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No One to Hate
In his new book, Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics, is Destroying American Democracy, Jonah Goldberg argues that classical liberalism – belief in individual responsibility, equality under the law, and free markets – is not natural. Human beings spent most of their 200,000 to 300,000 years on earth living in tribes organized on the basis of cooperation and mutual obligation.
Free markets are also based on cooperation and mutual obligation, but the scope is the world rather than the tribe. As Milton Friedman explains in his summary of Leonard Read’s classic essay, “I, Pencil,” free markets foster cooperation between millions of people in different parts of the globe – people who have never met, who don’t speak the same languages, or worship the same gods.
The problem, as Goldberg sees it, is that the everyday, worldwide cooperation needed to create even the simplest products – such as the pencil – is not obvious. We long for the visible, face-to-face cooperation and sense of shared purpose that came with tribal existence.
There’s another difference between classical liberalism and tribal thought that Goldberg doesn’t address in his book but that is every bit as important: Classical liberalism doesn’t exclude anyone. It doesn’t provide us with an “other” to hate.
Socialism, fascism, Nazism, mercantilism, identity politics, and all the other throwbacks to tribal existence supply that unfortunate, but very human, desire. Socialism is based on the idea of class warfare. Fascism was arrayed against capitalists. Nazism, Hitler’s version of fascism, added Jews and other “non-Aryans” to its list of enemies. Mercantilists are aligned against foreigners and foreign products. Identity politics posits a world split between light-skinned oppressors and the dark-skinned oppressed.
Classical liberalism, by contrast, offers equality under the law regardless of class, race, religion, or wealth. Free markets are concerned with the color of a person’s money and not his skin. As Voltaire wrote about capitalist England, “Go into the Exchange in London, that place more venerable than many a court, and you will see representatives of all the nations assembled there for the profit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian deal with one another as if they were of the same religion,…”
Published in General
Well, there were the Aztecs.
I think they’re trying to get another shot at communism. To be sure, there are some environmental offshoots of the progressive movement that would like to go there, but overall, I’d say not.
I did mean specific cultural development rather than any limits on that capacity. Choice, aggregate and individual, I guess is what yields the vast differences in this.
Jonah specifically mentions this, citing Alex de Tocqueville, and his reference to mediating institutions. These institutions are voluntary, though the federal government as its gotten bigger has replaced a lot of their functionality, especially charitable groups. I’d say that the attacks on religion is another example of trying to marginalize such groups.
George W Bush with his faith based initiative was an attempt to revive mediating institutions.
Bob Thompson uses the qualifying word “every.” Which offers some ambiguity to his statement. After all, it can be true that in a primitive society, for instance, the Mound people’s society, certain instincts would not necessarily arise. When times are generally good, and people have no need to be greedy, perhaps some instincts would not need to be expressed.
We see the same thing in our own culture in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Sure we still had politicians who participated in corrupt activities. But not to the point of a Mussolini. So various Chicago politicians saw the inside of the prisons, but no one individual or groups of individuals felt the need to string them up on lamp posts.
Bob, of course, if generation after generation a population reproduces below replacement rate, the population will continually decrease.
A more pressing problem is that many of the financial/social structures of developed countries were implicitly based on a continually growing population. This is especially true for provisions for the elderly, which have been socialized in all developed countries.
No developed country will be able to continue very long with the current arrangements — there simply will not be enough working people to support the elderly. I believe the squeeze has already started. Public pensions and Social Security are starving other parts of state and federal budgets, and it’s only going to get worse.
Any serious solution, such as raising the retirement age by 5 years, or converting defined-benefit pensions to 401(k)s, is going to be resisted incredibly hard. The battles will make us nostalgic for the politics of 2018.
And it doesn’t provide us with an “us” to love. In between the tribe and the world comes the nation. Without an enforceable (in some real sense) commitment to the values that enable the good that comes from ‘classical liberalism’, in a world that includes many – one might say a vast majority of – folks who are not committed to those values, how is ‘classical liberalism’ to survive?
The idea of “us” and “other” doesn’t have to imply the “other” must be hated or feared. It does imply the “other” may have to be fought, if it threatens “us”. With no concept of “us” there is nothing to be protected against internal or external enemies of the things we consider to be important and distinctive about “us”.
Now, if you consider that the pre-conditions of a ‘classical liberal’ mode of life are, essentially, nothing but basic human nature, the elimination of “us” won’t worry you. If you think there is more to it, you may be concerned. You might even wonder if liberalism is inherently self-defeating.
Under classical liberalism, that’s the role of the mediating institutions – families, churches, voluntary services organizations, and the like. All the institutions that the left has worked so hard to destroy.
That certainly is a problem and maybe is the only reason the population is thought necessary to increase. Oh, I forgot about the the need for economic growth to increase the wealth of billionaires.
One place to start is to work to roll back the regulatory state. I think that there are two bases on which classical liberals can bring lawsuits aimed at reigning in regulatory agencies:
(1) The takings clause: By dictating what we can do with our property, regulations reduce the value of that property – usually with no compensation.
(2) Separation of duties: Regulatory agencies typically fill the legislative, executive, and judicial roles. This is contrary to the Constitution and the rule of law.
Lawsuits that publicize egregious examples of these usurpations of power may not initially win in court, but they will eventually build public support for change (recall, for example, the backlash against the Kelo decision).
Senator Mike Lee has been active for a while trying to restore Article I of the Constitution. He also has been active recently regarding Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service exceeding legislative intent in the exercise of police powers.