This fall, liberals from the president on down have begun to grasp the scope of the political and intellectual disaster that the past three years have been for the Left. Their various responses to the calamity have tended to have one thing in common: immense frustration. But the different expressions of that frustration have been deeply revealing. They should help Americans better understand this complicated moment in our politics, and, in particular, help conservatives frame their responses.
Liberal frustration has fallen into two general categories that seem at first to flatly contradict each other: denunciations of democracy and appeals to populism. In September, Peter Orszag, President Obama’s former budget director, wrote an essay in The New Republic arguing that “we need less democracy.” To address our country’s daunting problems, Orszag suggested, we need to take some power away from Congress and give it to “automatic policies and depoliticized commissions” that will be shielded from public pressure. “Radical as it sounds, we need to counter the gridlock of our political institutions by making them a bit less democratic.” Two weeks later, North Carolina’s Democratic governor, Beverly Perdue, made a less sophisticated stab at the same general point, proposing to suspend congressional elections for a few years so members of Congress could make the difficult decisions necessary to get our country out of its deep problems.
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Orszag and Perdue both seemed to channel a long and deeply held view of the Left — that the complexity of modern life and the intensity of modern politics should lead us to put more power in the hands of technical experts who have the knowledge to make objective, rational choices on our behalf. Leaving things to the political process will result only in delay and disorder. President Obama has frequently expressed this view himself — wistfully complaining to his aides earlier this year, for instance, that things would sure be easier if he were president of China.
At the same time, the Left has been rediscovering the joys of populism. Populism can mean many things, of course, but in America it has often meant not only a faith in the wisdom of the masses but also a channeling of resentments into a case that the majority is being oppressed by an elite few. And that is just what the president has sought this fall. On the stump, he has been railing against wealthy corporate-jet owners and their Republican henchmen, who care not for the struggling working man and want only “dirtier air, dirtier water, fewer people on health care, [and] less accountability on Wall Street.” Meanwhile, a small but opulently publicized populist protest movement has arisen to “occupy” parts of New York’s financial district as well as parks and public spaces elsewhere around the country. Although it seems at times to be all fringe and no center, the movement does appear to be held together by resentment against corporate greed and crony capitalism, and a sense that the large mass of the public shares that resentment.
So should we be guided by expert commissions or a popular movement? Does the public have too much of a voice in our politics or not enough of one? It is tempting to see the Left’s simultaneous calls for populism and technocracy as a profound incoherence, because we are inclined to see the two as opposite ends of an argument about who should govern.
For that reason, too, it has been tempting to respond with populist outrage to the stunning administrative overreach of Washington liberals in recent years — from banning Edison’s light bulb to giving 15 experts the authority to set health-care prices to expanding the scope of regulatory discretion seemingly without limits. For all its populist rhetoric of late, the Left has leaned far more heavily toward government by experts. And on its face, populist outrage does appear to be the character of the conservative response to the Obama years. It has been embodied above all in an extraordinary populist movement — the Tea Party, which has tried to fight back against the incursions of technocracy.
"The difference between these two kinds of liberalism — constitutionalism grounded in humility about human nature and progressivism grounded in utopian expectations — is a crucial fault line of our politics, and has divided the friends of liberty since at least the French Revolution. It speaks to two kinds of views about just what liberal politics is."
It reflects a profoundly Judeo-Christian worldview. Man is not good, but fallen. Humanity makes wrong decisions and can do evil things unless restrained. Give someone the power to do good and you unleash someone else to use that power to do evil.
We have before us the example of the failed Communist utopias. Yet the progressives somehow claim that evil will never come from the power they unleash for it will only be exercised good people who will only excise that power properly. True Communism/Socialism has never been tried, but if it could we would have heaven on earth. So we just need to get the "right" people into power. But it never happens because people are fallen and make bad decisions unrestrained by the necessary checks and balances.
The Founders know this very well and so crafted a government that presupposed bad or at best mediocre people. Their solution was fragmented power and multiple checks and balances. And one of those was the creation of limited Federal government. If you read the record of the Constitutional Debate, some of the delegates wanted a government of general police powers, but this was rejected in the final document.
Under progressivism we have been dismantling those checks and balances: weakening of federalism, rule by executive order, end runs around the Congress, expansion of the commerce clause to give general police powers to the Federal government (Wickard v. Filburn).
To the progressives I say that this will advance your agenda, but what when the right gets into power and uses the power you have crafted against you? What will you do when an opposition President wages war without Congressional authority the way Obama has done? Is your opposition principled or opportunistic? I submit it's the latter.
We tread on dangerous ground as we dismantle the protections contained in the Constitution.
MBerry, your penultimate paragraph, I think, contradicts the rest of your point. If you are defining the progressives as defined by their willingness to use power for "good" ends and conservatives as defined by their hesitance to do so, than isn't "when the right gets into power and uses the power you have crafted against you" a category error? At that point, wouldn't the right cease to be the right at all? And if so, what would it become, and what would the left become by contrast? This is why I have to dispute left vs. right, progressive vs. conservative being defined in terms of means rather than ends.
This leads us to the third—and the worst—argument, used by some “conservatives”: the attempt to defend capitalism on the ground of man’s depravity.
This argument runs as follows: since men are weak, fallible, non-omniscient and innately depraved, no man may be entrusted with the responsibility of being a dictator and of ruling everybody else; therefore, a free society is the proper way of life for imperfect creatures. Please grasp fully the implications of this argument: since men are depraved, they are not good enough for a dictatorship; freedom is all that they deserve; if they were perfect, they would be worthy of a totalitarian state.
Dictatorship—this theory asserts—believe it or not, is the result of faith in man and in man’s goodness; if people believed that man is depraved by nature, they would not entrust a dictator with power. This means that a belief in human depravity protects human freedom—that it is wrong to enslave the depraved, but would be right to enslave the virtuous. And more: dictatorships—this theory declares—and all the other disasters of the modern world are man’s punishment for the sin of relying on his intellect and of attempting to improve his life on earth by seeking to devise a perfect political system and to establish a rational society. This means that humility, passivity, lethargic resignation and a belief in Original Sin are the bulwarks of capitalism. One could not go farther than this in historical, political, and psychological ignorance or subversion. This is truly the voice of the Dark Ages rising again—in the midst of our industrial civilization.
The cynical, man-hating advocates of this theory sneer at all ideals, scoff at all human aspirations and deride all attempts to improve men’s existence. “You can’t change human nature,” is their stock answer to the socialists. Thus they concede that socialism is the ideal, but human nature is unworthy of it; after which, they invite men to crusade for capitalism—a crusade one would have to start by spitting in one’s own face. Who will fight and die to defend his status as a miserable sinner? If, as a result of such theories, people become contemptuous of “conservatism,” do not wonder and do not ascribe it to the cleverness of the socialists.
This is a truly important essay, Mr. Levin--thank you. I hadn't been able to quite put into words why the current populism has been bothering me; you do so quite nicely.
I think both sides have forgotten that the whole system is set up so that you have to earn a rational consensus to enact any change. Instead, people are demonizing the "enemy" and scheming for ways to make sure he or she is shut out so that the right political choices will automatically be made. The system, bless it, is designed to stall and spin its wheels when the people are behaving stupidly.
Any suggestion of how to change the attitudes to remind people that their goals need to actually convince their neighbors, rather than coerce them?
The problem liberals have is with defining the proper role of an "expert". The role of the so called experts is to educate and provide advice to the decision-makers; not to be the decision-makers themselves. The reason for this is simple. You can find an "expert" to support both sides of any argument. Keynes, or Hayek? Global warming, or no global warming? Subsidize Solyndra, or not? Surge in Iran, or withdraw? Clearly, the liberals know this. Look how the press, after the fact, always finds someone who advised the President to do just the opposite of what he actually did, and try to turn it into some sort of scandal. But, obviously, someone else advised the President to do what he actually did. Any decision-maker needs to have both sides of the argument in order to make an informed decision. The liberals just want to put "experts" who believe the same things they do in charge. Then, they can justify it by saying that the "experts" say this is what we have to do. What amazes me is the number of people who blindly go along because someone is labeled as an "expert".
People also fail to verify that the expertise pertains to the domain in which advice is offered. Paul Krugman won a Nobel Prize for economics, yet rants about political issues and even global warming.
Obama is a wannabe Mao, seeing in the OWS rabble his wannabe Red Guards. Alas, he realizes, America isn't China, and he himself is just another Punahou brat.
Excellent piece, and thank you. But I think your last paragraph ascribes too much of the Tea Party's populism to a reaction against the Left: "Because the Left has been so much more technocratic than populist these past few years, the Right’s response has naturally drifted into populist tones."
The Right, or at least the GOP, had been captured by technocrats and insiders almost to the extent that the Left has been. That is what sparked the populism of 2009-11, the lack of a alternative on the Right to the Left's own government by technocrats and for technocrats. Tea Partiers et al didn't want to be populist. They had populism thrust upon them by default.
"The Right, or at least the GOP, had been captured by technocrats and insiders almost to the extent that the Left has been."
Bingo. An argument centered around "The Right"v"The Left" is a red herring to deflect the fact that both machines are collectivist in nature and political discussion is driven towards comparing and contrasting each party's flavor of central planning with total disregard to the notion that individual liberty is sacrosanct and if government merely did its proper job in securing individual rights, their plans would be entirely unnecessary.
Well-stated. I agree that this is an excellent piece, a keeper to explain to others what I mean when I call myself a constitutional conservative. I also agree that the Tea Party phenomenon took populist form-- though, as the author points out, it is atypical of populist movements in its ultimate philosophy of government-- because the establishment GOP and the broader conservative movement both have powerful elements whose oxen are gored by the core Tea Party points of fiscal soundness and governmental restraint. I am fond of saying that I have no use for the so-called "social conservatives" except for the occasional voting coalition. My criticism of social conservatives is similar to my criticism of left-liberals including greens: they reject what I see as the paramount principle: to err only on the side of liberty. Social conservatives are all about state's rights until it is their hot-button issue, when suddenly they want a federal law to enforce their point of view. In that way social conservatives are a mirror image of the modern liberal (and again, the term "liberal" is as overbroad toward uselessness as is "conservative" anymore; I much prefer Camille Paglia's clearer designation "left-liberal"), in that they hasten to have government prohibit, suppress, and confiscate in pursuit of their respective Utopias. The prevailing left media seek to characterize the Tea Party as synonymous with the worst of social conservatism, and in this they are patently wrong.
Almost all dictators, from Julius Ceasar to Hitler began as populist demagogues. The left would be delighted to have it happen here, and FDR set us on the path....
As a Liberal, let me just say that this is unequivocally false. Go back to the Bush years and you will find exactly the same concerns, for good reason, voiced by the left. If anyone wants dictatorship, fascism, or anything other than our Constitutional republic, they're a small minority who doesn't represent the bulk of either conservatives or liberals.
