NEOLIBERALISM'S HESITATION DANCE

...Amonth after this declamation, I got a sense of what was missing from my comments while reading Elizabeth Drew's profile of Senator Jesse Helms in the July 20, 1981 New Yorker...

...James Fallows, the Washington editor of the Atlantic, grew up in Texas, and after Harvard he wrote speeches for a Georgia peanut farmer...

...But I just don't think that neoliberal fairmindedness will translate into political will— that is, into real sacrifices by the wealthy, or serious moves toward responsible investment and worker control—as long as neoliberals and others keep striking illusory "balances" between the sins of the poor and the sins of the rich, the abuses of unions and the abuses of corporations...

...I think neoliberals know this...

...Certainly, the corporate apologist Irving Kristol, who cunningly pushes the "antisnobbery" line, had little trouble staking out a role for himself at the conference as a "friendly" critic and coach for the new neoliberal movement...

...People know that Democraticparty liberalism has been a jumble of fitful efforts to adjust people's needs to corporatedominated priorities—a pacification program without economic integrity or social vision...

...Liberals have to face them and fix them...

...Ford and Kissinger are only the right wing of the left wing...

...I think the Eastern Airlines settlement moves its participants in this direction, and 186 that its glimmer of a progressive alternative should give neoliberals pause...

...How can we strengthen democratically elected authority over educational reform while still demanding that corporations foot the brunt of the bill...

...If we've defended unions, it's not for their wage demands alone but also for their potential power to shift the system's social costs to where they belong...

...Feminism, struggling against patriarchal oppression, sometimes seems determined to use the state to ward off every sense of familial obligation across the generations...

...and the leadership groups that run the country—not just the media, but also the politicians, corporate executives...

...Nor is it to deny that urban socialists have often been too quick to proclaim the demise of the structures Lucier calls "pre-political...

...It is to condemn family, church, neighborhood, and ethnic bulwarks to an increasingly narrow defensiveness...

...Many of the people I met at the Washington Monthly's conference were full of energy, compassion, and faith...

...We never lost sight of the fact that rising prices, deepening inequities and unemployment, the decline in health care, education, and other services have causes more systemic than the abuses of unions or entitlement programs...

...And, unlike People Express employees, they're organized into a potential bloc of votes...

...The left brings the sobering news that in the modern West there are no such things as "pre-political" values, only the struggle in history toward "post-political" values nourished by a just economy...

...it says in an editorial that neoliberalism's purpose is `to make good intentions marketable again.' The very phrase is an unnecessary apology, a concession to the dominant ideology of selfishness and hucksterism...

...So you ought to be lying awake nights thinking, 'Why isn't anyone listening to liberals anymore...

...They're bringing up the rear on this one...

...I think Reagan will win big in '84...

...They understand that there is never any final political substitute for an ethic of social responsibility based upon conscience and good will...

...Eastern's woes were less the result of labor costs than of poor management decisions —as, for instance, a crash program to buy new equipment based on a miscalculation of the market (a miscalculation heartily endorsed by the banks and Boeing, who supplied the capital and the planes...

...You neoliberals aren't really helping," I concluded...

...In this case, a better model has been developed by socialists, including William Wimpisinger, the International Machinists' president, and economic analysts Michael Locker and Stephen Abrecht, who represented the unions in the recent agreement to restructure the airline...

...Kennedy's personal life is fair game because it's part and parcel of his liberal social position...

...They insist, with some truth, that our freedom will always depend in part upon the charity and restraint of those entrusted with power, for no democracy can be wholly participatory...

...But I wonder why more neoliberals don't come over my way...

...Probable result, when push comes to shove: labor discipline and crackdowns on programs for the poor, but only token moves toward productive investment and progressive taxation...

...and that a government should not be based on deficit financing and economic redistribution, loyalty to the country that you live in...

...They have been trained in an intellectual tradition that is not only at variance with the way the ordinary person thinks but is contradictory to it...

...They aren't dealing with abstractions...

...Property as a fundamental human right...

...Tom Paine, in Common Sense, had something to say about wishful comity that neoliberals might ponder...

...True, 183 many neoliberals are young achievers from corporate suburbs, but Charlie Peters was a member of the West Virginia state legislature before getting involved in the Peace Corps...

...In the first place, no socialist will sit still for the neoliberals' confusion of left politics with liberal snobbery...

...While the agreement negotiated by the Machinists and Locker/Abrecht involves wage cuts amounting to 10 or 12 percent, the pay still is far higher than at People Express, and Eastern workers have a chance for what Locker calls "real codetermination" in running the company, from designing new facilities that will require fewer future workers (but no layoffs) to redesigning flexible work rules at the supervisory level...

...The sense of vertigo only deepened as I realized how my neoliberal acquaintance could have confused my position with traditional liberalism...

...My diversion with neoliberalism is nearly at an end...

...The fact is, it would never have come from neoliberals, who are suspicious of union power and enamored of management initiatives like Burr's...

...We would carry communal responsibility forward into the allocation of investment and the organization of production, rather than confine it to the charmed circles of church and family life...

...But neoliberal conference-goers also touted Donald Burr, the president of People Express, an antiunion, "worker-owned" airline created in 1980 out of Burr's and others' conservative unionbusting experience at Texas International airlines...

...They recoil from the pushy, "alien" demands of union organizers and liberal lawyers, who seem to thrive on the confrontation and litigious acrimony that small communities believe they honorably avoid...

...But . . . bring the doctrine of reconciliation to the touchstone of nature, and then tell me whether you can hereafter love, honor, and faithfully serve the power that has carried fire and sword into your land...

...Peters and Fallows, like other neoliberals, haven't forgotten the political landscape they've left behind...

...We are impatient with what we're sure are people's doomed hometown illusions...

...But then he feels compelled to add, 'We criticize liberalism to rescue it from its myths, not to destroy it.' The New Republic makes the same mistake...

...California's taxpayer revolts meant that only substantive reforms and higher standards could convince voters that more money would really mean improvement...

...0 My listener finessed a speedy retreat—in defeat, I assumed...

...I lie awake wondering how to put serious new alternatives before the people...

...By contrast, Locker argues, "People's workers have meetings and offer suggestions, and they certainly have more motivation than a unionized company with bad labor-management relations would, but they really don't have ownership...

...Why can't we attract a constituency?' And that will lead you, inevitably, I think, to the conclusion that the excesses and abuses of unions, poverty programs, and entitlements aren't minor quibbles with liberalism but are standing squarely in its path...

...In addition, $3 million in preferred stock will produce dividends, depending upon profitability, which could pay back the equivalent of the wage cuts over ten years—an incentive to efficiency and productivity...

...They only want to go more slowly than those on the left...

...Charlie Peters, the neoliberal founder of the Washington Monthly, claims you're for community, for a society that shares its burdens and rewards...

...While he and most neoliberals have sojourned among the "rationalistic" elites at such places as Harvard—and indeed see themselves as saving a potentially "rational" liberalism from the darkness of the right—many of them have sojourned even longer in heartland American communities whose public horizons seem to be what Lucier says they are...

...The poor and the unions are more visible and vulnerable to political censure because abuses by the rich and the corporations inhere in established power relationships...

...Protected by the liberal state, late capitalism, in the fictitious "persons" of its corporations, has proved itself eminently compatible with, and willing to market and profit from, virtually every kind of decadence, every violation of honor and taboo...

...The snobbery that is most damaging to liberalism is liberal intellectuals' contempt for religious, patriotic, and family values...

...He's a young writer of fairly typical neoliberal pedigree: prep school, the chilly Harvard College of the 1970s, then on to the precocious circle at the Washington Monthly, and finally to glossy, "responsible" national journalism...

...Shouldering their own burdens responsibly, as they see it, they are unimpressed by celebrations of the poor's power to disrupt, and outraged by rationalizations of criminal behavior as a response to injustice...

...I felt gripped by an acute sense of vertigo...

...is highly rationalistic . . . , it excludes most of the things that are important to the people who are selling cars and digging ditches and getting their kids on the bus to school...

...The difference is that we believe, with all due respect to the presumed "givens" of national character, that human constants must forever be recreated in the process of being reaffirmed...

...You should remember," I added grandly, "that just because corporate conservatives oppose liberal social programs, that doesn't mean those programs haven't served conservative interests too...

...To do that, he had to find 50 corporate leaders and 15 Chambers of Commerce to write the Republican governor and legislative leaders to say that, yes, they would support (relatively progressive) taxes if the money would improve the quality of education...

...He actually had to fend off minority attacks on one of his proposed reforms—the reintroduction of a core curriculum: "How can they argue that those of us who want all kids to know more history and English are elitists...

...It won't, because something is missing from answers like mine, some critical spark that would arouse the people among whom neoliberals move, people whose public discourse has been wrenched rightward...

...This is not inflaming matters, but trying them by those feelings and affections . . . without which we should be incapable of discharging the social duties of life, or enjoying the felicities of it...

...Which means that if the rest of the people are cynical about liberal programs, it's not necessarily because they've moved to the right...

...Despite much academic agitation about the horrors of being an 'organization man,' " Kristol has written, "the majority of those who now work for a living, of whatever class, have learned to prefer the security, the finely calibrated opportunities for advancement, the fringe benefits, the paternalism of a large corporation...

...But now I'm not so sure he went home to think things over and become a socialist, or that the neoliberal movement will quickly discover the bankruptcy of good intentions in the American corporate dispensation...

...If they insist on placing socialism beyond the Easternmost horizon, they will learn that the world is round when homegrown socialists in their own backyards fight runaway shops, real-estate speculation, and other forms of exploitation, doing so out of commitment to community, childrearing, and celebration affirmed in Michael Harrington's flat Midwestern accents and Jean Bethke Elshtain's familial memories...

...How progressive will the taxes be...

...Peters has made haste to endorse the Eastem agreement...

...More important, Burr was able to lay off hundreds of "temporary" reservation clerks, most of them minority people from Newark, to hire college student replacements, even though some of the Newark workers had been "temporary" for as long as two years...

...In addition, we've often resorted, because there seemed no choice, to the classical liberal logic of negative entitlements—of legal defenses from harassment—rather than to more sensitive affirmations...

...Even boardroom decisions are influenced not only by direct union participation but also by the fact that workers now own 25 percent of the company...

...Indeed, there was a West Virginian on nearly every panel at the neoliberal conference...

...But if you have, and can still shake hands with the murderers, then you are unworthy of the name of husband, father, friend, or lover...

...It's pre-political...

...0 "You call for democracy," he said, "but the democratic process in this country has been rejecting liberalism in recent years, and workingclass people are no exception...

...Gay rights become a vehement demand for protection by the liberal state, not an affirmation of erotic and emotional possibility...

...What he wrote about the British monarchy I would now apply to corporate capitalism and the way it undermines those who profess to value family and faith: Men of passive tempers look somewhat lightly over the offenses . . . and, still hoping for the best, are apt to call out, "Come, come, we shall be friends for all this...

...the "hallelujah" crowd pushing religion at the fringes of their conference made many of them a bit nervous...

...Helms and many neoliberals seem to think that those circles can be set off somehow from the corporatization of American life...

...Honig had to go to conservative Republicans for support, deflecting their demands that curbs on bargaining, seniority, and tenure be part of the reform package...

...We don't even have a glimmer of what it means to live in a society where people begin from a position of security in their everyday existence and then move out from there to engage others...

...And if we socialists have defended the liberal programs, it's because they do give people some breathing space for that, a base from which to challenge the larger system...

...Honig may well be worthy of that trust...

...yet Honig recounted that he couldn't find a single Democratic sponsor in the state legislature for his modest reforms, because he couldn't get the endorsement of the defensive unions...

...My point," I continued, in what I assume is good democratic socialist form, "is that people can oppose liberalism from the left, out of progressive yearnings for a broader social vision...

...People seem to prefer the corporate dispensation much as they appear to prefer the constants of family and church, even as both disintegrate around them...

...Nor have the neoliberals forgotten the special patience and humility, the careful pace and posture required of fighters for justice in places where local and statehouse establishments have seemed monolithic and immovable, places where often the only appeal is to notions of comity, faith, and fair play, all conceived to be part of an enduring national character...

...Lucier was describing a country where Ted Kennedy is of a piece with the Rockefellers, all right, but only because he and they are together on the extreme left horizon of American political vision, the Eastern horizon, if you will, where New York and Cambridge lie...

...These are contradictions we socialists often resolve quite poorly...

...That's the problem we have in the Republican Party...

...Helms's chief legislative assistant James Lucier told Drew: The problem in our country is [that] there is a tremendous gap between the people...

...And if he represents the far left horizon, then socialists are so much beyond the rim that we're invisible...

...Of course, liberalism has curdled into defensive legal claims, bureaucratic protectionism, and the scramble by better organized constituencies to hold onto eroding gains —the interest-group politics and general cynicism you denounce...

...I think the telling point will be when we can get to a place where people respond eagerly rather than fearfully to everyday ordinary encounters...

...Socialists also face challenges and corrections from neoliberals in the economic realm, as in California Superintendent of Public Instruction Bill Honig's gripping account, at the conference, of the end run he had to make around teachers' unions to raise money for education...

...It's not the "new right"—people are groping for a new term...

...that God is the creator of this world that we live in, and that there is a higher meaning than materialism...

...What Helms has been doing is appealing to people by going around the leadership structure...

...Since I'd been scoring neoliberalism as top-down tinkering by privileged if wellintentioned young men with public-policy schemes that don't really challenge American corporate power, I was taken aback to find him accusing me of liberal elitism...

...His airline grew rapidly, while such unionized lines as Eastern slid toward bankruptcy...

...Those professionally engaged in corporate marketing and consolidation tend to disdain the old conventions...

...Have voters resisted proposed school levies in the past because taxes have been regressive, burdening those who can least afford to pay...

...Thus Peters, fairly echoing Lucier: Snobbery, like the credentialism to which it is related, is another neoliberal target...

...You dogmatic socialists frustrate me because you won't ever do that...

...If no one listens to liberals like Ted Kennedy anymore, maybe it's because people see liberals as largely of a piece with the Rockefellers, rationalizing a system that no longer works...

...When someone like Helms or Reagan offers an ideal for a better America or belief in God, he's getting strong support even from people whose lives may not exemplify those virtues...

...Instead of scorning people who value family, country, and religion, neoliberals believe in reaching out to them to make clear that our programs are rooted in the same values...

...We need organizing, rooted in real needs and hurts, pitted against economic concentration and maldistribution of the fruits of labor...

...And there's the defensive quality of interpersonal relationships...

...We know that the denigration and disintegration of traditional bonds is not the work of some alien agent from the Eastern horizon but the result of a dangerous combination of classical liberalism's doctrine of "negative rights" with the increasing concentration of economic power...

...You neoliberals frustrate me because your rational good intentions won't ever organize the power to make real changes...

...Perhaps they limit their criticisms of capitalism to plaints about "welfare for the rich" and the most egregiously wasteful outcomes, only to settle for People Express, because they're afraid that anticapitalism itself is a form of snobbery...

...Kristol's penetration of the conference obscures a more penetrating socialist observation about people's apparent preferences for corporate security, offered in a Mother Jones interview by left economist Gar Alperovitz: If you really go to the core of most family life, two-thirds of the people live in constant fear of losing what they've got...

...From Lucier's vantage point, liberals and corporate planners constitute an elite that threatens all the "pre-political" verities that people think sustain their lives...

...To say nothing of the fear of crime, which is the necessary concomitant of economic decay...

...Conservatives like Helms and neoliberals like Peters cannot keep this fact a secret forever...

...They also profoundly mistrust liberal government programs, which seem to substitute bureaucratic fiat for the freely given mutual aid that embodies and reinforces the ancient, "prepolitical" truths...

...What I mean is, the intellectual training of those groups...

...Only when the program's passage seemed imminent were the teacher and supervisory unions willing to send representatives to the press conference detailing the plan...

...it ratifies Reaganism only as it shrinks in size and vitality...

...Even as I understood Peters's perspective better, I began to recover my balance, knowing how socialists might reply...

...But if you say you can still pass the violations over, then I ask, . . . Are your children and wife destitute . . . ? Have you lost a parent or a child by their hands . . . ? If you have not, then you are not the judge of those who have...

...I don't lie awake nights 182 wondering how to defend liberalism...

...faith...

...Well, I thought I had him on charges of limited political imagination alone: "In the first place," I answered, "the 'democratic process' in this country has turned off fully half its eligible participants...

...To stop short of that, as neoliberals do for all their celebration of the small entrepreneur and their brave words about responsible investment, is to render the traditional sources of liberty, honor, and faith defenseless against powerful corporate solvents...

...We are surprised by the resiliency of traditional bulwarks and beliefs...

...They were terminated without a single day's notice, a reminder to neoliberals that stodgy unionism is often rooted in traumatic encounters with the power relationships of capitalist production...

...they are the right wing of the [rationalistic] revolution...

...We sometimes sound to neoliberals and conservatives as if we actually wanted to hasten the decay of old forms within which many people still live and move and have their being...

...Neoliberals, I fear, want national consensus and comity too desperately to let themselves stand outside those power relationships long enough to challenge them—as a democratic movement really must...

...And to do that, Honig, bereft of significant progressive support, had to present education to the businessmen as a form of investment in human capital, designed to enhance California's position in the wider economy...

...The principles that we're espousing are the ones that have been around for thousands of years: the family...

...184 There's no going home again, and they know it —which isn't to say that religion is dead or all Spirit departed from this earth...

...Instead of seizing the initiative on these questions, organized teachers adopted a defensive trade-union posture that parallels other groups' resort to negative legal entitlements on social questions...

...There are questions a less defensive union might have put to Honig and to the state's voters: "If educational reform is presented as a kind of capital investment, shouldn't the businesses that will benefit most pay the freight...

...They'd been so frightened of losing a few minor prerogatives that even California's sharp decline in the proportion of its income going to education hadn't swayed them...

...By paying his machinists roughly half the union scale and hiring "temporary" reservation clerks on renewable three-month contracts (which save People Express the cost of health benefits and unemployment compensation pay185 ments), Burr undercut the competition...

...Finally, the left simply had to trust Honig's values and skills...

...Settling thus for "negative rights," we hardly know what to make of San Francisco's gay Republican gentry or the "feminism" imputed to corporate ladder-climbers...