Re: Populism,
Technocrats, Democracy etc.
Excellent article and a follow-up
analysis. However ( however ) there is a certain
predictability you would expect from NRO. The Constitution
is both anti-populist and anti-technocratic ?
How do you square this with, for
example, the ratifying conventions ? These were town hall
meetings writ large, held in every state, and were almost
pure democracy , viz, populist exercises. As for
technocrats, whatever Hamilton said in The Federalist
Papers on this theme, there also was his Report
on Manufactures in which he advocated ( strongly )
for industrialization of America --which would necessarily
involve experts in making this happen. Similarly, Hamilton
wanted a central bank run by economic experts, not by
elected officials.
There also is the "detail" that in that
era, about a good number of things, the public was educated
to the Law and to the political process more generally. It
was, after all, the immediate post-Revolution era and many
of our first citizens did, indeed, take their
responsibilities for the success of their new government to
heart. This would change, not exactly a question about that,
but only gradually, over a protracted period of time. The
point being that populism / democracy was inevitable from
the start, with the caveat that "the people," semi-experts
themselves, at least about some matters, would be supportive
of experts in various capacities. Not to over-emphasize
these observations, the Constitution was and is both Liberal
and Conservative, and much in the thoughtful article
rings quite true. Its just that the major premise is not
really water tight. There are important exceptions to the
rules it identifies.
Billy
=========================================================
November
22, 2011 4:00 A.M.
What Is Constitutional
Conservatism?
From
the Nov. 28, 2011, issue of NR
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This
fall, liberals from the president on down have begun
to grasp the scope of the political and intellectual
disaster that the past three years have been for the
Left. Their various responses to the calamity have
tended to have one thing in common: immense
frustration. But the different expressions of that
frustration have been deeply revealing. They should
help Americans better understand this complicated
moment in our politics, and, in particular, help
conservatives frame their responses.
Liberal frustration has fallen into two general
categories that seem at first to flatly contradict
each other: denunciations of democracy and appeals to
populism. In September, Peter Orszag, President
Obama’s former
budget director,
wrote an essay in
The New Republic arguing
that “we need less democracy.” To address our
country’s daunting problems, Orszag suggested, we need
to take some power away from Congress and give it to
“automatic policies and depoliticized commissions”
that will be shielded from public pressure. “Radical
as it sounds, we need to counter the gridlock of our
political institutions by making them a bit less
democratic.” Two weeks later, North Carolina’s
Democratic governor, Beverly Perdue, made a less
sophisticated stab at the same general point,
proposing to suspend congressional
elections
for a few years so members of Congress could make the
difficult decisions necessary to get our country out
of its deep problems.
Orszag and Perdue both seemed to channel
a long and deeply held view of the Left — that the
complexity of modern life and the intensity of modern
politics should lead us to put more power in the hands of
technical experts who have the knowledge to make objective,
rational choices on our behalf. Leaving things to the
political process will result only in delay and disorder.
President Obama has frequently expressed this view himself —
wistfully complaining to his aides earlier this year, for
instance, that things would sure be easier if he were
president of China.
At the same time, the Left has been rediscovering the
joys of populism. Populism can mean many things, of course,
but in America it has often meant not only a faith in the
wisdom of the masses but also a channeling of resentments
into a case that the majority is being oppressed by an elite
few. And that is just what the president has sought this
fall. On the stump, he has been railing against wealthy
corporate-jet owners and their Republican henchmen, who care
not for the struggling working man and want only “dirtier
air, dirtier water, fewer people on health care, [and] less
accountability on Wall Street.” Meanwhile, a small but
opulently publicized
populist
protest movement has arisen to “occupy” parts of New York’s
financial district as well as parks and public spaces
elsewhere around the country. Although it seems at times to
be all fringe and no center, the movement does appear to be
held together by resentment against corporate greed and
crony
capitalism,
and a sense that the large mass of the public shares that
resentment.
So should we be guided by expert commissions or a popular
movement? Does the public have too much of a voice in our
politics or not enough of one? It is tempting to see the
Left’s simultaneous calls for populism and technocracy as a
profound incoherence, because we are inclined to see the two
as opposite ends of an argument about who should govern.
For that reason, too, it has been tempting to respond
with populist outrage to the stunning administrative
overreach of Washington liberals in recent years — from
banning Edison’s light bulb to giving 15 experts the
authority to set health-care prices to expanding the scope
of regulatory discretion seemingly without limits. For all
its populist rhetoric of late, the Left has leaned far more
heavily toward government by experts. And on its face,
populist outrage does appear to be the character of the
conservative response to the Obama years. It has been
embodied above all in an extraordinary populist movement —
the Tea Party, which has tried to fight back against the
incursions of technocracy.
But the Tea Party has been very unusual
for an American populist movement. It has not been focused
on soaking the rich, as left-wing populists always have
been. It has not even been primarily focused on reducing the
tax burden
on the middle class, as right-wing populists usually are.
Rather, the Tea Party has focused on restraining government.
It originated in outrage about federal bailouts, and has
directed its energies toward pulling back the cost and reach
of the state. It has asked for fewer government giveaways,
not more. It has even given voice to a tight-money
populism, criticizing the Federal Reserve for inviting
inflation — a far cry from populists of old. And the Tea
Party has also been intensely focused on recovering the U.S.
Constitution, and especially its limits on government power
(and therefore on the public’s power) — another very unusual
goal for a populist movement.
These substantive demands of the Tea Party have been at
least as important as its populist form. But that form, and
the energy it has brought to the effort to resist Obamaism,
risks causing us to draw the wrong lesson from the past few
years. Populism as such does not define the proper response
to the rise of technocratic administration, and cannot be
the essence of the defense of our constitutional order
against a resurging progressivism.
In fact, a look at the progressives
themselves would help us to see that. The original
progressives of the early 20th century, just like today’s
seemingly incoherent liberals, were populist and technocratic
— they argued both for direct democracy and for expert rule.
Even as they called for enlarging the scope of the federal
government and putting a class of educated specialists in
charge of it, they also called for radical democratic
reforms of our constitutional system. In the 1912 election,
the Progressive-party platform proposed not only the direct
election of senators but also the enactment of federal laws
by public initiative, and even advocated allowing the public
to overturn some court decisions by referendum.
And the progressives generally did not see a
contradiction between their technocracy and their populism.
They expected their technocratic ideas to be popular, and so
they expected populism to lead to more expert government.
Technocracy and populism would together undermine the power
of the moneyed interests, freeing our government from
corruption by the wealthy and thereby making it both more
democratic and more rational. Those moneyed interests, the
progressives argued, were protected by our constitutional
system, which, with its slow-moving mechanisms and
counterbalanced institutions, made any kind of change very
difficult to bring about. As the progressive theorist
Herbert Croly put it in 1914, the desire of the American
people for a government that serves them rather than the
rich and powerful was constantly thwarted “not by
disconnected abuses, but by a perverted system.”
The simultaneous populist and technocratic appeals of the
progressives’ successors in today’s politics seem to echo
this premise. They at least implicitly suggest that
technocracy and populism are two sides of the same coin.
And the framers of our Constitution seemed to think so
too. But whereas the progressives championed both
technocratic government and direct democracy, the
Constitution stands opposed to both. As the framers saw it,
both populist and technocratic politics were expressions of
a modern hubris about the capacity of human beings — be it
of the experts or of the people as a whole — to make just
the right governing decisions.
The Constitution
is built upon a profound skepticism about the ability of any
political arrangement to overcome the limitations of human
reason and human nature, and so establishes a system of
checks to prevent sudden large mistakes while enabling
gradual changes supported by a broad and longstanding
consensus. Experts should not govern, nor should the people
do so directly, but rather the people’s representatives
should govern in a system filled with mediating institutions
and opposing interests — a system designed to force us to
see problems and proposed solutions from a variety of angles
simultaneously and, as Alexander Hamilton puts it in
Federalist
73, “to increase the chances in favor of the community
against the passing of bad laws through haste, inadvertence,
or design.”
That such a system
is far from populist should be obvious. In
Federalist 63,
James Madison says plainly that the constitutional
architecture involves “the total exclusion of the people in
their collective capacity” from directly governing. The
democratic elements of the Constitution are intended to be
checks on the power of
government,
not expressions of trust in the wisdom of the public as a
whole. And even as checks, these elements are imperfect. As
Madison argues in
Federalist 51, “A dependence on
the people is no doubt the primary control on the
government, but experience has taught mankind the necessity
of auxiliary precautions.”
But those precautions do not amount to the rule of experts.
The framers were disdainful of the potential of technocratic
know-it-alls whose abstract expertise was often of value
only in what Hamilton calls, in
Federalist 28,
“the reveries of those political doctors whose sagacity
disdains the admonitions of experimental instruction.” And
even men with expertise in administration should not be
given too much power. In
Federalist 68, Hamilton
argues that, while good administration is very important,
the idea that the best-administered regime is the best
regime is a “political heresy.” There is much more to
government than administration.
Thus expert omniscience could not be
trusted to check the excesses of popular passion, and public
omniscience could not be trusted to check the excesses of
expert arrogance. In the view of the framers, there is no
omniscience; there is only imperfect humanity. We therefore
need checks on all of our various excesses, and a system
that forces us to think through important decisions as best
we can. This may well be the essential insight of our
constitutional system: Since there is no perfection in human
affairs, any system of government has to account for the
permanent imperfections of the people who are both governing
and governed, and this is best achieved through
constitutional forms that compel self-restraint and enable
self-correction.
This emphasis on moderating forms – that is,
the focus on arrangements that impose structure and
restraint on political life — is crucial, and it has always
been controversial. Indeed, it is what troubled the
progressives most of all about our system, and what troubled
many other technocrats and populists before them. But as
Alexis de Tocqueville noted a century before the New Deal,
“this objection which the men of democracies make to forms
is the very thing which renders forms so useful to freedom;
for their chief merit is to serve as a barrier between the
strong and the weak.” And he added, with his usual
prescience, “Forms become more necessary in proportion as
the government becomes more active and more powerful.” In
other words, we need them now more than ever.
The framers’ formalism, with its humility about our
knowledge and its limits on our power, is at work not only
in our political institutions but in our
economic
system too. American free enterprise, like our
constitutional system, establishes rules of the game that
restrain the powerful and create competition that helps
balance freedom and progress. And in
economic policy,
just as in politics more generally, that framework is
undermined by a populism that wants to take from the wealthy
and by a technocratic mindset according to which Washington
should pick winners and losers. In economics and in
politics, our defense against these dangers has to start
with an adherence to procedural rules and forms that
restrain the hubris of the powerful — defending markets, not
coddling
big business
or soaking the rich; defending the Constitution, not
advancing technocracy or populism.
It is no surprise that we find the same pattern in our
economic and our constitutional debates. In fact, the humble
assumption of permanent human imperfections and the humble
desire for forms that might prevent large mistakes are at
the core of the greatest achievements of the modern age: of
constitutional democracy, of the free market, of the
scientific method. Yet the most ardent champions of
liberalism in our politics have too often failed to see the
power of such humility, instead articulating a liberalism
rooted in utopian ambitions or their mirror image — naïve
resentments — all dressed up as a theory of justice.
The difference
between these two kinds of liberalism — constitutionalism
grounded in humility about human nature and progressivism
grounded in utopian expectations — is a crucial fault line
of our politics, and has divided the friends of liberty
since at least the French Revolution. It speaks to two kinds
of views about just what liberal politics is.
One view, which has always been the less common one, holds
that liberal institutions were the product of countless
generations of political and cultural evolution in the West,
which by the time of the Enlightenment, and especially in
Britain, had begun to arrive at political forms that pointed
toward some timeless principles in which our common life
must be grounded, that accounted for the complexities of
society, and that allowed for a workable balance between
freedom and effective
government
given the constraints of human nature. Liberalism, in this
view, involves the preservation and gradual improvement of
those forms because they allow us both to grasp the proper
principles of politics and to govern ourselves well.
The other, and more common, view argues
that liberal institutions were the result of a discovery of
new political principles in the Enlightenment — principles
that pointed toward new ideals and institutions, and toward
an ideal society. Liberalism, in this view, is the pursuit
of that ideal society. Thus one view understands liberalism
as an accomplishment to be preserved and enhanced, while
another sees it as a discovery that points beyond the
existing arrangements of society. One holds that the prudent
forms of liberal institutions are what matter
most, while the other holds that the utopian goals of
liberal politics are paramount. One is conservative while
the other is progressive.
The principles that the progressive form of liberalism
thought it had discovered were much like those that more
conservative liberals believed society had arrived at
through long experience: principles of natural rights that
define the proper ends and bounds of government. Thus for a
time, progressive and conservative liberals in America —
such as Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine on one hand and
James Madison and Alexander Hamilton on the other — seemed
to be advancing roughly the same general vision of
government. But when those principles failed to yield the
ideal society (and when industrialism seemed to put that
ideal farther off than ever), the more progressive or
radical liberals abandoned these principles in favor of
their utopian ambitions. At that point, progressive and
conservative American liberals parted ways — the former
drawn to post-liberal philosophies of utopian ends (often
translated from German) while the latter continued to defend
the restraining mechanisms of
classical-liberal
institutions and the skeptical worldview that underlies
them.
That division is evident in many of our most profound
debates today, and especially in the debate between the Left
and the Right about the Constitution. This debate, and not a
choice between technocracy and populism, defines the present
moment in our politics. Thus the Left’s simultaneous support
for government by expert panel and for the unkempt carpers
occupying
Wall Street
is not a contradiction — it is a coherent error. And the
Right’s response should be coherent too. It should be, as
for the most part it has been, an unabashed defense of our
constitutional system, gridlock and all.
Because the Left has been so much more technocratic than
populist these past few years, the Right’s response has
naturally drifted into populist tones. That is appropriate,
and it has been effective, but the tone must not overwhelm
the substance of the Right’s critique. In this time of grave
challenges, conservatives must work to protect the
fundamentally constitutionalist character of the Tea Party,
and of the conservative movement — avoiding the excesses of
both populism and technocracy as we work to undo the damage
done by both, and to recover the American
project.
— Yuval
Levin is the editor of National Affairs and
a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. This
article originally appeared in the Nov. 28, 2011,
issue of National
Review.
============================================================
( Conservative Liberalism )
NRO
Yuval Levin on
Constitutional Conservatism
Yuval Levin’s cover story in the new National
Review is an excellent distillation of the case for
modern American conservatism. One of the most common
tropes I encounter in conversation with left-of-center
friends and colleagues is the notion that our political
system is broken precisely because it is not sufficiently
democratic. Indeed, I was on a panel with a member of
Congress recently and he criticized, as is common on the
left, the structure of the U.S. Senate for violating the
principle of one man, one vote. It is hard for many
left-liberals to understand why conservatives would defend
an institution like the U.S. Senate, as it seems to
violate their understanding of liberal democratic norms.
Yuval’s article helps explain why U.S. conservatives are
so invested in a constitutional system that is such an
outlier among postwar parliamentary social democracies:
The difference between these two kinds of liberalism —
constitutionalism grounded in humility about human
nature and progressivism grounded in utopian
expectations — is a crucial fault line of our politics,
and has divided the friends of liberty since at least
the French Revolution. It speaks to two kinds of views
about just what liberal politics is.
One view, which has always been the less common one,
holds that liberal institutions were the product of
countless generations of political and cultural
evolution in the West, which by the time of the
Enlightenment, and especially in Britain, had begun to
arrive at political forms that pointed toward some
timeless principles in which our common life must be
grounded, that accounted for the complexities of
society, and that allowed for a workable balance between
freedom and effective government given the constraints
of human nature. Liberalism, in this view, involves the
preservation and gradual improvement of those forms
because they allow us both to grasp the proper
principles of politics and to govern ourselves well.
The other, and more common, view argues that liberal
institutions were the result of a discovery of new
political principles in the Enlightenment — principles
that pointed toward new ideals and institutions, and
toward an ideal society. Liberalism, in this view, is
the pursuit of that ideal society. Thus one view
understands liberalism as an accomplishment to be
preserved and enhanced, while another sees it as a
discovery that points beyond the existing arrangements
of society. One holds that the prudent forms of liberal
institutions are what matter most, while the other holds
that the utopian goals of liberal politics are
paramount. One is conservative while the other is
progressive.
The principles that the progressive form of liberalism
thought it had discovered were much like those that more
conservative liberals believed society had arrived at
through long experience: principles of natural rights
that define the proper ends and bounds of government.
Thus for a time, progressive and conservative liberals
in America — such as Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine
on one hand and James Madison and Alexander Hamilton on
the other — seemed to be advancing roughly the same
general vision of government. But when those principles
failed to yield the ideal society (and when
industrialism seemed to put that ideal farther off than
ever), the more progressive or radical liberals
abandoned these principles in favor of their utopian
ambitions. At that point, progressive and conservative
American liberals parted ways — the former drawn to
post-liberal philosophies of utopian ends (often
translated from German) while the latter continued to
defend the restraining mechanisms of classical-liberal
institutions and the skeptical worldview that underlies
them.
That division is evident in many of our most profound
debates today, and especially in the debate between the
Left and the Right about the Constitution. This debate,
and not a choice between technocracy and populism,
defines the present moment in our politics. Thus the
Left’s simultaneous support for government by expert
panel and for the unkempt carpers occupying Wall Street
is not a contradiction — it is a coherent error. And the
Right’s response should be coherent too. It should be,
as for the most part it has been, an unabashed defense
of our constitutional system, gridlock and all.
One of my favorite arguments from Yuval is that it’s not
so much that the U.S. political system is broken; rather,
we’re dealing with the legacy of the Johnson
administration, which, after the crushing defeat of the
Goldwater presidential campaign, briefly enjoyed an
overwhelmingly large ideological majority in Congress that
allowed for a profound transformation of American
governance. In some regards, like the Civil Rights Act,
this was a very good thing. In two other cases, the
implications of sweeping legislation were far greater than
was commonly understood at the time. The 1965 Hart-Celler
Immigration and Nationality Act, for example, utterly
transformed the demographic composition of the U.S.
population. Though I tend to think the benefits outweighed
the costs, the fact that the implications were not
seriously discussed at the time should give us pause. And
the Social Security Act of 1965, which created Medicare
and Medicaid, was at least as consequential, in that
continues to fuel the expansion of the public sector at
the federal and state level, far beyond expectations.
So one could make the case, as Yuval does, that an
unnaturally un-gridlocked moment led to an imbalanced
political settlement that we’ve struggled with ever
since.
In an ideal world, I’d love to see progressive liberals
read Yuval’s description of conservative liberalism, as I
think it would give them a better sense of how we on the
right approach the larger political questions. At its
best, the right is the party of tragedy and the
impossibility of creating a perfectly just human society,
but also of optimism about the potential of voluntary
cooperation to help us achieve (modest) moral and
(immodest) material progress across generations.
