Political prescriptions and fuzzy thinking
Packer, George
Ispent a good part of my summer reading cures for liberalism. One prescribed a limited but activist government; another a colorblind, egalitarian nationalism; others an affirmation of democratic...
...It could come from evangelical Christians or from state legislators...
...Of course, those prepared to eliminate the welfare guarantee were themselves unwilling to face the dilemma between the value of work and the well-being of poor children...
...On September 25, 1912, campaigning in New Haven, Wilson confronted a dilemma that has been troubling liberals ever since...
...He tried to carry the flag for nineteenth-century ideas in a new era of economic concentration...
...If this sounds dangerously like softheadedness, that's one more dilemma...
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...It must come to his assistance to see that he gets fair play...
...The fact that the public now seems ready to spend money on day care, transportation, and other 6 • DISSENT Comments and Opinions programs to enable poor people to get and keep work suggests that the liberal explanation of welfare hatred—meanness and more than a little racism—was partly wrong...
...A decade and a half later, the New Deal accelerated and consolidated the trend...
...Confusion requires training...
...During last year's congressional debate of the welfare bill, welfare advocates were paralyzed by their own intellectual bankruptcy—for too long they had been defending the indefensible...
...It might even be a good idea to start a file of items that suggest you were wrong...
...T.R.'s intellectual champion, Herbert Croly, had already anticipated Wilson's argument and refuted it three years earlier, in his book The Promise of American Life: "The central government in its policy toward the large corporations must adopt one of two courses...
...It had at least as much to do with work and idleness as with black and white, and if liberals had recognized that sooner then we might have been spared the end of the federal guarantee...
...In other words, Wilson's idea of eliminating unfair trade practices and reverting to an older system of free economic individualism, in which government took no sides, was a fantasy...
...By habit we know what we think, especially in public...
...Part of the confusion is over practical dilemmas...
...Moral qualities, such as social sympathy and intellectual courage, count for more right now than ideological consistency: a generous heart and an open mind...
...Wilson had seen a dilemma, acknowledged it, and deftly resolved it...
...confusion is not a natural state for the mind used to preparedness for debate...
...I agreed with them—all of them, even ones that contradicted others or were self-contradictory...
...But the worm turned again, and the ghosts of Jefferson and Jackson came back to haunt their party...
...Freedom today is something more than being let alone...
...Either it must discriminate in their favor or it must discriminate against them...
...No one knows what the next reform impulse will look like or where it will come from...
...Liberals today face a problem indirectly inherited from the Progressive era and similar to Wilson's in one way...
...Confusion serves the beneficial purpose of leaving one to the mercies of experience...
...If, for example, you make a point of reading to the end of news stories that contradict your view of things (like reports of increased state spending on welfare-to-work proFALL • 1997 • 7 Comments and Opinions grams), you will be better equipped to deal with genuine dilemmas than those who go on fattening their file of clippings that prove them right...
...The very words "liberal" and "left" should probably be avoided as much as possible for the foreseeable future (note to myself...
...In public philosophy anything seems possible, so in the reading such books can be completely persuasive, but afterward tend to melt away, like daydreams in the afternoon heat, leaving you groping to remember the verbal formula that had been so reassuring just a short time ago...
...One example is welfare...
...The wartime Espionage Act deprived individual freedoms like no piece of legislation since the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798, which Jefferson ran against in 1800...
...Then he proceeded rhetorically to untie it: But I feel confident that if Jefferson were living in our day he would see what we see: that the individual is caught in a great confused nexus of all sorts of complicated circumstances, and that to let him alone is to leave him helpless against the obstacles with which he has to contend...
...Where is the line drawn between prudent compromise and shameful capitulation...
...Modern life, especially the practices of large corporations, had made government interference in the economy necessary for freedom—the "New Freedom...
...New Freedom reforms like the Federal Trade Commission ended up regulating monopoly instead of competition...
...At a time like this the essential virtues are imagination, self-scrutiny, a willingness to question the most basic ideas...
...This autonomy "would blend individualism and collective obligation, by considering people as neighbors who inhabit partially common and partially separate spaces...
...Dilemmas are unpleasant to live with for long...
...Should we find a way to make the new era ours, like T.R., or reassert the old ideals in new terms, like Wilson...
...If, say, we appear to have reached the end of Keynesian growth-oriented national economics and the social contract it underwrote, what should we do then...
...Roosevelt's moment of opportunity lasted slightly longer than Wilson's, then it, too, was gone...
...bigness was inescapable...
...If someone prescribes a cure for liberalism in these terms only, demand the details and the all-important question "how...
...Abstract terms like equality, freedom, community, and justice do at least as much to enable thinking around dilemmas as thinking through them...
...By couching the problem of trusts as a matter of restoring freedom to the individual, Wilson was positioning himself against Theodore Roosevelt, whose brand of progressivism accepted the fact of increasing bigness FALL • 1997 • 5 Comments and Opinions in American life, proposing to use government to regulate or take over monopoly but not break it up...
...This kind of formula doesn't so much resolve the dilemma as point up its existence...
...others an affirmation of democratic universalism, a revival of civic republicanism, a program of economic populism, or a judicious mix of autonomy, diversity, and solidarity...
...Thus the Jeffersonian principle of national irresponsibility can no longer be maintained by those Democrats who sincerely believe that the inequalities of power generated in the American economic and political system are dangerous to the integrity of the democratic state...
...Neither one of these two trends is hospitable to the social contract prevailing since the 1930s and its primary guarantor, the federal government...
...Most efforts to find a way out take Wilson's rhetorical route of squaring the circle and having it both ways...
...Social justice required enlarging the state, not reducing the corporations...
...It is better for the moment to admit that "individualism and collective obligation" are not a blend but values in conflict and not at all easy to reconcile...
...Twenty years later, the assistant secretary took Wilson's words to heart and put the New Deal on a fast track...
...liberals now carry the flag for twentieth-century ideas in a new era of political decentralization nationally and economic concentration globally...
...But allowing experience to make an impression requires an effort of will...
...He reminded his audience that Jefferson had warned against excessive government interference in the activities of citizens, a warning that had been gospel to the Democratic Party ever since...
...Individualism turns out to be a value Americans won't turn over to "national purpose" quite so willingly as Croly imagined...
...Adjust, or wait it out...
...Part of liberals' trouble comes from an unwillingness to face that some of the most important dilemmas of our time are dilemmas at all...
...You can read a long article apparently full of the spirit of selfquestioning and discover at the end that the author hasn't entertained one really new thought, like a dog sniffing all over the yard before going to squat in the same old spot...
...and that, therefore, law in our day must come to the assistance of the individual...
...But the dilemma refused to be resolved so easily...
...that is all, but that is much...
...Language plays a key role in disguising confusion from self and others...
...Wilson won the argument in 1912...
...Woodrow Wilson, who had reason to know, said that the reform impulse comes once every twenty years and is lucky to last a single term, which was why he refused the advice of his young assistant secretary of the Navy to delay part of his program until a second term...
...A recent essay in the Nation, which has been running a useful series called "First Principles," acknowledged the persistence of anti-federalism in American life by proposing a new liberalism based on the principle of "autonomy...
...By raising the spirit of Jefferson, Wilson was admitting that modern conditions posed a conflict with inherited values—that the rise of trusts presented a difficult knot for Democrats...
...Their use, implying an organized body of people and ideas, is flattering but doesn't correspond to the reality of incoherence and flux and may prevent us from recognizing unlikely allies and useful ideas when they come along...
...We are trying to remain New Dealers, as Wilson tried to remain a Jeffersonian, when it may no longer be possible...
...Trusts existed because of fair play and equal rights...
...Since the 1960s, the traditional Democratic slogan of "Equal rights for all, special privileges for none" has worked against liberals and in favor of conservatives...
...For the better part of the twentieth century, Herbert Croly won the argument...
...Wilson's dilemma remains unresolved...
...Perhaps Daniel Patrick Moynihan's was the only strong opposing voice because he admitted the dilemma three decades ago...
...By 1918 events, conditions, and his own choices had Wilson presiding over a vastly more powerful national state, far closer to Roosevelt and Croly's New Nationalism than to the New Freedom...
...He had also scored points on the stump...
...It only became permissible to acknowledge the destructive aspects of the system when it was too late, the momentum for drastic change too great...
...When the world is moving in a direction you don't want it to go, what should you do...
...With this insight a progressive could remain a Jeffersonian...
...After America entered the European war in 1917, the War Industries Board undertook the first large-scale nationalization of the economy...
...The third alternative—that of being what is called 'impartial'—has no real existence...
...In the hard world of fact, reform looks like a rare and fragile thing, forced to maneuver in the narrow straits between money power and public opinion, always the outcome of particular conditions that cannot be duplicated, and none more so than the New Deal, which seems more and more like an extraordinary subplot in the American story of self-interested pursuit backed up by the Bill of Rights...
...But the more serious confusion is intellectual...
...For any thinking liberal, this must be a time of enormous confusion...
...In the modern era, he said, life had become tremendously complex, and the size of corporations threatened individual freedom in a new way...
...I also read American history, and there the effect was the opposite...
Vol. 44 • September 1997 • No. 4
