Correction politics

Two pieces this week, and a common theme.

One looks at Marco Rubio's recent speech on an industrial policy.

In current debates on the right, proponents of neoliberal economics (especially on trade) have often joined forces with those who want to defend the “liberal international order” (or who wish, in any case, to maintain a proactive American foreign policy). In some ways, this alliance makes sense. Many view President Trump as the central question in American politics, and he has trumpeted his criticism of the post-1989 consensus on both foreign and economic policy. Moreover, American policymakers pivoted to international “free trade” agreements as a key element of geopolitical strategy in the aftermath of the Second World War.

However, in some other ways, there might be some tensions in this alliance. In many respects, the economic trends of 2001 to 2016 undermined the ability of the United States to continue as a ballast of the post-1945 geopolitical order. The extended slowdown in economic growth since Y2K has shrunk the size of the American economy relative to the rest of the world, and the social turmoil accelerated by the disruptions of the neoliberal economy makes it harder for the United States to realize long-term geopolitical goals.

A new effort at policy reform could be a way of reversing some of these destabilizing trends and place the US economy and geopolitical position on firmer grounds.

The other gives a quick analysis of the results of the new parliamentary elections in the UK. We can draw some parallels between American and British politics these days, but there are some significant differences, too:

There are obvious lessons here for American politics. As working-class voters migrate to the Republican column, the GOP will probably have to do more to represent blue-collar concerns in its policy platform. (In many respects, it looks like this lesson hasn’t been learned yet.) A radical swing to the left — especially on cultural issues — could pose a danger to Democrats in 2020. Many suburban voters are suspicious of Trump, but they are also repelled by plans to abolish private health insurance and impose radical “wokeness” upon the nation as a whole.

There are, however, some major differences between the U.K. and the U.S. here, too. Boris Johnson was able to make a novel alliance, simultaneously appealing to populist sentiments while also appearing as the champion of constitutional normalcy. The through-the-looking-glass world of recent years has presented many surprising inversions, one of which is that many members of the political establishment have themselves succumbed to the very constitutional pyromania of which they accuse populists. In the United Kingdom, establishment resistance to honoring the 2016 referendum ensured an extended constitutional torment. The British public (and observers abroad) witnessed month after month of parliamentary paralysis, as MPs voted not to leave without a deal, and then against every deal that was offered.

While the Trump White House has often leaned into disruption, Johnson instead offered a Tory victory as a way of moving past the constitutional chaos caused by Remain intransigence--"Get Brexit Done."

And what's the common theme? It's that reform can offer a way of lessening the risk of political radicalism. The radical disruptions of the high-neoliberal paradigm are fueling extremist forces on all sides. A kind of correction (one that reinforces national solidarity and shores up the working and middle classes) might end up draining some of the force from such polarizing movements.

Revealingly, this is a point raised by Dominic Cummings, one of the top strategists for Leave and for Boris Johnson, in a 2016 interview:

"Extremists are on the rise in Europe and are being fuelled unfortunately by the Euro project and by the centralisation of power in Brussels. It it is increasingly important that Britain offers an example of civilised, democratic, liberal self-government."

Andrew Sullivan has also echoed this point in his writings on the British election and Brexit.  Here's a snippet from his recent profile of Johnson:

[Johnson] has done what no other conservative leader in the West has done: He has co-opted and thereby neutered the far right. The reactionary Brexit Party has all but collapsed since Boris took over. Anti-immigration fervor has calmed. The Tories have also moved back to the economic and social center under Johnson’s leadership. And there is a strategy to this. What Cummings and Johnson believe is that the E.U., far from being an engine for liberal progress, has, through its overreach and hubris, actually become a major cause of the rise of the far right across the Continent. By forcing many very different countries into one increasingly powerful Eurocratic rubric, the E.U. has spawned a nationalist reaction. From Germany and France to Hungary and Poland, the hardest right is gaining. Getting out of the E.U. is, Johnson and Cummings argue, a way to counter and disarm this nationalism and to transform it into a more benign patriotism. Only the Johnson Tories have grasped this, and the Johnson strategy is one every other major democracy should examine.

(See also Sullivan's write-up of the parliamentary election results.)

As Rubio, Josh Hawley,* and others have implied, taking on the challenges of reform can be a way of preserving certain certain key values and democratic practices.

(Speaking of Hawley, check out Charles Fain Lehman's recent profile of him.)

The Not-So-Uncommon Good

A few days ago in National Review, I looked at some possible affinities between the "common good" and the market economy:

In many ways, though, liberty and the common good can be allied. Civil and economic freedom can contribute to the common good, and attention to the common good (while noble in its own right) can also be instrumental to the preservation of our liberties.
Though some sectors of the post-liberal Right and Left have soured on the idea of “capitalism,” much could be said on behalf of this system for contributing to the common good. It has slashed poverty across the globe, and, as Benedict XVI has suggested in Caritas in Veritate, the diversity of employment opportunities provided in a market economy helps open up the realization of individual gifts. For all the faults of the high neoliberal era (and there are many), it has also helped lift hundreds of millions out of crushing poverty. One needn’t be a radical utilitarian to think that this is a considerable accomplishment. The birth of the industrialized, modern market has helped nurture a modern middle class, one of the bulwarks of stable democratic governance.

You can read the rest here.*


Toward the end of the piece, I outline various reforms that could speak to the common good and provide more opportunity for an integrated body politic: immigration reform to tighten the labor market, efforts to cut medical costs, an infrastructure program, and so forth.  We live in a time where people like to lean into polarization, where relatively minor differences are extrapolated into gaping canyons.  But it seems to me that many elements of "common good" reforms would be quite compatible with the mainstream of policy norms--including on the right.

Contrary to some public mythologies, it's not socialism to offer policy corrections in order to help strengthen the hands of workers.  (I mean, Calvin Coolidge specifically called for policy efforts on trade and other areas to drive up the wages of American workers, and I don't think most people would call him a socialist.)  And anyone who wants to call Reagan a political success would have to acknowledge his own agenda of policy interventions in the economy (from buttressing Social Security to import quotas on foreign vehicles).  Some folks seem to suggest that the GOP needs to jettison Reaganite policies in order to succeed in the 21st century, but it seems to me that many aspects of the Gipper's actual record could offer some inspiration to proponents of more populist or "common good" reforms.

In the latest print issue of NR, Ramesh Ponnuru makes a similar point in thinking about the issue of "common good" capitalism:

As the examples of the Presidents Bush suggest, though, there is by now a long history of Republicans’ attempting to create a governing majority for conservatism, or just to win elections, by softening its devotion to limited government and markets. Running in 1980, Ronald Reagan took care not to present himself as Barry Goldwater redux: He was not a threat to Social Security or Medicare, and his tax cuts would generate enough growth to avoid a painful retrenchment of the welfare state.

Later came Pat Buchanan’s “conservatism of the heart” — complete with frequent invocations of Franklin Roosevelt’s line about the occasional faults of a benevolent government paling beside the constant ones of “a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference” — and Bush’s compassionate conservatism.

As unusual as he is in many respects, as much of a jolt as he has given to the political system, Trump fits this pattern. He did not change a comma of Republican orthodoxy on social issues. But he ran as a Republican who would protect the elderly from entitlement cuts and manufacturing workers from imports.

I don't mean to obscure some of the important theoretical divisions here, and I think that coping with the disruptions of globalization will likely require a wide range of reforms.  But I also think it's worth remembering that some of these reforms have a longer lineage--and that making some of these reforms might be a way of averting more radical changes.

(*In this Twitter thread, I link some other pieces discussing "common good" controversies.)

Two Recent Posts

Here are links to a couple recent pieces:

An essay in National Review on pluralism and politics of the good.

A shorter piece at The Federalist on Ross Perot, NAFTA, and the role of public trust.

Identity and Difference

Over the past week, I read Francis Fukuyama's 2018 book, Identity, so here are a few scattered thoughts about it ("scattered thoughts" being one of the prime modes of blogging):

The shadow of The End of History and the Last Man (an oft-misunderstood work) hangs over much of Fukuyama's work, and Identity is no exception.  Using the concept of "identity" as a lens, it explores elements of the modern condition that may keep a polity or even the whole globe from "getting to Denmark"--that is, to a market-oriented liberal democracy.  Fukuyama offers a tripartite account of the human soul: reason, desire, and thymos. According to Fukuyama, "thymos"--"the seat of judgements of worth" and the cause of a craving for recognition--poses certain challenges to liberal modernity.  While "isothymia" is "the demand to be respected on an equal basis with other people," "megalothymia" involves "the desire to be recognized as superior."  For Fukuyama, both valences of thymos are implicated in contemporary politics of identity.

After laying out this division of the soul, Fukuyama surveys evolving notions of identity, from the Protestant Reformation to Rousseau to contemporary therapeutic culture.  If you want a more in-depth discussion of the stakes of identity for Fukuyama, you could check out this interview he did with Matt Lewis. But, briefly, he argues that the demand for recognition by members of previously marginalized groups is part of the process of the demand for the universal recognition of equal dignity within liberal modernity.  Fukuyama is broadly sympathetic to such demands, though he also fears that the emphasis on identity politics as purely slicing and dicing the polity might end up undercutting some of the norms necessary for defending a liberal society--moreover, it might inspire a backlash.  In the final chapter, Fukuyama offers a variety of suggestions to try to confront some of the challenges of identity, such as a more democratic central governing body for the EU, mandatory national service in the US, assimilationist reforms to immigration policy, and an emphasis on creedal national belonging.

I might not necessarily agree with everything in Identity, but it does offer a thoughtful survey of some of the forces that have influenced contemporary notions of the self.  Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self plays an important role here, but this book more broadly bears a Hegelian stamp.  Hegel's account of evolving shapes of human consciousness seems an important theoretical frame for Identity, and Fukuyama has long acknowledged the influence of Alexandre Kojeve, one of the most influential 20th-century interpreters of Hegel and one of the founding proponents of the European Union.  (Speaking of Kojeve: The Strauss-Kojeve debate about tyranny remains, I think, rewarding reading.  Of particular note these days might be the theme in that debate about the role of sovereign states. In his "Restatement" to Kojeve, Strauss defends the idea of the world being populated by independent regimes: "the coming of the universal and homogeneous state will be the end of philosophy on earth.")

With the neoliberal order being increasingly embattled, some have doubled down on postnational tendencies.  Others have instead emphasized the importance of the nation for maintaining liberty.  Fukuyama falls into that second camp.  In the twelfth chapter, he outlines the various ways that an "inclusive sense of national identity" helps free societies function: it helps provide physical security, non-corrupt government, economic development, public trust, and a social safety net.  He goes even further: "The final function of national identity is to make possible liberal democracy itself."  The "social contract" of liberal democracy requires citizens to believe that "they are part of the same polity."  It's a popular thing these days to pit "liberalism" against "nationalism," but that headline-generating quarrel should not obscure the way that sovereign nations have proven important vehicles for the defense and exposition of liberty (as it is often understood).

And there's another point about identity here, too.  In the final paragraph of this volume, Fukuyama notes that "identity" is a double-edged concept: it "can be used to divide, but it can and has also been used to integrate."  It would be a mistake to walk away from this book thinking that Fukuyama wants to end "identity politics."  Instead, he wants to foster a form of national identity to balance out and complement other forms of identity.  (A similar point might be raised about Mark Lilla's Once and Future Liberal--he criticizes the left not for mentioning identity-related issues but instead for failing to give sufficient attention to forms of civic identity.)  As I've written before, one of the ways of addressing some contemporary identity-related tensions is to recognize the mutability of some of the identity silos that seem so solid to contemporary observers--and to realize that there can be robust forms of civic belonging that also recognize the diversity of human experience.

The "Socialism" Trap

At National Review, I look at the case that Republicans may be walking into a political trap if they allow attacks on "socialism" to crowd out an affirmative policy message.

Yearbook Politics

In some ways, the rise of yearbook politics is a tribute to the norms of the meritocracy.  Schools play an important role in meritocratic sorting, so it is perhaps unsurprising that many in the media and political classes (citadels of the meritocracy) should think that yearbooks are a valuable mechanism for moral sorting.  Just as someone is always a graduate of Harvard or Stanford or wherever, someone's yearbook stands as an indelible testament of who he or she is.

However, there's something profoundly limited about reducing someone to a yearbook profile from decades ago.  Such a reduction presumes that a person can't change; moreover, it also presumes that a person's yearbook profile is a sufficiently revealing document of who a person was even then.  In reality, human beings are complicated.  Well-intentioned people do offensive things all the time, and it would be morally absurd (and intellectually naive) to reduce a person to a single unworthy incident.  Also, people do change, which is why it can be a troublesome enterprise to say that someone's representation of themselves from decades ago represents who they are today.

The vulgarized predestination of yearbook politics might gratify moral vanity, but it's less clear that it serves the purpose of either ethical rigor or a responsive politics.  A politician's record in office (including his record of rhetoric) is far more relevant to the public interest than a yearbook from a lifetime ago.  A society that does not admit that people can change and rejects the possibility of moral improvement is one that will have a hard time sustaining republican self-governance. Character matters, but recognizing the full import of character means recognizing complexity and possibility.

Yearbook politics also points to a wider danger in our politics.  Many in the leadership class have expressed more interest in conducting moralistic inquisitions than taking on the responsibility of confronting the challenges of the present.  The constant refrain of "that's not who we are" might be comforting, but serious politics demands much more.  Earlier this week, I wrote about the importance of magnanimity for sustaining civic liberties, and I think that point still applies.

The Varieties of the Liberal Experience

In National Review today, I have a write-up of Helena Rosenblatt's new book, The Lost History of Liberalism:

Helena Rosenblatt’s The Lost History of Liberalism is an important work of scholarship, a survey of the varieties of “liberalism” in the past two centuries. At a time when defenders of “liberalism” fear that their ideological enemies have the winds of history at their backs, Rosenblatt offers a helpful reminder of the diversity within the tradition of “liberalism” and of the ways that certain variants of liberalism can end up undermining its promise. Those who champion liberalism have often seen it as an embattled worldview (particularly on the European continent), but they have also sometimes inadvertently supplied arms against it.Rosenblatt offers “a word history” of the terms “liberal” and “liberalism.” As she notes at the outset, their meanings are deeply contested. In France, “liberal” is associated with “favoring ‘small government,’ while in America it signifies favoring ‘big government.’” Self-professed “liberals” call for extending the welfare state, while others claiming the same title argue that it’s an unjustified restriction on liberty. The Lost History of Liberalism is intellectual history, not ideological polemic, so Rosenblatt does not set out to determine which faction counts as the “real liberalism”; she seeks instead to explore the complexity of the tradition.

Read the rest here.

Finding Common Ground

In National Review, I explore the idea of a "party of the nation" as reconciling both populists and their critics.