Paul Starr's Freedom's Power
Mattson, Kevin
FEW OF US WILL forget November 2004. I remember driving myself to the point of pneumonia, having spent the previous two months making "persuasion" calls to my fellow Ohioans during the evenings...
...This was the party not associated with Iraq, a war now perceived as disastrous...
...Michael Lind, for one, took him to task in the New York Times for "airbrushing American Populists out of the picture" and thereby eschewing "historical accuracy" But Starr is making an argument, not writing a purely historical account of the left in America...
...STARR KNOWS that he's wandered into contested terrain with this particular version of a "usable past...
...Starr recognizes this confusion in his discussion of "classical" and "modern" liberalism...
...106 DISSENT / Fall 2007 Starr is especially right in placing the American Constitution squarely in the liberal tradition...
...Unfortunately, the dullness is not just a stylistic problem...
...It also requires some historical explorations that can show just how important liberalism has been throughout the years...
...Liberals hunger for a philosophy that will explain them to a public that seems uncertain about its political loyalties...
...Domestically, modern liberalism became more willing to accept state intervention in the economy while growing more attuned to civil liberties...
...With these caveats in mind, let me reaffirm the purpose behind Starr's project...
...Those who have read his pieces for the American Prospect know this already...
...Liberals are squarely within the mainstream of American history, conservative arguments to the contrary...
...I remember driving myself to the point of pneumonia, having spent the previous two months making "persuasion" calls to my fellow Ohioans during the evenings and doing weekend "lit drops" in tiny rural towns, consistently chased away from houses by snarling dogs...
...Starr's style is not likely to propel him into the world of political discourse, which seems too enamored with the intellectual ballistics of an Ann Coulter or Christopher Hitchens...
...After all, Democrats had won by playing a strange mix of pro-gun libertarianism and wild-eyed populism...
...Try to create a legitimate public policy about science, medical ethics, or environmentalism based upon populism...
...Though Starr doesn't pick this fight (it's not in his nature to pick fights), he implicitly rejects the strident tones of recent critics of religion, such as Christopher Hitchens or Sam Harris, who renew Mencken's tones...
...When Starr finally gets to the present and the George W. Bush administration, he gets derailed, becoming so bogged down in criticism of the administration—especially its mistaken war in Iraq and its attack against multilateralism —that he loses sight of his positive articulation of the liberal project...
...We can only hope that this is not the case...
...So back to the liberal past Starr goes...
...108 DISSENT / Fall 2007...
...Or, as Starr quips, "Liberalism invited democracy...
...Eventually, struggles for inclusion widened the liberal circle...
...Starr's a good person for the job: He can explain political theory and history to a wide audience...
...Unfortunately, Starr's arguments are developed too quickly and are unsatisfying in either sophistication or clarity...
...His book helps fill a liberal void...
...Starr's book is a start, and to say that is to pay him the respect he deserves...
...Then democracy changed liberalism...
...Then the results came in...
...Some paragraphs run on for more than a page, and they are often crammed with every point possible...
...Starr emphasizes a divide between Locke and Voltaire...
...But it's safer to locate the conservative tradition in antifederalism...
...Some hoped this was a victory for the left, but most knew it was a victory of conservative negatives, not progressive positives...
...For him, liberalism meant John Locke...
...for me, it meant Franklin Roosevelt...
...Friends told me they planned to move to Canada (they never did...
...The reader is left to wonder just how this sort of plan could actually link up with actors who could make it a political reality...
...Starr sounds Clintonian (Bill, that is), divorced, of course, from triangulation or middle-of-the-roadism...
...Starr knows time travel is not easy...
...Starr praises the "liberal" faith in "constraints on power" that "have created stronger self-corrective political mechanisms . . ." "A liberal constitution," he explains, "imposes discipline on the state itself, and that discipline— and the freedom it allows—brings power into clearer view...
...Rebranding, he argues, ignores the liberal tradition's usable past: too much is discarded by tossing it out...
...Starr's work seems ill-fitted for that world...
...One of the most articulate Democratic Party candidates for the Senate had been a Reagan administration official...
...Here again, Starr relates ideas to their wider historical context...
...He closes by calling for a "New Deal for the Young" that would "reopen the battle for universal health insurance" and make college affordable while requiring young people to do some form of public service...
...The Great Society of Lyndon Johnson was aided by the economic prosperity of the 1960s, and Starr shows that "economic growth" became a "means of achieving a good society in part through secondary effects on public attitudes and politics...
...the second vilified and attacked religion...
...Most liberals and leftists turned morose...
...It seems the right time to set out liberal first principles, to articulate liberal ideas that, just maybe, might come to fruition later...
...Conservatives have tried to appropriate the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 as their own founding moment, arguing that the framers embraced states' rights and rejected centralized power...
...If this is a good time to remind Americans of the liberal nature of their own Constitution, it's an even better time to remind them of the liberal doctrine of church-state separation...
...He and I got into a debate about the liberal tradition, and things turned strange...
...That's not to say these are the only issues that should matter to DISSENT / Fall 2007 107 liberals, but it is to say that populism—the tradition so many on the left seemed hopped up about in 2006—can't provide all of our answers and shouldn't become the only train for progressives to climb aboard...
...He cites Theodore Roosevelt's and Woodrow Wilson's ambitions to create an "extensive system of corporate regulation" and discusses the political thinking of Herbert Croly, who argued for using "Hamiltonian means"— a strong government—to acquire "Jeffersonian ends"—equality and democracy...
...But before he sounds like a technocrat who marries economic growth to top-down policies, he reminds his readers that, at core, liberalism is grounded in "moral conceptions of human well-being" Starr knows that his moral vision of liberalism has fallen on tough times...
...some thought the country had lost its mind...
...KEVIN MATrsoN's most recent book, edited with Neil Jumonville, is Liberalism for a New Century...
...Mencken defended a "civilized minority" against small-minded Christian fundamentalism...
...He's partisan to the rise of the "new liberalism" in England during the early twentieth century and its correlation with the "Progressive Era" in America...
...The first tolerated religion while checking its influence...
...At other times, the book slips into demographics and potted history...
...And he's smart to ignore the pitchfork farmers at the turn of the century and the wider populist tradition...
...Just what Democrats stood for remained a question none dared ask...
...As Starr shows, the Federalists believed in energetic government, while creating checks and balances that ensured government didn't grow abusive...
...My guess is that Starr hopes that this "New Deal for the Young" might become the campaign slogan for a future Democratic Party presidential candidate (Barack Obama...
...Then came November 2006, and progressives sighed with relief...
...And you can't help reading the book and thinking that perhaps liberalism is so enamored with civility and rationality—rightfully so, I might add— that it will always remain on the outside of contemporary American discussion...
...Starr declares liberalism a tradition worth recuperating and condemns those who ditch the term liberal for progressive...
...And some of those points could have benefited from fact-checking...
...The conflict between the promise of universal rights and the practices of political and social exclusion was a continuing source of tension within liberalism as well as opposition to it," he explains...
...He's aware of the historical transformation of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, especially struggles for women's suffrage and racial equality...
...He is currently writing a short book about the conservative intellectual movement...
...The Constitution's framers wanted to make "the United States into a single nation with a government at its center that had fiscal, military, judicial, and regulatory powers denied to the Confederation...
...And so Paul Starr's book is nicely timed...
...But for Starr this simply requires tweaking and rethinking the tradition's purposes rather than ditching it for competing theories such as communitarianism or participatory democracy...
...After all, if you think there are problems with recuperating the "new liberalism," try building progressive coherence out of the populist tradition...
...That makes his ending refreshing...
...Jettisoning the liberal tradition would not just hand conservatives an undeserved victory in the culture wars—allowing them to stereotype and erase a rigorous mode of political thinking —it would endorse intellectual laziness...
...During the 1990s, for instance, he writes that liberals became "so emphatic about civil liberties and the rights of minorities that many people were persuaded that liberalism had lost sight of the demands of personal responsibility and the interests of society as a whole...
...Not only has the tradition veered to the right—as numerous political critics have pointed out over the years— but it's always offered an amorphous language prone to emotional appeal more than concrete policies...
...Here again, Starr is eager to recuperate an Anglo-American connection...
...We argued past one another about two opposed traditions that shared a name...
...He recaptures classical liberalism's reverence for constitutional government and individual rights, locating the tradition within a series of British revolts against monarchy during the seventeenth century and then finally the American Revolution...
...But the sigh barely covered up a wince...
...But it behooves us to remember different aspects of the Enlightenment project central to liberalism...
...He discusses Lloyd George's "people's budget," which taxed "high incomes and inheritances" in order to fund "national health insurance and unemployment insurance...
...Shock, sensationalism, and worn-on-the-sleeve passion seem the marks of popular contemporary political pundits...
...BESIDES FOCUSING a bit too much attention on Bush and leaving readers with undeveloped themes toward the end, the book suffers from plodding prose and dull style...
...The liberal tradition, he believes, was found wanting, but only in terms of its exclusivity, not its core values...
...He also champions the British intellectual Leonard Hobhouse, whose political theory helped broaden the "conception of liberty" to include "not just civil and personal freedom but also social liberty" Starr then connects this political and intellectual project to the work of American progressives—including activism surrounding "working hours and conditions, child labor, housing, and the supply of food, drugs, and other products and activities affecting the public health...
...He sees good things in cold war liberalism, especially its multilateral approach to fighting the Soviet Union...
...After identifying with the progressive and liberal tradition of reform, Starr moves further along in his timeline...
...Reading his opening discussions about "classical" liberalism reminded me of when, just out of graduate school, I supervised the work of a newly trained political theorist at a think tank...
...The journalist Marc Cooper argued that it became easy for a progressive in 2004 to "fancy" oneself "a member of a persecuted minority, bravely shielding the flickering flame of enlightenment from the increasing Christo-Republican darkness...
...In America, the latter tradition lived on most memorably in the 1920s when the critic H.L...
...Conservatives have successfully stereotyped it, for sure, and he admits liberals have strayed from their own teachings as well...
...Starr recovers a great deal from the classical liberal tradition before working his way to modernity...
...He goes behind the collectivist FDR to the individualist Locke and then moves back up to the present...
Vol. 54 • September 2007 • No. 4
