarters for plutocratic tyranny, imperial aggression, secrecy, corrupt media sycophancy, corporate whoring and unaccountable elitism. And since our current crop of national politicians are part of that culture, I have a generally negative view of them as well. This means I'm conservative?
I would also suggest that questions about what does and does not pertain to human nature are empirical questions, not "metaphysical" questions. Whether human beings have innate dispositions and capacities related to sociality and political behavior is a question about contingent facts about a particular kind of animal, not a higher-level question about the nature of substance and attribute, essence and accident, actuality and potentiality, parts and wholes, universals and individuation, etc.
Finally, highly ambiguous metaphors about "mushrooms in the rain", or "the political is primary" don't help matters much.
Again, I really wish we could get over the notion that there is a reasonably well-defined philosophy called "liberalism" that characterizes the Democratic party. The many conflicting uses of that term comprise such a verbal and conceptual mess that it would be good to move on to something else.
October 8, 2007 4:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
Are Those Liberals Wearing Crosses?
.
Imagine a handful of mostly older women handing out toothpaste, razors and toothbrushes at a homeless shelter.
Imagine a group of mostly older women in the basement kitchen of a church cooking up chicken, peas and mashed (lots of coffee) for their weekly soup kitchen for the poor.
Imagine thousands of mostly older women volunteering and performing acts of charity all across America.
Some of the ladies have crosses in their lapels; are they not liberals?
Some of their co-workers are altruistic agnostic or atheist volunteers; are they not serving the morality engendered in the world's god based religions.
It may serve a conservative vision of political dominance to set these kind faced Americans upon each other over implications of being a 'liberal' but it really isn't the American way.
And it's not a word that anyone should remotely shy away from.
Craig Johnson
October 8, 2007 6:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
Dan K points out the ambiguity of the phrase 'political animal.' Whatever it means, Aristotle only said the human was a politikon zoon. Politikon is an adjectival form of polis, the Greek word for 'city.' Aristotle is saying humans are by nature 'city animals.' This is not a statement about how sociable or altruistic people are, but a statement about the form that sociability takes in nature. Hobbes and Locke and Montaigne and others, having read the travelers' tales of the Age of Exploration, realized Aristotle was wrong. Neither Hobbes nor Locke denied the existence of familes. Locke talks about families a good deal in his writings. Nor did Locke ever say, 'It's your money' or anything like that.
If Aristotle and Hobbes and Locke matter, liberals should tell the truth about them. If they don't matter, why are we talking about them? It's inexcusable is to peddle fake history and fake philosophy, strawmen cherry-picked and name-dropped as symbols to sell ideas that have nothing to do with the philosophers in question. This is no different than Bush blathering on about Vietnam to justify The Surge.
That the public is willing to listen to us a bit, that there is even an 'us' to be listened to, is because George Bush and his party have been a disaster. We can convince people to reject privatization, torture, preemptive war, tyranny, theocracy, and so on. It is dishonest, wasteful and futile to use these issues to attack the Enlightenment. The country hasn't rejected the Enlightenment. Neither conservatism nor neoconservatism is rooted in the Enlightment.
Why do you think people like Brooks cite Edmund Burke so much? Because the more famous statesmen and philosophers of the Enlightenment were liberal. Tho' many of those liberals were at times as misguided as I'm finding Linda Hirshman.
October 8, 2007 10:30 AM | Reply | Permalink
In any society there is public wealth and private wealth. Private wealth is our homes, cars, personal belongings, etc; public wealth is our parks, highways, museums, hospitals, universities, etc. Communism, as practiced by the Soviets, held that all, or almost all, wealth should belong to the State (fallaciously called the Dictatorship of the Proletariat). Keynes held that society benefits from an equitable distribution of wealth between public and private owners, and that the public interest demanded that corporations be regulated by the government. Milton Friedman argued against the liberal philosophy of Keynes, and argued that wealth should be largely private, that the best system was unrestrained capitalism, and that the State should atrophy to a hollow shell, with few regulatory powers, and little taxing authority.
Friedman's philosophy has come to be the dominant economic philosophy in the U.S. since the "Reagan" revolution, which amounted to throwing the mentally ill into the streets, privatizing schools, health care, the post office, and now the military. Boondoggles such as Enron are to be regarded as minor blips on the road to the creation of greater wealth for the wealthy. Extreme wealth of the few is an end in itself.
Friedman's economic theories have led to a decline in our civil liberties, to the fiasco in Iraq, the declining dollar, huge deficits, among other things. Left unchecked, they will bankrupt the United States. In fact, that is the deliberate goal: to bankrupt the state, so that it can default on its obligations to the citizens, eg. Medicare, schools, social security.
When Reagan came to power arguing that "government was the problem", many Democrats sought to accommodate this economic philosophy, with the result that they deserted their base and tried to appeal to "Republicans". Blue collar workers, for various reasons, chose to vote for the Republicans on social issues, rather than for the Democrats for economic issues. The Democrats as a party did not respond with a defense of liberalism, of Keynes' principles, etc. Indeed, the Free Trade Agreements enacted by Clinton resulted in the exploitation of labor around the world. Global exploitation of workers and of the poor has resulted from a lack of any worker or environmental protections in the Trade agreements.
This exploitation is partly what is behind the low inflation numbers we keep hearing, despite the constant rise in the price of oil and fall of the dollar. The other part is that the Federal Reserve cooks the CPI, since they look only at "core" inflation, and exclude energy and food prices because of their "volatility". TIPS, inflation-protected bonds, are a fraud perpetrated by the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve, since they control the definition of inflation.
Friedman's influence also shows up in Hillary Clinton's health care proposal, in that it mandates that people be required to buy health care insurance, offered by private for-profit corporations. Thus Clinton sidesteps the epithet "socialized medicine", which the conservatives claim is a dirty word. What is the difference between mandating that everyone buy private health insurance, and levying taxes? Instead of making the solid economic case for universal health care funded by the government, the Democrats choose instead to march to the Republican drummer.
Oleeb is right: the Democrats need to stand up for their core values and make the case for liberal economics. The so-called "centrists", which now includes a majority of the Democratic party, are simply the "me-too" candidates of our age, the Republican collaborators.
The Democratic party has abandoned its principles and constituencies, and now stands for nothing but hot air. It loudly condemns the war in Iraq, but is fearful of taking the responsibility for stopping it. What liberals and/or progressives need to do is build a large organization, consisting of the MoveOn's the VoteVets, the labor unions, environmental groups, civil rights groups -- in short all the core constituencies of the former Democratic party -- and restore the principles, values, and integrity of the former Democratic party.
It would be nice if at the same time the good Republicans would free their party of control by the wing nuts, the Christian fundamentalists, the neocons, the charlatans, the bigots, and the crooks.
There is a lot of house cleaning to be done in both political parties. I hope the two parties will look quite different after the elections of 2008 and 2010.
October 8, 2007 2:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Liberal" sounds like "expansive"--i.e. "liberal with the paint" or (what she is obviously worried about) "liberal with the money"...whereas to be progressive is to move forward. I prefer the term also!
October 9, 2007 11:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
So the first liberal principle is that politics is based on the political, not the individual.
Did you mean to say "on the community"? Else, it sounds like a mere tautology.
And if you meant "community," then, Kansas knows what the trouble is. The trouble is that America -- all 300 million of us -- is not a community -- that is, if the word community is to have any real meaning.
October 9, 2007 12:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
Excellent point. There's a lot of ways in which 300 million of us are not all "in it together."
thosethingswesay.blogspot.com
October 9, 2007 1:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
Not being chimpanzees we don't have to rely upon grooming to maintain our communities. On the other hand our neocortexes do have limits, and maintaining social relationships in excess of 150 may be beyond us. See, Dunbar's number.
Quaere: In political theory how is "community" defined and/or characterized?
October 9, 2007 11:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yeah, this just confirms my suspicion from last week that this project is not worthwhile. Sorry, Ms. Hirschman, I am a liberal and I believe in individualism. Saying that the individual is the primary unit of political organization does not make you a conservative. Read Locke again. Individuals form the government. Governance comes from the need for individuals to live together.
Yes, Locke was telling a story, but as a source, Locke does not tend towards conservatism or liberalism.
Nice try, but I don't agree with your principles.
October 9, 2007 11:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
. . . as feminist political thinkers remind us . . . .
if you want to be taken seriously at the APSA annual meeting, you should attend braless.
October 10, 2007 12:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
For the most part older political theory doesn't deal with community much; it tends to limit itself to 'politics' in the older sense of governmental offices and laws.
To me this makes sense. If we were still living in foraging bands we wouldn't have a government so we wouldn't have this conversation anyway. What all Americans really have in common factually speaking is our constitution, government and laws. We don't necessarily share the same customs or culture or values or whatever.
I don't know German philosophy very well; maybe Schopenhauer or Kant talks about community as such. Aristotle talks about differences between human cities and animal hives and herds.
October 10, 2007 8:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
Liberalism is founded on the principle of natural human equality and human rights. Liberal thought rejects hierarchies based on the authority of tradition and religion. It recognizes people's right to form their own laws and assent to them on the basis of reason, rather than of fear of punishment in the world to come.
Liberals believe that a secular democratic republic is the best way of assuring the common good (later called by Rousseau "the general will"). The common good encompasses the maximum freedom of individual expression and the right of individuals to pursue their own interests. Slavery, privilege, and exploitation have no place in the liberal state.
Since all have an interest in their own freedom, it is in their interest to participate in the government of the state. It is in everyone's interest that people be accorded equality of opportunity through education to develop their reason so that they can participate in the democratic process.
Writing about the 17th c Dutch republicans, whom he believes are the true precursors of today's liberal democratic state, Johnathan Israel says:
October 13, 2007 10:46 AM | Reply | Permalink