A Socialist Politician in the Land of The Pursuit of Happiness

Re socialist member of Seattle City Council Kshama Sawant: "Not drowning other voices (although she'd probably like to do so)" [Emphasis added] - Vide infra

To sell one's birthright for a mess of pottage. - Esau, as described in Genesis 25:29-34

Those who sacrifice liberty for [economic] security deserve neither. - Attributed to Benjamin Franklin

The purpose is always the same, to leave the economic realm in command over all others, to explain all human impulse, as it is expressed in the political process, in terms of nothing more than the "acquisitive instinct." ... They are in bondage to an economic view of human aspiration against which they have no defense once the supremacy of [human rights in] the political realm has been surrendered. - Henry Fairlie, Bite the Hand That Feeds You, p. 274

The Rights of Man, in liberal thought, are meaningful only if applied to immunities, such as freedom of speech. To speak of entitlements as rights, as the UN Declaration of Human Rights does, is to make a fundamental category mistake.  - Vide infra

Up in Seattle a self-identified 'socialist,' Kshama Sawant, has been elected to the city council. On November 22, an acquaintance, who in turn identifies as a baby boomer, wrote to one of us:

Did you happen to catch Essex Porter's interview with K. Sawant last night?  Essex did a double-take when Kshama proclaimed, "Boeing is an economic terrorist." [The reason, as Yglesias described: "The company tried to use the lure of building those planes in Washington State to get the machinists union to agree to some concessions in other areas of negotiation. The machinists said no. So on the face of it, 777X production is going to end up somewhere else."] In Seattle, one is supposed to genuflect when the sacred name of Boeing is invoked!  Not Kshama.  She went on to elaborate:  "They hold their workers hostage.  They hold the city hostage.  They hold the state hostage.  Boeing is an economic terrorist."

This acquaintance continued:

. . . For far too long, that particular aspect has not been voiced (or not loudly and clearly enough).  With luck, Kshama can continue to be that loud clear voice―not drowning other voices (although she'd probably like to do so), but at least holding her own.

A response:

One thought to be kept in mind in what follows is that such humanitarian safety net elements as 'Social Security' are part of the core business of liberal democracy (Keillor's "Politics of kindness" PDF), not a needed modification in the direction of  'socialism.'

The late Soviet Union seems to have proclaimed that their system represented "real existing socialism." (Wikipedia: "Real socialism (also real-socialism and even actually existing socialism) is a political term popularized during the Brezhnev era in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.") "Socialism" in that sense is explicitly identified with totalitarian command societies. Thus, for example, if a European 'democratic socialist' country does not allow *anything* to trump the civil liberties of the citizen, it is not properly socialist; on the other hand, if it allows 'economic rights' to supersede civil liberties (as Franklin, above, suggests), it is not democratic.

This is one of many areas in which liberal political concept is truly profound. The Rights of Man, in liberal thought, are meaningful only if applied to immunities, such as freedom of speech. To speak of entitlements as rights, as the UN Declaration of Human Rights does, is to make a fundamental category mistake.

One, the habit of terming desirable things 'rights' in order to put the weight of the justice system behind them would place coercion everywhere in what had been a free society.

By far the most important consideration, however, is the second one. When entitlements (which belong in the democratically accepted laws and not, as the Bill of Rights is, in the Constitution which constrains those laws (i.e., Judicial Review)), are *mandated*, a tax, unreachable by the voters, is imposed. And, violating the We the People principle, the public is divided into two groups, the group which receives the entitlements, and the group which pays for them, creating powerful vested interests with lessened concern for the public good. Democracy is sundered.

The kind of safety net we have―Social Security has been modified by vote several times―we citizens are basically comfortable with that not despite, but because, of our constant arguing and grousing about it. It is the healthy "clamor of democracy":

What Walter Bagehot wrote in 1874 ... "Parliamentary Government is not a thing which always succeeds in the world; on the contrary ... First, Parliamentary Government requires that a nation should have nerve to endure incessant discussion and frequent change of rulers." - Fritz Stern, The Failure of Illiberalism

What is liberalism's answer to the way the one percent has hijacked our economics and our politics? We may not know yet. Thomas Paine said ,"On the part of the public, my intention is, to show them their true and sold [sic] interest; to encourage them to their own good . . ." (An American Crisis). A free society has to wait―painful as it may seem―for the democracy to rouse itself. That a Kshama Sawant is needed to *coerce* them into it is unworthy of a free people (her suggestion that the workers confiscate Boeing property to 'do the right thing' would come at the enormous cost of abandoning the rule of law):

From "A Man for All Seasons":

William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: ...And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned around on you―where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast―man's laws, not God's―and if you cut them down...d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.
― Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons

Thus we read with great interest a November 20 post by Matthew Yglesias, "Socialism off to a Poor Start in Seattle":

Seattle City Council member-elect Kshama Sawant recently displaced a longtime business-friendly incumbent from the City Council, and is noteworthy for her status as an avowed socialist. ... I hope her political career blossoms so as to provide sensible liberals with someone noteworthy to triangulate against. Sen. Bernie Sanders is in some technical sense a socialist, but his views don't seem distinct from those of a dozen or two other Democratic Party senators.

By contrast, this from Sawant is some real socialism. Boeing is getting a bunch of orders for its new 777X planes. [... Without state concessions, Boeing will likely locate 777X production elsewhere.] Sawant thinks the union should counter by seizing the means of production:

“The only response we can have if Boeing executives do not agree to keep the plant here is for the machinists to say the machines are here, the workers are here, we will do the job, we don't need the executives. The executives don’t do the work, the machinists do,” she said.

Sawant says after workers “take-over” the Everett Boeing plant; they could build things everyone can use.

“We can re-tool the machines to produce mass transit like buses, instead of destructive, you know, war machines,” she told KIRO 7.

Can Boeing's front-line workers actually retool an airplane factory and turn it to bus production and win contracts to sell buses that raise enough revenue to keep everyone employed? Only time will tell for sure, but in the real world the answer is "no." This is exactly what you need executives for. Retooling plants, establishing relationships with suppliers and customers, understanding the size of the market for buses, and all that other stuff is a nontrivial task.

If Sawant were a smarter politician she would better disguise the rigid ideology under which she labors. "The executives don't do the work, the machinists do" is Marx's senseless Labor Theory of Value, which does not understand the essential role of management, distribution and marketing in successful production enterprises. Our correspondent sees Sawant as a needed "alternative" voice countering the flaws of capitalism.

But nonsense is not an alternative, it is only nonsense. (One voter responded to Sawant's proposal, "Knee-jerk party-line Marxist dogma, totally out of touch with reality and the wishes of her voters. She's an animated cliché machine.")

Liberal, Left, Ctd

Charles K. Rowley: In 1993, in his book, Post-Liberalism, [John] Gray poked around among the rubble of classical liberal philosophy to determine what, if anything was left. He concluded that none of the four constitutive elements of doctrinal liberalism — universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism (or human flourishing) — could survive the ordeal by value pluralism and that liberalism, as a political philosophy, therefore was dead. www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_01_1_rowley.pdf

Continuing Liberal, Left, further notes, not necessarily in any particular order:

The left sees the world in terms of a zero sum game. What benefits one person is necessarily taken away from some other person. Liberalism thinks in terms of win-win situations. De Tocqueville wrote that American public-spiritedness arose out of a concept of altruism as enlightened self-interest:

Among us, men still constantly feign great abnegation which they no longer feel. The Americans, on the other hand, are fond of explaining almost all the actions of their lives by the principle of self-interest rightly understood; they show with complacency how an enlightened regard for themselves constantly prompts them to assist one another and inclines them willingly to sacrifice a portion of their time and property to the welfare of the state.

From the earlier Liberal, Left:

• The most famous three words in liberalism: “We the People.”
• The left's most famous phrase: “Workers of the World, Unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains!”
• The left characterizes virtue as a property of a group (the oppressed). It takes a personalistic approach to evil, in the form of an implied out-group which chains the oppressed worker. The battle against evil, it is implied, will take the form of a war against a group of people who are, as a foregone conclusion, evil.
• This is in contrast to liberalism, which tends to see evil—at least the evil which a political system may seek to remedy—as error resulting from ignorance. To personalize evil, and in the process demonize certain types of people and create conflict, is seen as a category mistake. It can lead to what Frederick C. Crews called a “reckless dispensation of guilt.”
• “We the People,” by contrast, suggests harmony, cooperation, and altruism.
• In all of this, the left is thinking in terms of groups, oppressed groups versus oppressor groups, not in terms of the rights-bearing individual. This is a mind-set which does not place much emphasis on civil liberties. A person believed to be a member of a "reactionary" group tends to be treated as guilty of the sins ascribed to that group.

Such an us-vs-them outlook fits perfectly with the zero sum game perception, even as liberal enlightened self-interest is harmonious with universal justice. It may be noted in passing that the sources of liberalism in the classical world are the Roman concept of justice, on the one hand, and Jesus of Nazareth's philosophy of cooperation, kindness, and altruism, on the other.* (The modern antecedent, as noted in The Liberal Founding, was the scientific revolution which preceded the invention of the liberal modern state.)

An example of liberal/left differences is the contrast between Women's Liberation, the feminism of the pre-counterculture era, and "feminism," which has replaced it. In Who Stole Feminism? Christina Hoff Sommers contrasted "equity feminism" with "gender feminism." The equity feminists of Women's Liberation cited "all men are created equal" as their philosophical claim to political and social equality--to equal justice. In the more radical feminism which followed, "womyn" are the virtuous gender and "all men are created equal" is a biased pronouncement of the patriarchy--us-vs-them.

Wikipedia contains an example of such modern ideologized feminism:

Elaine Showalter describes ... "gender theory", in which the "ideological inscription and the literary effects of the sex/gender system are explored".

As The Liberal Founding suggests, it is in the United States' DNA, so to speak, to be liberal. And so it is, but more so before the left effects of the counterculture. The late Roger Ebert's discussion of "American Graffiti" illustrates the change:

On the surface, Lucas has made a film that seems almost artless; his teenagers cruise Main Street and stop at Mel’s Drive-In and listen to Wolfman Jack on the radio and neck and lay rubber and almost convince themselves their moment will last forever. But the film’s buried structure shows an innocence in the process of being lost, and as its symbol Lucas provides the elusive blonde in the white Thunderbird -- the vision of beauty always glimpsed at the next intersection, the end of the next street.

What characterizes a liberal society is yearning, because yearning is the entryway to ideals and aspirations; and because the dream is for all (see meliorism, above) it is pure and untainted. “The music was as innocent as the time,” Ebert wrote:

Songs like “Sixteen Candles” and “Gonna Find Her” and “The Book of Love” sound touchingly naive today; nothing prepared us for the decadence and the aggression of rock only a handful of years later.

The founding liberals thought in terms of a transformation of the whole world (see universalism, above). Thomas Paine proclaimed, “I have been tender in raising the cry against these men, and used numberless arguments to show them their danger, but it will not do to sacrifice a world either to their folly or their baseness.” The music of yearning had been replaced by a music of decadence and aggression, folly and baseness. For example, by the Rolling Stones:

You can't come back and think you are still mine / You're out of touch, my baby / My poor discarded baby / I said, baby, baby, baby, you're out of time.

“My solemn belief of your cause,” Paine added, “is, that it is hellish and damnable, and, under that conviction, every thinking man's heart must fail him.”

(*) John 10:10, "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly," could serve as a concise expression of the purpose of liberalism.

How the United States Has Changed, Ctd

At no point in the films is there any suggestion that one ought to put an abstract ideological or ethical commitment above a specific obligation to family.
Sociologically speaking, this is a classic moral outlook of a low-trust society . . .  - Matthew Yglesias

The Loyal Opposition: "a minority party esp. in a legislative body whose opposition to the party in power is constructive, responsible, and bounded by loyalty to fundamental interests" - Merriam-Webster Online

"The country I stayed in was a different America, a long time ago" - Daniel Ellsberg

"A fear society of arbitrary, disproportionate punishment" - "You Have a Monstrous Ideology": How the United States Has Changed

[They're] capable of anything. - Very Hard Choices, Spider Robinson

We might die to preserve our nation's principles but most of us won't kill our country to win an argument. - James C. Moore

A country once guided by exalted principles is now tainted by cruel ones. - Dahlia Lithwick

Now old inhibitions have given way. Things that weren’t done suddenly are done. - David Frum

From Spider Robinson's SF novel Very Hard Choices:

[Spider, born in the US, who now lives in Canada]: I live in a civilized country instead of America. p. 8

The United States of America has the most magnificent of ideals any nation ever failed to live to live up to. p. 125

In this, one of his later novels, Spider Robinson uncharacteristically inserts a discussion of recent developments in American life, viewed from the standpoint of ethics and decency:

"If this account is ... accurate ... then all three of you are unusually ethical people," p. 180 spoken by a character who until then had seemed to be a master criminal. "Ethics of that order [are rare.]" p. 182 “Who's the most ethical human being in the firm? . . . I think they are . . . one hundred percent honest and utterly fearless.” p. 183 “The Constitution and Bill of Rights are among the most enlightened political documents the human race has produced so far, and its people are, so help me, some of the kindest who have yet walked the earth. . . . So far nobody's ever been as ashamed of their own racism as we are.” p. 187 “. . . people of good will and good sense seem helpless to do anything about it.” p. 188 A few pages later he says the U.S. "didn't dismantle its own Constitution and Bill of Rights and the Geneva Convention and its own image of itself without help. ... All my life, if there was anything everyone in America knew for sure, without even thinking about it, it was that John Wayne would never beat up a little guy. ... The America he knew is gone." p. 189

The kind of people I'm talking about [...are] just very rich. ... They're not impressed by political power, popularity, or viciousness. They use people like those as chess-pieces--pawns. They've got handles on them all. They themselves are off the radar. They don't think of themselves as Americans. They don't even think in terms of nations or ideologies or the improvement of mankind; they are fundamentally indifferent to all suffering and death except insofar as it affects their game. ... The tools they have now are finally good enough to completely subvert democracy. ... Vandals ... absolutely selfish, utterly contemptuous of all morality and ethics. pp. 189-190

[They're] capable of anything. p. 191

All they were doing was treating each other with courtesy and common sense. ... What made me mad was, people used to treat each other that way in America when I was a boy. p. 197

. . . the hijacking and corruption of the United States. p. 200

Knowledge and reason and kindness and personal liberty really are worth all the dreadful effort they cost. p. 205

In "You Have a Monstrous Ideology": How the United States Has Changed, we recounted Daniel Ellsberg's reflection on his part in the Pentagon Papers exposure of concealed information. The justice system of that time took a lenient, freedom-of-speech approach to what he had done. A public-spirited citizen described today's changed situation:

John Cusack at The Guardian isn't sure Eric Holder will protect journalists. Cusack (yes, the actor from Say Anything) argues that David Miranda's recent detainment in the U.K. "was an assault on press freedom that should make every reporter shudder no matter their opinion on the NSA." He asks, will the U.S. act similarly when NSA journalists try to enter the States? He wonders if Americans should now "conclude that the U.S. is willing to create a generation of exiled watchdogs, who are trying to hold their government accountable from afar." Glenn Greenwald recommended the piece, as did Jason Leopold, an Al Jazeera reporter who covers civil liberties.

James C. Moore described an underlying degradation of decency in those who govern:

We had a process. Congress proposed, and the president disposed with his signature. A law then went on the books. Courts might be asked to test its constitutionality, but by surviving legal challenges, a measure became the settled law of the land, which was the case with Obamacare. The American legislative system was, in spite of the disturbing influence of big money, actually quite elegant. But now it is broken.

We have entered into an era of gunpoint government.

Americans have discovered that a tiny, radical minority can immobilize their entire country and hold it as still as a robbery victim staring at the barrel of a pointed gun. And regardless of how this might anger the majority, they must live with the fact that it can happen again. ...

Political accommodation for the common good is not even a consideration. Shutting the country down is the only objective, with no purpose beyond political destruction and personal ambition. ...

[Cruz's] ideological strain thrives on the notion that government should do little more than protect the borders, pave the roads and then get the hell out of our way. ...

We might die to preserve our nation's principles but most of us won't kill our country to win an argument. ...

He was willing to jeopardize the lives and incomes of millions of Americans, along with global economies. ...

Our deliberative government was not designed to be hijacked by a few dissidents. But fanatics have found a way to pry open the cockpit door and demand course corrections that put everyone on board at risk.

Aphorisms and observations which may apply:

Those who violate the bounds of propriety counting on the reluctance of more decent people to stoop to their level to protect them.

A willingness to fight in territory where conscience forbids most others.

David Frum - Theoretically, the party that holds the Senate could refuse to confirm any Cabinet nominees of a president of the other party. Yet until recently, this just “wasn’t done.” In fact, quite a lot of things that theoretically could be done just “weren’t done.” Now old inhibitions have given way. Things that weren’t done suddenly are done.

James Fallows: Liberal democracies like ours depend on rules but also on norms -- on the assumption that you'll go so far, but no further, to advance your political ends. The norms imply some loyalty to the system as a whole that outweighs your immediate partisan interest.

Ten Years After: A USENET Conversation Between Liberal and Libertarian Viewpoints

From http://adissentersnotes.blogspot.com/2012/07/conscience-and-language-orwell.html, "See Waring’s great blog post on libertarianism: delong.typepad.com/sdj/2011/10/libertarian-ponies-what-still-may-be-the-best-weblog-post-ever.html"

"Michael S. Morris" <msmo...@netdirect.net> wrote:
>                            Friday, the 3rd of October, 2003

Mike wrote below:
>You don't understand Aristotle either. The idea is not that
>anybody has absolute knowledge of anything. The idea is that
>knowledge is possible, and therefore absolute knowledge is
>in the theoretical game.

You did not say absolute knowledge is possible. If it isn't, why
should it be in the theoretical game?

You have a greater difficulty than this, however. In order for there
to be a final truth, the fine detail of the universe would probably
have to be by definition finite. Even if finite (is that a provable
proposition?) it would also have to be within the grasp of human
understanding. It is for reasons such as this that I proposed, in
Liberalism Reviewed Part 1, "a suggested liberal definition of truth
as 'that conclusion from the currently available information which,
when acted on, tends to produce the expected result.'" Truth, or as
you say, knowledge, is a function of the current state of our best
observations and reasoning.

Your position, by contrast, is a concealed form of Platonism. "The
highest vocation of the soul in Platonism is to 'perceive the eternal
order of things'--to which the soul must passively adapt or conform."
(Richard Wolin, _The Terms of Cultural Criticism_ p. 37)

As Lee Smolin says in a chapter heading of _Three Roads to Quantum
Gravity_, reality consists of processes, not things. Knowledge--
truth--is a process. As such, your "absolute knowledge" is a
reification which should not be in the theoretical game. And as I have
suggested in previous articles, intellectual propositions of this sort
have unanticipated political consequences. Wolin: "As a species of
first philosophy, ontology posits an immutable order of being. Far
from there being anything intrinsically 'emancipatory' about this
ideal, it is a conception fully compatible with the most authoritarian
and rigid forms of political life." Wolin continues:

  With the transition from an "ontology" to "epistemology"
  inaugurated by Descartes, "reason" and "truth" need no longer
  be accepted on the basis of a spurious, supramundane claim to
  ontological primacy--for example, the claim that the "good"
  would be somehow a priori lodged in the "order of Being"; a
  claim to which human agents must simply submit. Instead, all
  truth claims and claims to right must be legitimated through
  the mediating agency of individual insight. The seventeenth-
  century shift from ontology to epistemology, therefore,
  displays profound affinities with the foundational values of
  political modernity: freedom, autonomy, and self-legislation.
   (p. 38)

Truth is not "out there" in the sense in which you argue. Truth is an
interaction between us and a non-subjective, extra-human "out there"
which constrains the range of legitimate propositions which we may
formulate about it but which does not, as such, determine those
propositions.

And that is the end-point of "absolute knowledge is in the theoretical
game": a determinism which is in remarkable contrast to your
libertarian wishes.

A second note: This clearly is not absolutism (I'm arguing against it)
but it is also not (moral) relativism, as you charge below. "Morality
is, roughly, what human beings owe to one another," Avishai Margalit
observed recently in the New York Review of Books. I've claimed
previously in the Liberalism Reviewed series that ethical positions
are roughly as described by Aristotle: something arrived at by the
analysis of cases.

Our ethics are a function of our growing understanding of the
right--of learning how not to do wrong to each other. This occurs by
our noting the consequences of our behavior and manners--our
consideration and restraint--towards each other.

What you wrote below contains a profound misunderstanding:
  The thing Nietzsche introduces is autonomy--the idea that there
  is no "moral code" and all there really are are possible "moral
  codes" which the victors make up at their convenience to pat
  themselves on the back for being "good", and [then] to kick the
  losers in the dirt for being "evil."

First, autonomy is independence, not imposition (nor sovereignty, a
word you overuse). "As I would not be a slave," Lincoln said, "so I
would not be a master." Therefore: As I would exercise autonomy, so I
would not constrain the autonomy of others (which would show that I do
not believe in autonomy).

Second, Nietzsche, and moral relativists generally, take an
intellectually trivial position. They do not consider the possibility
that ethical propositions may have functional value. Very strong
arguments can be formulated, for example, that murder is
dysfunctional: disruptive, destructive of human capital,
destabilizing, producing a climate of fear and inaction (or conversely
an internecine feud), etc. The relativists' argumentative inadequacy
in this regard signifies that moral relativism is not worthy of
critical inspection.

Mike wrote below:
>I do not wish to pretend to some agnostocism about whether,
>in some societies, it might be morally good to go and
>commit murder of those around one.

Nor do I. As Travis Porco wrote here some years back, the wrongness of
murder is "certain for all practical purposes." This is not, as
Platonists will tell you, an absolute position. It is merely, as
Gordon Fitch once noted, the "good enough." My point is that practical
certainty is adequate for a human ethics, and that it avoids the
cognitive and intellectual traps consequent on any claim of
metaphysical certitude, to wit: You can't prove that; and therefore
you must retreat to nihilism.

Mike wrote below:
>The whole point of Natural Law is precisely that it is that part of moral law
>which does not depend upon Revelation. It's what intelligent men anywhere
>and everywhere have understood to be ethically right in the absence of
>divine guidance.

Bravo! Unfortunately I cannot take seriously the claim that this is
your actual position. On October 22 you wrote:

  You really are willing to call
  liberalism anything that has gotten divorced from the doctrine 
  of the inalienable Rights of Man? Even in the face of the fact
  that the Declaration of Independence---the founding document of
  political liberalism if there ever was one---declares the Rights
  are the whole beginning and end of government in the first
  place?

You forgot that the passage in reference begins "We hold these truths
. . ." Before "these truths" the authors of the Declaration placed the
active human intelligence which is continuously formulating truths. A
reasonable observer will deduce from the tone of your statements about
"the doctrine" that when you think of "Rights" you are thinking of "an
immutable order of being [...] to which human agents must simply
submit."

You claim that Natural Law and Rights are "what intelligent men
anywhere and everywhere have understood to be ethically right" as if
it was not open-ended. But that can't be right. From everything we
know of what they said and did the greatest minds prior to the modern
era--Plato, Aristotle, Jesus of Nazareth, St. Paul--never clearly
formulated what seems morally obvious to us: the ethical status of
slavery.

Their position must have seemed to their contemporaries--if not to
they themselves--beyond discussion. So as to your charge: "You are
saying nothing is beyond argument" I repeat, That is exactly what I
mean. I do not fear argument or free thought or discussion. That is
how we got beyond the ancients on the question of slavery. Do we
know--indeed can we know--that our descendants will not better us in
some way which _we_ cannot now envision?

End-Stuff:

Unlike liberalism, with its fundamental belief in the long-range power
of ideas, conservatism is bound by the stock of ideas inherited at a
given time. And since it does not really believe in the power of
argument, its last resort is generally a claim to superior wisdom,
based on some self-arrogated superior quality.
 - F. A. Hayek, "Why I Am Not A Conservative" [PDF]

www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2003/oct/09/after-strange-gods/?pagination=false

 [Margalit cite above]

Liberal, Left

The ancient paradigm, so repugnant to a free people, of domination and submission. - Warraq, Ali and others

A politics phrased in the language of a war by the oppressed against oppressors clearly has abandoned the democratic perspective for something darker. - My "Liberalism" Problem—And Ours

A brute fact does not dictate the proper human response to it. That is a matter of choice — constrained, to be sure, but a choice nonetheless. - Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy

 "The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." - George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language"

Ultimate success and happiness comes from leading a principled life, not in getting the upper hand. - Sally Forth, comics section of Seattle Times, Sunday, 2/18/2007

Affirmative action is "the just spoils of a righteous war." - Julian Bond

A collection of notes on the difference between liberalism and the outlook of the left, in no particular order:

• The most famous three words in liberalism: “We the People.”
• The left's most famous phrase: “Workers of the World, Unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains!”
• The left characterizes virtue as a property of a group (the oppressed). It takes a personalistic approach to evil, in the form of an implied out-group which chains the oppressed worker. The battle against evil, it is implied, will take the form of a war against a group of people who are, as a foregone conclusion, evil.
• This is in contrast to liberalism, which tends to see evil—at least the evil which a political system may seek to remedy—as error resulting from ignorance. To personalize evil, and in the process demonize certain types of people and create conflict, is seen as a category mistake. It can lead to what Frederick C. Crews called a “reckless dispensation of guilt.”*
• “We the People,” by contrast, suggests harmony, cooperation, and altruism.
• In all of this, the left is thinking in terms of groups, oppressed groups versus oppressor groups, not in terms of the rights-bearing individual. This is a mind-set which does not place much emphasis on civil liberties. A person believed to be a member of a "reactionary" group tends to be treated as guilty of the sins ascribed to that group.
• This can lead to the person so identified to be punished for a wrong committed by another person, which is manifestly unjust.
• The plight of the oppressed is taken to be more important than the interests and needs of individual members of the oppressed group. “Workers of the World, Unite” calls for solidarity rather than moral reflection and principled action.
• This is collectivism, which Karl Popper, in The Open Society, described as a politics where the group is everything and the individual is nothing.**
• The process of identifying certain people as members of oppressor groups is profiling. The process of targeting the person profiled is discrimination. The general modus operandi of the left is in practice inherently discriminatory.

To be continued . . .


(*)From Tikkun:

What makes Crews's account so compelling, however, is his brilliant writing combined with his quite accurate condemnation of the way psychoanalysis came eventually to be practiced, especially in the United States: "its deliberate coldness, its cultivation of emotional regression, its depredation of the patient's self-perceptions as inauthentic...its reckless dispensation of guilt."

(**)C. R. Hallpike (hallpike.com/EvolutionOfMoralUnderstanding.pdf‎):

What Sir Karl Popper has called the ‘closed society’: ‘the magical or tribal or collectivist society would be called the closed society, and the society in which individuals are confronted with personal decisions,the open society.’ . . . For Popper, the closed society can be justly compared to an organism, in which ‘slavery, class and class-rule are “natural” in the sense of being unquestionable.’. . .

So, therefore, in a closed society ‘the tribe is everything and the individual nothing’

"You Have a Monstrous Ideology": How the United States Has Changed

At no point in the films is there any suggestion that one ought to put an abstract ideological or ethical commitment above a specific obligation to family.
Sociologically speaking, this is a classic moral outlook of a low-trust society . . .  - Matthew Yglesias

The Loyal Opposition: "a minority party esp. in a legislative body whose opposition to the party in power is constructive, responsible, and bounded by loyalty to fundamental interests" - Merriam-Webster Online

"The country I stayed in was a different America, a long time ago" - Daniel Ellsberg

"A fear society of arbitrary, disproportionate punishment"

A pair of recent articles have suggested that the United States has become a harsher nation with less tolerance for dissent, whistle-blowing, constructive protest, or civil disobedience. Jathan Sadowski wrote, of Edward Snowden's exposé of massive NSA surveillance:

If Snowden were sure to receive a fair, just trial, he might not have chosen to embark on his journey around the world, from hideout to hideout, potentially sharing more valuable secrets with countries that America isn’t on the best of terms with. The way whistle-blowers are persecuted now, though, leaves little reason to believe Snowden would enjoy such treatment.
Yes, Snowden could walk with head held high into federal custody. But it’s not clear that this would do much of anything besides ensure that the rest of his life is hell.

Later in another magazine, Eric Levenson wrote:

Unlike Snowden, after leaking the Pentagon Papers in 1971 [Daniel] Ellsberg did not flee the U.S. and faced trial for his leak, but "the country I stayed in was a different America, a long time ago," Ellsberg writes in a column that The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald calls a "must-read." Ellsberg's trial was thrown out due to "the revelation of White House actions against a defendant that were clearly criminal in Richard Nixon’s era — and figured in his resignation in the face of impeachment — but are today all regarded as legal," including denied bail and post-arrest isolation for Bradley Manning that would be applied to Snowden, too.

The erosion of liberty, and the transformation of the open society intended by the Founders into a fear society of arbitrary, disproportionate punishment, has proceeded by slow, steady increments in the last half century. The incarceration society,  the prosecutorial society, the society in which Bradley Manning is casually abused in an overlong wait for his day in court—a court whose impartiality and equity we have reason to doubt—these are the symptoms of the transformation of a free country into a regime which no longer appears to be any such thing.

At the same time the liberal democratic principle that the party out of power is, ethically, the loyal opposition ("a minority party esp. in a legislative body whose opposition to the party in power is constructive, responsible, and bounded by loyalty to fundamental interests"), has been obliterated by movement conservatism's unbelievable betrayal of what the Founders stood for. In The Guardian, Michael Cohen writes that the GOP has become the heartless party of cutting food aid to the poor, abortion bans and denying people health coverage:

Never before in American history have we seen a political party so completely dominated and controlled by its extremist wing; and never before have we seen a political party that brings together the attributes of nihilism, heartlessness, radicalism and naked partisanship quite like the modern GOP. ...
In the narrow pursuit of political gain, Republicans have adopted an agenda that is quite simply, inhumane and cruel. Even if one is charitable and defends it on the ground of adherence to an ideological agenda of smaller, less intrusive government (except in the case of lady parts) it can't be defended. If one's ideological predisposition means denying food assistance to people who are laid off from their job or forcing a woman to carry a dead fetus to term or preventing individuals from getting health care coverage, then you have a monstrous ideology.

In the past such "crises of the Republic" been met with a fervent, often religiously based revival movement by the people. The last such was perhaps Martin Luther King's civil rights crusade—don't forget, he was a Baptist minister who spoke in a southern preacher's stirring sonorous crescendo—but is any such voice on the horizon? Would it be heard in the present absorption with the relentless trivia of social media?

Write for the Public Good

Advice from a pair of writers:

Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. - Thomas Merton, "Letter To A Young Activist"

The great Atlantic correspondent Jeffrey Tayler, a writer of nonfiction, recently meditated on the question of how one becomes a writer. He settled on a much more onerous approach:
The question for me was not, then, how does one read to write, but how does one read to live? I conceived early on the conviction that one should lead one’s life as if one were the protagonist of an epic novel, with the outcome predetermined and chapter after chapter of edifying, traumatic and exhilarating events to be suffered through. Since the end is known in advance, one must try to experience as much as possible in the brief time allotted.
The protagonist of “The Death of Ivan Il’ich” died moaning, in agony, overcome with the realization that he had wasted his days on earth following social conventions. He lacked l’esprit frondeur, and he paid for it. Conventions now are hardly less pervasive than they were in Tolstoy’s day; we’re pressured to start a career, build our résumé, earn a certain amount of money, and so forth. But remember: None of us gets out of here alive. So don’t fear risks. Rebel. Be bold, try hard, and embrace adversity; let both success and failure provide you with unique material for your writing, let them give you a life different enough to be worth writing about.

Akhmatova, in a translation by Martin Cruz Smith:

I drink to our ruined house, to the dolor of my life, to our loneliness together, and to you I raise my glass, to lying lips that have betrayed us, to dead-cold, pitiless eyes, and to the hard realities: that the world is brutal and coarse, that God in fact has not saved us.

For other examples of principled writing, see Fritz Stern and Timothy Ferris in The Liberal Founding.