Roberto Mangabeira Unger's What Should the Left Propose?

...The parties that claim an historical connection with the Left are seen to oscillate between a shamefaced collaboration with this program of insecurity, in the hope that through growth it will generate resources that can be redirected to social spending, and a halfhearted, weakened defense of traditional social contracts...

...He would like, for example, to rebuild civil society by compelling each of us to come face to face with the facts of our mutual dependence: Checks sent through the mail are not enough...

...Earlier he'd spoken of "the simple abolition of the right of inheritance," and now he speaks of "the simple expedient of organizing to transport [women needing abortions] to the permitting states...

...Some of What Should the Left Propose...

...We will thereby "arouse a fever of productive activity, not by suppressing the market but by broadening opportunities to participate in it," even as we "impose on the creations of such feverish productive activity a rigorous mechanism of competitive selection...

...Sounding more like Antonin Scalia than Martin Luther King, Jr., Unger decries "the attempt by the progressives to use judicial politics to circumvent political politics" with regard to racial justice...

...Together with the racial orthodoxy, it helped diminish the chances of winning the support of a supra-racial working-class majority for a progressive national project...

...Unsurprisingly, the advocate of surprise closes by reassuring much of humanity that such resignation to incrementalism is "an illusion fueled by a lack of imagination," and that "acts of defiance that seem impossible may, once practiced, seem inevitable...

...Those readers are in for a bit of a shock...

...MICHAEL BtRURE is the author of What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts...

...Take for example the following passage, which begins quite sensibly by rejecting the idea of inevitable social progress, both in its Marxist and Whiggish versions: We can no longer assume, as the liberals and socialists of the nineteenth century supposed, under the spell of now unbelievable dogma, that the institutional conditions of material progress naturally and necessarily converge with the institutional requirements for the emancipation of individuals from well-established social division and hierarchy...

...Unger is scrupulous enough to admit that his alternative "addresses a constituency that does not yet exist: a workingclass majority able to transcend in its commitments racial and religious differences," but otherwise he seems unaware of the practical DISSENT / Winter 2007 n I2 I BOOKS politics on the ground: he claims it was a "mistake" to support War on Poverty programs "that circumvented the machines of traditional workingclass politics in the large cities," as if those machines, prior to the 1960s, were not as racially exclusive as any country club...

...But, for another example (only two pages later), he would also like "the willing elements of the Norwegian people to become an international service elite," taking the whole world as their horizon for a broad range of entrepreneurial, professional, and philanthropic activities...

...For Unger does not say very much about how his left's proposals might take root, and at times it's not entirely clear what the proposals themselves might mean...

...Boring, I know, but then, some of my best friends are boring...

...They become more like us...

...I will say, though, that this one example makes me curious to hear more in this vein...

...The burden, however, could be lifted by the simple expedient of organizing to transport them to the permitting states, and paying for their transport...

...Instead, Unger's project seeks "to root a bias to greater equality and inclusion in the organized logic of economic growth and technological innovation rather than making it rest on retrospective redistribution through tax and transfer...

...That means that a woman in Colorado or Texas need merely hop on the shuttle to Illinois or California in order to terminate an unwanted pregnancy...

...It's the same old Utopia in the end, then, to be achieved the traditional way—practice, practice, practice...

...The Left must strive to identify the zone in DISSENT / Winter 2007 n 119 BOOKS which the two sets of conditions can he made to intersect, and it must try to move society forward in that zone...

...Norton, 2006) and Rhetorical Occasions (University of North Carolina Press, 2006...

...He also advises us to "weaken the influence of money in politics, for example by providing for the public financing of political campaigns and by restricting as much as possible the electoral use of private resources...

...With respect to the star moral-agenda issue of the day, poor women who would need to travel from states forbidding abortion to those permitting it would be the greatest victims...

...elaborates a kind of creative self-contradiction, as when, not long after he excoriates liberalism for "the hope that through growth it will generate resources that can be redirected to social spending," he proposes a value added tax whose regressive effects "may be more than compensated not only by the redistributive social spending it makes possible but also by the opportunity-creating potential of the larger program it may help support...

...For all its incoherence, though, creative self-contradiction is finally preferable to the tangles entailed in Unger's critiques of American liberals' reliance on the judiciary with regard to racial integration, affirmative action, and abortion...

...I am particularly eager to learn what role will be assigned to Canadians...

...AND YET, THERE is a sense in which Unger is at his best when he is at his most diffuse, because some of his specific proposals are even more baffling than this...

...It may prefer to resign itself to small victories in the defense of old rights or in the achievement of new advantages...

...They subject to heightened scrutiny and pressure the arrangements on which all stable hierarchies of advantage depend...

...And it is strange that anyone with a decent respect for justice or liberty would fail to see that a regime dedicated to eroding or abolishing the separation of powers might very well seek to circumvent the rule of law—even the principle of habeas corpus—rather than to create a dynamic, exciting, high-energy democracy...

...It seems almost ungenerous to ask Unger how, precisely, we are to go about weakening the influence of money in politics and reversing the decline of labor as a political and economic force...

...It is a small price to pay for the cutting of the Gordian knots that now threatens [sic] to strangle the progressive cause in America...

...They make it easier to engage in the recombinations of people and resources that are vital to practical progress...

...This could be read as a reasonably fair description of Clinton and Kennedy Democrats, respectively...

...I am not sure what "problem" Unger is addressing here, unless there is a shortage of Norwegian service missionaries of which I am unaware...

...and with regard to abortion, which he considers as part of a larger "modernist agenda," he writes, "the decision by the progressives not only to espouse the modernist agenda, but to enforce it by federal power and federal law was a practical calamity...

...It is a circumstance not only unjust and disempowering in itself but also subversive of all other aspects of a program like the one advanced here...

...was written ten or twelve years ago, in response to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of "Third Way" leftism...

...is its untimeliness: neither global nor domestic U.S...

...THE HISTORY of the twentieth century has led him to acknowledge that appeals to our utopian potential have sometimes gone awry: "After the ideological and institutional adventures of the twentieth century, with their terrible record of oppression in the name of redemption, much of humanity may have reason to be wary of proposals to reorganize society...

...122 n DISSENT / Winter 2007...

...If this sounds like a paradox, surely it is no less a paradox than the idea of creating a new branch of government devoted to the creation of ceaseless flux, a kind of Megadepartment for the Fomenting of Constant Change, "equipped with both the practical resources and the political legitimacy to undertake a task for which the traditional Legislature, Executive, and Judiciary are ill suited...

...However, we would be equally mistaken to suppose that these two sets of conditions inevitably conflict...

...But then, part of the strangeness of What Should the Left Propose...

...The aim is less to humanize society than it is to divinize humanity: to bring us to ourselves by making ourselves more godlike...

...It destroys the link between the accumulation of wealth and the ability of the ordinary worker to enjoy the benefits of economic growth...

...The principle must be established that every able-bodied adult will have a position in both the production system and the caring economy: part of a working life or of a working year should be devoted to participating in the provision of care for the young, the old, the infirm, the poor, and the desperate...

...It is strange that anyone identifying with the left in the Constitution-shredding era of Bush II would complain about "the cult of the Constitution" as "the supreme example of American institution worship...

...I N FAIRNESS to Unger, some of his specific proposals are utopian in the best sense...

...How do we root a bias to greater equality and inclusion in the organized logic of economic growth and technological innovation...

...For it doesn't require too much imagination to suppose that some people, offered the opportunity to live a big life transfigured by ambition, surprise, and struggle, might prefer simply to have a decent, stable job, health care, a couple of weeks' vacation to go fishing, and a reliable pension fund that will allow them to retire and spend some time with the grandkids...

...So let's say that each of the states that voted for Bush in 2004 passes a ban on abortion...

...The almost certain result would be divergence among the states in the relative weight they would give to each agenda, and the consequent deepening of the national debate...

...Let no one fault such a proposal for lack of ambition...

...As an answer to the perennial question, What is to be clone?, this has to be about as diffuse as it gets...

...Fortunately, such an institution will not become a citadel of despotism itself, because it will work in the service of high-energy democracy, and, as Unger writes, a "deepened, high-energy democracy wants to enhance our ordinary powers, enlarge the scope of our ordinary sympathies and ambitions, and render more intense our ordinary experience...

...By the time you've reached the end of the second paragraph, it's a fair bet that you have no idea who "they" are...

...To understand the nature of those proposals, one needs to realize that when Unger speaks of the Dictatorship of No Alternatives and humanity's desperate need to overthrow it, he is not just talking about the narrow spectrum of politics in the United States, where the center has shifted so far to the right that tepid Clintonian triangulation has become the left wing of the possible...

...But this is not all such a democracy wants—for there is no reason to BOOKS think a man's reach should exceed his grasp: The overriding goal to which this practice and this project are directed is to make us bigger, both individually and collectively, and to make us more equal, in circumstance as well as in opportunity, only insofar as inequality diminishes and confines us...

...The government— by the terms of this Carthaginian solution— would act as a master venture capitalist and instigator, helping spawn the broad array of organizations that would have to do the firstline work of preparation and support...

...And it is underscored later in the book when Unger lodges the standard complaint about the decline of labor in the United States: In no democracy, rich or poor, has the position of labor—its share of national income, its degree of internal segmentation, its level of organized power, influence, and security—degenerated more dramatically over the last forty years than in the United States...

...For Roberto Mangabeira Unger's diagnoses of the left's decline are both plausible and familiar, and they say nothing about left debates since 2001...

...This is a fine suggestion in 2006, just as it was a fine suggestion in 1994 and 1988 and 1980...

...But it is not unreasonable that readers, when opening a book titled What Should the Left Propose?, expect to find answers to questions like this...

...Against flexibility, for labor: Unger's positions here are anything but surprising...

...events over the past five years have led Unger to reconsider his faith in the transformative power of an unfettered executive capable of breaking through the gridlock of politics as usual...

...Leaving aside for now the condescension dripping from the phrase "the star moralagenda issue of the day," I have to acknowledge that I'm puzzled by what Unger considers "simple...

...That task, Unger explains, "is to intervene in particular social organizations and practices that have become little citadels of despotism, and to reconstruct them...

...On returning home, transformed by the experiences of the whole world, these missionaries of constructive action would change the tenor of national life...

...Moreover, it arouses an impatient anxiety that is at least as likely to help the Right as it is likely to serve the Left...

...A simple expedient, this, and a small price to pay for the deepening of democracy...

...and when it comes to abortion, he sounds eerily like Ralph Nader...

...At the same time, we will set about creating a form of "high-energy democratic politics" that "requires a sustained and organized heightening of the level of civil engagement," including plebiscites and other instruments of direct democracy that will override fusty old constitutional strictures and the friction-generating effects of that pesky Madisonian separation of powers...

...It is simply one example among many of how a problem considered to lie beyond the reach of reform may in fact be brought within it...

...he's dissenting from the idea that the projects of egalitarian social justice should be funded by the redistribution of wealth...

...The means by which to accomplish both the tactical and the programmatic goal is to return to the states the decision concerning the issues in contest...

...But you know that they've become more like us, and that they seem to do good things...

...Still, when Unger speaks of "the need to give people a better chance to live a big life, transfigured by ambition, surprise, and struggle," I have to wonder whether the unambitious among us might decide to pass on the chance...

...But guess what...

...He lodges the standard complaint about neoliberalism (though he refrains from using the word): Flexibility—the watchword of the orthodoxy of markets and globalization—is rightly understood to be a code word for the generalization of insecurity...

...A feature of the zone of intersection is that in it practices have the property of a heightened susceptibility to revision: by laying themselves more fully open to revision they become less like natural objects...

...And in this Utopia, everything will be devoted to a constant creation of the new, except the work of Roberto Mangabeira Unger, who, whatever else happens, will continue to make the same case he's made for decades...

...12,0 n DISSENT / Winter 2007 (This does not, however, prevent Unger from proposing a confiscatory tax on inheritances— or, as he puts it, "the simple abolition of the right of inheritance" so that "social inheritance for all would gradually replace family inheritance for the few...

...It is something of a disappointment, then, to go back over the syntax of this passage and realize that "they" are practices that inhabit a zone into which the left has moved society forward, and that the zone itself is a kind of place in which the institutional conditions of material progress and the institutional requirements for the emancipation of individuals neither converge nor conflict but intersect...

...Basically, by making market dynamics more dynamic than even the most exuberant cybercapitalist has yet imagined, in order "to produce a series of repeated breakthroughs in the constraints on economic growth...