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July 13, 2007

Brink Lindsey's Marxist libertarianism

Over at Cato Unbound, Brink Lindsey has posted a precis of his book, The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Culture. I haven't read it and I don't plan to. I'll just note quickly some passages that bring out one of the many dark sides of libertarianism, specifically its Marxist streak. Not every one of these is evidence of the Marxist streak on its own, but taken together they are pretty damning.

First: history, it would seem, is on the side of libertarian liberty:

Nevertheless, the fact is that American society today is considerably more libertarian than it was a generation or two ago. Compare conditions now to how they were at the outset of the 1960s. Official governmental discrimination against blacks no longer exists. Censorship has beaten a wholesale retreat. The rights of the accused enjoy much better protection. Abortion, birth control, interracial marriage, and gay sex are legal. Divorce laws have been liberalized and rape laws strengthened. Pervasive price and entry controls in the transportation, energy, communications, and financial sectors are gone. Top income tax rates have been slashed. The pretensions of macroeconomic fine-tuning have been abandoned. Barriers to international trade are much lower. Unionization of the private sector work force has collapsed. Of course there are obvious counterexamples, but on the whole it seems clear that cultural expression, personal lifestyle choices, entrepreneurship, and the play of market forces all now enjoy much wider freedom of maneuver.

Make what you will of the examples. Counterexamples are indeed obvious, and Matthew Yglesias does a nice job of pointing them out. Granted, Lindsey also cites cultural and economic changes that he takes to be "irreversible" (like the sexual revolution and the deregulation of the '80s). Whether or not they are irreversible, it is curious how libertarians need to feel that history is on their side for the same reason that the Marxists did: because they lack a serious normative justification for their politics.

Second: historical progress is caused by developments in the economic base:

The many and complex reasons for this trend can be boiled down to one sweeping generalization: in an age of mass affluence, economic development and individualism go together.... American society has become more libertarian because, more than any other country on the planet, it has successfully adapted to the novel conditions of economic abundance. And because of the way this adaptation took place, a broadly defined libertarianism now occupies the center of the American political spectrum.... Though the exact percentages fluctuate in response to events, the secular trend is both clear and, as Ronald Inglehart has documented, global: as people get richer, their faith in government and established authority generally declines.

There may be some point to the idea that economic progress entrenches the same values that made that progress possible. But Lindsey's (and Marx's) stories neglect the original source of that progress. Something about "the goods are here" comes to mind...

Third: historical progress necessitates cultural contradictions and even "class" conflict:

As I describe in The Age of Abundance, mass affluence triggered a mirror-image pair of cultural convulsions: on the countercultural left, a romantic rebellion against order and authority of every description; and on the traditionalist right, an evangelical revival of socially and theologically conservative Protestantism. Both arose around the same time, in the dizzying 1960s. Between them, these two movements have played decisive roles in shaping America’s accommodation to mass affluence. But those roles were deeply ambivalent, mixing positive elements and negative ones in roughly equal measure. The countercultural left combined genuine liberation with dangerous, nihilistic excess, while the traditionalist right mixed knee-jerk reaction with wise conservation of vital cultural endowments.

The two movements thus offered conflicting half-truths. On the left were gathered those elements of American society most open to the new possibilities of mass affluence and most eager to explore them – in other words, the people at the forefront of the push for civil rights, feminism, and environmentalism, as well as sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. At the same time, however, many on the left harbored a deep antagonism toward the institutions of capitalism and middle-class life that had created all those exciting new possibilities. On the right, meanwhile, were the faithful defenders of capitalism and middle-class mores. But included in this group were the people most repelled by and hostile to the social and cultural ferment that capitalism and middle-class mores were producing. This is the blind vs. blind struggle of the culture wars: one side attacked capitalism while rejoicing in its fruits; the other side celebrated capitalism while denouncing its fruits as poisonous.

This conflict is still with us today, in the form of the polarized politics of Red America vs. Blue America.

Of course it's true that the progressives and conservatives represent two ends of a false dichotomy. But the dichotomy is not a response to mass affluence, and it preceded the 20th century by millennia. It's the false dichotomy between the mystic and the subjectivist--it's the "If God is dead, all is permitted" premise, which preceded even Dostoevsky.

Fourth: the conviction that the cultural contradictions will be overcome by a new (libertarian rather than communist) synthesis:

The good news, though, is that this polarization mostly concerns minorities of true believers and their media talking heads rather the bulk of ordinary Americans. Most Americans, it turns out, have moved on since the ’60s toward a common ground whose coloration is not recognizably red or blue – call it a purplish, libertarianish centrism. On the one hand, they embrace the traditional, Middle American values of patriotism, law and order, the work ethic, and commitment to family life. At the same time, though, they hold attitudes on race and sex that are dramatically more liberal than those that held sway a generation or two ago. Likewise, they are deeply skeptical of authority, and are strongly committed to open-mindedness and tolerance. Such an amalgamation of views is flatly inconsistent with current definitions of ideological purity. Despite all the talk of raging culture wars, most Americans are nonbelligerents.

Of course even if most Americans believe in patriotism and most also believe in racial toleration, this does not imply that most people believe in both. The majority with each position may cluster towards opposite ends of a spectrum. That aside, patriotism and racial tolerance are not much to work with. They aren't fundamental enough, philosophically, to spur on genuine cultural change for the better. And it's unclear that change for the better is what Lindsey actually wants, given that the most he can say about the direction of our "progress" is that it is postmodern and anti-authoritarian. Anti- what authority?

Fifth: the synthesis will be possible, but only by raising the consciousness of the oppressed:

There are some obvious objections to the idea of a libertarian center. First, as I stated at the outset, there is no libertarian political movement to speak of. Accordingly, there is no organized libertarian-leaning constituency that could ally with either conservatives or liberals to alter the balance of power. Rather, at best libertarianism exists as a diffuse, inchoate set of impulses that operate, not as an independent force, but as tendencies within the left and right and a check on how far each can stray in illiberal directions. Second, as I conceded in an earlier essay for Cato Unbound, American public opinion is noticeably unlibertarian in many important respects. In particular, economic illiteracy is rife; much of government spending – especially the budget-busting middle-class entitlement programs – remains highly popular; and the weakness for moralistic crusades, long an unfortunate feature of the American character, remains glaring (though today’s temperance movements direct their obsessive zeal toward advancing health and safety rather than virtue).

The American proletariat needs only organize and learn of its economic oppression by the collectivists! It has nothing to lose but its chains!

In fairness, Lindsey reminds us that he is not arguing for "libertarian triumphalism." He does not mean to suggest that libertarian liberty must win in the end. So he faces the same problem the communists did: how to motivate an ideological movement in the face of alleged historical necessity. He opts for the same solution: to say that history is on his side, and that we'd better join up if we want to be on the winning side. But I daresay that it is hard to claim that history is on your side when it's unclear what exactly your side is. Libertarians praise a vague "liberty" from an even vaguer "authority." It is no wonder that their ends are vague, given their lack of any basic philosophical foundations. In this respect, they've got even less going for them than the Marxists did.

Posted by admin at July 13, 2007 02:14 AM

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Posted by: Neil B. at July 17, 2007 07:33 PM

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