Earlier this week, Will Cain very kindly asked me to participate in a series of online debates with Chris Hayes of The Nation, a leading left-of-center thinker. To his credit, Hayes describes himself as a social democrat, a political tradition that remains obscure in U.S. political discourse. Unlike left movements in Europe, the American left has traditionally had a strong individualist streak, hence the resonance of the “liberal” label that many center-left Americans now eschew in favor of “progressive.” The best book I’ve read on the origins of social democracy is Sheri Berman’s The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century, a sympathetic account that describes the movement as an outgrowth of the various revisionist movements that emerged in tension with and in opposition to Marxist orthodoxy. Another movement that emerged from the intellectual ferment of revisionism is, of course, fascism, and Jonah Golderg has vividly described the awkward relationship between these traditions at great length. Though it should go without saying that egalitarian social democracy and racial fascism are deeply different, both see the creation and cultivation of social solidarity as vitally important.
One could argue that the neoconservatives of the 1960s and 1970s remained committed to liberal individualism, and so they abandoned the political left in response to the emergence of what they saw as a pernicious racialized solidarity politics. Like a lot of folks at NR, I’ve often thought that the turn against the liberal label speaks to a deeper intellectual shift towards a different kind of solidaristic politics — not a racialized politics, but an American version of class politics that, as in John Edwards vision of Two Americas locked in contention, pits both the lower-upper-middle class (in Matt Miller’s excellent turn-of-phrase) and working families (a useful catch-all) against an elite minority of moneychangers and other rakish ne’er-do-wells. This is a social democratic turn. You saw it in Barack Obama’s 2004 campaign for the U.S. Senate, where he drew on the emotive appeals of Michael Harrington and the Christian socialism of the late Martin Luther King Jr. For obvious reasons, you saw it far less often during his presidential campaign. So is Barack Obama a socialist? I tend not to think so. But that doesn’t mean that the cumulative result of successive interventions won’t be an economic regime that deserves the name.
We’re living through a politics of emergency. Earlier on, the politics of emergency was about the national-security state. Now it is about the economic-security state. The result, as Chris suggests, is “lemon socialism,” which, in fairness, we’ve also seen during Republican administrations. (Reagan backed SEMATECH, for example.) The intention of the federal government is to transform GM into a viable business. And in the past, the federal government has had some success in this regard, e.g., with Conrail. The troubling question is: have we passed the point where such an effort is even politically possible? For example, the transformation of GM into a viable business enterprise might require a much leaner, more global profile. Yet the political case for the intervention is the rescue of jobs in the Great Lakes region. The tension should be obvious, and who believes that politics won’t play the dominant role? Some on the left are disappointed that GM isn’t being transformed into a vanguard of the green-jobs economy of the future. It’s not obvious to me that GM won’t eventually be used to that political end.
The most worrying sign to me is that the charge of socialism is losing its sting. Lawrence Lessig recently wrote a post criticizing Kevin Kelly for favorably characterizing the economics of peer production as a species of socialism, and Kelly’s Wired essay was clearly a playful provocation. And yet it’s a sign of the times.
When it comes to countering the destigmatization of socialism, Lessig has the right idea.
Unlike statists of later years, Smith was fascinated by emergent public goods — goods that were public goods (since nonrival and nonexcludable, as economists later would formalize the concept), but that were created not by any central actor like the state, but by the mutual and voluntary actions of individuals. Language is the simplest example — language is a quintessentially public good, but no central coordinator is necessary to produce language. But Smith was eager to describe a wide range of emergent public goods that set the preconditions to a well functioning market.
Obviously, in this focus on civil society, Smith is not alone — even among the heros to libertarian/capitalist/free marketeers. In this respect, Hayek continues the tradition Smith began. He too was deeply sensitive to the health of civil society, and recognized how civil society was produced by “masses of people who own the means of production [and] work toward a common goal and share their products in common, [people who] contribute labor without wages and enjoy the fruits free of charge.” But Hayek too was not “socialist.”
Lessig, who was once a right-leaning libertarian, gets that the partisans of anti-statism are at their best the partisans of society, and that peer production is a paradigmatic example of spontaneous order.
All that said, Hayes makes a powerful and compelling point regarding the capacity of the American state. Denmark, for example, is the only country in the Western world that has succeeded in sharply reducing per capita carbon emissions without the aid of a collapsing economy. Monica Prasad explained why and how in an Op-Ed for the New York Times last year. This was possible in part because the Danish bureaucrats are highly-regarded professionals. The culture of public service is strong. Though there are slices of the U.S. federal government that draw elite professionals, and DARPA is everyone’s favorite example of a nimble, entrepreneurial, highly-effective public agency, our government has never worked all that well. And it arguably works less well now after Clinton and Bush both sought to replace bureaucrats with contract employees. Consider that overages on defense contracts have sharply increased since the oversight of said contracts has been outsourced. The irony is that a government-cutting measure has in effect swelled the size of government, but with no added benefit for the taxpayer.
David Brooks and Daniel Casse and other conservative thinkers have often said we need a limited but energetic government. I think I’d settle for limited but competent. And that means having the federal government retreat from some sectors of economic life — I’d start with the ridiculous way we limit access to the spectrum and education and, as I discussed in the last post, even health care — and do a better job in its more limited domain. For a sophisticated normative case on these grounds, one that I don’t agree with in every detail, I recommend the work of Ilya Somin.