Understanding and Restoring Freedom: A Multi-Dimensional View
Introduction
Here in America I think we have a very serious problem with the way we talk about and understand ‘freedom.’ Freedom is one our most precious words. It is central to our self-understanding as Americans, and how we see ourselves in the world and in history. We invoke it frequently, but often in such a cramped and thoughtless way that we run the risk of misunderstanding what freedom means, how to gain it, and how to preserve it.
To state the problem in its simplest terms, America has two distinct political and intellectual traditions regarding freedom. The first, which is dominant today and has been dominant at various times in our past, understands freedom as the absence of external coercion. Defending individual rights and property rights, with the bare minimum of coercion needed to protect Americans from crime and foreign enemies, is the touchstone for judging government. Good government gives individuals the maximum of liberty to interact with one another and employ their talents in a market system to acquire wealth and develop the economy. I will call this the libertarian tradition. In America this vision is associated closely with Jefferson and Reagan, and finds its finest expression in the Declaration of Independence and its ringing claim that every human being is endowed with inalienable rights.
The second tradition sees freedom embodied in democracy and in the mechanisms for determining the public interest and the well-being of the nation and its citizens. Freedom is realized when citizens act together as equals to further the common good. Good government is actively engaged in developing the economy, helping the disadvantaged, and preventing the concentration of wealth and power in a few hands. I will call this the democratic tradition. In America this vision is associated closely with Hamilton, Lincoln, and both Roosevelts and finds its finest expression in the Constitution and its preamble calling on “We the People” to take collective action to secure the blessings of liberty and promote the general welfare.
Of course both traditions intertwine in American history, and for most Americans it is a matter of course that individual rights and participatory democracy are two sides of a coin. There is a natural pendulum swing between periods when one tradition or the other is ascendant, and Americans are taught that both must be taken into account: the will of the majority is decisive in selecting leaders and making policy and law, but majority will is limited by the need to respect individual rights to free speech, due process, etc. However, there is an underlying tension between the two traditions that can lead enthusiasts for liberty to see democracy as a threat to property and freedom, and enthusiasts for democracy to see a too zealous regard for rights as an unacceptable limitation on popular will.
A touchstone for how you see these traditions is how you interpret the Boston Tea Party. Did American patriots throw boxes of tea overboard to say “don’t tread on me”— we don’t like taxes and we don’t want government telling us what to do—as the contemporary ‘Tea Party’ would have it? Or was the message that we want to impose our own taxes and, with democracy as the vehicle, take charge of government for the public good? Today the former understanding is dominant, but I believe the latter is more accurate.
Today we face a Janus-like challenge from both directions. The first and most far-reaching comes from libertarians who seek to use the power of wealth to entrench an oligarchy protected by legal and institutional limits on democracy. Distrust of government, complacency about the strength of our institutions, and poor understanding of how government contributes to individual liberty, have allowed enemies of democracy to dominate our public discourse. For today’s would-be oligarchs, property rights take precedence over democratic efforts to regulate and tax. They seek to hem in the popular will by lobbying, throwing money at politicians, voter suppression, gerrymandering, control of the courts, and flooding public discourse with subsidized experts. The contemporary libertarian-dominated Republican Party, although it controls and is responsible for the national government, has no agenda for actually governing and is instead at work actively undermining the capacity of the federal government.
The second threat is more recent and takes the form of a reactionary populism energized by anger over ‘political correctness’ and the assertion of equal rights by minorities, women, immigrants, and the LGBTQ community. The personality cult around Donald Trump rests on the white majority’s view that its interests are being thwarted, and its identity demeaned, by an excessive concern for these other groups. An often tone-deaf progressive movement has helped fuel today’s populism by focusing relentlessly on the grievances of excluded groups and America’s sins, without a more inclusive message.
I think we can counter these trends with a three-part liberal agenda.
• Reinvigorating and reforming our democratic institutions to make words like ‘citizenship,’ ‘politics,’ and ‘government’ sources of pride, not the butt of jokes.
• Fighting the partisan divide by putting in place ways, such as a modified draft, to actively mix together citizens from different classes, races, regions and religions.
• Uniting the country behind big ideas for the common good such as universal healthcare.
Government and Freedom
The greatest misunderstanding, in my view, has to do with our view of government. The libertarian tradition focuses most of its attention on government as the number one threat to liberty. Government without question can be one of the prime culprits and great attention and skill are needed to devise political systems that prevent abuse. But a single-minded focus on guarding against government overreach ignores the ways freedom can be threatened from many other directions. Our neighbors, our families, our churches, our employers—all these can be sources of coercion. Good government is often the only means to defend ourselves and create the conditions for a free life. If government is too strong and uncontrolled, it restricts freedom and undermines other key institutions; but if too weak, it allows those institutions and individuals to become threats to freedom in their own right. Every system and institution, whether family or church or market or government or whatever, needs to be checked by other independent systems and institutions.
Freedom is also at risk when we live as slaves to necessity and want. The classical view was that to be free meant first and foremost to have enough wealth and means to have leisure, free time to devote to public affairs or philosophy or private interests. No one could really be free who had to spend all their time focused on survival. Given pre-modern conditions, only an elite few could afford freedom—most people were peasants, one bad harvest away from starvation. Greeks and Romans justified their use of slaves, in part, as the necessary means for a privileged few to be free.
Here too our view of government is crucial. For libertarians, government is the enemy of prosperity, always prone to strangle individual initiative and burden entrepreneurs with taxes and regulations. But a supportive government is essential to modern capitalism, and without government intervention to shift resources from the haves to the have-nots, many Americans would live in poverty, and few could afford the education and training needed to advance.
Freedom is also in jeopardy if the fruits of economic growth are captured by a self-perpetuating oligarchy. Some version of oligarchy, rule by the wealthy and those who control the acquisition and perpetuation of wealth, has been the norm for most of human history. The American Revolution was first and foremost an experiment in creating a “new order” without oligarchs. But, as Thomas Piketty showed convincingly in his surprise bestseller Capital in the 21st Century, free markets and capitalism have not changed the powerful human forces that tend to create a small class that captures a disproportionate amount of society’s wealth. Government must be strong enough and autonomous enough to prevent this, a task that, given the rising levels of wealth inequality in the United States, our government is not doing very well. (The United States ranks 32nd in inequality out of 35 developed states).
Dealing with Coercion
Even hard-core defenders of individual rights are prone to misunderstand the central role of government in ensuring those rights and guarding against other, equally dangerous threats. What are the other sources of coercion that we need to guard against? Four stand out: other people; family; religion; and markets.
Other People. In fact, every other human being can constrain freedom. It was Hobbes who invented modern political thought by asking, what is the most important task of government, and answering: to protect us from our fellow man. Left to ourselves in a state of nature, every neighbor, every person we encounter, is a potential threat. Hobbes is careful to stress that even a small and weak person can attack and kill someone much stronger. This war of all against all can only end if we give up our natural freedom to a powerful state capable of punishing and preventing this violence.
Anyone familiar with movies about asteroid strikes, or the zombie apocalypse, knows what Hobbes is talking about. When civilization collapses, there is a terrible fight for food and shelter and the minimum of security. Previously friendly neighbors turn into snarling enemies. Well short of this extreme, we see the same phenomenon in parts of the world—including parts of the United States—where police and the law are weak or nonexistent.
I had lunch in the early years of the Iraq war with the journalist George Packer, who wrote the book Assassin’s Gate about the American occupation of Iraq. After exchanging vivid stories about the collapse of order in Baghdad, I asked—rhetorically—why no one in the Bush White House seemed to remember the basic teachings of Hobbes. “They’re all business majors there; no one knows anything about politics,” was his scathing response.
The Hobbesian solution, an all-powerful state, probably seems extreme to most of us. It prioritizes security and protection against other human beings over every other good, and lacks what most of us would consider minimal barriers to abuse of state power. But reflection and experience tell us that some kind of authority strong enough to ensure personal security, and security of property and property rights, is essential for liberty. It is misleading to think of this as ‘giving up’ some of our freedom in exchange for security. We give up our ‘right’ to use violence against others (except in self-defense), and in return are provided a secure space within which we can plan for the future, build institutions, improve our property, raise families, and in short live like human beings. We have seen more than enough recent examples in places like Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan of what happens when this authority disappears, even when it is grossly imperfect.
In his recent book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker makes a convincing case that in most of the world we have seen a tremendous drop in levels of violence, both domestically and between countries. Murder rates in Europe are a fraction of what they were several hundred years ago. So are rates of robbery, rape, and all manner of inter-personal violence. Our norms and expectations have shifted, so that punishments such as burning heretics at the stake or putting people to death for petty crimes, that seemed normal to our ancestors, are now beyond the pale.
Why this tremendous change? Pinker says a critical factor for Europe was the growth of strong centralized states that, while not (initially) democracies, had an interest in advancing the conditions of their populace. These stronger states brought to heel the hundreds and thousands of semi-independent fiefdoms, petty nobles, landlords, and wealthy churchmen who produced in Europe something close to the state of nature. The first police forces were created in London only 200 years ago. Before that no permanent institution was tasked with preventing crime or capturing criminals. Ad hoc posses, often organized by local landowners or nobles, might go after criminals, often acting as judge, jury, and executioner.
Does this growth in law enforcement and state power mean we are less free? For the vast majority, clearly not. They have moved from being constant victims of crime, random violence, arbitrary punishments, and abuse by their social superiors, to being citizens with expectations of a peaceful life and protection from threats and violence. Those who feel most aggrieved are the rich and powerful, who under weak states were free to do as they pleased. Now they see strong central government as a burden. Just as America’s first wave of robber baron capitalists was devoted to laissez faire liberalism, many of today’s billionaires advocate some form of libertarianism, not because of any devotion to individual freedom, but because government redistributes some of their winnings and (sometimes) stands in the way of their schemes.
At first glance a large group of Americans seems eager to weaken the protection provided by government and take on the job of security for themselves, in effect returning to pre-modern conditions. Being “pro-gun” is often shorthand for being suspicious of the state and happy to trade off less security for an expansive right of self-protection. On closer inspection, however, most 2nd Amendment enthusiasts are not really looking for a weaker government—in fact, they usually extol the military and police, the armed face of Leviathan. They would like those institutions to have more money and more authority. What they don’t like is that the state isn’t doing enough to put down minorities and immigrants and other perceived threats.
Family. Families nurture and protect, and extensions of family—clans and tribes—are how most people provided security and gathered resources to stay alive before the development of the state. Families remain central components of all human society. Clans and tribes have waned in the modern West in favor of the nuclear family, but still matter in much of the rest of the world.
Families, however, are not sources of individual freedom. For most of human history they have sharply constrained individual choices—about marriage, work, dress, faith, friendships and much else. Romeo and Juliet brings vividly to life how family and tradition can conspire to destroy human happiness. Patriarchal families, clans and tribes have subordinated and, often, abused women. Families are not democratic, and are the conveyers and enforcers of traditional norms. In most societies sons and daughters have been expected to subordinate their own ambitions to family interests. Tribes seek ferociously to channel power and wealth to fellow tribesmen, without regard for competence or any broader public good. Shielded from outside scrutiny, it is all too easy to hide exploitation and abuse of children and spouses, and reject children who are gay or ‘abnormal.’
When family goes bad, what recourse is available? Other institutions can intervene; a priest or minister, a benevolent neighbor. But in many societies tradition gives the heads of families tremendous leeway. Exposing and preventing abuse within the family is hard. Think about women living in a society that practices genital mutilation, or the burning of widows, traditions enforced by a woman’s own mother and close relatives. Impartial laws, backed by police and investigative resources and enforced by a strong state, are a necessary option when people face intimidation or violence from a spouse, or a parent.
The ‘state’ as an institution can be understood as the method of governance devised to replace the family/clan/tribe as the source of authority. Francis Fukuyama gives a clear account in his recent multi-volume analysis of the Origins of Political Order—the state comes into being when merit and achievement (and sheer force) replace blood ties as the criterion for leadership, and when membership in a political community derives from living in a given territory rather than kinship. The symbol of this shift is the Chinese exam system, first developed over 2000 years ago, where administrators are chosen from those who master classic texts and key elements of culture rather than bloodlines.
In America and most modern states, government interferes in the family in myriad ways. It requires that parents educate and vaccinate their children. It prohibits polygamy and child marriage. Children can be put in foster care for neglect or criminal behavior by parents. Nepotism is frowned upon and restricted by law. These interventions are justified in the name of individual rights, which trump family considerations for adult citizens. Without this government activism to weaken and counterbalance families it is hard to imagine that most individuals would be free in meaningful ways.
Religion. Religious teachings and leaders—prophets, ministers, saints—can be a critical check on corrupt and tyrannical governments. Religion is the source of law, rules that bind earthly governors as much as the governed under a god or gods from whose lofty heights the difference between kings and commoners means little. Law is not the same thing as freedom, but it is a necessary condition if we want to constrain leaders and neighbors.
The force of divine law speaks through Old Testament prophets who warn the princes of Israel against abuse and corruption. Christianity in Europe gave rise to Catholic and then Protestant churches that were in principle independent of particular rulers and could, on occasion, call them to account. Fear of divine punishment might restrain kings and princes, or lead them to see a common spark of God in their subjects or potential enemies. Religion can be a check on arbitrary power.
The power wielded by religious figures, however, can easily be abused. Recently we heard excruciating details of how the Catholic Church in Pennsylvania fostered and protected sexual predators. The truth was revealed by an investigation from the attorney general of Pennsylvania, acting to penetrate the veil of secrecy and intimidation that had kept thousands of victims from speaking up.
Where would we be if our government, instead of investigating the Catholic Church, was joined with it, was its champion? Who would reveal the truth then? This has been the norm throughout history, with religion and secular power working together to reinforce one another. Only the separation of church and state, achieved first in the United States, has succeeded in keeping these two sources of authority apart and ensuring that state power is not used to put down rival faiths and enforce compliance to the particular beliefs and moral codes of one religion or sect. Religion cannot be used to justify racial discrimination or child sacrifice. No one can be forced to submit to religious restrictions against their will. The essential condition is for the legitimacy of the state to rest on a secular foundation—in the case of the United States, one based on reason and universal principles. Where this separation has not taken hold, as in much of the Muslim world, freedom is severely limited.
Around the world we see attempts in countries with secular traditions to re-combine church and state: Hinduism in Modi’s India, Orthodoxy in Putin’s Russia, Catholicism in Orban’s Hungary, Islam in Erdogan’s Turkey. Aspiring dictators see religious fervor as a way to oust rivals and rally supporters; leaders of the major religion are happy to see state power deployed to put down their religious rivals. Often this is accompanied by vicious campaigns against homosexuals and others who don’t meet ‘traditional standards.’ While not yet at the same level, determined forces in the US want to redefine America as a Protestant Christian nation rather than a religiously neutral one. Almost half of Americans now say that their identity as a Christian is more important than their identity as an American. Any movement in the direction of re-defining America’s basic principles as inseparable from Christianity is a terrible threat to freedom—and also to Christianity.
This is not to deny that Jerusalem was a source of the vision of individual human dignity and freedom that has animated the United States since its founding. Christianity was arguably a necessary condition for liberal democracy. Necessary—but far from sufficient. The key thinkers and doers who set the stage for the American Revolution and made it happen did not, in my view, act as Christians or for the sake of Christianity. They understood, correctly, that what they were attempting was made possible only by a free exercise of reason unconstrained by dogma, and was contrary to longstanding Christian traditions and the role of Christian churches and leaders in politics.
Markets. In no area it seems to me is there greater misunderstanding of freedom than our discussion of markets. Acolytes of free markets are the most outspoken critics of government for interfering with market forces and, supposedly, reducing wealth and efficiency. Corporations and entrepreneurs often argue that their freedom is diminished by taxes and regulations and unions. Contemporary market fundamentalists dream of returning to the era exemplified by the 1905 Lochner decision by the Supreme Court, which struck down a state law that limited working hours on the grounds that it violated the ‘freedom’ of employers and workers to engage in contracts. Since then our views have evolved to allow government to intervene to protect employees and the public from corporate exploitation.
Markets, however, depend on government in myriad ways: to create a medium of exchange; to enforce contracts; to define and protect property rights; to prevent and punish thievery and fraud, and much more. Most of this is not controversial. More disputable are other ways government arguably makes modern capitalism possible and keeps it from being destructive: preventing monopoly, regulating working conditions, keeping our air and water clean, insuring banks, preventing overly-risky financial practices, etc.
Laissez-faire advocates like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek have tried to argue that much of this can be done by individuals acting freely in accord with market forces. Government is needed, barely, for the first set of goods, not the second. Government efforts to regulate capitalism are counterproductive at best, a slippery slope to communism at worst.
But actual American experience doesn’t bear this out. We can start with slavery, perhaps the ultimate expression of laissez-faire thinking. Attempts to end slavery were resisted ferociously by slave owners on the grounds that they violated their freedom to dispose of their property as they saw fit. Other periods in America when we have been most in love with laissez-faire policies—the Gilded Age, the Roaring 20s, the Greenspan Era—have led to terrible crashes and corrosive economic inequality. The period of our greatest sustained prosperity, a time when the rising economic waters really did lift all boats, was in the 1950s and 1960s when unions were strong, taxes were high, and government programs (the GI Bill, the interstate highway system) took hold to grow the economy and cushion Americans from capitalism’s excesses. Starting in the Progressive Era, government began to see it had a responsibility to restrain the private sector for the benefit of all, and over time developed tools to analyze and direct our market system.
Teddy Roosevelt’s “malefactors of great wealth,” however, have continued to fight fiercely to undermine the legitimacy of public, democratic intervention in the economy. During the 1950s and 60s they wrung their hands about the threat to freedom from socialism and big government, exploiting Cold War fears of international communism to equate all government intervention with Marxism. Few listened until the stagflation of the 1970s, brought on by a foolish unfunded war and OPEC’s manipulation of oil prices, gave them an opening. Wealthy individuals and foundations—the Koch Brothers, the Scaifes and Adelsons and many more—have funded countless think tanks, institutes, university departments, conferences and publications dedicated to free market and libertarian ideas. Their message was embodied in Reagan and his transformative Presidency, whose message was that government itself was the problem. Largely as a result, today many Americans instinctively think that the ‘private sector’ is more virtuous and efficient than anything that involves government. The market is equated with freedom, government with coercion.
But nothing is more inimical to individual freedom than unrestrained markets. Left to itself, capitalism generates huge concentrations of private wealth—an oligarchical system that rests on severe restrictions of individual rights. Marx was wrong about many things, but on this one big thing he was correct: capitalism left to itself will concentrate wealth—and power—in a few hands. Something competing corporations can agree on is limiting the rights of workers and consumers by weakening collective bargaining, labor laws, individual bankruptcy options, environmental protections, class-action lawsuits, and other political and legal protections in hiring and the workplace.
Unfortunately a growing body of legal scholarship, funded by wealthy market fundamentalists, has emerged to defend the rights of corporations on First Amendment grounds, ‘weaponizing’ the right to free speech as a way to limit other rights. This radical new doctrine is well-represented on the Supreme Court, especially with the confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh. Justice Kagan’s dissent, in a recent case that overturned the right of public sector unions to require workers to contribute union dues, is eloquent: “Speech is everywhere—a part of every human activity (employment, health care, securities trading, you name it)… For that reason, almost all economic and regulatory policy affects or touches speech. So the majority’s road runs long. And at every stop are black-robed rulers overriding citizens’ choices. The First Amendment was meant for better things.” 1
The blunt truth is that many of the rich see democracy as a threat—it was Aristotle who warned that under democracy the people would try to take the property of the rich—and therefore have fought tenaciously to secure the right to use money freely to buy political influence. As explained persuasively and at length by historian Nancy MacLean in Democracy in Chains, the libertarian right under the guidance of the Koch network has used its money to reshape the rules of politics to make sure that their wealth can offset votes. The United States today is already a semi-oligarchy, where wealthy individuals and corporations easily fund candidates, create fake ‘grassroots’ movements, control major media, and lobby elected officials. These efforts are usually sold as ways to enhance individual freedom for everyone, but are in fact designed to enhance the freedom of the haves at the expense of the have-nots.
Freedom and Want
The debate over free markets leads to a second aspect of freedom. The first was freedom from coercion, the second is freedom from want. People who live in poverty and chronic economic uncertainty struggle to be free, even if they have formal political and legal rights. All their time and energy is taken up by ensuring survival for themselves and their family. Their neediness makes them vulnerable to coercion by employers or landowners. This was the normal condition for the vast majority before the modern era.
It is no coincidence that the success of democratic government has coincided with the historically unparalleled growth of wealth from modern technology and industrial capitalism. Today the United States and other advanced economies are rich enough to free most citizens from grinding poverty and provide them with education and literacy. Most have enough wealth and economic security to use their freedom meaningfully in leisure activities, intellectual pursuits, private passions, and public life. We have largely overcome the pre-modern divide between the impoverished and enslaved many, and the wealthy few. The strength of America’s civil society, the multiplicity of associations that are the way most citizens participate in public affairs, noted by Tocqueville and others, rests on both the country’s wealth and its equitable distribution.
Since the 2008 financial crisis, however, Americans have received a crash course in the problem of economic inequality. Inequality has been growing sharply since the late 1970s; income and wealth for the top 10%, and especially the top 1% and 0.01%, has been going up remorselessly. Almost all the gains in national wealth over the past 40 years have gone to a small class, while for the bottom income has been largely stagnant. To the apparent surprise of some, cutting marginal tax rates sharply in the Reagan (and again in the Bush II) administrations ended up making the rich richer while producing disappointing economic growth, much lower than in the 1950s-60s.
As a result many Americans who thought of themselves as solidly middle-class and living the American Dream have become economically and socially insecure; they no longer expect their children to do better than they did. They are angry at the contrast between the wealth and status of the few, and the declining prospects of the many. Condescending lectures from both liberals (go to college!) and conservatives (work more!) ring hollow when college is more and more expensive, unskilled jobs pay less, and in many families both partners are running flat out and not getting ahead.
The meaning of ‘poverty’ is slippery in a country as wealthy as the US. Even those at the bottom typically have enough to eat and a roof over their heads, not to mention cellphones and flat-screen TVs. But a significant number of Americans still live only a stone’s throw from poverty, bankruptcy, and homelessness. Their lives are dominated by the fear of foreclosure or eviction, losing a low-paying job, being denied government benefits, going to jail for minor fines they are unable to pay, bankruptcy for medical expenses they can’t afford, and an endless array of other challenges. These challenges are of course greater for African-Americans and other minorities. A recent Atlantic article showed that nearly half of Americans would have difficulty raising $400 in cash for an emergency. 2These conditions make it hard to exercise formal legal and political freedoms. Exceptional individuals certainly do rise from poverty. But the rags to riches myth is becoming less and less true with time. Economic mobility is declining and less common in the US than most other advanced economies.
To sum up: from the standpoint of individual liberty a strong, capable government is necessary to counter the power of other individuals, family, religion, and wealthy actors—emphatically including in a free market system. Counter, but not destroy. The suspicion of government comes from cases where the state goes too far to eliminate or subordinate competing institutions. Personalist dictators, theocracies, kleptocracies, and one-party states are easy to find, not just in the history books but in the world today. But denigrating government in the name of utopian conditions of individual freedom is a prescription for feeble states and less freedom. States, even democratic ones, need to be strong but limited in order to maintain autonomy for individuals, families, churches and companies.
The Grand Inquisitor and the Burdens of Freedom
The question facing us today is why so many people in established liberal democracies seem to be dissatisfied and ready to embrace populism and rally behind simple-minded leaders. Part of the answer, I think, is that freedom is hard. To be fully free does not mean just the absence of external coercion, it means deliberately and consciously choosing what you do or say. For most human beings this is impossible, even aside from difficult questions about how much our individual decisions are determined by genes or upbringing or invisible mental and physical processes. To get through our lives, to avoid starting every day with a blank slate, all of us need to leave many choices to custom or habit or an outside authority. When he was President, for instance, Barack Obama decided to wear only a few identical suits to free his limited energy for the important things.
But lots of people want to find ways to focus more on their wardrobe and less on important things. In religion, submission to God (arguably a condition that enables the individual to act freely towards others) can easily turn into submission to a priest or ayatollah or a charismatic charlatan. In politics, market extremists want to substitute impersonal economic forces for conscious deciding and planning. Right-wing nationalists want to dissolve their individuality in the ‘nation,’ usually by submitting to a charismatic leader. Left-wingers often fall back on ‘history,’ an impersonal force that you must bow to.
Genuine politics is demanding, sometimes exhausting. And it never ends. There is no point at which the basic problems of human interaction are solved, where everyone agrees forever and you shake hands and go home. Dialogue, debate, disagreement, and struggle keep going. With politics often comes hypocrisy, corruption, deception, and betrayal. Good people often understandably want to keep their distance. They want all this squabbling to go away. Hence the seduction of proposed ‘solutions’ that promise to resolve all political problems, or remove the sources of conflict and disagreement that make politics necessary.
Populism appeals in large part because it promises to short-circuit all this political nonsense. Hillary Clinton, a policy-wonk and political “borer of hard boards” if there ever was one, was blindsided by a movement that disdained the work of politics in favor of vague promises and easy fixes. In a November 2018 Guardian interview she gave a sober analysis:
Clinton said rightwing populists in the west met “a psychological as much as political yearning to be told what to do, and where to go, and how to live and have their press basically stifled and so be given one version of reality. The whole American system was designed so that you would eliminate the threat from a strong, authoritarian king or other leader and maybe people are just tired of it. They don’t want that much responsibility and freedom. They want to be told what to do and where to go and how to live … and only given one version of reality. I don’t know why at this moment that is so attractive to people, but it’s a serious threat to our freedom and our democratic institutions, and it goes very deep and very far and we’ve got to do a better job of shining a light on it and trying to combat it.” 3
Dostoyevski’s Grand Inquisitor tells us that what people want most of all is to give up the burden of freedom. Taking it from them, making decisions for them, is for the Inquisitor the supreme act of generosity and morality; freedom is demanding, and most people don’t want it. This is the bargain offered today by the Putins, the Xis, the Erdogans—stay out of public life, let me make those decisions, and I’ll let you make money and enjoy yourselves. Give your freedom up to me.
Democracy of course assumes that citizens, however defined—and in today’s democracies, almost every adult is a citizen—are able and willing to pay attention to public affairs, to weigh the public good (or at least their own good) in a reasonably rational way, and use this knowledge to make decisions about voting and support for leaders and parties. In our representative democracy only a few pay attention all the time, but everyone is expected to pay attention some of the time. When too many people opt out, or can’t be bothered, or think their vote doesn’t matter, the system fails. When too many make decisions based on trivialities, or let themselves be misled by a 30-second commercial or a Facebook posting, the system fails. I would wager that most voters put far more effort into buying a new car than picking a governor or Senator. The United States ranks 28th out of 35 developed states in the percentage of adults who vote in national elections. 4
Today, unthinking partisanship and party loyalty have become a way for people to avoid the burden of choice. Americans who vote for the Democratic or Republican Party as though they were the equivalent of the Yankees or the Crimson Tide are fleeing from the difficult task of sorting through competing arguments and coming to conclusions. Not long ago John McCain died, calling forth praise for his many efforts to reach across the aisle. In the eulogies for McCain, a theme was his unflagging energy, his intense curiosity and interest in meeting a variety of people and hearing their stories. He loved debating, arguing, and championing lost causes. McCain was one of those odd people who delighted in exercising his freedom to the utmost.
Most citizens can’t devote themselves to deliberating and arguing the way McCain did. When the country was founded, it was rightly held that the direct democracy of Athens, where every major decision was made by participation of all its citizens, was both impractical and dangerous. Instead we created a republican system that delegates most day to day decisions to elected representatives.
But the expectation at the beginning was never that Americans would devote themselves only to their private affairs, or that a good constitution would be measured only by how well individual rights could be protected (the original Constitution didn’t include a list of rights). A republic requires active participation and engagement. In America today I think there has been a downgrading of what used to be upheld as civic responsibility. Patriotism has been reduced to wearing a uniform, and offloaded to the volunteer military. Few Americans today undertake public service, even for a short time. The duty of every citizen to be informed, to weigh facts and arguments for themselves, to consider the public interest and not just their own interest, has been neglected. Trust in government is so low that people, already looking for excuses to avoid the hard work of self-rule, find it easy to opt out. Disproving conspiracy theories and outright lies has never been easier, but apparently too hard for millions who dismiss nuanced, complex narratives produced by qualified journalists and researchers as ‘fake news’. An easy cynicism prevails among large swathes of America, with people disparaging government and politicians and reflexively proclaiming “a plague on both your houses.”
Why has this happened? Without going into great detail, six trends seem to me at work: hyper-individualism, growing diversity, prosperity and technology, the end of the Cold War, less civic participation, and a narrowing view of education.
Hyper-individualism. The individualistic free-market ideology championed by our would-be oligarchs teaches us that there is no such thing as public interest, only individual rights and the conglomeration of private interests. According to the ‘public choice’ theory that won libertarian economist James Buchanan the Nobel Prize, people in government who profess to care about the public interest are just ‘predators’ who are deceiving us for their private gain. With this view now commonplace, many Americans decided in 2016 that they might as well vote for a super-predator. Oligarchs prefer a cynical, atomized citizenry that distrusts the government, because this gives them carte blanche to weaken and manipulate it. Today’s Republican Party has moved to implement this vision and undermine the federal government by deliberately refusing to staff key positions and putting avowed enemies of core government functions in top jobs. 5
Growing Diversity. With the civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights and immigration revolutions that took hold in the 1960s the composition of our public space changed rapidly. Many of the old white elite were encouraged by cynical politicians to think that efforts to integrate new actors and give them education and opportunity were plots to take away their privilege. When rising new cultures pushed for more freedom, they viewed it as a zero-sum game, an assault on their freedom. As the country became more conscious of its diversity, a significant part of the majority became less willing to support programs to help the have-nots. Instead, they worked aggressively to limit their freedom by finding ways to keep them from voting and participating.
Unfortunately, the response on the left has been to dig ever deeper into the bottomless identity swamp. The fight for greater inclusion has taken the form of demands based on unyielding and incommunicable identities, rather than a common citizenship that might convince the majority that sharing wealth and power is the American way. The left’s fixation on identity mirrors the right’s fixation on individual rights—both are private and inward-looking. As Mark Lilla pungently notes, “Identity is not the future of the left. It is not a force hostile to neoliberalism. Identity is Reaganism for lefties.” 6
Prosperity and Technology. The great unmixing of America that exploded with the move to the suburbs after World War II has done its work. Wealth and technology have allowed Americans to segregate themselves geographically and mix less with a diverse set of people. Class divisions are more entrenched. We cocoon at home with our own privately curated entertainment options. Our ubiquitous devices connect us to inescapable information networks that have become notoriously open to manipulation, while allowing Americans to easily avoid any encounter with opposing views. Wealth inequality has reinforced cynicism by highlighting the gap between a few with the means to manipulate public policy, and the many who feel helpless.
The End of the Cold War. Since our founding, Americans have seen their country as a central player in a global drama of competing ideologies: monarchy and absolutism in the 19th century, fascism and communism in the 20th. This narrative of threat from powerful outside forces served to discipline some of the problematic tendencies of American individualism and laissez-faire capitalism. Beginning with the Progressive movement in the late 19th century it helped create a willingness to sacrifice for the common good and to embrace restrictions on big business, coupled with a government safety net, as necessary to head off radicalism. World War II created a tremendous reservoir of social capital, bipartisanship, and trust in government, and after the war the external enemy of the USSR and ‘global communism’ helped push our political parties together to face a common threat.
The fall of the USSR, however, was widely viewed as proof that democracy, individual rights, and free markets were the natural order of things rather than fragile achievements requiring constant attention and dedication. Any sense of common purpose after 9/11 was dissipated by two botched and costly wars. Triumphalism and complacency have led politicians, especially on the right, to disregard many of the norms that had kept partisanship and populism in check, plundering our political commons as though its maintenance required no restraint or cultivation. Mitch McConnell’s shameless refusal to seat Merrick Garland was, I believe, a turning point that will be hard to overcome.
The ‘negative liberty’ of individual rights is, by itself, thin gruel. It fails to satisfy the desire of many people for a larger purpose or for belonging to something greater than themselves. The sense of challenge and threat from competing worldviews is largely gone, and with them support for national projects that might provide a sense of common purpose. As America’s civic version of nationalism weakens, in its place we see blood-and-soil nationalism, narrow identities, consumerism, religion, and cults of personality.
Less Civic Participation. Americans grow up today with less exposure to majoritarian decisionmaking in the form of community organizations, labor unions, and other experiences that used to inform most citizens’ understanding of democracy. Nineteenth-century observers of American society like Tocqueville pointed to this rich associational life as one of the country’s most distinctive features; Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone in 2000 described its multi-decade decline, due to television, geographic dispersion and sorting, economic pressures, and lack of a unifying national project. Kids today, at least in the upper middle classes, spend much more time in activities organized and controlled by adults, and much less in self-organized play, than in the past. There is less opportunity to learn the basic skills of negotiation, compromise, assertion, and mutual trust that underpin an active liberty.
Neglect of Civic Education. Lastly, I think our education system has lost its way in educating for citizenship. There is less consensus on what a good citizen should be like, and less conviction that being a good citizen makes any difference. Schools understandably want to avoid the simplistic, assimilationist messages that characterized earlier civic education. Recognizing and celebrating diversity is essential, but if not balanced by a celebration of what we have in common it leads to new versions of tribalism.
Education—and here I think not only of formal schooling, but the messages sent by our leaders in government, business, religion and media—fails to emphasize the duties of citizens, starting with the duty to vote, to vote with purpose and intelligence, to monitor elected officials, to participate in civic life, to consider the public good. The duty to sometimes sacrifice your individual interest for the sake of your community or to help fellow citizens who have less money or less opportunity. The duty to critically consider basic laws and norms and change them when necessary (that the electoral college still exists, for instance, is a national disgrace).
Today’s conservatives promote a transactional vision of education that focuses narrowly on job training. Republicans are less likely to support public funding of higher education on the grounds that education benefits individuals, not society. 7Moreover, in the age of Trump they see a liberal education that creates critical thinkers as politically dangerous. Almost 60% of Republicans think colleges and universities are having a negative effect on the country, according to a 2017 poll.
Unfortunately, conservative criticism is not entirely misplaced. Many colleges and universities have a culture that is excessively critical of American flaws, prioritizes ‘diversity’ over every competing value, and promotes outrage rather than engagement. Students are encouraged to find a narrow niche rather than think broadly. It is hard to find an education that is genuinely liberal in the original sense of creating a human being free from ignorance, prejudice, and complacency.
Conclusion
Understanding these trends points the way forward. A new liberalism should have three pillars. First, it must articulate an alternative to today’s narrowly rights-based, individualistic understanding of patriotism, where the military is the only legitimate unifying institution. This is part of, but only part of, American identity. Conservatives have been very successful at defining their vision as ‘genuinely American’ while saying Hamiltonian alternatives are outside the mainstream. This is false and must be vigorously challenged. 8
Its focus must be invigorating core democratic institutions to make citizenship, politics, and government sources of pride, not the butt of jokes. Make voting mandatory and make election days national celebrations; clear away all obstacles to the ballot box; squelch gerrymandering; prune away the strangling vines of money and corporate influence; rid ourselves of that relic of slavery, the electoral college; get the country experimenting with new electoral systems (like the ranked-choice system now being used in Maine) that give voters more choices; find the strength to rethink the Senate, the least representative legislative branch in the developed world; and for God’s sake do something to restore faith in the Supreme Court, like setting limits to terms. For starters.
Second, progressives need to present a positive agenda to mix Americans up and expose all of us to genuine diversity; you can read my suggestions for specific policy steps here. (Mixing It Up: A New Progressive Political Strategy). This might include integrating schools and housing, national service for young Americans, and moving big chunks of the federal government out of Washington. Ask people, especially members of the upper-middle-class progressive base, to make some sacrifices and not make progressivism only about what government can do for you.
Third, a successful progressive government must unite the country with big ideas for the common good. Universal healthcare would be a good place to start, followed by a major infrastructure program and steps towards a universal basic income. Dealing with climate change should become a unifying national project. And as the lights of liberal democracy flicker in today’s increasingly authoritarian world, we should reinvigorate our long tradition of standing for democracy, freedom, and human rights.
We Americans must re-learn the truth that there is no democracy, and no genuine freedom, without democrats. It is not only overseas that freedom is under threat. If we want to keep it, we must fight for it.
- https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/30/us/politics/first-amendment-conservatives-supreme-court.html
- https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/my-secret-shame/476415/.
- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/22/hillary-clinton-europe-must-curb-immigration-stop-populists-trump-brexit?CMP=share_btn_fb
- This article describes how many people have given up voting because they don’t think it matters anymore. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/03/us/non-voters-midterm-elections.html
- See this review of Michael Lewis’s new book, The Fifth Risk, which describes the contemptuous way the Trump Administration has treated federal institutions. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/12/06/trump-saboteur-in-chief/
- The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics, Mark Lilla, 2018, p. 94
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/prestoncooper2/2018/05/22/republicans-democrats-disagree-about-the-point-of-higher-education/#2f7d6df67ae6.
- I have written more about creating an alternative narrative here that builds on our tradition of civic nationalism. http://www.adamideas.org/2018/06/two-nationalisms-reconciling-intellect-and-emotion/