Dependent Individualism: A Welfare State Without an Ethical Core?

...The idea of neighborliness brought with it a sense of that cooperative spirit that had sometimes characterized city life...

...But without cohesive and ethically informed political communities and movements to stand watch over the legislative process, reforms tend to be waylaid by powerful interest groups and even to aggravate the problems they were designed to deal with...

...Advertisers and merchandisers have long understood this process of fragmentation...

...The suburban worldview that Lewis Mumford described as "a collective effort to lead a private existence" has increasingly come to define the political life of what is now a suburban nation...

...But viewed from the broad sweep of the twentieth century there is another decade, the 1920s, the era of the first mass media and the first taste of mass consumption, which has an almost equal claim to be called paradigmatic...

...Freedom from Blame and Responsibility But what, you may ask, does all this have to do with the welfare state...

...We now have magazines that circulate only to selected zip codes...

...The freedom to experiment with drugs was a product of the social freedom and/or license provided by the breakdown of the old moral/social order...

...The old adage, "You can't sue city hall," no longer applies...

...The policyholders/taxpayers, although they no longer pass moral judgment, have an interest in limiting the financial costs they will have to bear...

...Instead, the state, through the courts, has become the guarantor of new "rights-based protections" for workers...

...These generally walled and gated complexes, are sometimes further subdivided into areas for high-tech enthusiasts, nudists, tennis buffs, etc...

...Insurance principles isolate the individual even as they also aggregate people by sorting them into statistical "communities" based on categories of probable risk...

...The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism," Wilde wrote, "is undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others...

...The suits, which have dealt with everything from support for the handicapped to zoning, have become, notes a prominent lawyer, an all-purpose "weapon against any action taken by a municipality...

...These nefarious trends were quickly sniffed out by William H. Whyte, C. Wright Mills, and thousands of cliché-mongerers who proceeded to rail on and on about the loss of individualism and the dangers of America becoming a society of automatons...

...Emerson may have screeched, "the state is a trick," but most Americans, their grousing aside, believe they can turn the trick on the state...

...In these and other cases, such as attempts to reimpose surveillance on welfare mothers in the name of preventing child abuse, the tensions between the claims of privacy and free choice come into inevitable conflict not with social norms but with the costs imposed on other policyholders/taxpayers...

...But between 1957 and 1988 government was divided 60 percent of the time, and 80 percent of the time between 1969 and 1988...

...The concept of social cost, which applies to unemployment as well as to automobile insurance, converts injury and fault into costs to be spread as widely as possible...

...In the age of me-generation evangelists preaching selfgratification, the posters of the once austere and still Stalinist French Communist party have featured a comely brunette and the slogan "Une vie plus heureuse . . . Adherez au parti communiste...

...That hunger for community has, despite its ghostly appearance in some speeches at the 1984 Democratic convention, largely disappeared from the national political agenda...

...Most dramatically, the growth of social insurance in the form of public and private pensions allows the generations to be more free of each other, both geographically and emotionally...

...M]odem social insurance techniques . . . break the link between compensation and fault...

...The traditional suburb was both detached from yet part of the magnetic field of the metropolis...

...It was swept away by the enticing promise of personal liberation...

...If viewed through the prism of the 1920s, the collective struggles of the New Deal and World War II eras were only a temporary interruption in a long march of self-fulfillment to newer and better forms of consumption...

...But now it appears that older, largely informal constraints will be replaced by widespread drug 442 • DISSENT Dependent Individualism testing as a response of those who wish to avoid the costs imposed upon them by drug users...

...Loss of Community The social democratic tradition, which rejects both forced collectivism and radical individualism, has always wrestled with the unavoidable tensions between individual claims and common needs...

...And since every state expresses the character of its citizens, it has also given us the kind of beggar-thy-neighbor politics likely to endure for some time to come...

...Interdependence was the order of the day...

...The effect is a rough retributive justice...

...On to the "Burbs" The growth of centrifugal tendencies in American life is nowhere more concretely expressed than in the rise of what has been described variously as the "anticity," the "slurb," the "technoburb," or the "urbanoids...

...Or, as one of my relatives put it, "from now on, everything is a la carte...

...The answer is that the primary means of regulating the conflict between drivers is also increasingly the principle on which the welfare state is based...

...Single-issue politics is another growing trend...

...In Western Europe that ethical core was usually provided by social democracy...

...But as Daniel Bell points out, capitalism, too, has been shorn of its transcendent justifications...

...That would be as reprehensible as it is implausible...

...Innovative judges and lawyers have used a once-obscure section of the 1871 Civil Rights code to enable advocates to win city resources for the homeless and increased rent payments for welfare recipients...

...reads a Los Angeles billboard complete with a number to call...

...It is the subtle but totally coordinated order of an actuarial table...

...The restless of the 1960s, looking to move up the hierarchy of satisfactions, were not so much critics of capitalism (they would soon pioneer the boutique America of the 1970s) as they were hostile to its failure to deliver the ever-increasing pleasures it promised...

...Sources of self-restraint and stable identity such as the family, the neighborhood, and the institutional church were increasingly in disarray...

...In these and numerous other examples state politics are inevitably drawn into the politics of risk as defined by the unholy triangle of trial lawyers, doctors, and insurance companies, the interest groups that both organize and profit from the distorted shadow welfare state...

...Because divided government is generally ineffective government, the very process tends to reinforce itself...

...In a parody of blinkered individualism, those individual choices have disastrous collective consequences for traffic...

...The bar has been the chief beneficiary of this shadow welfare system...

...The ideology of these outlying areas is a secularized version of the pre-New Deal belief that sin stemmed from city life...

...But in actuality, individualism and the welfare state have been marching arm-in-arm over the past three decades...

...Dependent individualism has, in a marriage of convenience, joined the consumerist and rightsbased individualism of the 1920s with a debased version of the social insurance ideal of the 1930s...

...Big-city machine politics helped create the ideology of the New Deal by challenging the pastoral ideology of rugged individualism...

...This new entity has no clear boundaries and, like American culture, it lacks, says historian Robert Fishman, "any recognizable center to give meaning to the whole...

...Where communities of a sort flourish in the new suburbia, they thrive as "special interest subdivisions" that help undergird specialinterest politics...

...This sprawl of "special-interest" housing has been described as having the political character of "a loose confederation of shopping centers...

...The urban crisis has virtually disappeared from the national agenda— when's the last time you heard a speech on the subject...

...Ineffectual administrations deepen the hostility to party politics, which helps generate splitticket voting to begin with...

...Freed from the necessity of developing self-restraint, the "personality of man," said Wilde, "will be as wonderful as the personality of a child...

...Instead of working through a political party, the middle class can now turn to direct action through the courts...

...This support for the expansion of the American welfare state seems all the more remarkable given (a) the unmistakably libertarian, not to say anarchic, trends of American culture and (b) the sharp decline of institutions like trade unions and big-city political machines that were long the engine of welfarestate policies...

...Capitalism, as the Reagan years have made clear, defends itself in the hedonist terms of its cultural critics...

...In a similar vein, stress-related cases, far and away the fastest growing occupational ill of this decade, have become another stopgap substitute for generalized health coverage...

...They are private cities complete with their own police and sanitation...

...A Great Society, a national community, depended for its support on the cultivation of the habits of cooperation nurtured by "secondary" and local social institutions...

...The upshot is divided government...

...The effect, coming on top of the doubling of workers' compensation premium costs to thirty-five billion dollars since 1980, is that aid to the disabled "has become part of the welfare system...

...Does your job make you sick...

...And although the litigants don't always win, on 1871 Civil Rights suits alone local governments paid out nearly two billion dollars over the first five years of the Reagan administration...

...Even without the excesses of the sixties, the ideal of community would have declined because its social and institutional basis had already eroded...

...At the same time, the broad-gauge democratic institutions such as political parties, the draft army, the comprehensive high school, the department store, the general magazine, and the mass-market movie theater, all of which created sets of shared experience, have either been dismantled or discredited...

...Suburbanites of the 1950s tended to define themselves in terms of a common way of life and shared sense of values...

...But where the different classes had an awareness of each other as they mixed to some degree in great city department stores like Macy's, the suburban mall shopper is "less class conscious," because the malls themselves have already been class segregated...

...Loyal to their organizations and to their neighbors and family, these people actually seemed to enjoy socializing in their backyards...

...Or perhaps nonsystem would be a better way to put it since, while the rate of industrial accidents has actually been declining, the percentage of compensation claimed by the lawyers prosecuting these suits has risen...

...439 Dependent Individualism The courts provide for the semi-private pursuit of what should—or could—be public policy...

...Rather, there was a new shopping list, because the mass-produced goods were unable to deliver the higher levels of satisfaction that had come to be expected...

...But even as voting declined, other forms of middle-class political participation have been on the rise...

...But even as unions have been forced from the factory floor, the state has not similarly withdrawn...

...In the words of one longtime suburbanite, "everyone is going their own way...

...In state after state, proand anti-abortion groups, each with their own lawyers and medical experts, struggle over who will pay for the exercise of abortion rights...

...The tobacco companies, who are battling medical insurers, have created coalitions with labor and minority groups in the name of "workers' rights...

...And the movies went from production for a general audience to market segmentation and then to the even narrower-gauged viewing of the VCR-centered living room...

...The mutuality and fraternity at the heart of the social democratic ethic are essential today as never before if America is to be saved from its own worst inclinations...

...The idea of a national community, spiritually infused by the camaraderie born of depression and war, served as an implicit reproach to proponents of private profit making...

...America has always been defined by its centrifugal tendencies, but historically these were partially counterbalanced by inherited 438 • DISSENT Dependent Individualism traditions, however diverse...

...Political power, and the ideas that animate it, have followed the shift of wealth and population into the suburbs...

...They needn't have worried...

...What made the sixties different was that for the first time mass-produced goods were often seen as a threat to individuality and personal wellbeing...

...The decline of the Republican right and the renewed interest in major social legislation compels us to ask a crucial question: Can the welfare state fulfill its promise without a strong ethical core...

...Today, while suburban per capita income outstrips the city's by one-third, the average suburbanite pays twentyfive percent less in taxes...

...The New Deal ethos, a somewhat social democratic response to the absolute claims of individual property rights, redefined the balance between the individual and the community...

...Many of the fastest growing residential areas in America are child-free retirement complexes...

...And meanwhile, the triumph of the market, which has not only been internationalized but has spread from the economy to the social sphere at home, has left increasing numbers of people bereft of traditional social and institutional protections...

...The shopping malls, fractional private cities, whose walkways are the replacement for town commons or public parks, "provide what little civic identity exists...

...It was Oscar Wilde who saw the possibilities collective security could create for what he hoped would be the rich development of personality...

...These dual reversals, the one by deepening the support for the welfare/insurance state and the other by undermining the status of capital, have made government activity seem more legitimate and desirable than ever...

...It would only feed the fevers that threaten to consume American society...

...If no one name has been able to stick to what is clearly the most important demographic development of the past twenty years, the leapfrogging of the American population beyond the cities and the older suburbs, it is because the organization of these areas is so diffuse and fragmented as to defy easy characterization...

...Single-issue campaigns emphasize, like the market, intense personal preferences of scattered groups or individuals—the consequence is that the age of designer jeans also produces designer politics...

...Other forms of public and private insurance mean that the network of mutually interdependent ties upon which an individual or family once relied has been replaced with an impersonal version...

...Similarly, as insurance costs rise, companies are monitoring the habits of employees with an eye to eliminating bad habits, which raise medical expenses...

...Erected as a barrier to property-rights individualism, the solidaristic ethos of the New Deal was undermined by new forms of individualism—namely, an expressive individualism made possible, ironically, by the New Deal's legacy of mass prosperity...

...FALL • 1988...

...Liberated by the federal highways system and information-age technology, many corporations and a large chunk of white America have seceded from the disorder and crime of city life...

...In Gwinnet, the nation's fastest growing county, which lies outside Atlanta, only one worker in twenty commutes to the city...

...Recent administrations have in effect withdrawn government protection for unions by allowing the Wagner act to be eviscerated...

...First, as the foundations of the welfare state have shifted from, roughly speaking, the ideal of social solidarity to self-interest, the welfare state has in effect stolen the individualist clothes of its critics...

...The political party's decline has brought the lawyer's rise...

...Our conventional view of American history places the conflict between the welfare state and self-reliant individualism at the core of post-Depression American politics...

...Even if they do know each other, neighbors are now less likely to share the same values, the same sense of the world, than those who had emerged from the shared experiences of the thirties and forties...

...Risk," says Roger Simon, "creates its own collective order...

...The "belongers" are gone, replaced by single-minded careerists whose search for success seals them off from social pressures of nosy neighbors...

...One response has been a rapid growth of state-level social services and economic promotion, even as Reagan marginally reduced the scope of federal government...

...In America social democratic traditions have been severely undermined by radical individualism...

...Both Dukakis and Bush have depended on suburbia for their core support...

...But therein lies the rub...

...Roughly translated, "have more fun, join the Communist party...

...In the midst of Reagan conservatism, even as federal cutbacks have pushed many of the poor out of the safety net, the courts have continued to build, willy-nilly, a rights-based shadow welfare state...

...The center of this new ad hoc city, says Robert Fishman, is the individual household that can use its car to gain access to FALL • 1988 • 441 Dependent Individualism a dispersed but full range of urban amenities, including cultural events that increasingly take place at the malls...

...q FALL • 1988 • 443...

...Dukakis, barely touched by the passions of the civil rights movement or Vietnam, made his mark as a procedural reformer pushing issues of primary concern to suburbanites—issues like insurance-rate determination and health-care cost containment...

...Social democrats have by and large recognized that the individual is sustained by the community even as he or she may also stand in opposition...

...Driven by the emotional costs of depression and war, suburbanites, like many other Americans, were attracted to structure and security...

...The welfare state is no longer driven by New Deal sentiments of social solidarity...

...Without punishing, moralizing or redeeming, it provides for the security and harmony of the social body by coordinating risks and access...

...If Gwinnet's transient residents, consisting almost entirely of baby boomers, complain of a shortage of grandparents, that, in part, is because the "seniors" have migrated to their own new settlements...

...FALL • 1988 • 437 Fred Siegel Dependent Individualism The most dramatic example of the process whereby the old justifications for state action have broken down and been replaced by new ones is in the workplace...

...For young Americans who rejected the "off-the-rack" identities of their parents, life has increasingly been a matter of customizing what are to a great extent self-chosen identities...

...Dominance of the center cities is, in the words of H.G...

...The tension between the claims of individual rights and the medical costs imposed by the exercise of those rights is reshaping the politics of our largest states...

...Instead, as Roger Simon points out, "We don't feel that it is problematic for drivers to be relieved [via insurance] of the financial harm of their own faulty conduct...

...The future, it would seem, holds religion without hell and "socialism" without sacrifice...

...The sprawl of the "technoburb" is in effect a mapping of uncoordinated individual choices...

...The covenants of the rapidly growing private communities restrict ownership on the basis not of race, but of age, marital status, or the presence of children...

...The lone individual riding in his car, a distant heir of the lone cowboy on horseback, insists on riding solo across ever more crowded highways as the aggregate effect of these discrete choices is near gridlock...

...Urban life required 440 • DISSENT Dependent Individualism government support or public cooperation...

...The difficulty, as one official put it, is that "When you meter somebody, you're penalizing an individual who may not see the benefit to the community...

...If it does or if you claim it does, you can now sue in twenty-six states...

...Drunks aside, we no longer talk of the individual driver as carrying a moral responsibility to drive safely in the interest of others...

...The political currents driving the state-sponsored expansion of child care and long-term health care for the elderly are so powerful as to have overwhelmed the Reagan administration...

...A consequence is ticketsplitting...

...Contemporary political life is based on two remarkable inversions...

...Instead it is the mechanism that, prosperity aside, has freed the individual from the social burdens once borne by family and church and fraternal, work, and community organizations...

...In the 1960s and 1970s, individuals, behaving like fragments of an exploded consensus, broke through the ever thinner walls of tradition in pursuit of transcendent personal satisfaction...

...Party politics, offering only an either/or choice as compared to the five hundred or so television programs available on a day's cable television, is an affront to sensibilities pampered by the personalized promise of product differentiation...

...Together, divided government and single-issue politics have substantially contributed to a decline in middleclass voting...

...But from the family to the workplace, the organizations that once, however imperfectly, served as a training ground for what at the least had been a common and at the best a cooperative experience, were now in marked decline...

...But instead of aiding workers as a group, these new protections against, for example, arbitrary employer actions—which have grown as the unions have receded—are extended individually to each worker...

...Long March of Hedonism Americans of a liberal bent tend to regard the 1930s as the paradigmatic decade, the period against which current changes can be measured...

...The assumption that individual, largely context-free, choice should always be paramount has also come to entail the notion that there is no collective/common learning, so that we each begin de novo to reconstruct our own personal social weal...

...Prior to 1946 and the postwar prosperity that helped produce ticket-splitting, the party that controlled the White House almost always won both the House and the Senate...

...They are dependent individualists —like the rugged farmers who live off crop insurance and the dashing motorcyclists free to ride without a helmet and with the right to have others pay the tab when they're banged up...

...Its offspring is an easy mark: a government whose jurisdictional reach has been dramatically extended, but whose moral grasp recedes before the privatization of life...

...Today there are 228 basically suburban seats but only seventy-nine primarily urban districts...

...The workers' organizations that were once at the heart of the welfare state have been reduced to a mere 17 percent of the workforce...

...Lyndon Johnson hoped that his programs would create a society "where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community...

...With the VCR, even when we are together in watching the same movie, we are together alone...

...Planning officials responding to the tremendous hostility generated by growing traffic jams explain how they could solve the problem if (a) they could convince potential drivers to share a ride or (b) impose ramp metering to control the flow of individual cars onto the highways...

...The new suburbs are characterized by a palsied sense of affiliation...

...The very success of Reaganite consumer capitalism has intensified the demands placed on the welfare state...

...The Reaganites have gone so far as to suggest, Mencken-like, that the only possible objection to the recent carnival of debt-driven consumption is a fear on the part of Democrats that people might be enjoying themselves...

...Eight years into the most conservative administration since the 1920s, support for the welfare state in America is more widespread than ever...

...In a situation in which society is largely a multifaceted insurance agency we are, in short, alone together...

...Between 1982 and 1985 the number of lawsuits against municipalities jumped 100 percent, with the average suit in 1985 asking between one and two hundred million dollars in damages...

...The effect, to overstate somewhat, is that the principle of the market, the totemization of choice, now informs not only the economy but all the other institutions that once provided a common memory and counterbalancing of principles to the sovereignty of individual desires recorded as market preferences...

...In what demographers describe as a "true revolution," considerably more than twice as many commuters shuttle back and forth between suburbs as commute between a home in the suburbs and work in the old cities...

...Bush salvaged the nomination by winning the suburbanites of Nouvelle Hampshire who had fled Boston's crime rate and Massachusetts's taxes...

...And here we may learn that we have been freed from one set of social controls only to be delivered into another...

...But the perverse irony is that the more a municipality tries to do for its citizens in the way of providing public health, public recreation, public hospital and rehabilitation services, the more it is liable to legal action...

...Rather than vote down the line like their parents, they shop among the candidates/ market choices offered...

...The one would be reconciled with the many, said Roosevelt, by "extending to our national life the old principle of local community...

...Rather than being understood in even partially moral terms, accident insurance not unreasonably assumes that the risk of damage is simply part and parcel of the cost of driving...

...For hardshell conservatives, the conclusion is clear—dismantle the welfare state and return to unfettered market individualism...

...At the end of World War II urban incomes actually exceeded suburban ones...

...Roosevelt largely succeeded at what Alexander Herzen once described as "the most difficult social goal": to understand "the extent and sacred nature of the rights of the person, without destroying society, without fracturing it...

...The two-income suburban/exurban families can use their cars to create a kind of customized city for themselves...

...It's not that the 1960s saw the abandonment of consumption as the route to self-satisfaction...

...Determined to ease this tension, they have argued that what's important is not so much what differentiates people as what allows them freely to choose mutuality...

...Modern insurance techniques not only free individuals from blame, but also from the community pressures which once regulated conduct...

...Wells, "as obsolete as the mailcoach...

...Without bringing people into a shared discourse or common rituals, it attaches precise links between them...

...Looking for nirvana, they found . . . the market...

...In a pinch, instead of being dependent on the whims of Uncle Moe for a loan, the modern individual is dependent on the less personally stifling and/or engaging connection to a risk-management bureaucracy...

...Only a decade-andahalf ago, the cities held a four-seat edge (148 to 144) in Congress...

...This is no longer the case...

...The problem is that in a society where risks are shared socially but pleasure is, as with small children, purely individual, politics degenerates into a struggle to shift risks onto others while one continues to enjoy one's own benefits...

...The triumph of choice-driven hedonism is not confined to Yuppie Reaganites...

...If there is one thing these fast growing areas have in common, it is antipathy to the city...