concept:
liberal activists standing behind police lines clapping and chanting. harlem shake is playing in the background. the bass drops. property destruction and resistance to police ensues.
Showing posts tagged liberalism
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We obviously don’t live in a perfectly libertarian world, but libertarians have had a pretty impressive winning streak in recent decades, especially on economic policy. Income tax rates are way down. Numerous industries have been deregulated. Most price controls have been abandoned. Competitive labor markets have steadily displaced top-down collective bargaining. Trade has been steadily liberalized.
Simultaneously, the intellectual climate has shifted to be dramatically more favorable to libertarian insights. Wage and price controls were a standard tool of economic policymaking in the 1970s. No one seriously advocates bringing them back today. The top income tax bracket in the 1950s was north of 90 percent. Today, the debate is whether the top rate will be 35 percent or 39 percent.
Timothy B. Lee, who’s a libertarian (although often a pretty good read on tech issues and why abolishing software patents would be a good idea) and is saying this like it’s a good thing. This was from early 2011, before Occupy. Back when taking credit for the changes to the US economy since the 70s sounded like a good idea.
Now, of course, you say things like this and people start to figure out that that’s also when middle class income growth stagnated, and start wondering if the liberals’ willingness to adopt a libertarian intellectual framework might have something to do with it. It’s been so long since there’s been an actual Left in this country it’s pretty depressing. One of these days I’m going to write a bigger rant about the uselessness of the Democratic Party.
“I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death” – Jacobin Magazine
Let’s take stock of what’s happened here. For twenty or thirty years, Democratic politicians — for their own purposes — have been paying what must amount to billions of dollars by now to consultants, pollsters, and think tank gurus to tell them how to talk to the public about inequality in some way that might spark sustained public engagement. For twenty or thirty years, they have failed so spectacularly that it’s given rise to a whole subgenre of political commentary, the old “why don’t Americans care about inequality” op-ed grist.
Then the Occupy movement comes along and after two and a half months shifts the national consciousness so palpably that Republican governors are scrambling to ask their Rasputins how capitalism can be defended to their constituents back in Peoria. And the message from so many liberals is: okay, that was nice, but now let’s get back to the real task of hurling Hatfield talking points at the McCoys.
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Patents and copyrights are both explicit government policies to promote innovation and creative work. They reward inventors, musicians, writers and other creative workers with government-enforced monopolies for set periods of time, and these monopolies allow the holders to charge prices far above the free-market price. For example, the nation will spend close to $300 billion in 2011 on prescription drugs.2 In the absence of government-enforced patent monopolies, the same drugs would cost around $30 billion, an amount that implies a transfer to the pharmaceutical industry of close to $270 billion a year, or about 1.8 percent of gross domestic product.
Dean Baker, in his new book The End of Loser Liberalism. True to his argument, the book’s available as a free download at the link. I’m pretty pessimistic about the chances of getting a real revolution out of the Occupy Movement, but I think there’s a decent chance of getting at least a reinvigorated, better educated, more powerful Left out of it. Time to relegate neoliberalism to the ash-heap of history.
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I don’t bother writing about Fox News. It is too easy. What I talk about are the liberal intellectuals, the ones who portray themselves as challenging power, as courageous, as standing up for truth and justice. They are basically the guardians of the faith. They set the limits. They tell us how far we can go. They say, ‘Look how courageous I am.’ But do not go one millimeter beyond that. At least for educated sectors, they are the most dangerous in supporting power.
Noam Chomsky (via rethinksocialism)
(Source: thegermansmakegoodstuff)
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Conservatives have big appetites for ideology; liberals don’t. There are, of course, taxonomies of conservative schools of thought. People on the right classify themselves as libertarians, neoconservatives, social conservatives, traditional conservatives, and the like, and spill oceans of ink defining, debating, and further subdividing these schools of thought. There is no parallel taxonomy on the left.
Carl T. Bogus, a self-described “dyed-in-the-wool liberal,” telling National Review great things about conservatives. Yeah, maybe there’s no taxonomy of leftists once you ignore everything to the left of mainstream Democrats, who all shy away from even describing themselves as liberals, much less anything scarier sounding. But out here further left there’s socialists, social democrats, trotskyists, maoists, communists, and a wide variety of anarcho-somethings, just for starters. Really, this guy apparently writes for The Nation and isn’t familiar with the existence of a wide variety of leftist ideologies?
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Here’s a cool thing about neoliberal policy: you can justify any kind of terrible proposal by invoking the idea of a market and throwing more weight on the back of that already overburdened word “choice.”
So I could say, “This certainly looks like a way to run a low-skill temp agency giving weeks of free labor to employers, employers who already probably have monopsony power and labor that is effectively deskilled, with taxpayers picking up the tab.” A neoliberal would then respond, “Well this program gives people the market dynamism of the choice to be choosing in the market of choice for the market of uncompensated labor, a choice market that synergizes with employer’s full choice of market wages,” and in our age that would somehow constitute a strong retort. Repeat that enough and the policy fellowships will just start falling into your lap.
Another great Mike Konczal piece on the failings of neoliberal policy.
(Source: rortybomb.wordpress.com)
One Less Bell to Answer – Corey Robin
So, the other day, Mitt Romney came out with his plan to replace our current system of unemployment insurance with individual unemployment savings accounts so that we can have more freedom and choice and all that good stuff. The amazing Mike Konczal ran down five ways to “contrast the liberal policy of unemployment insurance as it exists now with a neoliberal approach – an approach to governance where the state’s role is one of creating and completing otherwise incomplete markets.” The whole thing is well worth a read.
But it inspired this brilliant post by Corey Robin (who I’d never heard of before, but apparently he writes for The Nation), which nicely put into words thoughts that had merely bubbled around in my head without ever coalescing.
But Konczal’s post reminds me that there is a deeper, more substantive, case to be made for a left approach to the economy. In the neoliberal utopia, all of us are forced to spend an inordinate amount of time keeping track of each and every facet of our economic lives. That, in fact, is the openly declared goal: once we are made more cognizant of our money, where it comes from and where it goes, neoliberals believe we’ll be more responsible in spending and investing it…
In real (or at least our preferred) life, we do have other, better things to do. We have books to read, children to raise, friends to meet, loved ones to care for, amusements to enjoy, drinks to drink, walks to take, webs to surf, couches to lie on, games to play, movies to see, protests to make, movements to build, marches to march, and more…
One more account to keep track of, one more bell to answer. Why would anyone want to live like that? I sure as hell don’t know, but I think that’s the goal of the neoliberals: not just so that we’re more responsible with our money, but also so that we’re more consumed by it: so that we don’t have time for anything else.
Damn! Exactly right. Freedom isn’t the ability to manage my own unemployment insurance and retirement savings and health insurance and everything else. Freedom is to have it just work. To be free from the “immense, and incredibly shitty, hassle of everyday life” to the extent that such a thing is possible. I’ve heard libertarian types extolling the virtues of places where as many as six different companies compete for trash hauling, with a bewildering array of plans one can purchase. Here, I put the trash out on a Thursday night, and sometime on Friday it gets taken away. Sure, it might be cheaper overall if there was competition, but none of my life is spent on trash issues more complex than trying to stay sober enough on a Thursday night to take out the trash before it starts to be a problem.
Mike Konczal followed up on this post shortly afterward. And then Peter Frase (over at Jacobin Magazine, my new favorite thing) expands the argument to the broader point that “in a highly unequal society, greater complexity in the institutions of the state will generally favor the interests of the rich.”
Franklin Foer on the Roots of Liberalism
Franklin Foer, former editor of The New Republic, discusses five books on the roots of liberalism.
1. The State by Woodrew Wilson (1898):
Today people like to call Barack Obama and Bill Clinton intellectual presidents. They aren’t, in comparison to the likes of Woodrow Wilson. He was a genius. He wrote this book, The State, as a young academic. It’s from a neglected and relatively radical period of his career. In the next decade, he took a much more conservative turn as president of Princeton. The book outlines a much more robust role for the executive branch and also what an activist state would look like.
2. The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand (2002):
Pragmatism is the view that theories and policies should be evaluated based on how well they work. This became extremely important to the ethos of liberalism. Pragmatism coalesced when there was an abundant sense that we needed to break free from old thinking, and that we needed government by experts, who would experiment to produce policies that worked better to meet the challenges of the new century.
3. The Promise of American Life by Herbert Croly (1909):
The book provided the clearest distillation of American liberalism to date: “The use of Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends.” From the foundation of this country, there was a great debate between Hamiltonians, who had a vision of a strong state, and Jeffersonians, who advocated a yeoman’s republic with limited government. The genius of that aphorism is that it synthesises what liberals believe. We believe in individual freedom – we just believe that you need a strong state to realise that vision.
4. The Age of Reform by Richard Hofstadter (1955):
Hofstadter’s goal in this book is to dissociate progressives from New Deal liberals. He famously portrays progressives as members of a status-anxious middle class, whose anxieties shaped and limited their moralistic policies. He’s not a big fan of Woodrow Wilson either. I love this book but I also don’t especially agree with Hofstadter. I think that he fails to see all the continuities between the Wilson years and the New Deal years.
5. The Paradox of American Democracy by John Judis (2000):
Judis makes the case that elites lost the ethos of disinterestedness, one of the great ideals of the progressive era. It connects back to pragmatism, which advocated disinterested policy makers making decisions based on a calculus about the public good. This progressive ideal of disinterestedness became enshrined in the way that elites thought. If you look at the Federal Reserve, or the Brookings Institution, or TheNew York Times, all these elite entities were supposed to act with blindness towards the class interests of whoever was running and funding them.
