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<head><title>The last century-- what went wrong</title></head>
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<h1>The last century: What the heck was that?</h1>
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<p>If an intellectual from 1900 could be bodily transported to
the end of the milennium, top-hat, monocle, and all, he would explode in
puzzlement.
<ul>
<li>Why aren't we all communists and atheists?
<li>Liberalism won all its battles-- so why is it retreating?
<li>Where did all these conservatives come from?
<li>Where are the flying cars and moon bases?
</ul>
<p>If the thinker you picked was G.K. Chesterton, he might
advise you that he was right all along: "In eighty years, London will be almost
exactly as it is today," he wrote in 1904. But he was a contrarian, and underneath that poise, he'd be just as
shocked as the rest of them.
<h4>All-purpose apology</h4>
<p>I'm going to go into more detail and provide more balance
than the typical op-ed piece; but it's not a dissertation. Consider the whole thing to be preceded by a
big "In my opinion" and all the generalizations to be preceded by "In most
cases". I could qualify and nuance everything, but... in my opinion, and in most cases... that leads to wishy-washy,
unreadable prose.
<p><i>This essay is also available <b><a href="http://www.geocities.com/Athens/8308/rosenfelder1.html">in Irish</a></b>, thanks to Panu Höglund.</i>
<h2>Destroy it all! ..or not</h2>
<h3>Disdain for the organic</h3>
<p>
The intellectual fashion at the turn of the century (and
well beyond) was for the artificial, the planned, and the scientific at the
expense of the natural.
<p><img src="illo/predshaw.gif" align=right alt="George Bernard Shaw">
<ul>
<li><b>Capitalism</b> was messy and evil and
would be replaced by planned utopia. Or at least there would be <b>scientific management</b>, with
technocratic experts telling brute labor what to do.
<p>
<li><b>Cities</b> were disgusting organic
agglomerations, to be replaced by massive monoliths in geometric parks.
<p>
<li><b>Languages</b> were sinks of
irregularity, to be replaced by Esperanto or something even more rigorous
and analytical, a sort of voiced Dewey Decimal System.
<p>
<li><b>Art</b>, for at least the first half
of the century, recoiled against the depiction of nature, preferring
abstraction and itself as subjects.
<p>
<li>There
was nothing good to say about <b>religion</b>.
<p>
<li>There
was even less good to say about <b>non-European
cultures</b>. If they could not
Europeanize, it was better that they simply disappear.
<p>
<li>History
was a <b>long rise upward</b>; before agriculture, men were simply brutes,
dominated by violence, hunger, and fear.
<p>
<li>One
even found (in science fiction, here as so often the manifestation of
contemporary wishes and fears) the expectation that organic life itself
was a sort of rot, a corruption to be superseded by intelligent machines.
<p>
<li>Even <b>democracy</b>, the triumph of 19C
(= "19<sup>th</sup> century") liberalism, was on the defensive. As William Shirer memorably related,
people who believed in democracy in interwar Germany were an embattled and
discredited minority; one form or another of absolutism waited in the
wings. As late as the '40s, C.S. Lewis (in <i>Mere Christianity</i>)
found it necessary to depict democratic liberalism as merely one
alternative for a Christian, beside socialism and fascism.
</ul>
<p>So what happened?
<h3>Well, communism failed, of course</h3>
<img src="illo/predmao.jpg" align=left alt="Mao Zedong">
<p>By this time, it's such a commonplace that communism doesn't
work that it's hard-- especially for Americans-- to understand why anyone ever
thought it would. But remember the
'30s, when the capitalist nations had all knocked themselves into grinding
poverty, and Soviet industry, unaffected by the collapse, was burgeoning. Soon fascist industry added to the shame;
liberal capitalism looked like it was running a distant third. And in the '50s, analysts worried themselves
silly over the Soviet growth rate, which by some measures was three times that
of the U.S.
<p>What wasn't realized at the time was that this growth
differential said nothing about capitalism vs. communism. It wasn't that the Soviets were good at
running an economy; it was that dirt-poor countries can achieve massive gains
in production by increasing, educating, and urbanizing the labor force, and by
plowing a huge proportion of industrial output back into increased production (as
opposed to, say, more consumer goods).
Russia did this after the Revolution; Singapore and the other Asian
Tigers did it in the '60s and '70s; China is undergoing the process today.
<p>But it's a finite change that can only be done once. You can double your workforce participation
from 27% to 51% of the population, as Singapore did; you can't double it
again. Further gains depend on
increasing productivity. Americans (and
Japanese) are good at this; the Soviets never got the hang of it. Once they reached modern levels of
production, they ground to a halt.
<p>This not-yet-familiar story is told in more detail in
<a href="http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/myth.html)">Paul Krugman's Nov. 1994 <i>Foreign Affairs </i>article</a>;
see also his recent <i>The Return of Depression Economics.</i>
<p>
<h3>It's down, but is it out?</h3>
<p><img src="illo/predchomsky.jpg" align=right alt="Noam Chomsky">
These days even Noam Chomsky's rag <i>Z</i> concedes that socialism is "undemocratic, often uncoordinated,
and wasteful"; and a reissue of Rius's <i>Marx for Beginners</i> has to reassure readers that the Soviet Union wasn't what
Marx had in mind.
<p>I wouldn't write socialism off quite so fast, for several
reasons.
<ul>
<li>Socialism is like Christianity: <b>it might work if anyone tried it</b>.
Rius's backtracking is not entirely foolish: people are normally taken
in by labels, and consider the Soviet system to be socialistic because it said
it was. But to say that the workers
controlled the means of production in the USSR is to make a bad joke. It was basically a state monopoly with
control firmly in the hands of a small managerial class.
<p>Not that you should trust those
backtracking socialists: back when the USSR was a going concern, they or their
predecessors were happy to claim it as a model, rejoicing that the evils of
"property" had been eliminated for a quarter of the globe. People who can't say "We goofed" are the
last folks you want to put in power.
<p>
<li>Socialism means
many things</b>, some of them untried, some of them tried with great success
under capitalism. The open-source
movement doesn't deserve its messianic pretensions, but exists as a living
rebuke to property and profit. (For an
intro see Neal Stephenson's <i><a href="http://pauillac.inria.fr/~lang/libre/reperes/beginning_print.html">In the
Beginning was the Command Line</a></i>.)
<p>
<li>And for that matter it's
fascinating how many of our institutions, from families to faculties to
churches to law firms to condo associations, are organized internally along
socialist lines (relying on common ownership, and making decisions based on the
common good).
<p>
<li>Extreme forms of socialism are <b>a disease of capitalism</b>, and become stronger whenever capitalism
indulges its penchant for mistreating the poor. Is it really such a a hot idea to keep twenty percent of the
population struggling, suspicious, and well-armed? How long will emerging markets be content to make outside
investors happy by following economic prescriptions (e.g. raising interest
rates and reducing government spending during a recession) that are the
opposite of those used by rich countries and that send their economies into a
tailspin?
</ul>
<p>Still, I only point this out because I'm a contrarian
myself, and distrust things that "everybody knows". For the purposes of politics, it doesn't much matter whether
socialism really failed, or is simply perceived to have done so.
<h3>The revenge of the organic</h3>
<p>Our present-day suspicion of communism is only part of a
larger trend. In almost every area, the
hubris of the early 20<sup>th</sup> century has been punished. The natural and the unplanned have
triumphed.
<ul>
<li>It turns out that <b>market economies</b>-- once
liberalism has smoothed out their rough edges-- are mighty fine distributors
of goods. Markets do a better job
of reconciling the differing goals and capacities of millions of people
than central planning.
<p>
<li><p><img src="illo/predjane.gif" align=left alt="Jane Jacobs">
Architects have rediscovered the virtues of human-scaled, miscellaneous, quirky,
vital <b>cities</b>. The skyscraper in a park-- instantiated
as many a low-income housing project-- turns out to be a nightmare. Only
French presidents still prefer <i>la
ville radieuse </i>to downtown Paris. The classic readings here are Jane Jacobs (<i>The Death and Life of Great American Cities</i>) and Christopher
Alexander (<i>A Pattern Language</i>).
<p>
<li>People,
by the billions, are <b>not learning
Esperanto</b>. I'll save my
opinions on why this is for another time, but for now let's just note that
languages turn out to be more complicated and more finely tuned to human
needs than language tinkerers realize. Even among conlangs, the most popular recent invention is Klingon,
which is a sort of linguistic celebration of the ornery.
<p>
<li>We
know far more than we did in 1900... and we talk far more about <b>limits on knowledge</b>. Quantum mechanics puts limits on what
we can find out about the physical universe, and destroys Leibnizian
determinism. Gödel diminished our
faith in pure mathematics. Evolutionary psychology and cultural materialism (to say nothing of
the <a href="memes.html">pseudo-science of memetics</a>) tell us that
many of our cherished beliefs are the results of natural selection. Deconstructionists maintain that
everybody's ideas but their own are merely the result of social
conditioning.
<p>
<li>The <b>ancestral
environment </b>gets a lot more respect these days-- after all, it's what we
evolved to fit, and the evidence is that it was a fairly pleasant
environment for hundreds of thousands of years. Hunter-gatherers were healthier, less violent, more relaxed,
and less hierarchical than agriculturalists-- only in this century have
societies emerged where the average person is better off.
<p>
<li><b>Non-Western</b> cultures have been
rediscovered, and the idea that they might have something to teach us is
no longer radical. (Of course, one may wonder how deep this openness goes:
many people seem to display their feng shui consultant or their shaman in
much the spirit as they used to decorate with Japanese lacquerware or
African masks. Still, if you doubt
that change has occurred, go back a century and read what people said
about non-Western cultures; the sense of absolute superiority will hit you
like a mugger.)
<p>
<li><b>Artificial intelligence</b> turned out
to be a lot harder than expected. After easy triumphs in chess and algebra, it bogged down in the
morass of everyday intelligence human beings master by the age of four
(including language).
<p>
<li><img src="illo/preddeming.gif" align=right alt="W. Edwards Deming">The
Frederick Winslow Taylor style of 'scientific' <b>management</b> is being
outperformed by more humanistic approaches. It turns out that the workers, not the managers, know how to
do their jobs; management is there to give them the tools to do it. For more on this see Robert Levering's <i>A
Great Place to Work</i>, or W. Edwards Deming (best known for his work on quality,
but a severe critic of American management as well).
</ul>
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<h1><a name="screed">The paradox of liberalism</a></h1>
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<p>The response to the 19C pundit is, then: it turns out
communism doesn't work so well-- it's outperformed by liberal capitalism.
<p>
<p>However, this just reintroduces the mystery on a deeper
level. If liberalism won out over both
laissez-faire capitalism and communism, why aren't we all liberals? Why doesn't anyone admit to being one? Why is liberalism in embattled retreat? Who are all these conservatives anyway?
<h2>What is this, how you say, liberalism?</h2>
<p>
<p>What is liberalism? Scholars often amuse themselves in their first chapters writing
gerrymandered definitions of things; if you like that sort of thing, I'd say
that liberals believe in <b>equality of opportunity</b> but <b>not of results</b>.
<p>
<p>In other words, in the game of life we should all start out
at about the same place, but there's no maximum level of attainment. That neatly divides us from leftists, who
would prefer some sort of ceiling, and from rightists, who don't believe in the
level floor.
<p>
<p>As a linguist, though, I consider definitions to be
artificial constructions; most words are really generalizations from
prototypes. So I'd rather talk about
the quintessential causes and coalitions of liberalism; and those have evolved
over time.
<ul>
<li>
<b>The New Deal core</b>: the use of government to mitigate the excesses of
capitalism: regulation, middle class welfare, and management of the
business cycle.
<p><img src="illo/predroos.jpg" align=right alt="FDR">
Regulation, conservation, and anti-trust law were
originally Republican and Progressive causes.
They were co-opted by the Democrats (especially under Wilson), but it
was Franklin D. Roosevelt who extended them into virtually a new form of
society. Rather as in SimCity,
government would lay down the foundations of society and work to keep it
prosperous, while leaving actual production to the citizens.
<p>The New Deal was the basis for a grand coalition
that dominated American political life from the '30s till the '80s. Mainstream Republicans didn't even attempt
to challenge it, and Eisenhower and Nixon even added to it.
<p>
<li>The <b>civil rights</b> movement. Once the New
Deal became mainstream, civil rights took its place as the defining focus
of liberalism, and the prototype for political action. You could define a liberal as someone
who thinks that legal and economic disenfranchisement backed up by
vigilante terrorism is no way to treat people.
<p>Again, protection of the rights of
blacks was once a <i>Republican</i> issue, but as the party that won the war,
the Republicans became the party of the establishment, and slowly abandoned
their 19C radicalism.
<p>The modern civil rights movement
began in the '40s and '50s-- among blacks, of course. Why then? One common
answer is industrialization, and the need for black labor; but the civil rights
movement began in the South, not the North, and was nurtured in the churches,
not the factories. Perhaps a better
reason is the maturation of black education: black colleges founded in
Reconstruction days were now producing educated black pastors and lawyers.
The 1954 school desegration case could not
have been won by 1870s sharecroppers.
<p>More to the point, perhaps, a war
against fascism had necessarily depended on appeals to egalitarianism and the
common good, and after helping to win the war, blacks were understandably
enraged to be invited down into their old inferiority.
<p><img src="illo/predmlk.jpg" align=left alt="Martin Luther King Jr.">
The key figure in the movement is
Martin Luther King Jr. His non-violent
methods kept the movement on the moral high ground and attracted Northern
sympathy; while his oratorical skills and rooting in the black church mobilized
a large proportion of the black population. (His book on the Montgomery bus boycott,
<i>Stride Toward Freedom</i>, is a good read, and shows how
much grassroots involvement the movement required.
All most modern movements can get out of their members is a
yearly check-- which is perhaps why no one is changing American attitudes like King did.)
<p>It was by no means preordained that
blacks end up with the Democrats rather than the Republicans, who were after
all their original sponsors. Eisenhower
sent federal troops to enforce desegregation; and well into the '60s, the core
of the Democrats' support was Southern whites. But Kennedy tentatively, and Johnson definitively, embraced the cause of
civil rights. Aided by New Deal
egalitarianism and statism, the Democrats moved away from being the party of
the South and toward being the party of Northern liberals.
<p>
<li><b>Modern
liberalism</b>, which has defined itself with issues such as these:
<ul>
<li>Feminism
<li>Environmentalism
<li>More social than defense spending
<li>Gun control and rehabilitation as responses to crime
<li>Campaign finance reform
<li>Freedom of expression
<li>Gay rights
<li>Multiculturalism
</ul>
<p>The models and methods for all of these come from
either the New Deal or the Civil Rights movement. The liberal impulse is a) to solve problems, and b) to solve them
using the state.
<p>
<li><img src="illo/predbill.gif" align=right alt="Bill Clinton">
The latest layer is the <b>New Democrats</b>-- people, like Bill Clinton, who
got tired of watching the Democrats lose elections, and thought that
winning required a move to the center. So, curiously, 'lawnorder' is now a <i>Democratic</i> issue, and
the Republicans find themselves fighting against putting more police on
the streets. Similarly, Clinton
defused the most crowd-pleasing Republican issues-- a balanced budget, free
trade, welfare reduction-- by adopting them as his own.
</ul>
<p>I distinguish liberals from <b>progressives</b>, who can be
recognized theoretically by their belief that The Man is as oppressive as ever,
and operationally by their low-circulation magazines, their Volvos, and their
Third World jewelry. Of course, all
liberal ideas started as progressive or downright revolutionary, but liberalism
has always sought to reform the system; progressives want to replace it. (The contrast is social as well; I always
find it amusing that the uptight, conventional guy in <i>The Return of the
Secaucus Seven</i> is the Democrat.) If
you want to see which faction each of the attendees at the wine and cheese
party belong to, start a discussion on socialism, or on Bill Clinton.
<h3>Liberalism rules, dude</h3>
<p>Liberalism has spent the last twenty years under constant
attack... which is puzzling, since it has been right in all its principles and has won all its battles.
<ul>
<li><b>Government regulation</b>. People
flirt with lunatic libertarianism... but the Fed, the FDIC, and the FDA are
still in business. Laissez-faire
capitalism is great for making a few people rich and the rest of the
country miserable; if 1890s America is hazy in your mind, you can see
<a href="http://www.prospect.org/archives/33/33holmfs.html">the results today in Russia</a>.
<p>Liberal capitalism-- with government regulation of
banks, financial markets, and product safety, and social nets and progressive
taxation to prevent excessive concentration of wealth-- is simply the most
successful economic system yet invented.
<p>Conservatives feel most comfortable in an
aristocracy. But aristocratic nations
are poor nations. (The conservatives
who realize this don't mind it, because they are or feel they should be part of
the elite.)
<p>A luminous exception: Henry Ford, who doubled the
wages of his assembly-line workers-- earning the scorn of the 1920s business
community. Ford, however, saw the
potential of a huge class of consumers rich enough to buy automobiles. Liberal capitalism thrives because a huge
middle class, as in the U.S., is a better market than a small wealthy elite, as
in Brazil.<p>
<li><b>Middle-class welfare</b>. Republicans
have belatedly learned that people love their Social Security. Now instead of attacking this little
sweetmeat of socialism, they argue with the Democrats over who holds it
dearer to their hearts.
<p>
<li><b>Civil rights</b>. Almost everyone today accepts the ideal
of a color-blind society-- even conservatives, who enjoy sporting a few
blacks among their number. "Racist" is one of the few political terms that anyone on the political
spectrum can use as an insult. But
conservatives fought the civil rights movement every step of the way. They still hate affirmative action, but
their very grounds for opposing it-- that it favors particular segments of
society and that color should not be a factor-- is borrowed from '50s
liberalism.
<p>
<li><b>Feminism</b>. Gender equality is not
quite as accepted; but women are in the workforce to stay, and today's
young women grow up expecting to be treated equally in school, at work,
and increasingly in relationships; and the sight of women in positions of
power and prestige is becoming unremarkable. Again, conservatives opposed everything from giving the vote
to women to letting them into "male" jobs to giving them equal pay for
equal work.
<p>
<li><b>The environment</b>.
In order to discredit environmentalism,
conservatives are now reduced to finding the dippiest activists they can
dig up (PETA is a good source); they can no longer directly defend
belching smokestacks, dead lakes, and toxic waste dumps. The need to protect the planet is one
of those things that almost everyone agrees on.
<p>
<li>
<b>Gay rights</b>. <img src="illo/predaudre.jpg" align=left alt="Audre Lorde">
Here no consensus has been reached, but
it's another area where conservatives are simply wrong, and what was
formerly considered troublingly radical-- acceptance of homosexuality-- now
seems like mere human decency. You don't have to like gays and lesbians,
but that's no reason to jail them, fire them, beat them up, or deny their
civil rights. This battle is not
yet won, but it's too late to put the toothpaste back in the tube. We're not going back to classifying
homosexuality as a mental illness or a crime.
</ul>
<p>The left, as opposed to liberalism <i>per se</i>, has
happily extended the civil rights model, and found oppressed groups in the
elderly, in children, Native Americans, illegal aliens, the handicapped,
consumers, bisexuals, the transgendered, sex workers, people with fragrance
allergies, people without good looks, people with various diseases, nudists,
fetishists, various ethnic groups, various non-Western nations, linguistic or religious
minorities, believers in alternative medicine, pagans, atheists, pets, and farm
animals. You could probably map out how
far to the left someone is by finding out which of these groups they consider
to be oppressed. I'd maintain that none
of these are core parts of liberalism, however.
<h3>But not for long</h3>
<p>So, liberalism has been right in every one of its battles,
and conservatives wrong. Shouldn't we
then expect liberals to be f�ted gurus, and conservatives laughed out of
intellectual life, at least till they had apologized for their errors and
revamped their philosophy accordingly?
<p>Well, no-- that's not how human nature works. Movements <b>don't acknowledge error</b>; they quietly adapt to the new
intellectual ecosystem and hope that no one notices. They thrive by staking out <b>strong
positions</b> and claiming absolute truth; this is simply incompatible with an
attitude of thoughtful repentance. (No
one in Russia admired Gorbachev for re-evaluating Stalinism.)
<p>Moreover, successful movements don't stick around, reaping
the plaudits of a grateful citizenry... they disappear or marginalize. You can't get voters excited about battles
that are already won, or principles that are already universal.
<p>We've seen this story before, in fact, with the original <b>Liberal Party</b> in Britain.
It presided over the successful transfer of
power from the landed aristocracy to the newly prosperous middle class-- and
then, its major battles won, found itself superseded and outvoted by the Labour
Party, which had new, strong ideas for workers to rally round.
<p>By contrast, <b>conservativism
never dies</b>. Whatever the economic
or social changes going on, there is always someone to oppose them-- generally
those whose wealth and attitudes were formed by the old system. Society always looks like it's going to the
dogs; simple solutions and an appeal to old rustic or military virtues always
have an appeal.
<h2>Where did all these conservatives come from?</h2>
<img src="illo/predron.gif" align=right alt="Ronald Reagan">
<p>I think I wasn't alone in being <i>surprised</i> at the
'80s. Hadn't liberal capitalism produced
general prosperity? Was anyone really <i>against</i>
civil rights and unions, or <i>for</i> pollution and robber-baron
economics? I knew, of course, of
dinosaurs like Goldwater and McCarthy; but the emphasis was on the past
tense. Richard Nixon, if you put aside
the little matter of the war, was no Reaganite; indeed, he helped <i>build</i>
the welfare state that Reagan attacked.
We used to have flip-a-coin choices like Ford vs. Carter, for heaven's
sake.
<p>Well, I was young. The consies were there all along, but they were divided and marginal and
hadn't taken over the Republican Party yet.
In fact, they were hardly a 'they' yet; the present coalition hadn't yet
been assembled.
<h3>Did the '60s beget the '90s?</h3>
<p>Conservatives usually talk as if the '60s were the decade
when Western Civilization went to hell.
However, a case can be made that the Right learned its essential
strategies from the Left.
<p>
<ul>
<li>If there's an essence to the '60s, it's <b><i>Question authority</i></b>. Radicals despised bourgeois sensibility
and routinely called the republican US a fascist regime. This attitude has been taken up lock,
stock and barrel by conservatives, right down to the accusations of
fascism (remember the NRA's "jack-booted government thugs").
<li>The conservatives obviously learned much from the near-<b>impeachment</b> of Richard Nixon-- not about his abuses of power,
but about how a presidency can be derailed by insistent congressional
investigation.
<li>Likewise, though they decried the "high-tech lynching" of Clarence Thomas, they
learned the use of a powerful political tool: <b>seamy sexual allegations</b> irrelevant to any rational
qualifications for office.
<li>Conservatives
opposed measures pioneered by liberals to clean up government, such as <b>independent prosecutors</b> and
strengthened <b>sexual harrassment</b>
laws-- and protested fiercely when they were the targets-- but were happy to
use them against the Clinton administration.
<li>Liberals like to take the side of victims, and the standard political move for the
last couple of decades has been to assume the status of a <b>victim</b>.
(Perhaps that seems eternal, but it's not. Contrast it with the strategy of (say)
Booker T. Washington: to assume the status of a human being, out-virtuing
one's oppressors.) Conservatives
learned to talk like victims as well, decrying prejudice against Christians
or conservatives or white males.
<li>After years of complaining about the "<b>liberal
media</b>", conservatives figured out what the hippies learned in the
sixties: you can only get media you like by creating it yourselves. There is now a well-funded industry
cranking out right-wing magazines, newspapers, think tank pieces,
websites, and radio shows. You
used to have to live in Reaganesque denial to swallow whoppers like the
"fact" that the US has spent trillions of dollars on the poor with no
result. Now you can read it in the
(right) papers.
</ul>
<p>For more similarities between right and left, see my page on
<a href="leqr.html"><i>Left and Right: Birds of a feather?</i></a>
<p>In short, the sixties shattered the <b>American social compact</b> that dated from the New Deal-- a
near-consensus on the goodness of our bedrock institutions: benign government,
tireless industry, a prospering middle class, strong but apolitical churches;
political parties that increasingly resembled each other.
<p>The '60s radicals scorned all of these, talked of revolution
and spiritual transformation, and spotlighted the dark side of traditional
wisdom. The '80s conservatives
continued this <b>rejection of the common
good</b>, denying any connection to the poor, feeling no need to share the
wealth generated by industry, and pressing their own vision of a morally
bankrupt nation.
<p>Not that the left invented a distrust of the state, of
course. Anti-statism is a long
tradition in American politics-- see Garry Wills's <i>A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government</i>
(1999)<i>-- </i> but since the Civil War it
had been relegated to the fringe. The
'60s made it fashionable, and the '80s made it part of the mainstream.
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<h1>Field guide to the North American politico</h1>
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<p>There's several ways to think about the political divide in
this country.
<ul>
<li><b>Left</b> vs. <b>right</b>. If you're
left-wing, this means "progressives vs. reactionaries"; if you're
right-wing, it means "reasonable decent people vs. socialists".
<li>The
four-way analysis from the Libertarian Party website. They posit two dimensions, <b>social</b>
and <b>economic</b>. You can be <b>laissez-faire</b>
or <b>statist</b> on the economy; and you can be <b>permissive</b> or <b>restrictive</b>
socially. That makes for four
combinations:
<ul>
<li>Statist + permissive = <b>left-liberal</b>
<li>Statist + restrictive = <b>authoritarian</b>
<li>Laissez-faire + permissive = <b>libertarian</b>
<li>Laissez-faire + restrictive = <b>right conservative</b>
</ul>
<li>George Lakoff's analysis (in <i>Moral Politics</i>) of liberalism and
conservativism as two extended <b>metaphors</b> based on differing views
on <b>family life</b>: the <b>Strict Father</b> and the <b>Nurturant
Parent</b> moralities.
<li><b>Pro- vs. anti-government</b>-- the set of values Garry Wills explicates in his
book.
<li>Michael Lind's <b>regional</b> analysis, <a href="http://www.salon.com/politics2000/feature/2000/03/06/lind/index.html">as explained at <i>Salon</i></a>.
<li>The
orthodox <b>Christian</b> view, in which political movements are judged
based on their seeming compatibility with Christian morality.
<li>The <b>Marxist</b> view, whose goals derive from a 19C German tailor's idea of what
industrial workers want. More
charitably, this view divides people into haves and have-nots. Applied to 20C America, it turns out
that most people, including Democrats, are haves... and left-leaning haves
are if anything despised more than out-and-out reactionaries.
<li><b>Administration</b> vs. <b>opposition</b>. Some things are best explained by considering
who's in power and who's not.
</ul>
<p>These views overlap in some ways, contradict in others. They're all simplifying metaphors, imposing
some order on a complex reality, and each has its pluses and minuses.
<h4>A metaphor from the French Revolution well past its sell-by date</h4>
<p><img src="illo/predduce.jpg" align=left alt="Not Richard Nixon">
<b>Left/right</b> is absurdly reductionist. It's fashionable today for conservatives to
affect difficulty in distinguishing Lloyd Bentsen from Noam Chomsky from Josef
Stalin... just as it was fashionable in the '60s for progressives to confound
Richard Nixon and Mussolini. The danger
is that one can come to believe one's own rhetoric. Not making distinctions is a sign of insanity.
<p>You will not
understand such phenomena as the alliance of feminist and religious anti-porn
crusaders, or progressives' hatred of Bill Clinton, or the fight over free
trade, if you cling to a left/right dichotomy. And any analyses you attempt will be vitiated by misunderstandings.
A correspondent, for instance, informed me
that Republicans value "the individual" while Democrats prefer "<b>the</b> <b>collective</b>".
That's right-- except where it's completely
wrong, as with the Democrats' support of the ACLU, which champions individual
rights. And it's conservatives, not
liberals, who want communities to be able to force the local atheists to pray
with them and pay for their religious schools.
<p><a name="flip">And yet</a>, because we have a two-party system, positions do
tend to <b>polarize</b> in a binary fashion. So there are bundles of ideas that come to be labelled Democratic and
Republican. But much of the time the
particular views in the bundle are more to be explained by a spirit of
contentiousness than by principle.
<ul>
<li>Republicans
decried special prosecutors when Reagan was being investigated, loved them
when Clinton was under the gun.
<li>Democrats
were all for pursuing sexual allegations against Clarence Thomas, but grew
suspicious of the tactic when it came to Clinton.
<li>Progressives
lambasted the Gulf War, but found themselves gunning for a fight in
Bosnia. Republicans found no need
to fight there, but were all for projecting our presence in Grenada (pop.
100,000) and Somalia.
<li>Republicans
lambasted Hillary Clinton for suggesting that children could have legal
rights opposed to those of their parents� until Eli�n Gonz�lez came along.
</ul>
<p>
<p>These flip-flops are reminders that many a political battle
is nothing but that. People who insist
on interpreting everything ideologically inevitably dance between contradictory
positions, following motions of their leaders which are not ideological at all.
<h4>The libertarian square</h4>
<p>The <b>four-way</b> libertarian analysis could be used to
predict the existence of two branches in each of the major parties:
<p>
<ul>
<li>Republicans
are divided into libertarians (e.g. Newt Gingrich) and social
conservatives (e.g. the Religious Right)
<li>Democrats
are divided into liberals (e.g. Hillary Clinton) and authoritarians (e.g.,
er... Jesse Jackson? Joe Lieberman?)
</ul>
<p>
<p>This is a good first step toward understanding the
Republican coalition... but it's less helpful with the Democrats. It doesn't capture, for instance, the divide
between moderates (what I've called liberal capitalists above) and progressives
(people who want extreme reforms of an exploitative system).
<p>And it seems to miss the point to talk about an
"authoritarian" wing of the party; this faction is usually just called
"blacks". Blacks tend to be fairly
conservative socially, but they throw their lot in with the Dems because it's
the only way to get more pie.
<p>This view also does not explain why Republican libertarians
ally themselves with the religious right-- doesn't it bother them to have allies
that would support government intrusion into personal life? And shouldn't they
feel as close to left-liberals (who share their dedication
to personal liberty) as to right-conservatives (who differ with them on this)?
<p>Lakoff maintains that the libertarians are simply a close
variant of conservatives, who emphasize pragmatism and noninterference by
government more than other conservatives. Thus libertarians support civil liberties, but for very different
reasons than liberals: out of a conservative concern with self-reliance and
adult independence from the
parent/government, not from a liberal concern with equality and fairness.
<h4>Lakoff's metaphors</h4>
<p>I can't do justice to Lind, Lakoff, or Wills in a paragraph
or two... and <i>reconciling</i> them would take a
long essay in itself. Suffice to
say that all three of them are worth reading.
<p><img src="illo/predlakoff.jpg" align=right alt="George Lakoff">
I think <b>Lakoff</b> does an excellent job explaining to
liberals how such seemingly disaparate elements as opposition to abortion,
support for gun ownership, 'family values', and opposition to pro-family
legislation, all fit together into one metaphorical package.
<p>In particular, he's good at explaining why conservatives
just don't get worked up about suffering, at least if it's not their own. They're like Calvin's dad: they think
suffering builds character. It's a
dog-eat-dog world out there, son, and if the bleeding hearts really succeeded
in making it as safe and nice as a kindergarten, what would become of the manly
virtues?
<p>(As a corollary, if you want bipartisan support, don't talk
about <i>feelings</i>. Leftists love to
delve into psychology, and worry about the psychological trauma of racism, or
how patriarchy is encoded in texts. This just infuriates consies, who are not simply 'not in touch with
their feelings', but take pride in rising above them-- that is, ignoring them.)
<p>Tellingly, the best research shows that the 'strict father'
metaphor actually makes for lousy parenting.
The root problem: it produces children with an external conscience-- in
other works, people who behave only when other people are watching. To this we might add Robert Levering's
finding, that workplaces that promote fair treatment of workers are also the
most profitable businesses, as well as the fact that liberal democracies work
better than Pinochet-style oligarchy. �
The hierarchical alpha male worldview fails on its own hardheaded
terms. (Not that there's any arguing
with its proponents; it's too central to their sense of self-worth.)
<h4>Wills on the anti-government complex</h4>
<p><img src="illo/predwills.jpg" align=left alt="Garry Wills">
<b>Wills </b>is not trying to explain everything in
politics, but only the peculiarly American notion that government per se is
evil. Wills traces it back to
Revolutionary times-- and shows that much modern conservative palaver about the
minutemen and the Constitution is romantic balderdash. The minutemen did not win the war, and the
Constitution was not intended to create a divided, small, inefficient
government-- quite the reverse.
<p>But the anti-government meme is not about facts, it's about
myth. It's part of a complex of values
that have exerted a powerful hold over the American mind-- a preference for the
provincial over the cosmopolitan, the amateur over the expert, the voluntary
over the mandatory, the organic over the mechanical, the authentic over the
authoritarian, rights over duties, religion over secularism, spontaneity over
efficiency.
<p>The most curious element of this story is that these
oppositions are <b>orthogonal</b> to "left vs. right" or "conservative vs.
liberal", and indeed the left and right have flip-flopped on these issues more
than once in this century. In the
sixties, it was the left that celebrated anarchy, spontaneity, authenticity,
the organic, the local, the spiritual-- to say nothing of the desirability of
armed rebellion-- and it was the right that demanded (as Pogo had it)
"lawnorder". Today we find leftists
defending the use of force by NATO or the Attorney General, and right-wingers
blowing up civil servants.
<h4>Lind's regional tribes</h4>
<p><b>Lind</b> has a fascinating story to tell. What he addresses straight on is the odd
political reversal that occurred a generation ago: the Republican and
Democratic parties switched consituencies.
The Republicans used to be the party of Northerners, of blacks, and even
of progressives. The Democrats were the
Southern party. The South shifted from
Democratic to Republican, starting in the '60s
<p>However, Lind suffers from a disease shared by too many
political thinkers: an urge to fit everyone into snug little boxes-- "Yankee",
"Southron", "New Dealer", "Left-liberal", etc. At least he has more than two boxes. But I think each of his categories is each more complex than he
recognizes. And there seems to be no
place in his story for religion or for historical change... is the political
behavior of an Atlanta systems analyst of 2000 really exactly the same as that
of a Georgia planter of 1840? And some
of his 'rules' for making alliances are
questionable... that blacks and 'Southrons' can't be in the same party, for
instance. They were for a generation,
from the New Deal till the '60s.
<h4>Good (= us) vs. evil (= them)</h4>
<p>The Christian morality play is as unsatisfactory as any of
the other binary models; but at least it has the virtue of placing <b>religion</b>,
which has been of primary importance in many an American political movement, at
center stage<b>. </b>If you're
irreligious and know only of the Religious Right, by the way, you're as
willfully stupid as those right-wingers who see commies wherever they
look. The civil rights movement, for
instance, was based in the black churches; it's not an accident that Dr. King
was a pastor. And to this day there is
a religious left, which would be a natural ally of progressives if they knew
where to look.
<h4>Marxism</h4>
<p>The <b>Marxist</b> view... and its mirror-image, Randism... are
tedious, not to mention dangerous; but it can be bracing and informative to
look for the power relationships in any political situation. Who benefits from a proposal? Whose point of view is easily predicted from
their financial interests? Who runs an
institution, and how can it go wrong? These are essential questions that are invaluable for intelligent
thinkers of any political point of view.
<h4>Who's on first?</h4>
<p>A party isn't just a constituency or an ideology-- it's also a
<b>party in power</b> or out of power, and that affects political discourse
more than we usually think. The party
in power, no matter what its beliefs, tends to defend state power and specific
governmental actions. The opposition,
no matter what <i>it </i>believes, tends to criticize the state. After all, it's not going to
get back in power by praising the administration. Some cases in point
(besides the <a href="#flip">flip-flops mentioned earlier)</a>:
<ul>
<li>The U.S.'s China policy: perenially the administration, Democratic or
Republican, defends its rapprochement with the regime, while the
opposition criticizes this appeasement of the communists.
<li>Half
the "politics" stories on CNN consist of the Republicans nit-picking
something the administration's done.
Of course it was the other way around when Reagan and Bush were in power.
<li>The
fact that Republican Governors are, as a whole, more pragmatic and
moderate than Republicans in Congress.
For the most part they try to deliver and improve state services... rather
than undermine or eliminate them like good anti-government libertarians
should.
</ul>
<p>Long-term power (such as the Democrats enjoyed for a
generation) makes a party fat and lazy, and makes the opposition cranky,
reckless... and occasionally reflective. They have to be open to new ideas to get back in power, since their old
thoughts landed them in minority status.
<p>There's an inertia effect here as well.
The Republicans have controlled Congress for
six years, but they still seem to think like an aggrieved minority, and do
reckless things like impeaching the President or shutting down the
government.
<td width=10%>
</table>
<h1>Meet the Rightists</h1>
<table width="100%">
<tr><td width="10%">
<td>
<p>Let me try to put some of this together in an analysis of
who makes up the Republican party, and how they got there.
<p>I'd better stick in another <b>general apology</b>: these
are the ruminations of a bemused outsider (except for the bits on religion,
which I do know something about). Insiders could explain things better, avoid some mistakes, tell what
it's really like to be there. On the
other hand, insiders can be lousy at analyzing their own group. They want to expatiate on principle instead
of admitting the human tensions and frailties which are more relevant and more
interesting to outsiders; they can't set aside their assumptions even to
explain what they are; what they say about their opponents is vitiated by
tedious bias. I mean, just look at <a href="#screed">this
screed on liberalism</a>. So, an
outsider's view can be worth looking at.
<h4>Money</h4>
<p><img src="illo/predrocky.gif" align=right alt="John D. Rockefeller">
First, there was big money, which didn't have to come to the
party because it was already there. The
Republicans have been the Money Party since the civil war-- and that's no
coincidence; after the war they were the Northern Party, the people who won the
war, the people who were creating the modern industrial economy.
<p>If you look at the <i>rhetoric</i> of the Republicans, you'd
think the party is the playground of the fundies and/or libertarians. But the Reps in power don't do what they <i>say</i>
they will (thank God). If you look at
what they actually <i>do</i>, it's pretty much dictated by what big business
thinks will be good for it: free trade, except where foreigners can do things
better than us; subsidies for business, reducing taxes on the rich, bailing out
failed S&Ls, opposing minor impediments to business like universal health
care, unions, and regulation.
<p>The rich control this country; the richest 5% of families
own 40% of the national wealth. Its
only problem, really, is that to win elections you need not only money but
masses of warm (or at least registered) bodies. So they need allies.
<p>It's not written in stone that those allies must be the
religious right. There are Democratic
rich people, after all, and if the rich go in for religion they generally
prefer something a little more subdued, like Anglicanism or Reform
Judaism. The Democrats are
pro-business, but <i>their </i>power base includes unions, disenfranchised
minorities, and statist academics-- all of whom are going to want to push the
government's nose into business. The
rich can work with these people if they have to-- e.g. back when the Dems
controlled Congress-- but it's no surprise that they find the social
conservatives more congenial. Those
folks are fervent and numerous, and since their main concerns are social they
won't stand in the way of business.
<h4>The religious right</h4>
<p>
There's the Religious Right, of course. This can be more narrowly divided into
fundamentalists, evangelicals, and Catholics, each of which has slightly
different understandings of religion and the state.
<h5>From complacent to outraged</h5>
<p><img src="illo/predjesus.jpg" align=left alt="Jesus">
Fundies were not always Republicans. For theological reasons they tend to
distrust <i>all</i> worldly institutions, and arguably their natural state is
to shun politics and keep to their little enclaves, getting right with God and
watching the world go to hell.
Historically, they've erupted into the political scene several times
(last time, they were for William Jennings Bryan in a big way), and they ended
up leaving in disgust when things didn't go their way.
<p>The father of a friend of mine is typical, I think, of a
certain type of old-time fundie. He's
socially conservative-- very-- but politically his roots are Chicago Democrat.
He's a union man, and distrustful of big
business... and the British, for some reason.
He's a strong father, in Lakoff's sense, and a Nordic in Lind's.
He's always voted more in line with his
union principles than his religious views.
<p>Fundies have always found something to despise in society;
but I think the '60s snapped them out of their complacency. Jazz and cigarettes were bad enough, but for
God's sake, these hippies were getting naked, taking drugs, and questioning
authority. Riots and bombings,
increased crime, and lawsuits against school prayer showed that things were truly
spiralling out of control. Feminism
seemed like an attack on the way things should be.
And above all there was abortion, which was not just perverse but truly evil.
<h5>How they got into politics</h5>
<p>Hard as it is to picture now, it was a Democrat, Jimmy
Carter, who first attracted conservative Christians as a bloc. He was one of them, after all; and his party
was the traditional home of social conservatives. But Carter was discredited by Iranians and economic doldrums, and
his "malaise" couldn't hold a candle to Ronald Reagan's sunny certainties.
<p>
How did a divorced second-tier actor who didn't even attend
church win the support of legions of Christians?
And maintain it, despite twenty years' evidence that Reagan and
his successors were paying mainly lip service to their concerns, taking action
only on items of concern to libertarians and businessmen?
<p><img src="illo/predjerry.jpg" align=right alt="Jerry Falwell">
Part of it was Carter's talk of "malaise". Fundies don't want to hear people dissing
America; the American Way is as much a part of their theology as the King James
Version. Another important factor was
abortion, which only the Republicans promised to roll back.
<p>There was also disaffection in the air. Economically, there was stagflation and the
energy crisis. People were feeling
pinched, and bad times make people more conservative. And the sixties were widely perceived to have produced social
chaos.
<p>And again, liberalism had gone mainstream, and therefore (as
with the British Liberals) run out of steam. No one fights hard for mainstream ideas. The people who cared about the Democrats in the '70s were progressives,
and they managed to alienate the ethnics and Southerners who had previously
been important parts of the coalition; most spectacularly in the unseating of
the Daley delegation at the 1972 convention.
<h5>Their noisy but unsuccesful tenure</h5>
<p>Back in the '80s, it seemed like the fundies were going to
take over everything; and the feeling returned in 1994 when the Repubs took
control of Congress. Yet somehow, in
six years, they haven't got around to recriminalizing abortion, or legalizing
organized school prayer, or subsidizing religious schools, or censoring
Hollywood. These would have been huge
fights; but parties will fight for what they really believe in.
<p>The impeachment and trial of Clinton made things even
clearer: though there is a solid core of Clinton-haters in the country, they
are simply a minority, no more than 25% of the electorate, and it turns out to
be a bad, bad move to let that 25% dictate policy. It's no accident that the top Republican candidates in 2000, Bush
and McCain, tried to put across a softer, more widely appealing image.
<h4>Libertarians</h4>
<p>Then there's the <b>libertarians</b>. These come in several flavors.
You could describe big money as libertarian,
since it likes laissez-faire and courts fundies but ignores their demands.
But big money is a good deal more pragmatic
and socially traditional than hard-core libertarians. Businessmen are not clamoring to repeal the drug laws, privatize
the interstates, or allow gays to marry. And frankly, they don't <i>need</i> libertarianism to prosper.
The system already works for them.
<p>Billionaires
don't need extra stroking. When you
have power, that's satisfying in itself; if anything, you think about endowing
a charity. As well, people with real
power are not likely to have an adversarial relationship with government. Cabinet officers, after all, return their
phone calls, and Congressmen listen closely when they speak. Why fix what isn't broken?
<p><img src="illo/predrand.jpg" align=left alt="Ayn Rand">
A more typical libertarian, I suspect, is one of my recent correspondents, who
earnestly explained that prosperity was not based on "brute labor", but on
"clever thinking". That's pure Randism;
but the guy makes $14,000 a year. What's the story here? Randism
seems to be built for billionaires. It's a transparent reponse to socialism: When people are calling for
your blood as exploiters, it's mighty comforting to be told that your place at
the top of the heap is heroic and even moral.
<p>I suspect Randian rhetoric appeals <i>most</i> to folks like my $14K/year
correspondent-- basically, smart whites who have a grudge against the
system. They're not doing as well as
they'd like, but they're not in enough difficulty that liberals pay them any
heed. Rand crystalizes for them their
suspicion of socialism and the welfare state, and assures them that their
ambition and hard work are the marks of future Nietzschean overlords. There's also a particular pleasure in being
contrarian, in not merely opposing but scornfully <i>rejecting</i> the liberal
idea that one should resist misery and injustice. It's a miserable and unjust world, baby! We are <i>winners</i>, and damn the
losers! Only they're not exactly
winning yet. Something must be holding
them back. Ah, the government!
<p>I can't take Rand seriously, because I've worked for some of those "clever
thinkers", and they were no Randian heroes. The founder of the first firm I worked for, for instance. I salute the clever idea that started the
company. Problem was, he never had any
more. He went off on one failed scheme
after another, while brute labor such as myself kept the company making money
to pay for his play. Eventually he was
kicked out, and the money brought in another clever thinker, who proceeded,
over five years, to halve the size of the company and leave the stock worthless
in a booming economy.
<p>Libertarians,
like <a href="baudri.html">French intellectuals</a>, are also too fond of argumentation so abstract that
it has no particular relationship to reality.
They like to justify property, for instance, as compact between some
undefined primitives at some epoch when it was clear that fencing off land
couldn't harm anyone else. This is
dubious enough at the theoretical level-- even if it didn't harm the non-owners
in 4500 BC, who says it doesn't today?-- but it's criminally absurd as history.
Just as a starter, after all, virtually
every piece of property in the United States was ultimately stolen from the
Indians, who've suffered greatly for it (those who survived the massacres and
the relocations and the diseases). Anyone who owns some of that property-- such as myself-- has to come up with
<i>some</i> specious bit of special pleading in order to live with
themselves; but let's not insult our own intelligence by pretending that the
process was completely moral.
<h4>Illiberals</h4>
<p>A difficult category is <b>people who just don't like
liberalism</b>. These are the people
who (say) send me e-mail contesting my editorials. I've never seen a good analysis that explains these people. They're generally not fundamentalists, or businessmen, or Southerners, or even (say) white ethnics competing with blacks for jobs. They may be libertarians, but
not extremely so-- they generally don't vote Libertarian, and don't seem to
advocate simply tossing out the government.
I'm not sure if they buy into Lakoff's "strict father" metaphor, though
it's likely that they <i>don't</i> accept the opposing "nurturing parent"
metaphor. They're not generally rich;
some of the most fervent consies I know make substantially less than the median
salary.
<p>Some elements of a tentative explanation:
<ul>
<li>The
Democratic Party is still <i>run</i> by moderate liberals; but the more <b>radical
wing</b> is louder and gets more press-- especially in the rightist
media. And the progressives'
agenda (gay rights, suspicion of big business, affirmative action,
PETA-style environmentalism, multi-culturalism, lower defense spending)
and their anti-white, anti-male, anti-Christian rhetoric works like sodium
on water for some people. They are
unable to dismiss it as a fringe phenomenon; they find it outrageous and
frightening, and it taints the whole Democratic Party for them.<p>
<li>Many
people's views are formed in <b>college</b>, and progressives and radicals
are not only more prominent there, but are in positions of authority. This may be the first exposure many
young suburbanites have to progressive ideas, and they become allergic to
it. They fail to realize, however,
that academia is a small, strange subculture, and that progressives'
presence there is an anomaly.<p>
<li>The
country is <b>too rich</b> for progressive causes to be understood, much
less championed. When prosperity
moved people into the middle class, they took up middle class
politics-- liberalism. A substantial
number of people, however, have moved into the upper class, and they've
adopted upper-class politics-- conservativism. <p>
<li>As a
corollary of the last two points: the people we're talking about <b>just</b>
<b>don't know</b> <b>anything</b> about what it's like to live in the
ghetto, or to be gay-bashed, or to have no health insurance. They judge liberal sentiments based on
their own experience, and of course condemn them... hey, <i>I</i> don't need
state assistance, why should Joe Black in downtown Detroit? And, frankly, these folks are not very
good at empathy. Lakoff comes
closest to an explanation for this-- empathy is a central part of the "nurturing
parent" model; it has a place in the "strict father" model, but subjugated
to such virtues as self-reliance and order.<p>
<li>I
wonder if Frank Sullivan's theories about <b>firstborns and laterborns</b>
fits in here. Firstborns tend to
be more conservative; they easily adopt adult values and feel comfortable
in the world as it is. Laterborns
are more rebellious (they have to be to get any attention; they can never
outcompete the older brother in maturity). I suspect that firstborns are going to feel ill at ease
with liberalism.
</ul>
<p>Several reasons arise out of liberalism's <b>long tenure</b>:
the Democrats ran Congress for nearly forty years, and liberals-- counting
Nixon and Ford as social centrists-- controlled the Adminstration for half a
century.
<ul>
<li>Liberalism
has <b>succeeded too well</b>, in that it's no longer perceived as
fighting for things that most people need or want. Social security, unemployment
insurance, the FDIC, the FDA, a fair amount of freedom for minorities and
women-- these were popular battles, because they benefitted the middle class
which still makes up the majority of Americans. The progressive agenda is now perceived as fighting for
minorities only. And a political
movement cannot survive based solely on empathy.
<p>
<li><b>Decades-long tenure </b>is bad in itself. It's
not good for a political party to hold power for a long time; it becomes
complacent, stops examining its methods, and even dips into
corruption.
<p>
<li>It also <b>stops explaining itself</b> with any eloquence or passion. Many noisy consies, such as <i>Salon</i>'s
David Horowitz, were once liberals; their descriptions of what liberalism
is are usually unrecognizable, and their reasons for leaving it are
adolescent. (E.g. one recent
apostate decided that conservativism was more 'sensible'; his example was
that the homeless weren't disadvantaged people, but street lunatics.
So, it was just 'sensible' to keep
blacks from voting or holding good jobs? And the 'sensible' way to treat lunatics is to keep them as filthy,
drunken vagrants?)
<p>Similarly, many people abandon the Christianity of
their childhood without ever achieving an adult understanding of their
religion. They think they've left the
religion for rational reasons, when all they've defeated is the Sunday-school
simplification of it.
<p>
<li>Finally, there's <b><i>post hoc propter hoc</i></b>. Long-term liberal rule gets blamed for everything that went
wrong in the world during its tenure, from hippie excesses to the drug
epidemic to rising crime to communism.
</ul>
<h4>Hierarchs</h4>
<p>Another (overlapping) category is <b>hierarchs</b>-- people
who believe that some people are superior to others. Of course, this describes everyone, in some fashion. But liberalism as a whole denies many
traditional claims of superiority, such as those based on religion, race,
gender, orientation, and culture, and promotes equality of all persons (at
least) under the law. Many people, to
put it mildly, feel out of sympathy with this view.
<p>This particularly hits certain groups:
<ul>
<li>Christianity thinks hierarchically: there is a scale of
value from brute matter, to living things, to humans, to angels, to God; and
Christians traditionally and unapologetically made sharp divisions of value
within the 'human' category, too.
<li>The military depends on hierarchy-- it can hardly do its
job if obedience to superiors hasn't become second nature.
<li>And the successful in life-- or those who identify with
them-- find hierarchy congenial. It's human nature to assume that you are <i>and should be </i>on top
because you're a superior being.
</ul>
<p>The hierarch in extreme form is of course the <b>bigot</b>. Liberals should not think that every
conservative is an unreconstructed redneck who viscerally hates blacks, gays,
Jews, and immigrants. But they're out
there, and there's enough of them for their vote to matter. They put Republican leaders into an uncomfortable
bind. If they pander to the bigots,
they'll be severely criticized, and may even lose the respect of moderate
members of their party. But if they
attack them, it's bye-bye to their votes. Not surprisingly, the usual solution is weasel-speak and code
words.
<p>Democrats have the opposite problem. There are
anti-white bigots, of course, but also various radicals and progressives whose
agenda is completely impossible in today's political climate. Bill Clinton has an amazing ability
to walk this tightrope.
In 1992 he gained moderate cred by attacking Sister Souljah; and he's
pursued a largely center-right program. Yet he projects compassion and
listening ability, especially in person, to the extent that Toni Morrison
called him "our first Black president".
<p>(Gore, who doesn't share this ability, has decided to simply fight Bush for the
center, a tactic which leaves his left wing dangerously weak.)
<p><img src="illo/predmenc.gif" align=right alt="H.L. Mencken">
A genteel subcategory of hierarchs is the <b>antidemocrat</b>-- generally
a cultivated man of leisure, who does not scruple to disparage the "mass-man"
and lament that he can vote. Wills's
book provides a brief tour, highlighting Thoreau, H.L. Mencken, and Albert Jay
Nock, an early inspiration for William F. Buckley (and thus an influence on
American conservativism).
<p>It's
hard not to smile at the educated misanthrope, so toad-fatuous in his own
self-congratulation, so gleefully vicious toward his fellow humans. One smiles less at (say) Nock's expressions
of sympathy for the Final Solution ("Thinking over Hitler's antisemitism, one
is forced to admit... that the Nazis could not have carried their program
through... without clearing the Jews out of Germany."), or at Mencken's
insistance that "the Negro, no matter how much he is educated, must remain, as
a race, in a condition of subservience [to] the stronger and more intelligent
white man". What keeps these people from
real evil is not much more than fastidiousness: they don't like to dirty
themselves with mere politics.
<p>Nonetheless, they're some of the few people we've met in our
survey who can mount a substantial and consistent, if unattractive, case
against liberalism. The usual consie
has to argue against liberal solutions on liberal grounds: e.g. affirmative
action is bad because it doesn't treat all races equally; gays are really
demanding "special rights". The
antidemocrat can argue more directly: he doesn't believe in equality.
<td width=10%>
</table>
<h1>Looking forward <i>(with
a glance back to Luther)</i></h1>
<table width="100%">
<tr><td width="10%">
<td>
<h2>Can we learn anything from the Right?</h2>
<p>Sure.
<ul>
<li><b>Getting past victimhood</b>. Liberals believe in fairness, and the
surest way to get our attention is to point out someone who's getting
screwed. But if only victims get
help, everybody acts like a victim-- and the standard of hurt drops to
absurdity. Here's a rough test: if
someone is getting beat up or killed or fired, they're a victim. If they're getting called names or
seeing pictures they don't like, they're not.
<p>
<li><img src="illo/predhfh.jpg" align=right alt="Jimmy Carter at work">
Help
should always be coupled with <b>responsibility</b>.
That's why one of my favorite assistance programs is Habitat for Humanity, which requires its
benefactees to work on their own and others' houses; and why I think <a href="welfare.html">welfare</a> should be replaced with
workfare.
<p>'Responsibility' isn't a
justification for neglecting social problems, it's a complement to them. It's a cruel farce to urge the unemployed to
find jobs that aren't there. The jobs
need to <i>be</i> there, and it may even be necessary to train people in how to
get and keep a job... you can't assume that people already know this unless
they're brought up middle class.
<p>
<li><b>Keep government lean. </b>We <a href="gummint.html">need
government for many things</a>; but it <i>can </i>be intrusive, and reforms can
go awry. Prosecutors in sexual harrassment cases, for instance, have been
given too much power-- if you're not sure about that, read
<a href="http://www.american-politics.com/100499Baker.html">the testimony of Julie Hiatt Steele</a>
on Kenneth Starr's police state tactics.
And our government's obsession with secrecy has done great harm
(and only to ourselves; most of what the government kept from us the
Russians already knew).<p>
<li><b>Ally with other institutions. </b>Liberals tend to be too happy with
their influence on government, the academy, and the media. They tend to forget (or are actively
hostile toward) the church, the military, business, the family. All of these can be allies for
progressive causes. Examples:
<ul><li>The EPA's EnergyStar program, which rewards
energy-saving products. It turns out
that manufacturers are willing to cooperate when asked, and it sure beats
trying to get everything done with lawsuits.
<li>The military has ended up as one of the few
institutions with real racial integration.
<li>The church was instrumental in the civil rights
movement; churches are also (in these anti-statist times) one of the only
reliable funding sources for social work in the Third World.
<li>When the Boy Scouts won the right to exclude gays, many businesses
started withdrawing funding. Intolerance is no longer a good corporate value.
</ul>
<p>
<li><b>Find out America is saying</b>. Pundits scorn "poll-driven" politics;
but arguably the Left has gone very wrong when it's indulged its own
hobbyhorses instead of concentrating on problems and remedies relevant to
the average American. (I put this
recommendation here because the conservatives have taught this lesson by
bad example.)
<p>
<li><b>Increasing
the wealth beats redistributing it</b>. Some people don't get enough of the pie. Reslicing it just makes enemies; better to make a bigger
pie. If we don't know how to make
the economy grow, shouldn't we find out?
<p>
<li><b>Defend the principle, not the program</b>.
Conservatives criticized welfare for rewarding irresponsibility and
encouraging people to stay out of the job market. You can argue all day long about their
callousness and about whether the system really has the results they
describe. But they do have a
point; and what's more important anyway, helping people, or defending the
particular solutions that could get past Congress in 1969?
<p>Why not come up with other solutions
to the problem that address (or defuse, if you like) conservative
concerns? Workfare is my personal
favorite. Don't give able-bodied
workers money; give them jobs.
<p>I think we went way wrong with <b>public
housing</b>, too. One thing that
impressed me in visits to the shantytowns in Peru: the houses may be ugly, but
they belong to the inhabitants, who therefore keep improving them. In a couple of generations they go from
straw shelters to brick multistorey buildings.
People aren't going to do the same with rental units, whether they rent
them from slumlords or from HUD.
<p>
<li><b>Bad attitudes are not removed by censorship.</b>
Leftists tend to be outraged when people express illiberal
sentiments, ranging from ethnic jokes and putdowns to 'hate speech', and
all too often they've tried to prohibit this, whether it's university
administrations policing students' speech, or radicals disrupting the
showings of films they disapprove of.
But you do not produce civility by limiting free speech; that just
drives it underground and produces resentment.
<p>(The Right could learn this lesson
too, of course. But it rightly points
out when the Left violates its own principles here. )
<p>
<li><b>Multiculturalism begins at home</b>. Leftists tend
to be more accepting of Buddhists than of Christians; readier to insist on
the right to live as they like for the Yanomama than for the redneck.
<p>This is a tricky bag of roaches,
really; but it's the key to the future. Do we really believe in a non-homogenized future, where communities as
well as individuals have a right to pursue their chosen lifestyle? Then we have to accept communities whose
values and rules we don't wholly approve of.
<p><img src="illo/predamish.jpg" align=left alt="Amish woman">
A good subculture to practice your
tolerance on is the Amish. Everybody
loves the Amish; and yet they're basically fundamentalists who reject modern
society. If they have a right to raise
their children in a way that allows them to preserve their extremely photogenic
culture, don't NRA members, creationists, stay-at-home moms, and Southern
Baptists have the same right?
<p>Of course, the Amish are canny:
they don't require teenagers to follow all their rules until they (voluntarily)
join the church, and they don't tell the rest of us how to live. This reminds us that the subculture has
responsibilities to the larger society, too.
Communities should not be able to harrass outsiders, nor should it be
impossible for their own misfits to leave.
</ul>
<h2>What happened to religion?</h2>
<p>Nothing, really. Religion is just fine.
<p>The 19C pundits misanalyzed the situation. They thought that religion was
disappearing. It wasn't; it was just
being toppled from its position of social supremacy.
It was no longer the acknowledged sovereign of society; no longer
a property of the government or the culture, only of its practitioners.
<p>
Because they got the process wrong, they got the causes
wrong too. They thought that 'science'
had superseded 'superstition.' The real
process was the <b>dethronement of religion</b>, and the real cause was
political, going back to the Reformation and the ensuing holy wars. What dethroned the One Holy Church was not
science, but the multiplicity of claimants to the throne. Since their claims were divine, they could
not be negotiated or compromised; since they were multiple, the only practical
solution was to deny them all.
<p>Arguably the pundits got cause and effect <b>backwards</b>.
Science didn't cause the dethronement of religion. Rather, the dethronement
liberated science to question everything. The One Church could arrest Galileo; the disestablished church could only
rant at Newton or Darwin.
<p><img src="illo/predluth.jpg" align=right alt="Martin Luther">
Some Christians have bemoaned their <b>loss of influence</b>
ever since, but arguably the effects on religion have been nothing but
good. Tie religion to power, and
ambitious hypocrites will join the church in search of it. (Boccaccio slyly suggested that God must
really exist, because only a religion with God behind it could continue to grow
despite the evident depravity of its leaders.)
Today, people are more likely to join a church because they actually
believe its doctrines. Worse yet, state
power tempts religion (and irreligion) to turn morality into law-- generally a
fairly bloody operation.
<p>Since the pundits got the process wrong, they also of course
got the d�nouement wrong. Religion
didn't disappear; it simply completed a centuries-long process of moving from
the universal center of society, to the private conviction of believers. Not that it doesn't still hope to prescribe
universal truths and behaviors, but without state authority it can't enforce
any of them.
<p>This isn't to say that things like <b>evolution</b> or
Biblical criticism had no effect, just that they had a different effect than
usually understood. They impelled a few
key thinkers to avail themselves of their new freedom not to believe. I wouldn't even say that this tempest in the
intellectual teapot played a role in religion moving from majority to minority
status. I think that process was an
inevitable result of the dethronement. The
natural state of any religion is not zeal but moderate acceptance on the part
of the majority. If no one can force
you to conform any more, then the people who didn't take it that seriously
anyway end up drifting away from organized religion entirely.
<p><b>Communism</b> seemed, when it was strong, to fit into the
picture of the death of religion-- Russia used to appear on maps of religions as
"atheist"-- but of course where communism has retreated, religion has made a
spectactular return. It's now clear
that communism was simply a competing state ideology, which persecuted religion
because it was a rival.
<img src="illo/prediss.jpg" align=left alt="International Space Station">
<h2>To infinity... and beyond!</h2>
<p>
We have seen how the 19C pundits were wrong about this
century. It wouldn't be fair to close
without making some equally imprudent predictions about America in the next
century.
<ul>
<li>The
Republicans will find that they like <b>governing</b>; as a result their
anti-government rhetoric will fade away, to be revived only on ceremonial
occasions (in much the same way that you only hear "these United States"
at political conventions).<p>
<li><b>Religion</b>
is here to stay; but the fundies, frustrated with their inability to
impose theocracy, will lose interest for a generation. The next time they pop up, they'll be
as likely to ally with the left as with the right (especially because <b>abortion</b>
will, I suspect, be largely eliminated by improved methods of
contraception).<p>
<li><b>Liberalism
will disappear</b>-- at least in its incarnations as described above; the
new movements and causes that replace it may keep the name. The political fights of 2100 will
center largely around ideas that are considered impossibly idealistic or
perverse today.<p>
<li><b>Conservativism</b>
will remain, of course; though it will end up implicitly accepting
everything that 20C liberalism stood for.<p>
<li>By the
end of the century, <b>racial tensions</b> will have been largely defused;
those that remain will be a matter more of <b>class </b>than race. There will still be resentment of
whatever group most recently immigrated, however.<p>
<li>Acceptance
of <b>gays</b> <b>and lesbians</b> will be mainstream in a generation, and
will spread to the conservative churches by the end of the century.<p>
<li><b>Collectivism</b>
will come back in a big way... but not for another generation, and Americans
won't be the ones to develop it. <p>
<li>New
forms of democratic government will be devised (again, not here; probably
in Europe) that prevent the <b>tyranny of the majority</b>. <p>
<li>The
important units of society will be, increasingly, not geographical units
but what we might call <b>tribes</b>: diffuse collections of like-minded
individuals who want to live life in a certain way and have broad rights
and powers to do so.<p>
<li>When
the <b>oil runs out</b>, mid-century, we'll finally make some progress on
sustainable development.<p>
<li><b>Corporations
</b>will be run quite differently, though if I knew exactly how I'd be a
business consultant, not a writer. I suspect that by present standards they'll be much more efficient,
much less autonomous, and more democratically run.<p>
<li>Half
the economy will be <b>bit production and consumption</b>-- an amalgam of
entertainment, news and business analysis, science, education, religion,
and the increasingly abstract support industries that these require. Manufacturing will be like agriculture
is today: a tiny though essential sector of the economy.<p>
<li>The <b>scientific
study of government</b> will make present-day political fights seem like
pure foolishness. Once we actually
know how to grow an economy, 20C moralisms of all political flavors will
sound like leeches and electroshock therapy do today.<p>
<li><b>English</b>
won't take over the world; localism will lead to a resurgence of local
languages, whose inconvenience will be mitigated by technology.<p>
<li><b>Artificial
intelligence</b> will be a significant factor, past midcentury. I suspect that human-level
intelligences won't turn out to be useful-- or politically viable. Rather, we'll see lots of low-level AI
in appliances, software, mechanical translators, etc.; as well as massive
systems that can contemplate the affairs of an entire corporation or
government.<p>
<li>Still no <b>flying cars</b>. Dammit.<p>
<li>A few hundred thousand people will live in <b>space</b>... the largest space
industry being <b>tourism</b>. But
Alpha Centauri will have to wait for the next century, at least.
</ul>
<p>The list sounds a bit utopian; but some of these changes
will be accompanied by massive upheaval, violence and destruction. How pleasant a society we'll have in 2100
largely depends on how creatively we meet some of the challenges discussed above.
<p>If there's any overarching theme here, I think it's this:
historically, as we move from a world based on resource exploitation and
physical power to one based on bit manipulation and intellectual power, <i>liberalism
is unstoppable</i>. But it proceeds in <i>half-century
fits and starts</i>. We've seen the
cycle several times now: the Revolution, Romanticism, Reconstruction, the
Roaring Twenties, the Radical Sixties. We surge forward, right some wrongs, indulge in various excesses, and
burn out. The conservatives then come
in; but the reaction doesn't last forever. Underneath the surface, the gains of the last period of exuberance are
consolidated, and the next one prepares itself.
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<p><i>© 2000 by Mark Rosenfelder</i>
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