Via Meadia
January 20, 2013
Full Fathom Five: 5.0 Liberalism and the Future of the State
Walter Russell Mead
Americans like to think we are pragmatic, results oriented people, but many
of our political disagreements are argued in terms of abstract theory. In
particular, Americans like to argue about the proper role of the state: how
big should it be and how its responsibilities should be divided between
state, local and federal levels. Often, these disagreements reflect cultural
differences that can be traced back to colonial times; David Hackett Fischer
’s _Albion’s Seed_
(http://www.amazon.com/Albions-Seed-British-Folkways-Cultural/dp/0195069056/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358702494&sr=1-1&keywor
ds=albion's+seed) is a good guide to the traditions that still today
inform the way Americans think about what government is and what it should do.
The New England tradition, rooted in Puritan experience and theology, wants
a strong state run by the great and the good to serve as the moral agent
of the conscience of the community. It is the duty of the state to make the
people better, and without a strong and moral state to guide development
and regulate behavior, the rich will become greedy and the poor will get lazy
and fat.
There’s a New York tradition, rooted in the middle colonies, that looks to
the state primarily to promote the development of the economy. Alexander
Hamilton’s Bank of the United States was a powerful instrument of state
power, but it was not an engine of moral reformation and guidance. Indeed, the
commercialism of Hamiltonian policy often offends the moral sensibilities of
the New Englanders who worry that if financiers and industrialists become
too powerful, they can pervert the state into the service of Mammon. The
New York tradition is also outward looking; it wants a strong national
government to protect the rights and advance the interests of American
economic
and security interests around the world.
There’s a Virginia tradition that worries about the centralism that both
the New England and Hamiltonian traditions support. Jeffersonians speak for
small business rather than big business, and for parts of the country that
are far from the centers of financial and cultural power. In this view, an
overweening government is a danger worse than (almost) any problem it tries
to solve. The Virginia tradition looks to limit the power of government as
far as possible and keep that power as close to the local level [ as
possible ]. It prefers state power to federal power and thinks the New England
model is a “nanny state” approach, while the New York model quickly turns
into crony capitalism in which large and well-connected business interests
and plutocrats use the power of the state to advance their private
objectives. The Virginia tradition shares the New England suspicion of wealth
and its
dangerous influence on politics; it looks to the classic texts of civic
republican literature that identify the rise of wealthy oligarchies with the
decline of liberty and republican institutions in ancient Rome and on down
to modern times.
Then there’s what might be called the West Virginia tradition which is
suspicious of both the Hamiltonian and New England visions of the state, but
which wants more from the state than the Virginia tidewater is willing to
provide. In Special Providence I called this tradition Jacksonian when it
came to foreign policy; Jacksonians share Jeffersonian suspicions about
government, but they want the government to advance the economic and social
interests of what today we call the American middle class: the broad mass of
the
people. They don’t like government debt, but they do like government
benefits. In the 19th century they wanted the government to give out free
farmland even though sales of public land were one of the best revenue sources
both federal and state governments had. The Homestead Act, making land
literally free for the taking, was passed during the Civil War at a time when
the
national debt was soaring to unprecedented levels and budget hawks were
wringing their hands at the horrendous debts the war would impart on the
country. Jacksonians simply did not care; they supported the war and the
Homestead Act — and groused about the debt. Jacksonians believe, like New
Englanders, that the state should promote moral values, but there are deep
theological and cultural differences between the values that New Englanders
and
West Virginians think should be promoted.
Generally speaking, American political arguments about the role of the
state often reflect these various traditions in a knee-jerk way; people come
to
these arguments steeped in a particular view of the proper role of the
state and more or less passively apply these inherited views to the situation
at hand. While intellectually speaking this makes for a lot of vapid
speech-making and tedious punditry, looking over the sweep of American history
it
would be hard to say that this pattern has been bad for the country. The
different traditions speak for different truths and each tradition not only
brings something useful to the table, the competition among them helps keep
the country on an even keel.
Today, as the country grapples with the consequences of the decline of the
blue social model, these traditions about the role of the state and its
relationship to society provide the conceptual tools that many Americans use
to think about what the fall of blue means and what we should do about it.
That’s to be expected, but to some extent it has turned the question of the
transformation out of industrial Fordism into a question of political
philosophy in the United States. In one particular case, the deep opposition
of
the New England school to the decline of the blue social model has helped
polarize the broader debate and, I think, promoted some misconceptions about
what the transition to liberalism 5.0 is all about.
New Englanders hate the decline of blue. In some ways, the blue social
model represented a triumph of the New England school over its opponents. The
blue model embodied key New England values. The administrative, educated
elite that regulated both the rich and the poor in a spirit of social uplift
was a twentieth century counterpart to the New England clergy and its role
in the Puritan Commonwealth. A society in which technocrats manage the
economy so that the worker, the manager, the investor and the community all
receive an appropriate share of the common product speaks powerfully to
traditional New England moral values and political ideas.
To the New England imagination, the decline of blue is the decline of
America. As horrible plutocrats make inappropriate fortunes at one end, and
evangelical Christians defy the moral consensus New England sought to impose on
the other, the slow decline of the postwar social model feels to many in
this tradition like the destruction of everything good.
As many New England progressives (partisans of the 4.0 liberalism that
dominated the twentieth century) see it, the social order has been falling
apart since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher unloosed the gates of Hell by
supporting deregulation and attacking the unions. The capitalists benefit
from the mobility of capital, enabling them to hide their wealth from
taxpayers and move their production facilities from high wage, high regulation
blue model enclaves in Europe, the US and Japan. Now they pay slave wages to
workers, ignore environmental and safety regulations, and sock their
grotesque profits in safe havens overseas, far beyond the reach of the IRS.
The
ballooning wealth they accumulate through this process feeds back into
politics; they can buy the Congress and the president they want, dictate the
law,
and if worst comes to worst, stuff the Supreme Court with regressive
judges who read the hyper-capitalist agenda back into the Constitution.
Meanwhile, the white working class—a group that has troubled the New
England mind ever since rowdy sailors and economic immigrants threatened to
disrupt the social harmony of the Puritan colonies in the 17th century,
trouble
which only intensified as mass immigration from Ireland filled sober New
England with rowdy Catholics—threatened to rebel against the gentry liberals
and their various agendas for social betterment. The southern rednecks and
northern ethnics rejected the Democratic Party and progressive social
ideology in the Reagan years. Worse, perhaps, populist America began to turn
against experts; ordinary people challenged the wisdom of the social and
economic planners who advance the agenda of the New England state.
Both the friends and the foes of the New England school of American
governance are drawn to equate the decline of the blue model with a threat to
the
New England way, and our debates about the nature and consequences of the
social shifts taking place tends to fall into a debate over how much of a
role the New England philosophy should play in American government.
The decline of the blue model calls into question the structure of many of
our social programs and government institutions. The post office may be on
the way out; the public school systems of the 20th century will probably
not survive in their current form. The welfare state faces a complex
demographic and financial crisis. All these changes are linked in some way to
the
decline of the Fordist social model, and they are informing some heated
national debates over the future of social policy and the size of the state.
To
supporters of the New England school, these debates lead directly to some
unsettling questions.
Does the end of the blue social model mean we have to throw the poor under
the bus? Does the end of the blue model mean the end of the mass middle
class? And, a related question that often comes from liberal defenders of the
old model: Are the people who keep talking about the crisis of the blue
model just doing this so they can panic the country into throwing poor people,
public sector workers, blue collar workers and almost everybody else in
the ’99 percent’ to the wolves?
I get those questions a lot; for many progressives, the blue social model
remains the only practical way that an advanced capitalist economy can do
its basic duty by the poor and the middle class. Without the restraints, the
income redistribution and the strong government role that the blue model
offered in its prime, progressives seem to believe, a capitalist society
inevitably degrades to a kind of Blade Runner future. There will be a handful
of very rich people, and the rest of us will be scuttling around the edges
of burned out urban warfare zones and living in cardboard boxes in ragged
refugee camps up in the hills. Government, shrunken and warped, will exist
only to impose the preferences of the rich on the poor; post-blue America
will be a banana republic.
That’s not, I think, where we are going. While the New England imagination
can’t help but envision the transition away from our current social model
as the apocalyptic destruction of America’s 20th century achievements (and,
for that matter, some Virginians and West Virginians have equally
exaggerated ideas about how we are about to extirpate all traces of New
England
progressivism from American politics), the transition from 4.0 to 5.0
liberalism is both more complex and more benign. (Readers of earlier posts in
this
series will remember that _liberalism 5.0 is what I am calling the next
stage of American political ideology._
(http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/01/16/life-after-blue/) )
Liberalism 5.0 isn’t about going back to the smaller state of the 18th and
19th century. The United States remains a complex society in which many
complicated trade-offs have to be made about the rights and interests of many
actors, and government will have to extend its reach in some directions if
our lives are going to improve. We will need, for example, an appropriate
legal framework so that individual health information can be pooled to
allow researchers to evaluate the effect of different medical treatments on
large numbers of people. We are probably going to have to increase federal
jurisdiction in health care as more and more health care professionals work at
a distance or collaborate in many states.
It is also true that the state will continue to have social
responsibilities beyond those of the Victorian era. Many of our fellow
citizens are in
real need and those needs cannot be met by purely voluntary efforts – though
voluntary, civil society organizations should be encouraged to step in
wherever possible.
The end of the blue model does not mean the end of the American state. We
are headed toward something more like what Ariel described in The Tempest:
Full fathom five thy Father lies,
Of his bones are Corrall made:
Those are pearles that were his eies,
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a Sea-change
Into something rich & strange
Sea-Nymphs hourly ring his knell.
Harke now I heare them, ding-dong, bell.
The state will transform but it will not disappear. We may change the way
the educational system works, but the goal of the changes will be to ensure
more and better universal education. We may change the policies aimed at
helping low income people move up the ladder of life, but American society
does not want to write off the poor. We may liberalize drug laws and look for
alternatives to imprisonment for non-violent offenders, but we won’t
abandon the effort to protect the public from unsafe or impure drugs and we
won’
t turn law and order over to the private sector. We may look for ways to
reduce the bureaucratic delays when it comes to permitting processes, but we
will not abandon the effort to impose safety and environmental standards.
The state will go high tech, its processes will accelerate, bureaucracies
will become flatter and more open, but it won’t wither away.
Ultimately even the doughtiest New Englanders are going to accept the need
for deep governmental reform. The American public is much better educated
than it used to be and knowledge is much more widely available. It is simply
no longer possible for an elite of technocrats in appointive offices and
regulatory bureaus to issue decrees and have them obeyed. Prussian
bureaucratic civil service models from the 19th century are too cumbersome,
too slow
and too expensive to handle much of the business of a 21st century
information society. It is not possible to reconcile the desire of individuals
to
control their own fate if authority is centralized at the federal level; we
will have to find ways to decentralize authority so that states and local
jurisdictions can make more of the decisions that directly affect peoples’
lives.
At the moment, the deep emotional commitment of the New England school to
blue model governance and social ideas — and the visceral hopes among some
anti-New England types that the death of blue is the death of New England —
gives a strange and ultimately not very useful cast to many of our national
debates. We are trapped into debates between the advocates of spendthrift
compassion (maintain Medicare and add new entitlements whether or not we
can pay for them because they are needed) or cut budgets even though some of
the services lost are, in fact, necessary for millions of people.
What disappears from this debate is the possibility that the transition
into a higher form of social organization and governance will make society so
much more affluent, and so bring down the costs of important services, that
we can strengthen our health care provisions without strangling the
economy or busting the budget. The question of transitioning past the blue
model
and developing an information society isn’t about cold hearted austerity
versus spendthrift compassion. It is about reconfiguring society and
reforming our institutions so that compassion is no longer spendthrift. It is
about
creating a more productive and abundant society in which we can afford to
see that old people and poor people get good medical care. It is about
building a society in which good education is more widely available on better
terms than it now is. It is about ordered liberty: about building a
government which can do more while restricting less.
The reform movement necessary to build the next stage in American life has
to be serious about the real needs that real people face, and the
fundamental challenge America faces is to make life better. This is not about
apportioning sacrifice in an age of restraint; it is ultimately about digging
the
channel through which new streams of abundance can flow. Certain
counterproductive and costly ways of doing things have to be changed, but we
need
more health care, more higher ed, more opportunity for the poor, more
fairness in society – not less.
Some readers and respondents to my original series of blue model essays,
like _Bill Galston_
(http://www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=1185) , ask some
pointed questions along these lines. How do I think the
post-blue society will work for the poor? What happens to welfare in it? I
haven’t answered these and other questions yet because at this stage we need
to think about how the majority of working people can make a good living and
have decent lives, and how society as a whole can be organized so that it
has the resources and the will to address the needs of the less fortunate.
You have to build a house before you can offer shelter to the homeless, and
America’s main job now is to figure out how to build a basically
prosperous society in a changing world. But as we make progress on that, the
question of how to extend and share that prosperity comes quickly to the fore.
The questions of poverty and social justice are very much on my mind; I
grew up in a pro-Civil Rights family at a time when that wasn’t always a safe
or popular thing to be in the Carolinas and some of my first jobs involved
things like going out into rural farm homes to sign families up for a new
government program called Project Head Start. There may not be a lot of
evidence that Head Start does what its designers hoped, but I won’t forget
talking to American kids who didn’t have shoes, whose houses didn’t keep out
the cold, and who were clearly undernourished.
I’ve also worked in urban high schools with low income kids and spent time
in housing projects and worked with families where lives had been shattered
by drug violence and gangs. These problems are real, they are part of
American life, and no serious political program for America’s future can
ignore
them.
In my home borough of Queens, more than 100 languages are spoken and my
walk to the subway takes me past people of all faiths and backgrounds from all
over the world. This is also America, and the next iteration of the
American dream has to work for my neighbors; this assumes a flexible,
competent
and well managed state.
The old America I grew up in and the new America growing up around me now
are very different places. Some of the changes are for the better and others
are for the worse. Yet somehow the America in which my grandfather was
born in 1897 is connected to the country my youngest great-nephew (born in
2012) will come to know. The lasting values that were the best things about
the America of 1897, or of 1776 for that matter, will still matter in 2097
and beyond. They will be embodied in different institutions and will deal
with more complex realities than we knew in earlier times, but the spirit of
ordered liberty that has brought the American experiment so far, so fast,
will, if we get things right, still be at the core of American life—and we
will still, I suspect, be quarreling about how to organize and limit
government in ways that the founding fathers would recognize.
Right now we are having an argument about whether the blue model is in
irreversible decline and whether its remnants should be liquidated or defended.
But as the model continues to decompose, and it will, the argument will
inevitably shift. The four schools who now quarrel about the old model will
change their ground without losing their values; New England, New York and
the Virginias will compete to shape the next stage in American history.
--
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