E-Pluribus | May 6, 2024
The blind elites leading the blind; what is "freedom"? And putting classical liberalism on antioxidants.
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Thomas Chatterton Williams: The Blindness of the Elites
While America has long had a love-hate relationship with “elites,” the elites themselves have often circled the wagons. In a recent Atlantic interview with novelist and literary critic Walter Kirn, Thomas Chatterton Williams finds Kirn part of a growing group who seem to be developing a clearer understanding of the public’s growing distrust of the de facto ruling class.
[Walter] Kirn would never describe himself as a Trump supporter, but he cares less about Trump’s rampage through American democracy, or even the lunacy and violence of January 6, than he does about the selfish and self-satisfied elites—all noblesse, no oblige—who sparked that anger and sustained it. Call him a counter-elite. As he said about Skull and Bones: “That’s our elite. Who wouldn’t want to be counter to it?”
Kirn described the dominant politics of his Minnesota youth as “rural progressivism.” He spoke reverently of his grandfather, also named Walter Kirn, a local politician in Akron, Ohio, who, in the 1950s, ruined his career by defending the right of the Black thespian and suspected communist Paul Robeson to come to town. Family legend has it that he opened up a high-school auditorium for Robeson’s performance “purely on the basis of his right to express himself. It wasn’t out of empathy for his views.” Kirn sees that “as the right kind of politics.”
Today he regards Trump’s supporters not as the proverbial basket of deplorables but as more or less reasonable citizens with valid concerns. The movement around Trump, Kirn told me, is “an expression of American frustration on the part of people who feel like they got a really raw deal.” He described himself as “anti-anti-Trump, in the sense that I don’t think that this is the unique challenge in American history for which we should throw away all sorts of liberties and prerogatives that we are going to want back.” One reason he doesn’t see the coming election as a state of emergency is he does not believe that previous American leaders, such as the Bushes, were particularly virtuous, even in comparison with Trump—a figure Kirn and his colleagues at that bastion of 1990s East Coast snobbism, Spy magazine, used to relentlessly mock. Here, Kirn’s personal evolution is telling: He is perhaps the most salient example of a mainstream writer rejecting his past to throw in with the populists.
Kirn is right that, as the internet and social media have allowed us to peer inside our national institutions, there is no denying their stewards have suffered profoundly from the exposure. And yet, I kept asking myself a question and phrasing it to Kirn in different ways: Why can’t we do two things simultaneously? Why can’t we revise our estimation of a decadent and often deceitful ruling class and refuse to downplay the sui generis outrage that is Donald Trump? It is not an acquittal of George W. Bush’s grandfather to insist that a second Trump term would be a mistake.
Whenever I tried this tack with Kirn, he didn’t dispute it. It just wasn’t an argument that excited him.
[. . .]
But Kirn insists that he’s stayed the same—that his ideological trajectory is actually defined by relative stasis. When I asked the journalist Matt Taibbi, Kirn’s friend and podcast partner on America This Week, how he would describe Kirn’s politics, he told me Kirn was an “old-school liberal,” reiterating that it was the other so-called liberals who had changed. “I’ve been told repeatedly in the last year that free speech is a right-wing issue,” Taibbi (another man of the left whom some view as having drifted rightward) said. “I wouldn’t call him conservative. I would just say he’s a free thinker, nonconformist, iconoclastic.”
“I’m not quite a libertarian,” Kirn told me, as we whipped his John Deere Gator across the knee-deep Montana snow. The occasional melted patch splattered us with mud. “I believe we should organize to do all sorts of things for the common good.” He said he resented being coded conservative: “I was like, Dude, you guys are jumping off the ship. I’m staying on the ship. This is the same ship I’ve been on.”
Read it all here.
John Cassidy: Joseph Stiglitz and the Meaning of Freedom
What is freedom? The Declaration of Independence’s rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” often serves as a short definition in an American context. Although not in so many words, Joseph Stiglitz, economics professor, Nobel laureate and former Clinton administration official, argues that those ideals are not sufficient. John Cassidy at The New Yorker takes a close look at how this unrepentant progressive defines it.
Gun violence and the spread of diseases by people who refuse to abide by health guidelines are examples of what economists call externalities, an awkward word that is derived from the fact that certain actions (such as refusing to wear a mask) or market transactions (such as the sale of a gun) can have negative (or positive) consequences to the outside world. “Externalities are everywhere,” [Joseph] Stiglitz writes. The biggest and most famous negative externalities are air pollution and climate change, which derive from the freedom of businesses and individuals to take actions that create harmful emissions. The argument for restricting this freedom, Stiglitz points out, is that doing so will “expand the freedom of people in later generations to exist on a livable planet without having to spend a huge amount of money to adapt to massive changes in climate and sea levels.”
In all these cases, Stiglitz argues, restrictions on behavior are justified by the over-all increase in human welfare and freedom that they produce. In the language of cost-benefit analysis, the costs in terms of infringing on individual freedom of action are much smaller than the societal benefits, so the net benefits are positive.
[. . .]
During our sit-down interview, Stiglitz told me that, for a long time, he had cavilled at the negative conception of freedom used by conservative economists and politicians, which referred primarily to the ability to escape taxation, regulation, and other forms of government compulsion. As an economist accustomed to thinking in theoretical terms, Stiglitz conceived of freedom as expanding “opportunity sets”—the range of options that people can choose from—which are usually bounded, in the final analysis, by individuals’ incomes. Once you reframe freedom in this more positive sense, anything that reduces a person’s range of choices, such as poverty, joblessness, or illness, is a grave restriction on liberty. Conversely, policies that expand people’s opportunities to make choices, such as income-support payments and subsidies for worker training or higher education, enhance freedom.
Adopting this framework in “The Road to Freedom,” Stiglitz reserves his harshest criticisms for the free-market economists, conservative politicians, and business lobbying groups, who, over the past couple of generations, have used arguments about expanding freedom to promote policies that have benefitted rich and powerful interests at the expense of society at large. These policies have included giving tax cuts to wealthy individuals and big corporations, cutting social programs, starving public projects of investment, and liberating industrial and financial corporations from regulatory oversight. Among the ills that have resulted from this conservative agenda, Stiglitz identifies soaring inequality, environmental degradation, the entrenchment of corporate monopolies, the 2008 financial crisis, and the rise of dangerous right-wing populists like Donald Trump. These baleful outcomes weren’t ordained by any laws of nature or laws of economics, he says. Rather, they were “a matter of choice, a result of the rules and regulations that had governed our economy. They had been shaped by decades of neoliberalism, and it was neoliberalism that was at fault.”
Stiglitz’s approach to freedom isn’t exactly new, of course. Rousseau famously remarked that “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.” In “Development as Freedom,” published in 1999, the Harvard economist and philosopher Amartya Sen argued, in the context of debates about poverty and economic growth in developing economies, that the goal of development should be to expand people’s “capabilities,” which he defined as their opportunities to do things like nourish themselves, get educated, and exercise political freedoms. “The Road to Freedom” falls in this tradition, which includes another noted philosopher, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Stiglitz cites Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech, delivered in January, 1941, in which the President added freedom from want and freedom from fear to freedom of speech and freedom of worship as fundamental liberties that all people should enjoy.
“A person facing extremes of want and fear is not free,” Stiglitz writes. He describes how, at a high-school reunion, he spoke with former classmates from the city he grew up in—Gary, Indiana, which had once been a thriving center of steel production. “When they graduated from high school, they said, they had planned to get a job at the mill just like their fathers. But with another economic downturn hitting they had no choice—no freedom—but to join the military . . . . Deindustrialization was taking away manufacturing jobs, leaving mainly opportunities that made use of their military training, such as the police force.”
Read it all.
Edward Feser: Western Civilization's Immunodeficiency Disease
Is Western Civilization sick? At the Postliberal Order website, Edward Feser says “yes,” and he believes he has the diagnosis. Although it’s difficult to capture in a few excerpts (read it all,) Feser explains via his immunodeficiency disease analogy how liberalism can undermine itself and what can be done to mitigate the damage.
[In his classic Suicide of the West, James] Burnham was saying that liberalism is best thought of not so much as the direct cause of the West’s decline and possible destruction, but rather as a condition that has made it possible for certain causes to bring about those effects.
I will leave aside, for present purposes, Burnham’s own way of developing this theme. What I want to suggest here is that one way of understanding it is on the analogy of immunodeficiency disorders that weaken the body’s immune system in such a way that it cannot effectively fight off infections. Liberalism is like AIDS or other immunodeficiency conditions in that it opens the social order to lethal threats that a healthy body politic would be able to fight off.
[. . .]
How [is] liberalism comparable to an immunodeficiency disorder in the social organism? The answer is in part that liberalism prevents governments from shoring up the moral and religious orders that in turn uphold the social order – and in part that, even worse, it positively fosters skepticism about the moral and religious orders.
To be sure, liberals often reject the suggestion that their position entails skepticism, relativism, subjectivism, and related ideas. And they certainly are not skeptics, relativists, or the like full stop. For one thing, they typically take their own liberal moral and political principles to be objectively true and knowable. They also take us to have much in the way of knowledge, or at least rationally justifiable belief, of a scientific kind, including a social scientific kind. More to the present point, they are not, they would insist, committed to denying that traditional moral and religious claims are true and knowable. They are committed only to preventing or at least severely limiting the influence of these claims on public policy, which, they maintain, should be neutral about such things.
This is indeed true at least in principle. The trouble is that it cannot work in practice, consistent with the realization of liberal outcomes. Consider that even liberal statesmen routinely have to appeal to fallible and controversial knowledge claims, and could hardly do otherwise without making government utterly unworkable. For example, in formulating and implementing policy, they have to make use of current scientific theory, economic data, social scientific analysis, and the like, and even moral judgments (about fairness, for example). They regard this, quite rightly, as perfectly legitimate despite the fact that there exists a plurality of reasonable views about these matters. They don’t think that the fact that free individuals disagree about the scientific, social scientific, and moral ideas in question entails that governing authorities who make use of such ideas are ipso facto threatening individual freedom.
[. . .]
If one looks at social and political questions through the lens of natural law theory, the specific ways in which liberalism has in fact now largely destroyed this immune system should be obvious. For example, it’s not just that liberalism is loath to use the law to discourage abortion, divorce, pornography, contraception, etc. It’s that liberalism’s fixation on the freedom of individuals to live as they like tends positively to promote the attitude that concern about these things reflects an irrational prejudice rather than sound moral thinking. The way is thereby opened for ideas and ways of living inherently subversive of the family to flood into the social order like a virus.
Similarly, it’s not just that liberals are loath to regulate immigration, or to mold the educational curriculum, for the purpose of maintaining cultural cohesion. It’s that liberalism tends to promote the attitude that concern with maintaining cultural cohesion reflects an irrational and even bigoted attachment to local and contingent social orders, one that is at odds with liberal universalism. The way is thereby opened to ideas that are subversive of a shared allegiance to a common homeland, and that foster the replacement of this allegiance by a conflict of ethnic, religious, and cultural factions.
Read the whole thing.
Around Twitter (X)
Here’s a long excerpt from an Atlantic piece by Jill Filipovic via Josh Kraushaar of an amazing, deceptive article from the Washington Post:
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has banned DEI statements. Former Harvard president and MIT alum Larry Summers is a fan:
And finally, here’s a good reason to Google an acronym you are considering before going ahead with it:"