A New Liberalism?

I want to draw your attention to a post by one of my favorite political and historical writers, Walter Russell Mead. This post continues his series on the evolution of today’s opposing political views in the United States. Dr. Mead sees the two forces arrayed against each other as developments of two differing strains of liberalism.

In this view today’s progressives’ views are a development of FDR-style New Deal liberalism which he terms “Liberalism 4.0” while today’s conservatives’ views are a development of the more individualistic style of liberalism sometimes called “Manchester Liberalism” and which he associates with Macaulay and terms “Liberalism 3.0”. I suspect a closer association might be with Walter Bagehot.

Both of these ideologies have problems—they’ve run out of gas:

A fundamentalist return to the 3.0 liberalism of the 19th century won’t work; here I agree with the 4.0 liberals. The American economy of the 19th century depended on conditions that we can’t reproduce today. For one thing, the economy was largely agrarian; most Americans earned their livings on family farms. In its prime the family farm provided Americans with high living standards compared to the rest of the world and gave independent farmers a sense of dignity, independence and worth. This system began to fall apart as technological progress made big farms with expensive equipment more productive than small ones; rising agricultural production here and around the world led to a long term decline in farm incomes and drove millions of Americans into the cities. The family farm no longer provided a good living — and the humiliating loss of the homestead and the migration to the city threatened to rob Americans of their dignity as well.

The industrial system of the 19th century is also not replicable today. On the one hand we had extremely high tariffs against foreign goods; on the other the national attitude toward immigration was completely laissez-faire. Through most of the nineteenth century if you got here you could stay here.

Trying to rebuild those trade walls today would lead to massive dislocations, depressions and quite likely wars around the world – not to mention wrecking the American economy and bankrupting many of both our banks and our biggest corporations. Recreating 19th century immigration policy would bring tens of millions of immigrants to our shores each year – something that few Americans are willing to contemplate.

But if 3.0 fundamentalism can’t bring back the agrarian utopia or the industrial conditions of the 19th century, blue fundamentalism won’t help us either. There is no going back to 1962. The Blue Social Model of 20th century, the great achievement of 4.0 liberalism, was rooted in conditions that we cannot replicate today. Between World War One and the 1970s – the years in which the Blue Social Model took shape and rose to power and success – the world economy was in an unusual state. International financial and trade flows were much lower than before 1914 and after 1970 due to the disruptions of the two world wars and the Great Depression. And the United States was so far ahead of the rest of the world in manufacturing (especially after almost European and Japanese factories were destroyed in World War Two) that few American companies (or workers) had anything to fear from foreign competition. Capital was much less mobile; it was much easier to tax high earners without driving savings and investment out of the country.

Where I think his post is strongest is in his characterization of what most Americans want:

1. Physical safety
2. A rising standard of living
3. Honor (meaning a feeling of being free, equal and in charge of their own lives)
4. Believing that America is “fulfilling its mission” (variously even contradictorily defined)
5. Integrity (meaning that the four other goals are working together)

Where I think it’s the weakest is in his failure to recognize that there are strains in both of today’s prevailing American political ideologies that are profoundly illiberal. On the progressives’ part the strain is represented by technocracy: the notion that we can solve our problems by putting experts in charge. Unfortunately, some of today’s conservative thought preserves the intolerant ideas that were part of the old Manchester Liberalism.

I agree with Mead that the prevailing political ideologies are both largely sterile, incapable of dealing with today’s problems and look forward to his views on the nature of the synthesis that might break the logjam.

Certainly food for thought and debate.