Kevin Drum and Scott Lemieux are both vexed by my assertion that liberalism-as-practiced has been about shoving things down the public’s throat whether they want it or not. Several liberal readers are similarly bent out of shape. This all comes from my bloggingheads appearance and my Corner post about same. The conversation could have gone more smoothly and I could have explained my examples better, but I still think — contra Drum et al — that I have the winning side of the argument.
There are two major complaints I’ve gotten. The first — mostly from liberal readers — is a tired hypocrisy whine. “How can you criticize liberalism for being undemocratic when conservatives want to do X, Y, Z?” they ask. I’m not going to address this point because it’s a distraction and because I never said that conservatism was always proudly democratic. One can argue about which movement is more responsive to the popular will all day long. But, that’s not an argument I raised.
What I was responding to was Bill Scher’s notion that liberalism is definitionally constrained by the popular will. Scher responds to all this here , by the way.
Kevin Drum writes:
Well, it’s certainly true that liberals, almost by definition, push for social change more than conservatives. And most social change doesn’t gain majority support overnight. Still, Jonah’s caricature is absurd as a definition specifically of liberalism, as opposed to a definition of anyone fighting for social change, whether progressive or reactionary. Every political movement worth the name starts out trying to convince the public about one thing or another, and sometimes they succeed and sometimes they fail. When liberals succeed (civil rights, gay rights), the country eventually comes around. When liberals fail (busing, gun control), the country doesn’t.
Me: I think this is for the most part fair and right, as far as it goes. But I still hold 100% to the view that Progressivism, and the liberalism upon which it is based, doesn’t care about popular, democratic consent as a first priority. Its first priority is “progressive change.” Democratic consent is a means or a sign that it has been successful. Drum’s point that sometime’s the public comes around to social change and so it sometimes becomes “democratic” eventually is my point exactly. Liberals, historically, have adhered to the strategy that if you shove something down the peoples’ throat long enough they’ll acquire a taste for it.
It is hardly as if liberals are against gun control now because it is unpopular. To the extent liberals are against gun control (and it’s a limited extent) it’s because they know their politicians need to get elected and so they forgive softening on it. But there are few liberals, I suspect, who would denounce an anti-gun court ruling or executive order by a Democratic President. The European approach to the death penalty is considered enlightened by liberals even thought it was imposed against democratic will. Al Gore said that the government must always be there to impose diversity. Bill Clinton said he couldn’t cut taxes because people might spend their money the wrong way. The war on smoking was hardly an unadulterated popular movement. Liberals defend activist judges, ACLU-driven anti-majoritarian legal causes, racial quotas and a host of other issues that are unpopular in the literal sense. Across the country popular referenda are passed on issues from gay marriage to voter integrity issues — constitutions are even amended — and courts are overturning these measures thanks to lawsuits brought by liberals and the decisions are celebrated by liberals. The Davos crowd, UN fetishists and the like are all about sweeping global arrangements which consider popular opinion a secondary issue. How many liberals would denounce a Democratic President who found some way to agree to Kyoto without putting the treaty before the Senate for ratification? Not very many. I suppose we could go on all day like this.
But my larger point was that liberalism, or at least the liberalism which comes out of Progressivism, was never founded explicitly on a straightforward emphasis on popular consent. The Progressive era was all about “social control” as E.A. Ross and others put it. For example, the Progressives were in favor of all sorts of eugenic schemes (most people don’t usually vote to be sterilized). The New Deal was explicitly grounded in the elite consensus that the country needed a strong man president and FDR asserted that he could make decisions based on war powers even though there was no war. Yes, both Progressivism and the New Deal talked a lot about the needs of the many over the needs of the few or the individual, but these arguments weren’t primarily about the advantages of democracy. These social planners believed they had a popular writ to do good for the many, but they didn’t think they had to consult with them on how to implement their do-gooding. “I want to assure you,” Harry Hopkins told New Deal activists in New York, “that we are not afraid of exploring anything within the law, and we have a lawyer who will declare anything you want to do legal.” That is the liberalism I’m talking about.
And as I said in that bloggingheads discussion, I don’t think liberals were always wrong. I’m not a democracy absolutist — as I’ve written about 9 trillion times. Moreover, I don’t think it’s always wrong to lead the people rather than merely follow them. But the idea that liberals are always working with a mandate for “social change” is simply nonsense and that’s what I thought Scher was saying.
And liberals who think I’m wrong need to ask themselves why the perception of liberals as pushy, undemocratic, social-engineers is so widespread in this country. It can’t all be attributable to clever ads by Republicans.