What is a "liberal" in America today?

The center-left in American politics has for decades been called "liberal" both by supporters and opponents.

But the meaning of political terms evolve over time. And that's certainly true of American "liberalism".

Helena Rosenblatt takes a stab a positioning the current use of the label in What We Talk About When We Talk About Liberalism Boston Review 09/12/2018. Along the way, she cites several other recent takes on the matter:

• Sean Wilentz, Fighting Words Democracy Spring 2018
• Jeffrey Isaac, Truce Time Democracy Summer 2018
• Doug Rassinow, Leftists and Liberals in the Political Heartland Boston Review 01/03/2018

Issac's article responds to Wilentz', with the two having different takes on how to describe the relationship of the Democratic Party liberals to the left over the past century or so. Wilentz takes a particularly critical attitude toward left criticism of the more traditional liberals. Especially the criticisms Bernie Sanders made of Hillary Clinton during Democratic primary contest in 2016.

Rosenblatt gives a useful summary of the nineteenth century usage of the term in Europe and the US:

Like much of our political vocabulary, the word “liberalism” emerged in the wake of the French Revolution. Coined in the early 1800s, it originally stood for a cluster of concepts including civic equality, constitutional and representative government, and a number of individual rights such as freedom of religion, property, and the press. But over the course of the nineteenth century, as a result of inequities generated by industrialized wealth, liberalism split in two. One branch advocated laissez-faire, often of a radical kind. Others, influenced by new ideas of political economy coming from Germany, advocated increasing government intervention to help the poor, calling themselves “social liberals” or “liberal socialists.” They saw no contradiction in this terminology; instead such ideas were thought to be the very expression of “true liberalism” — a common expression in the nineteenth century.

Doug Rassinow in his piece briefly recounts the liberal/left tensions in the US in the post-Second World War period. One thing that helps complicate the picture in the US during most of the 20th century is that self-described liberals were prensent prominently in both the Democratic and Republican Parties. Reagan's Presidency represents the turning point where the Republican Party became thoroughly ideologically conservative. Southern conservatives were still a significant if much reduced presence in the Democratic Party for a longer time. Once Bill Clinton won California in the 1992 Presidential race, the Democrats nationally had little need for tailoring their programs to that Southern conservative bloc, which in any case had largely been absorbed into the Republican Party.

I think the Democratic Party, aside from the differences between the corporate-liberal and progressive-liberal wings of the party, still has a kind of "phantom limb" (or phantom wing?) from the one-time existence of that Southern conservative wing. The Democratic leadership still seems to have a sort of instinctive reflex to frame their own positions in conservative/Republican terms, even when it makes no obvious sense.

Rosenblatt's bottom line, the last paragraph of her piece:

The predicament faced by today’s Democrats is therefore not a new one. History tells us that liberals have always been known by different names as they responded to new political and social circumstances. Some have called themselves “progressive,” while others have preferred “socialist.” The boundaries between these terms have been porous, their meanings changeable. If there is a moral to be drawn from this history, it is that even where they argued over the meaning of “true liberalism,” liberals were strongest when they found common ground—especially in the face of authoritarian rulers and demagogues. The 2018 U.S. midterm elections will put that pattern to the test once again.

In other words, what is a liberal in American politics? It depends ...

Class and the US Constitutional Convention of 1787

I've been paying closer attention recently to the classical liberalism of the era of the American and French Revolutions. And I came across some instructive comments about class is a popular history of the writing of the Constitution, Miracle at Philadelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention May to September 1787 (1966) by Catherine Drinker Bowen.

As the title indicates, the book was written in a celebratory mood toward the convention and the Founding Fathers, as they were near-universally called in 1966. It represents some kind of linguistic progress that today people know who you are talking about when you refer to them as the Founders.

Bowen was explicit about her celebratory approach in her preface:

Miracles do not occur at random, nor was it the author of this book who said there was a miracle at Philadelphia in the year 1787. George Washington said it, and James Madison. They used the word in writing to their friends: Washington to Lafayette, Madison to Thomas Jefferson.

So I guess the lesson is that since politicians, in 1787 and today, could occasionally be drama queens, we might as well be, too.

Every miracle has its provenance, every miracle has been prayed for. The wine was first water in Cana; there was a wedding and a need. If miracles are men's wishes fulfilled, so with the miracle at Philadelphia. ... Trial, error, success, retreat. Plans of union and plans of government, until, four years after the Peace of Paris, Americans attempted the grand national experiment.

My book celebrates that experiment.

I don't mean to imply that Bowen's book is in the vein of today's jingoistic conservative notion of American Exceptionalism, a phrase ironically made famous on the far left by Joseph Stalin and now adopted by Tea Party enthusiasts. She doesn't do that. And there's nothing wrong with writing a history of the Constitutional Convention in the vein of appreciating the pioneering liberal and democratic-republican accomplishment it was. The book is a narrative of the Convention itself designed for a popular audience, without the scholarly trappings of footnotes.

At one point, she notes the nationalist spirit of the 1780s:

The bragging and the boasting were in truth part of a young vigor, a young defiance. America must shout aloud her name, her independence. All the world must be informed of her grandiose new plans, which encompassed a continent and concerned nothing less than the equality of men. "We are making experiments," Franklin had said. (p. 165)

But if anything, the "bragging and boasting" are far more prominent now. Forget the Tea Party and John Birch Society enthusiasts for American Exceptionalism. Presidents for decades now have routinely described the United States as "the greatest country in the world" or some variation of that phrase.

Although she seeks ways to show the influence of the American examples inspiring European friends of liberty and troubling the tyrants on the throne, her account also allows the reader to conclude that most Europeans, including the rulers, regarded the American states as a backwater, though an interesting and potential wealthy one. She also cautions on the accounts of European travelers who wrote contemporary accounts of the former British colonies: "A traveler sees what he wishes to see." (p. 157)

What I want to emphasize here are some of her comments on class, wealth and power. She discusses the classical liberalism of the Founders on those subjects without falling into the reductionism of Charles Beard's famous and discredited argument on how the Founders built the Constitution around their own personal financial goals, reminiscent of monopolists sitting around planning price-fixing arrangements. Bowen discusses some issues related to Beard's arguments on p. 172ff. Referring to investments of leading Convention members George Washington, Benjamin Franklin James Wilson and Robert Morris, she writes, "Yet there is no evidence to show that these men allowed their speculative interests to influence their action in the Federal Convention." She writes, "The Federal Convention was composed of propertied men; more than half owned public securities which could be expected to rise in value under a new, strong government." (p. 73) But she didn't draw the over-simplified and erroneous conclusion from that fact that Beard drew from the Convention members' personal economic situations.

As Beard's critics have noted many times over, the political ideology of the late 17th-century liberalism with which the philosopher Adam Smith, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington operated was favorable to the emerging capitalist economic order. But it wasn't directed solely at individual business schemes or solely at pecuniary interests more generally. In any case, reading the outlook of the Progressive Era or Keynesian economics or the Great Society back into the days of the Founders would be an anachronism. As Bowen describes the view of James Madison, "The right to possess property, to hold fast to it and to be represented in whatever body determined taxes: this was an essential part of liberty and of the public happiness." (p. 239)

Although, with a nod to the Founder whose nickname this blog's title honors - yes, Old Hickory counts as a Founder; he fought in the Revolutionary War - Andrew Jackson's Presidency took economic liberalism and popular democracy (for white males) to a qualitatively new level. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. was right to see the Jacksonian era as one in which American democracy faced issues of class and democratic participation that in some ways were very similar to those confronted by Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Both political projects, Jacksonian democracy and the New Deal, carried historical baggage with them, certainly including a gigantic racial blind spot in their practical understanding of democracy.

But as Bowen writes, the class composition of the Convention itself could scarcely be shared to be representative of the economic diversity of the country in 1787:

Already in this second week of meeting it was evident that whatever should divide the Convention, the division would not be on the basis of class. George Mason for all his broad acres and aristocratic bearing had faith in the people, while Roger Sherman, son of a shoemaker, had not, nor had Elbridge Gerry, the self-made merchant. Benjamin Franklin, humbly born but by all odds the man of greatest worldly experience in the country, from time to time "expressed his dislike," wrote Madison, "of every thing that tended to debase the spirit of the common people. If honesty was often the companion of wealth, and if poverty was exposed to peculiar temptation, it was not less true that the possession of property increased the desire of more property. Some of the greatest rogues he was ever acquainted with, were the richest rogues. ... This Constitution will be much read and attended to in Europe, and if it should betray a great partiality to the rich, will not only hurt us in the esteem of the most liberal and enlightened men there, but discourage the common people from removing to this Country." [my emphasis] (pp. 47-8)

She doesn't give nearly as much attention to the status of Indians and slaves as we would expect from a contemporary history, though the slavery compromises (the slave trade, the 3/5's rule) form a significant element of her account of the Convention, of necessity. Women's rights are hardly a consideration in the book, nor were they at the Constitutional Convention. She devotes a few pages on the reported physical appearance of American women and table manners related to them. (pp. 165-7))

But she does note that European accounts of the general prosperity or at least lack of poverty among Americans was influenced by race: "When foreigners spoke of poverty in America they meant the poverty of white men; they were continually surprised not to find more of it." (p. 157)

And commenting on European romanticizing of the aboriginal people in the New World, she writes:

From the American Indian to the pagan hero was a nice poetic transference, but it irritated Dr. Johnson in London, who told Boswell not to "cant in defense of savages." Thomas Hobbes had seen the life of the savage as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Americans living on Western borders could have wished it even shorter. It is to be doubted if many eighteenth-century colonials looked on the Mohawk or the Cherokee as anything but verminous, thieving and potentially ferocious nuisances. The dusky maiden with the squash blossom in her hair ... the zephyr, the rill, the solitary glen ... only the poets of Europe could afford to indulge in such imaginings. As a rule Americans hated red Indians, wished to see them exterminated, and for the most part treated them accordingly. A William Penn, a Franklin, a Benezet, a Weiser or even a William Johnson [who saw the Indians from a less ruthless perspective] were few and far between. John Bartram the botanist, a Quaker, said the only way to deal with Indians was to "bang them stoutly." To Europe, however, the Indian had never been a "problem," but always a curiosity. (pp. 143-4)

She describes the social situation of American whites this way:

The Convention of '87 discussed America not in terms of social philosophy but in relation to the country as they saw it around them. In the fields were no wretched peasant tenants, subsisting by their lord's favor. These men owned the land they cultivated. Even the mean desolate cabins of the frontier were inhabited by settlers who had gone west of their own free will. The states had indeed their poor, their ill, their aged destitute. Care of these the Convention looked on as a local responsibility; Philadelphia had her Alms House and her twenty Overseers and Guardians of the Poor. That a large part of America rested upon slavery was again no part of the Convention's immediate problem; they were met not to reform society but to create a government for society as it existed. The idle rich were as yet almost nonexistent. An American worked for what he owned; Southern planter as well as Northern merchant was aware of it. (p. 72)

The absence of feudal structures like those in France or the German states of the time was an important factor in distinguishing American society and the classical liberal thought of its thinkers and philosophers (both Franklin and Jefferson can be counted as philosophers, even if the latter was used as a polemical insult against Jefferson later):

For English visitors as well as French, it was hard to understand a people who had no tradition of feudality, no loyalty of peasant to the lord who protected him, or of tenant to landlord. Not only were the Americans without tllis tradition, handed down through the generations, but they had r:o acquaintance with it. Although born as colonials they seemed to have been born free of the class above them. An English traveler, Francis Baily, put it down to the fact of easy subsistence. Because land could be acquired cheaply, men's dependence on each other was "so trifling, that the spirit of servility to those above them so prevalent in European manners is wholly unknown, and the [Americans] pass their lives without any regard to the smiles or frowns of men in power." Thomas Cooper said much the same thing. There were no Americans of great rank, Cooper wrote, nor many of great riches. "Nor have the rich the power of oppressing the less rich, for poverty such as in Great Britain is almost unknown." T he very term farmer, said Cooper, had in America another meaning. Whereas in England it signified a tenant, paying heavy rent to some lord and occupying an inferior rank in life, here m Pennsylvania a farmer was a landowner, equal to any man in the state? "having a voice in the appointment of h1s leg1sators, and a fair chance ... of becoming one himself. In fact, nine-tenths of the legislators of America are farmers." (pp. 155-6)

Bower's description is somewhat of an exaggeration. The mercantilist companies that Britain used to settle large portions of North America exercised land ownership and rule by private owners that was not wholly unlike feudal arrangements. Even whites citizens of Britain had been subject to indentured servitude. One of the legal actions pursued by the new states after the American Revolution was the abolition of feudal-aristocratic laws like primogeniture and entail. So there were at least remnants of feudal elements in the American economy and society of that time.

And she does describe some of the manifestations of poverty in the 1780s, though she doesn't appear troubled by its seeming incompatibility with her general assessment of poverty:

Filth was thrown into the streets, wells contaminated by backyard privies. Typhoid, malaria, smallpox, the bloody flux, the putrid sore throat (diphtheria) swept through the cities in summer like a scythe. Rickets and scurvy abounded. These were the good old days, so often lamented by moderns of a romantic turn. One is almost surprised that fifty-five delegates survived to maturity and the Federal Convention. A Virginia innkeeper and his wife told [François Jean de Beauvoir, Marquis de] Chastellux [1734-1788] they had had fourteen children, none of whom lived to the age of two. (p. 163)

The classical liberalism that dominated the thought of the Convention was dubious of the poor and didn't completely reject the idea of making the franchise dependent on some property qualification:

Madison told his colleagues that the United States had not reached the stage of a closely peopled Europe, where the propertied and the poor were natural enemies. In 1787, as today, the propertied men of America differed greatly in their sympathy with the common people. To George Washington, Captain Shays and his men [in Shay's Rebellion of 1786-7, a catalyzing even for the Constitutional Convention]had been "misled"; to Jefferson they signified a healthy republic; to Gerry they were incorrigible and should be allowed no part in government.

For the next three months the Convention would debate, argue, quarrel over the nature and disposition of the American people, the "people at large." What did the people desire in the way of government, what did they deserve, what would they accept? Most of the state constitutions required their voters to own property, in sums ranging from twenty pounds in New York to sixty pounds in Massachusetts, though Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Hampshire had already come out for free elections. In the end the Convention left this matter to the state legislatures. [my emphasis] (p. 73)

Bowen gives an accessible description of how the Founders tended to view property in a democratic-republican political order:

Elbridge Gerry agreed with Pinckney that the state legislatures should appoint the representatives in Congress. But could not the people first nominate certain persons from their districts, who in turn would do the final appointing? Like Pinckney, Gerry did not wish to rob the people of all confidence in the new government; they must be permitted to feel their share in it. In England, said Gerry, the people were in danger of losing their liberty because so few had the right of suffrage. Whereas here, the danger was the opposite. Look what was happening in Massachusetts! "The worst men get into the legislature ... Men of indigence, ignorance and baseness spare no pains, however dirty, to carry their point ... "

To most of the Convention there is no doubt that indigence was a bad word. We meet the phrases often: persons without property or character . . . men without character and fortune ... "The most dangerous influence," said John Dickinson, "of those multitudes without property and without principle with which our country, like all others, will soon abound." If today the words are shocking, almost absurd, it is well to recall that they were spoken in an America where, for a few generations at least, poverty very likely did mean sloth and idleness. America in 1787 was three-quarters agricultural, with land abundant and labor scarce. The poorest immigrant could soon earn enough to buy his plot of ground, cut down his trees, erect his log hut and plant his seeds against the coming spring. When those who governed Revolutionary America spoke of "men of the better sort," or "men of the baser sort," they did not refer to men with character or without it but to men with property or without it. And if the word property today carries sinister philosophical overtones, to the Convention of 1787 it had an altogether different connotation: property was not a privilege of the higher orders but a right which a man would fight to defend. Men had indeed died to defend it in the war with England. (p. 70) [emphasis in original]

She writes that James Madison argued for an even less representative version of the national Senate than the one on which the Convention settled:

Looking ahead, Madison saw a United States peopled very differently from the year 1787. "In framing a system which we wish to last for ages," he told the Convention, "we should not lose sight of the changes which ages will produce. An increase of population will of necessity increase the proportion of those who will labor under all the hardships of life, and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings. These may in time outnumber those who are placed above the feelings of indigence." Power, Madison said, could then slide into the hands of the numerous poor rather than the few rich. Symptoms of a leveling spirit had already appeared in certain quarters. How was this danger to be guarded against "on republican principles"? A body in the government (a senate) "sufficiently respectable for its wisdom and virtue," with an elective term of nine years to render it stable- surely this would provide a safeguard for liberty.

Present-day readers may be a trifle dashed to find the Father of our Constitution urging, in effect, that the American rich put up barriers against the American poor, who with power in their hands could be dangerous. By symptoms of a leveling spirit, Madison meant riots and rowdyism under Pennsylvania's popular government, the recent unrest in Maryland, the agrarian paper money troubles of Rhode Island, and of course Shays's Rebellion. Yet it is unfair to make judgment in terms of today. In the year 1787 the Convention's proposals were essentially new, untried. And before they could take effect the people must approve them. (pp. 122-3)

The population of the US and its great cities did, of course, growth considerably in the succeeding centuries. Bowen notes that in 1787, the population of New York city was 30 thousand, a modest-sized suburbs population in 2013.

Despite her statement "it is unfair to make judgment in terms of today," Bowen also had some Cold War considerations contemporary to 1966 in mind:

A rebellion which is launched over the principle of no taxation without representation ts hardly a proletarian revolution. Nor does a proletarian revolution include a Commander in Chief from whose tongue there trips easily the phrase "men of reflection, principles and property." Here was no quarrel, as today, between human nights and property rights. Madison said that "a man has property in his opinions and the free communication of them, he has property in the free use of his faculties, in the safety and liberty of his person." To the eighteenth century, property gave a man a stake in society, made him responsible, worthy of a vote and a voice m government. (p. 71)

It's not entirely clear what argument she was addressing here, since neither orthodox Soviet-line Communists nor anyone else of whom I'm aware was arguing that the American Revolution had been a "proletarian revolution." Certainly if one means by "proletarian" an industrial working class, such a thing scarcely existed in the United States at the time of the Revolutionary War.

It's also worth noting that the defenders of Jim Crow segregation laws often argued on the basis of "property rights" that the law shouldn't compel businesses to not discrimination against customers or employees on the basis of race. Advocates of civil rights at the time argued that human rights in that case trumped any consideration of property rights.

Bowen's statements quoted above that the Convention members "discussed America not in terms of social philosophy" and that "they were met not to reform society but to create a government for society as it existed" are potentially misleading in this context. There is a long-running and continuing controversy among historians as to whether the American Revolution was a conservative revolution or if it also involved elements of social revolution, i.e., changes the social and economic positions of portions of the population. It shouldn't surprise anyone to learn that this consideration also had implications for Cold War ideology. I won't go into that question any further here other than to say that it seems to me that the weight of the argument is on the side of historians like Gordon Wood who contend that there was indeed a social revolution involved in the American Revolution and not "just" a War of Independence from Britain.

Tags: american revolution, liberalism, us constitution

Making (up) American history on the right

These two articles complement each other nicely describing ways in which the American right remake early American history in their own ideological image: Robert Perry, The Right's 'Limited Government' Scam Consortium News 12/18/2012 and Michael Hattem, The Founders, the Tea Party, and the Historical Wing of the "Conservative Entertainment Complex" The Junto 12/18/2012.

Perry gives a good brief look at the classic liberal conception of democratic government and what "limited" government generally meant to the American Founders:

The reason that the Articles of Confederation are an inconvenient truth for the Right is that the Articles represented what the Right pretends the Constitution stands for now, strong states' rights and a weak federal government. The Articles even made the 13 states "sovereign" and "independent" and left the central authority as only a "league of friendship" dependent on the states. ...

However, under that structure, the young nation was coming apart as states went off in their own directions, the economy struggled and European powers looked to exploit the divisions. Then, in 1786, when a populist uprising known as Shays' Rebellion rocked western Massachusetts, the federal government lacked the money and means to field a military force to restore order. The revolt was eventually put down by an army financed by wealthy Bostonians. ...

When it became clear that the Articles of Confederation could not be feasibly amended to address the country's problems, [George] Washington and [James] Madison led what amounted to a bloodless coup d'etat against the states' "sovereign" powers. This coup was known as the Constitutional Convention. It was conducted in secret in Philadelphia and resulted in the Constitution, which flipped the power relationships between the central government and the states, making federal law supreme and dramatically expanding the powers of the national government.

In other words, in terms of the time of the transition from the Articles to the Constitution, the Framers were "advocates of a strong central government and opponents of states' rights."

The current rightwing and Republican doctrines stressing opposition to the federal government - on some issues like segregation and especially when Democrats are in power - and "states rights" have strong roots in the anti-Reconstruction "Redeemer" movement that overthrow democratic state governments in the post-Civil War South by force and violence:

Indeed, this current right-wing attack on “federal overreach” has been around since the 1950s and the civil rights movement, which put an end to Jim Crow laws in the South. The Right's claim is essentially neo-Confederate and harkens back to the South’s efforts prior to the Civil War to insist that slave-states had the right to nullify federal laws and ultimately to secede from the Union.

Though the Union was maintained by the Civil War, a neo-Confederate movement pushed back against federal efforts to "reconstruct" the South as a more egalitarian society. The neo-Confederates gained political allies among the new industrial elite in the North, "robber barons" who for their own reasons of self-interest wanted to block federal intervention on behalf of impoverished working men and women.

This alliance against federal activism prevailed though much of the late 19th Century and into the 20th Century but suffered severe setbacks when "free-market capitalism" drove the country into the Great Depression. That led to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal which imposed tighter regulation on Wall Street financiers and created new protections for the average American, whether in union rights or Social Security. Out of those and other efforts of the federal government grew the Great American Middle Class.

Hattem looks in particular at the eager market Tea Party activists the last four years have provided by bogus portrayals of the Founders:

In recent years, men like David Barton, Bill O’Reilly, and Glenn Beck, among numerous others, have written a number of books on eighteenth-century figures and events. But though they claim to be getting their principles directly from “the founders,” what they are really doing is giving their principles to the founders and the eighteenth century, more generally. This revisionism, promoted by conservative think tanks, was lapped up by hardcore conservatives and perhaps no group of people has been a more receptive audience than those who identify themselves as supporters of the Tea Party. ...

Through this revisionism, the founders have not only become honorary NRA members, they have also by turns become monolithically anti-tax, anti-government, pro-free market, pro-individualism, and deeply religious fundamentalist Christians. (emphasis in original)

Hattem gives various examples of how tricky it can be to shoehorn the revolutionary Founders into an Ayn Rand model of dystopian hyper-capitalism:

After all, a successful republic required virtuous and independent citizens, which required a more even distribution of wealth (or, in eighteenth-century terms, land). This is why, in his first draft of the Virginia state constitution, Jefferson included a provision that would have entitled "every person of full age" to "an appropriation of 50 acres of land." Later in the early national period, Jefferson and Madison sought to craft economic policies that would stave off the inequality that naturally arose in manufacturing societies. Franklin deplored the conditions of the laboring poor he saw while in Britain and attributed it directly to the rise of manufacturing and industrial capitalism. He also believed it was morally just for the wealthy to pay taxes that provided a safety net for the laboring poor, from whose exploitation the rich benefited.

Tags: liberalism, us constitutionfirst subject

The New Republic's editors show once again why they are smug and clueless Very Serious People

I feel like a rant along the lines of the statement attributed to Robert Frost that liberals are the people who are so open-minded they can't take their own side in an argument. But before I can do that and focus on the proximate target of the rant, I pretty much have to explain some background.

The US term "liberal" can be confusing, and not just because the Republicans and their fellow travelers use it as an insult term. In Europe and Latin America, liberals are advocates of something like "laissez-faire" economics, i.e., for deregulation and against government social programs. Those same liberals may also be serious civil libertarians and advocates against xenophobia and racial discrimination. They come out of the classical liberal tradition identified by the "free markets, free men" slogan, except that present-day version of those liberals can be strong advocates for women's rights, too. The "free markets" part draws from the tradition of classical economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo and neo-classical ones like Alfred Marshall. The political reform part of that tradition draws from thinkers like John Stuart Mill.

The current usage of "liberal" in the United States goes back to the post-First World War period when pro-labor politicians, thinkers and activists wanted a way to distinguish themselves from the Progressives, which then tended to be middle-class reformers of the "good government" sort, and from the socialists of various stripes. The Socialist Party actually had gained some traditional political clout in some places in the US prior to the Great War. Skipping forward to today, the terms liberal and progressive are sort of merged, although the more pro-labor, anti-Wall Street people tend to refer to themselves as progressives to distinguish themselves from liberals.

Inside the Oxycontin haze of the Rush Limbaugh bubble in which the thinking of today's Republican Party resides, "liberal" is synonymous with "socialist" which is synonymous with "bad", or rather "evil". Inside the OxyContin Bubble, they've been regularly telling each other for the past 20 years that liberal are liars, liberals are fools, liberals hate America, liberals hate God. Mad Annie Coulter's latest book-length pamphlet hating on liberals is called Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America. Mad Annie's anorexic, semi-secular variation on the notion isn't really that far from the belief of Rick Perry's close political friends in the New Apostolic Reformation that the Democratic Party is literally controlled by a giant demon named Jezebel.

Of course, if you try to word things in a way that might make sense inside the OxyContin Bubble, you wouldn't be able to say anything meaningful of substance about a policy issue. So while we have to be aware of the looniness that now dominates Republican Party thinking and language, we can't let it stop us from talking in plain language.

Now to the real existing world of real existing liberals. What put me in the rant mood was this editorial from the editors of The New Republic, Protests and Power: Should liberals support Occupy Wall Street? 10/12/2011. The whole thing sounds like some self-satisfied prig sniffing at the amateurishness of anyone who actually cares enough to actually participate in the political process. This kind of sneering is exactly the same kind that has been direct at labor unions since their beginnings in the US in the 1820s or so.

The authors are especially fastidious over associating in any way with anything that might sound a little Commie to anyone:

One of the core differences between liberals and radicals is that liberals are capitalists. They believe in a capitalism that is democratically regulated - that seeks to level an unfair economic playing field so that all citizens have the freedom to make what they want of their lives. But these are not the principles we are hearing from the protesters. Instead, we are hearing calls for the upending of capitalism entirely. American capitalism may be flawed, but it is not, as Slavoj Zizek implied in a speech to the protesters, the equivalent of Chinese suppression. "[In] 2011, the Chinese government prohibited on TV and films and in novels all stories that contain alternate reality or time travel," Zizek declared. "This is a good sign for China. It means that people still dream about alternatives, so you have to prohibit this dream. Here, we don't think of prohibition. Because the ruling system has even oppressed our capacity to dream. Look at the movies that we see all the time. It's easy to imagine the end of the world. An asteroid destroying all life and so on. But you cannot imagine the end of capitalism." This is not a statement of liberal values; moreover, it is a statement that should be deeply offensive to liberals, who do not in any way seek the end of capitalism.

Zizek is not alone. His statement is typical of the anti-capitalist, almost utopian arguments that one hears coming from these protesters.

Slavoj Žižek not only has one of them suspicious foreign-sounding names. He's an academic who admits to being a more-or-less Marxist philosopher! He writes books with spooky-sounding titles like Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Well, it sounds scary if you're a prig afraid of anyone associating you with dirty hippies. Because, you know, that Jacques Lacan is some kind of French intellectual or something. Žižek was even once a member of (gulp!) an actual Communist Party. From his biography page at the European Graduate School website:

Up until October of 1988 Slavoj Žižek was an active member of the Communist Party of Slovenia. He quit during the protest against the JBZ-trial. He was not alone in this protest, he quit along with thirty two other public intellectuals with origins in Slovenia. Slavoj Žižek was involved with the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights a social movement fighting for democracy in Slovenia. In 1990 the first free elections were held in Slovenia. At this time Slavoj Žižek ran for President aligned with the Liberal Democratic Party.

But, hey, this academic suggested that his audience might try to "imagine the end of capitalism." Oh, Miss Mellie, bring me smellin' salts! Lawd have mercy, ah thank ah'm gonna faint dead away!

That, by the way, is the only example the TNR editors give of what they describe as " calls for the upending of capitalism entirely".

But, hey, I hear on CNN that some of these hippies dress up in funny costumes and play bongo drums. No, we can't take them seriously like we can the Very Serious People at The New Republic. The diligent liberal prigs at TNR even found video of an earnest protester saying, "The point of this general assembly is to kick-start a democratic process in which no singular human being is inherently more valuable than any other human being." Why that's just so shocking because it, uh, well, why is that supposed to be shocking?

The TNR editors also find other dangerous totalitarian tendencies:

When someone speaks, he or she pauses every few words and the crowd repeats what the person has just said in unison. The idea was apparently logistical - to project speeches across a wide area - but the effect when captured on video is genuinely creepy.

Less fastidious guardians of Respectability might have noted that the Wall Street protesters adopted this technique, which they call a human megaphone, because they liberal-minded policy in the financial capital of the Greatest Country in the History of the World ... wouldn't let them use a megaphone. I saw a video of Michael Moore speaking to the protesters who were using the human megaphone technique to transmit his message to the larger crowd. It didn't strike me as creepy. But then I've been in real live protests and even organized a few myself. And I don't aspire to be one of the Very Serious People.

But I'm very relieved to know that the editors of even-the-liberal-New-Republic are Very Serious People. We won't see any of them out there protesting in public against Wall Street abuses where they might see some real live union member or somebody who doesn't think the Obama Presidency is the best of all possible worlds.

Tags: liberalism, new republic, occupy wall street

Stuff that makes me want to bang my head on the wall

Salon is still one of my favorite sources. But since Joan Walsh stepped down from being the main editor, there has been a slip in quality.

I pulled up this 07/04/2011 article by Brian Glenn, intrigued by the title What is a "constitutional conservative" anyway? and the subtitle, "From Goldwater to Bachmann, the meaning of one of the right's favorite terms has evolved considerably." I was expected a discussion of the John Birch Society's and other groups on the Radical Right and how they conceived "constitutionalism." And maybe he eventually gets there, I don't know. I stopped reading when I saw this at the start of the fourth paragraph:

The great writers in the conservative pantheon such as J. S. Mill, Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and the authors of the Federalist Papers ...

Now, it may be that conservatives today like to cite those people. But seeing them described as a "conservative pantheon" didn't go down so well with me.

Let's start with Edmund Burke (1730-97), mainly known for his rabid denunciation of the French Revolution in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). As Ian Harris writes of that work in his article on Burke in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2010):

Whether Burke was right in these claims about the Revolution, of course, is another question, and one that can never be answered: French readers of Reflections could take its lessons to heart, and, anyhow, events have a way of modifying tendencies independently of intention and interpretation. Indeed, none of this is to say that Reflections was intended as an academic work, or even an accurate factual statement, about the Revolution. It was calculated to produce a practical result, which was to dissuade the British from admiring the Revolution and so to dampen any propensity they might feel to imitate it: and thus to protect civilization in Britain. In the course of pursuing this goal, Burke was willing to satirize the Revolution and its English sympathizers unmercifully in order to make them as unattractive as possible to any sane reader, and he matched the satire with a panegyric on British social and political arrangements. [my emphasis]

It's at least questionable whether Burke belongs more in the classical conservative tradition or the outright antirevolutionary (i.e., anti-French Revolution) tradition that includes thinkers like Juan Donoso Cortés (1809—1853) and Franz von Baader (1765-1841). But Burke's political writings were enough of a grab-bag that conservatives and some liberals could take inspiration from them, as well. So there's a reasonable argument that Burke belongs in a "conservative pantheon." On the right wing of it, anyway.

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873): if anyone ever deserves to be called a liberal, it is John Stuart Mill. Whether you regard it as a compliment or a cuss word. He was working in the classical liberal (pro-democracy) tradition. But he also helped significantly in laying the basis for the more social-minded liberalism of the 20th century, a constructive developed away from the laissez faire dogma that easily degenerated into Social Darwinism in the Gilded Age. (Given the way maldistribution of wealth and income has developed in the US the last 30 years, maybe we should call the 19th century version the First Gilded Age.)

Mill stressed the importance of political liberty including the political equality of women. As a Member of the British Parliament, he introduced a measure that would have given the vote to women, which failed to pass. He thought natural conservation was a good idea. He recognized the importance of good wages for workers and workers' rights. He viewed distribution of wealth as a phenomenon not determined by economic or moral laws but one determined by social institutions. While he never embraced the program of the social democratic movement, he didn't see socialism as an impossible or evil thing. And he even suggested a worker-directed form of economic organization that might be called a brand of utopian socialism.

Does John Stuart Mill belong in a pantheon worshipped by union-busters, wealth-worshippers, and climate-change deniers? Not in this dimension. Maybe in some alternative world existing somewhere in the FOXverse, I don't know.

Benjamin Franklin the American Revolutionary leader a conservative? Please.

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805—1859), author of Democracy in America (1835/1840), was also a classical liberal. Conservatives always found something to like in his worries about the egalitarian trends during the Jacksonian era in the United States. But he viewed the United States as an exciting living example of a functioning democracy, one that offered lessons that France could usefully emulate. During the post-Napoleon Restoration period in France, he was active in politics and gravitated to the Liberal party, not to the Conservatives. During the 1848 revolution in France, when the working class emerged as a distinct political force with a preference for socialism, Tocqueville supported the liberal (capitalist) order rather than socialism. But the experience of that revolutionary period created new doubts for him about the compatibility of classical liberal notions of property and liberal concepts of political freedom. During the 19th century, when his influence was greatest, he was clearly associated with the classical liberal, pro-democracy tradition.

Abraham Lincoln who freed the slaves and who the Southern slaveowners and secessionists viewed as a Jacobin revolutionary - he's a conservative too? Only if conservatism includes things like this, from his First Annual Message to Congress of 12/03/1861.

It is not needed nor fitting here that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions, but there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others, to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government. ...

Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital producing mutual benefits. The error is in assuming that the whole labor of community exists within that relation. A few men own capital, and that few avoid labor themselves, and with their capital hire or buy another few to labor for them. [my emphasis]

Not in 1861, nor in 2011, is that a conservative notion. The difference is that in 1861, that was the head of the Republican Party saying that. No one will hear such a thing from a Republican leader in 2011.

Then there are the authors of the Federalist Papers: James Madison, John Jay and Alexander Hamilton. It is true that along with a vague idolatry toward the Constitution and the Founders, conservatives regard the Federalist Papers as some kind of iconic text. But despite some fuzzy confusion over the nature of the political fight for the Constitution, encouraged in no small part by the Progressive historian Charles Beard, the advocates of the Constitution to be substituted for the Articles of Confederation were the reformers and the pro-democracy liberals. It was conservatives of the time who were the main opponents of adopting the Constitutional system. So, in the specific historical and political context in which they were written, the Federalist Papers are classical liberal arguments.

Alexander Hamilton was a conservative in the context of the new government: favoring strong Executive power and believing an elected Congress could not function practically without essentially being corrupted by the Executive and its supporters. This was central to Thomas Jefferson's opposition to the National Bank supported by Hamilton.

John Jay was a leader of the Federalist Party in New York State, where he was an opponent of slavery and an advocate for internal improvements and other reforms. The Federalists were the more conservative party.

Of all the names in Brian Glenn's "conservative pantheon," only Hamilton clearly deserves to be there, with Jay second. But not in their Federalist Papers roles as advocates of the Constitution against the Articles of Confederation.

I'm not sure by what reimagining of American history James Madison could be considered a conservative.

Naturally, something that was liberal and cutting edge in, say, 1840, might sound like hidebound conservatism in 2011. Andrew Jackson's opposition to the Bank of the United States might superficially look like Ron Paul's Bircher opposition to the existence of the Federal Reserve. But only if one takes no account whatsoever of the particular historical situation in which Jackson's fight with the Bank took place. Jackson would have rightly regarded the Pauls, both Papa Doc and Baby Doc, as Calhounites, which they are. He would not have approved of them. To put it very mildly.

So it's not surprising that present-day conservatives and the Radical Right pluck selected quotes from famous political figures of by-gone centuries to act as proof-quotes for their talking points. But that doesn't mean the rest of us have to park our brains in the corner when we hear them do it!

Tags: andrew jackson, liberalism

National Socialism vs. liberal philosophy (6 of 6): Philosophical sources of the German reactionary philosophies

Ludwig von Mises: "The merit that Fascism has … won for itself will live on eternally in history." (1927)

This is the sixth and final in a series of posts about Herbert Marcuse's 1934 essay, "The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State." See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5.

Marcuse argues that the anti-liberal, far right ideology that created the philosophical framework taken over by National Socialism had four basic sources:

• celebration of the "heroic" individual in rejection of the supposed sterility of rationalism and technology

• hyper-valuation of an irrational "psychic underworld" which is held to be “as little evil as [is] the cosmic ... , but is rather the womb and refuge for all productive and generative forces, all forces that, though formless, serve every form as content, all fateful movements." (Ernst Krieck)

• irrational naturalism, rejecting reason and the possibility of objective knowledge of the world: "Reality does not admit of knowledge, only of acknowledgement.” (Heinrich Forsthoff)

• mystification of the society as a unified whole, the kind of Nazi universalism discussed above; this mystified totality can “never be grasped by hands, nor seen with outer eyes. Composure and depth of spirit are necessary in order to behold it with the inner eye.” (Othmar Spann [1878-1950])

Marcuse gives us a flavor of what kind of accusations such theorists had been making against liberalism:

If we ask the spokesmen of the new weltanschauung what they are fighting in their attack on liberalism, we hear in reply of the 'ideas of 1789', of wishy-washy humanism and pacifism, Western intellectualism, egotistical individualism, sacrifice of the nation and state to conflicts of interest between particular social groups, abstract, conformist egalitarianism, the party system, the hypertrophy of the economy, and destructive technicism and materialism. These are the most concrete utterances – for the concept 'liberal' often serves only for purposes of defamation, and political opponents are 'liberal' no matter where they stand, and are as such the simply 'evil'. [my emphasis]

As he notes, Marxism was also considered a product of liberalism, though neither Marxists nor classical liberals had any problem recognizing the distinction between them.

Marcuse also discusses at some length a couple of topics: what classical liberalism has in common with authoritarian ideologies, and the importance of the rejection of Reason in the reactionary philosophies.

On the former, he adduces some quotations from Ludwig von Mises, one of the idols of today’s American “libertarians”, part of what they call the Austrian School, to illustrate the central thing that classical liberalism has in common with fascism and National Socialism: the commitment to capitalism, to private property in the means of production. I’ve taken these quotations from a 1985 edition of Von Mises’ Liberalism in the Classical Tradition (1927), English translation by Ralph Raico. Marcuse cites these passages, though I’m giving somewhat longer versions of the quotations here:

The program of liberalism, therefore, if condensed into a single word, would have to read: property, that is, private ownership of the means of production ... All the other demands of liberalism result from this fundamental demand. (p. 19)

It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history. (p.51) [my emphasis]

... capitalism is the only feasible system of social organization based on the division of labor. (p. 85)

Immediately following that second quote, Von Mises goes on to say, “But though its policy has brought salvation for the moment, it is not of the kind which could promise continued success. Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something more would be a fatal error.” But that half-baked qualification doesn’t detract from the obvious implication of his words: his version of liberalism values the preservation of private property in the means of production far more than the value of human rights or parliamentary democracy.

In making this argument, Marcuse was coming from a Marxist perspective that was widely shared by Marxists at the time: that fascism was an ugly new form of counter-revolution against socialist movements, and one that might be appealing to capitalist in many countries. By pointing out the commitment of the Italian Fascists and German Nazis to monopoly capitalism, he was emphasizing that whatever rhetoric those regimes might use against greed or against “Jewish plutocrats”, both classical liberalism and fascism were fundamentally committed to preserving the capitalist system. His dig at Von Mises was a way of saying that even liberalism, of a corrupt brand like that of Von Mises’, was capable of finding virtue in fascism for exactly that reason: both were fundamentally committed to the preservation of monopoly capitalism. “The turn from the liberalist to the total-authoritarian state occurs within the framework of a single social order,” Marcuse writes.

Unlike Von Mises, though, Marcuse could see that there were radical differences between traditional liberalism and fascism. In the philosophical realm, a very big one was the reactionary philosophers’ rejection of Reason itself. I’ve touched on that topic already. But he also discusses it in terms of the uses that liberals and the German reactionaries made of the concept of society being subject to natural laws, laws which governments violate at the peril of disaster.

Marcuse doesn’t defend the natural law philosophy. But he does point out that the concept and function of natural law in liberal philosophy was based on Reason:

... liberalist naturalism is part of an essentially rationalist system of thought, antiliberalist naturalism part of an irrationalist one. The distinction must be maintained in order not to obliterate artificially the boundaries of both theories and not to misunderstand the change in their social function.

In elaborating on this difference, he gives us a look at an important aspect of his view of Critical Theory, though Max Horkheimer hadn’t come up with that label yet in 1934. Liberal theory assumed the existence of autonomous individuals in society who would be free to apply Reason to the existing institutions, which would enable them to take a critical perspective and act to change those institutions:

Within society, every action and every determination of goals as well as the social organization as a whole has to legitimate itself before the decisive judgment of reason and everything, in order to subsist as a fact or goal, stands in need of rational justification. The principle of sufficient reason, the authentic and basic principle of rationalism, puts forward a claim to the connection of ‘things’ or ‘facts’ as a ‘rational’ connection: the reason, or cause, posits that which it causes as eo ipso also in accordance with reason. The necessity of acknowledging a fact or goal never follows from its pure existence; rather, acknowledgment occurs only when knowledge has freely determined that the fact or goal is in accordance with reason. The rationalist theory of society is therefore essentially critical; it subjects society to the idea of a theoretical and practical, positive and negative critique. This critique has two guidelines: first, the given situation of man as a rational organism, i.e. one that has the potentiality of freely determining and shaping his own existence, directed by the process of knowledge and with regard to his worldly happiness; second, the given level of development of the productive forces and the (corresponding or conflicting) relations of production as the criterion for potentialities that can be realized at any given time in men’s structuring of society. The rationalist theory is well aware of the of human knowledge and of rational social action, but it avoids these limits too hurriedly and, above all, making capital out of the purpose of uncritically sanctioning established hierarchies. [my emphasis in bold]

As Marcuse wrote in 1968, the content of his essays from the 1930s, including the one discussed here, “has since become, perhaps not false, but a thing of the past.” But it does still provide an engaging look at a moment in time when the outcome of the struggle against Hitler’s regime was highly uncertain. And he left a record of the philosophical issues that he and the other members of the Frankfurt School were engaging as they sought to understand and oppose Nazism during the Third Reich.

Tags: critical theory, frankfurt school, herbert marcuse, liberalism, national socialism

National Socialism vs. liberal philosophy (5 of 6): - Nazi universalism and Nazi naturalism/organicism

Otto Koellreutter: wanted the “establishment of a real folk community, which elevates itself above the interests and conflicts of status groups and classes”

This is the fifth in a series of posts about Herbert Marcuse's 1934 essay, "The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State." See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

Marcuse addresses Nazi universalism from a somewhat different viewpoint in another section of his essay. The fact that his discussion of Nazi universalism overlaps his analysis of Nazi existentialism is a function of the fact of the simplistic core of Nazi ideology and of the philosophies that elaborated it: the Master Race, the nation, the Führer. Or, as one of the regime’s slogans had it: Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer (One people, one empire, one Leader).

Nazi universalism was not the universalism of Christianity or of liberal philosophy, which held that in some basic sense that “all men are created equal.” (And, yes, they usually meant men.) The universalism of the Third Reich was that of ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer. It was the nation, the Master Race and the Führer speaking for them that were the ultimate source of value: not God, not Reason, and certainly not the rights of the individual.

Marcuse stresses that monopoly capitalism itself has created a kind of social universalism by consolidating economic power and authority into larger and larger economic units that have a collective quality largely absent in the capitalism of the early 19th century characterized by the individual entrepreneur, the social assumptions of which lie at the root of classical liberalism. Liberalism emphasized the reality and the positive value of the diversity of interest groups within society. James Madison gave it a classic expression in Federalist #10 in 1787:

As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves. The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties.

The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts. But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government. [my emphasis]

Liberal theory not only recognized the existence of these diverse factions based on different opinions and interests, but, in Madison’s formulation, called the protection of those interests “the first object of government.” Nazi universalism instead wished to deny their existence, particularly the existence of class conflicts, in opposition to Madison’s liberal recognition that “the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property.” Marcuse writes of Nazi universalism:

The whole that it presents is not the unification achieved by the domination of one class within the framework of class society, but rather a unity that combines all classes, that is supposed to overcome the reality of class struggle and thus of classes themselves: the "establishment of a real folk community, which elevates itself above the interests and conflicts of status groups and classes" [quote from pro-Nazi jurist Otto Koellreutter]. A classless society, in other words, is the goal, but a classless society on the basis of and within the framework of – the existing class society. [my emphasis in bold]

Nazi naturalism/organicism

The other of the “three constitutive components“ of the pro-Nazi philosophy Marcuse identified in 1934 along with universalism and existentialism is naturalism or organicism. The central feature of Nazi naturalism/organicism is to set up the allegedly organic nature of the nation and the Master Race I opposition to any theory of historical development. To defend their absurd, pseudoscientific and ahistorical notion of the innate superiority of the "Aryan" race, the Nazis had to present history as periodically demonstrating the emergence of the superior Aryan qualities, without allowing the perception that the "Aryan race" was decisively shaped in any way shaped by its historical experience, let alone by biological mixture with non-Aryans.

(I deal more specifically with the pseudoscience behind the notion of the alleged Aryan race in Indo-Europeans, language and the myth of the "Aryan" race Old Hickory’s Weblog 11/24/2009.)

The glorification of Blut und Boden in Nazi philosophy held out the prospect that the German people could realize their destiny by adjusting their way of life to some sort of natural order that most closely fit their racial characteristics. Marcuse says of this notion:

The naturalistic myth begins by apostrophizing the natural as ‘eternal’ and ‘divinely willed’. This holds especially for the totality of the folk, whose naturalness is one of the myth’s primary claims. The particular destinies of individuals, their strivings and needs, their misery and their happiness – all this is void and perishable, for only the folk is permanent. The folk is nature itself as the substructure of history, as eternal substance, the eternally constant in the continual flux of economic and social relations. In contrast with the folk, the latter are accidental, ephemeral, and 'insignificant'.

The model of this supposed natural order, of course, is to be revealed to the Master Race through the leadership of the Führer. Marcuse describes the problem with this naturalist/organicist concept of history:

These formulations announce a characteristic tendency of heroicfolkish realism: its depravation of history to a merely temporal occurrence in which all structures are subjected to time and are therefore 'inferior'. This dehistoricization marks all aspects of organicist theory: the devaluation of time in favor of space, the elevation of the static over the dynamic and the conservative over the revolutionary, the rejection of all dialectic, the glorification of tradition for its own sake. ...

The community of destiny almost always operates at the expense of the large majority of the people: it thus cancels itself out as a community. In previous human history, this cleavage of national or communal unity into social antagonisms is not merely secondary, nor is it the fault or responsibility of individuals. Rather, it comprises history’s real content, which cannot be changed through adaptation to any sort of natural order. In history there are no longer any natural patterns that could serve as models and ideas for historical movement. Through the process in which men in society contend with nature and with their own historical reality (whose state at any given time is indicated by the various conditions and relations of life), 'nature' has long been historicized, i.e. to an increasing degree denuded of its naturalness and subjected to rational human planning and technology. Natural orders and data occur structured as economic and social relations (so that, for example, the peasant's land is less a clod in the homeland than a holding in the mortgage section of the land register). [my emphasis in bold]

Part of this natural order to which the Germans should strive, as described by Nazi philosophers and propagandists, involves sacrifice and duty on the part of most people. He quotes Ernst Krieck, who was already becoming a leading pedagogical authority for the Third Reich:

We no longer live in the age of education, of culture, of humanitarianism, and of the pure spirit, but rather under the necessity of struggle, of shaping political reality, of soldiery, of folkish discipline, of folkish honor and of the future of the folk. What is required of the men of this era, consequently, is not the idealist but the heroic attitude as both task and necessity of life.

Liberal philosophy certainly emphasized the values of patriotism and of sacrifice for the community and for the highest ideals. But the celebration of militarism and sacrifice for the sake of "heroic" sacrifice were far from the spirit of classical liberalism, as Marcuse explains:

As we have seen, the model of man projected by today’s heroic realism is of one whose existence is fulfilled in unquestioning sacrifices and unconditional acts of devotion, whose ethic is poverty and all of whose worldly goods have been melted down into service and discipline. This image stands in sharp opposition to all the ideals acquired by Western man in the last centuries. How justify such an existence? Since man's material well-being is not its goal, it cannot be justified on the basis of his natural needs and instincts. But neither can its goal be his spiritual welfare, or salvation, since there is no room for justification by faith. And in the universal struggle against reason, justification by knowledge can no longer count as a justification. [my emphasis]

That justification is provided by the "existential" fear described above that the nation and the Master Race are imminently in danger of being destroyed by external enemies.

Tags: critical theory, frankfurt school, herbert marcuse, liberalism, national socialism

National Socialism vs. liberal philosophy (4 of 6): Nazi philosophers attack liberalism - Nazi existentialism

Martin Heidegger: "Let not doctrines and 'Ideas' be the rules of your being. Today and in the future, only the Führer himself is German reality and its law." (1933)

This is the fourth in a series of posts about Herbert Marcuse's 1934 essay, "The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State." See Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

His discussion of existentialism has a particular biographical interest in Marcuse's life. At the University of Freiburg, he had studied under the theologian/philosopher Edmund Husserl and the Christian philosopher Martin Heidegger, who was considered the founder of existentialism. After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Heidegger became an enthusiastic support of the NSDAP and the Third Reich. This „Kampf gegen den Liberalismus“ essay included an early reckoning by Marcuse with this ugly turn in his philosophical mentor’s thinking. With particular reference to Heidegger, he writes:

In philosophy, existentialism begins as the antagonist in a great debate with Western rationalism and idealism, intending to save their conceptual content by injecting it into the historical concretion of individual existence. It ends by radically denying its own origin; the struggle against reason drives it blindly into the arms of the powers that be. In their service and with their protection, it turns traitor to the great philosophy that it formerly celebrated as the culmination of Western thought. The abyss between them is now unbridgeable.

By way of explanation, he quotes Kant on human rights:

Human right must be kept sacred, no matter how great the sacrifice it costs the ruling powers. One cannot go only halfway and contrive a pragmatically conditioned right. ... All politics, rather, must bend the knee before sacred human right ...

By contrast, Heidegger notoriously declared in 1933, "Let not doctrines and ‘Ideas’ be the rules of your being. Today and in the future, only the Führer himself [Adolf Hitler] is German reality and its law."

In that statement, Heidegger was arguing against the insistence on Reason, the need for understanding empirical reality, and the insistence on the centrality of freedom and humane values that were core elements of the philosophies of Kant and Hegel incorporated.

When Marcuse describes the brand of existentialism from advocates of the Third Reich, he emphasizes two components of it. One is the sense that the nation and the Aryan race are in constant existential danger, that their enemies are always trying to destroy them and are in danger of suceeding. This constant state of fear had the practical political value of allowing the Nazi dictatorship to rally the public in the us-against-them tribal feeling of a group in danger from without. Heidegger's existentialism up until his Sein und Zeit [Being and Time] had attempted to get beyond the limits of classical German idealist philosophy, which considered the human subject primarily in terms of his rational capabilities (Decartes’ "I think, therefore I am"), by aiming at "regaining the full concretion of the historical subject in opposition to the abstract 'logical' subject of rational idealism." But the existentialism of the Third Reich subsumed the existence of the individual in the race, made the individual completely subservient to the needs of the Race and the Nation as interpreted by the Führer who headed the state:

A total activation, concretization, and politicization of all dimensions of existence is demanded. The autonomy of thought and the objectivity and neutrality of science are repudiated as heresy or even as a political falsification on the part of liberalism. "We are active, enterprising beings and incur guilt if we deny this our essence: guilt by neutrality and tolerance" [quote from Alfred Bäumler].

The jurist Ernst Forsthoff (1902-1974) defended the Nazi Führerprinzip (leadership principle) this way:

Die Führergewalt ist umfassend und total; sie vereinigt in sich alle Mittel der politischen Gestaltung; sie erstreckt sich auf alle Sachgebiete des völkischen Lebens; sie erfasst alle Volksgenossen, die dem Führer zu Treue und Gehorsam verpflichtet sind.

[The authority of the Führer is comprehensive and total; it unites in itself all means of political formations; it extends to all specialized fields of the life of the people; it includes all those related to the people [i.e., those considered ethnic Germans], who are obligated to provide the Führer their loyalty and obedience.]

The other major component of Nazi existentialism is the emphasis on taking a side as being in itself more important than decided what side rationally makes sense. Bäumler again:

Action does not mean 'deciding in favor of' ..., for that presupposes that one knows in favor of what one is deciding; rather, action means 'setting off in a direction', 'taking sides', by virtue of a mandate of destiny, by virtue of 'one's own right'. ... It is really secondary [inferior] to decide in favor of something that I have come to know.

The Nazi brand of existentialism therefore rejects the heritiage of philosophical liberalism in two critical ways. One it rejects the concepts of Reason and the possibility of objective knowledge. The other is that it erases the essential value of the individual and his rights, it denies the necessity for society to be independent of the State, and also denies that distinct groups within society have conflicting interests. In the latter case, National Socialist ideology was particularly intent on denying the existence of class conflict within the Aryan race and the German nation. And the embodying of the collective into the will of the Führer was about as far removed as it could be from liberal notions of a social contract, the need for representative institutions, limited government, and the separation of powers.

Tags: critical theory, frankfurt school, herbert marcuse, liberalism, national socialism

National Socialism vs. liberal philosophy (3 of 6): Nazi philosophers attack liberalism

Arthur Moeller van den Bruck: popularized the term "Third Reich"

This is the third in a series of posts about Herbert Marcuse's 1934 essay, "The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State." See Part 1 and Part 2.

It requires some effort for a reader today to keep in mind that most of what we know as the history of the Third Reich still lay in the future in 1934. Marcuse himself in the 1968 Foreward to Negations wrote that he had not edited the content of this essay and others from the 1930s:

No revision could bridge the chasm that separates the period in which they were written from the present one. ...

That most of this was written before Auschwitz deeply separates it f rom the present. What was correct in it has since become, perhaps not false, but a thing of the past. To be sure, the concern with philosophy expressed in these essays was already, in the thirties, a concern with the past: remembrance of something that at some point had lost its reality and had to be taken up again. Precisely at that time, beaten or betrayed, the social forces in which freedom and revolution were joined were delivered over to the existing powers. The last time that freedom, solidarity, and humanity were the goals of a revolutionary struggle was on the battlefields of the Spanish civil war.

(In a footnote, he adds, "The last time in Europe. Today [1968] the historical heritage of this struggle is to be found in those nations which defend their freedom in uncompromising struggle against the neo-colonial powers.")

Marcuse was a philosopher and the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung was an academic journal. He was focusing in particular on the philosophical arguments made in defense of National Socialism (Nazism) with some attention to related ones defending Mussolini’s Fascism in Italy. He discusses such arguments from Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), Ernst Jünger (1895-1998), Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Ernst Krieck (1882-1947), Alfred Bäumler (1887-1968), Arthur Moeller van den Bruck (1876-1925), Otto Koellreutter (1883-1972), Gunther Ipsen (1899-1984), Heinrich Forsthoff (1871-1942), and Erich Rothacker (1888-1965). All were alive in 1934 except Moeller van den Bruck, author of the book Das dritte Reich [The Third Reich] (1923); the Nazis adopted the "Third Reich" terminology from his book.

One sees even in the 1934 essay that Marcuse was struggling to take seriously at a philosophical level ideas that, as he explains, defended the Third Reich with a core group of simplistic ideas: the Aryan race; the nation; the people (Volk); the Leader (Führer); glorification of war; the idea of the people/nation/race being always under threat and in a fight for survival.

Within the Nazi Party itself, theory or philosophy as such was held in very high regard. The NSDAP emphasized those themes in their propaganda. But it wasn’t expected that Party leaders show their qualifications by authoring papers on political theory or philosophy.

However, the Nazis did apply Gleichschaltung, the process of bringing every German institution under the control of the Party and the state, to education at all levels. And they did have philosophers and other academics promoting theories which encouraged the embrace of the NSDAP worldview. So there were serious and previously well-regarded academics like Heidegger, Jünger, Spengler and Carl Schmitt whose ideas had to be taken into account to understand that level of Nazi advocacy. Somehow, Heidegger, Jünger, and Carl Schmitt all managed to be considered respectable thinkers after the Second World War, as well.

As Marcuse explains, the ideas that became the lead ideology of the Third Reich had their gestation prior to the First World War.

Right down the line, an attack was launched against the hypertrophic rationalization and technification of life, against the ‘bourgeois’ of the nineteenth century with his petty joys and petty aims, against the shopkeeper and merchant spirit and the destructive ‘anemia’ of existence. A new image of man was held up to this paltry predecessor, composed of traits from the age of the Viking, German mysticism, the Renaissance, and the Prussian military: the heroic man, bound to the forces of blood and soil – the man who travels through heaven and hell, who does not reason why, but goes into action to do and die, sacrificing himself not for any purpose but in humble obedience to the dark forces that nourish him. This image expanded to the vision of the charismatic leader whose leadership does not need to be justified on the basis of his aims, but whose mere appearance is already his ‘proof’, to be accepted as an undeserved gift of grace. With many modifications, but always in the forefront of the fight against bourgeois and intellectualistic existence, this archetype of man can be found among the ideas of the Stefan George circle, of Moller van den Bruck, [Werner] Sombart [1863-1941], [Max] Scheler [1874-1928], [Friedrich] Hielscher [1902-1990], Jünger, and others. [my emphasis]

Marcuse in this essay doesn’t deal directly with the pseudoscientific racial claims behind Nazi racist ideology and its promotion of the fictitious “Aryan” race. (The Nazis so discredited the word that the word has now been replaced in its legitimate anthropological and linguistic uses by “Indo-European”.) This is presumably part of what Marcuse meant when he wrote in the 1968 preface to Negations, “That most of this was written before Auschwitz deeply separates it from the present.” Obviously, as a Jewish Marxist who had to flee Germany along with other colleagues from the Institute for Sozialforschung (Frankfurt School), he was keenly aware of that aspect of Nazi ideology. He discusses that in the 1934 essay in the context of the closely related concepts of Blut und Boden (blood and soil) and other naturalistic aspects of these philosophers’ work. As we will see, he thought that the Nazi racial concepts couldn’t be understood a primarily biological thinking.

Marcuse focuses on three philosophical concepts that he argued were the "three constitutive components“ of the pro-Nazi philosophical trends prevailing in Germany in 1934: universalism, naturalism or organicism), and existentialism.

Tags: critical theory, frankfurt school, herbert marcuse, liberalism, national socialism

National Socialism vs. liberal philosophy (2 of 6): Classical liberalism

James Madison

This is the second in a series of posts about Herbert Marcuse's 1934 essay, "The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State." See Part 1.

In government, the US Constitution was mostly a classic liberal document, its acceptance of chattel slavery being a big exception. It established a national government elected by the people, though directly only in the case of the House of Representatives. It established an elaborate system of checks and balances along the lines developed in the philosophical realm by Locke and Montesquieu (1689-1755). It insisted on the sanctity of private contracts. It eliminated remnants of feudal law like entail and primogeniture. It required that the President be a native-born American to minimize the chances of a European royal dynasty taking power through the Electoral College. It established a strong, robust central government, incorporating a liberal notion of nationalism. The Federalist is a leading statement of classical liberal political theory.

Today, even neoconservatives encouraging wars under the excuse of “democracy promotion” typically describe parliamentary democracy with rule of law and individual rights protected as “liberal democracy.”

Liberalism in Britain advanced through the mechanism of Parliament without the kind of traumatic internal revolutions the Continent experienced starting with the French Revolution of 1789. Liberalism in Germany and the Habsburg Empire took a big hit during the Revolutions of 1848. The German Parliament meeting in Frankfurt’s Pauskirche was the highpoint of liberalism in the German lands. It attempted to establish parliamentary rule in the context of a constitutional monarchy. But the Paulkirche movement was crushed and the parliament disbanded.

And in the 1848 Revolutions in Europe, a distinct working-class-based political movement began to emerge. It shared with classical liberals the desire for democratic political institutions, though they tended to prefer broader suffrage rather than the more restricted versions that many liberal businessmen found more congenial. But the working class movements also demanded that the abuses of the part of capitalist enterprises also be ended and focused on social inequities that classical liberalism prescribed should be left to the Invisible Hand of the free market. The working class movements formed the basis for the Social Democratic parties that emerged in the second half of the 19th century.

By the late 1900s, classical liberalism had become a defender of the unrestrained freedom of the capitalist, big and small, even at the expense of the rest of society, of the workers and the farmers. Social Darwinism may have been a more cynical and extreme brand of this line of thought. But it fit in well with the classical liberal insistence on the freedom of enterprise and limited government.

Harry Gervitz writes in his article on “liberalism” in Encyclopædia Britannica 2006:

In general, liberals believed that government must not do for the individual what he is able to do for himself. Legislation like Britain's Ten Hours Act 1847), which limited the labour of women and children to 58 hours a week, was denounced by the English jurist A.V. Dicey as late as 1905 as socialistic. Criticizing the Adulteration of Food or Drink Act and the Sale of Food and Drugs Act of 1899, he contended that such laws safeguard individuals from mistakes "which often may be avoided by a man's own care and sagacity" and therefore "rest upon the idea ... that the State is a better judge than a man himself of his own interest ..." (Law and Public Opinion in England, 2nd ed.; 1914; pp. 237–238; 263–264). Such views were even more prevalent in the United States.

The classical liberal tradition was largely based on the model of an economy dominated by individual capitalists. But with the consolidation of the corporations and trusts in the last three decades of the 19th century, capitalism in the leading capitalist countries had become dominated by monopolies. Corporations are not individuals, even though the US Supreme Court considers them to be. They are collective institutions that can manipulate markets and require a degree of planning at both the enterprise level and at the level of the national economy not accounted for in the Invisible Hand free-market theory of classical liberalism.

When 18th century business enterprises demanded to be released from unnecessary restrictions like mercantilist rules of others that served to preserve the feudal economy at the expense of business freedom and economic development, they were advocating policies that in the context advanced both political freedom and economic development. Giant 20th century corporations demanding freedom from government regulations for themselves often produced severe restrictions of the freedoms of much of the public and inflicted devastating depressions on their economies. The social context had changed radically. And there were many decades of experience with some of the devastating social ills that capitalist enterprises had created.

Otto von Bismarck, the "Iron Chancellor"

In Germany and France, the capitalist/liberal parties largely accommodated themselves to the authoritarian monarchies of Napoleon III in France and of Wilhelm I and his “Iron Chancellor” Otto von Bismarck in Germany. Bismarck not only promoted the development of industry and opposed the socialist movements on behalf of business. He also unified Germany in wars with Denmark, Austria and France. Wilhelm I’s German Empire represented the fulfillment of the Paulskirche Parliament’s “little German” (kleindeutsch) version of German nationalism, i.e., one excluding Austria. National unity was a major liberal goal. German liberals also supported Bismarck’s in the so-called Kulturkampf (culture fight) with the Catholic Church on behalf of more secularized government, also a major goal for liberals.

In Germany, the liberal goals of parliamentary democracy and civil liberties for all came to be primarily championed by the Social Democratic Party. Liberals were more captive politically to the monarchy, part of Bismarck’s political legacy. In classical liberal political theory, parliamentary democracy was the ideal government for a capitalist economy and society. But Bismarck and Napoleon III had shown that capitalist economies could also do very well under a nominal feudal form of government like a strong monarchy.

During the Weimar Republic, the main political battle was between the parties that supported Weimar’s “liberal democracy” (Social Democrats [SPD], the Catholic Center Party and the small German Democratic Party), on the one hand, and the authoritarian parties of the far right, on the other. The one of the latter group that eventually won out was, of course, Hitler’s NSDAP, the Nazi Party. The Communist Party (KPD) was opposed to the far right, but they also opposed Weimar’s brand of parliamentarianism in favor of a Soviet model. (The split and lasting hostility between the SPD and KPD is a fascinating and important story, but one that is not especially relevant to the purpose of this essay.)

This was the background in which Marcuse was looking at the philosophies identifying with the Third Reich and their rejection of key parts of liberal philosophy.

Tags: critical theory, frankfurt school, herbert marcuse, liberalism, national socialism