The Future of Liberalism - Post 2

At a time when the entire press is predictably focused like a...focused beam of light...on the Scandals of Bush the Younger, I would like to take the time to step back and point out that this "mega-story," while interesting to those who are concerned about American society's shift from a law-based society to a politics-based one, is not really all that important to politics itself.

After the scandals have died down, the subordinates have been sacked, the apologies have been read, etc., American politics and policy will be continue on their current trajectory. Just as they did after Iran-Contra, after the ridiculous Clinton impeachment, and after the fall of Newt Gingrich. The fundamentals have not changed. So I'd like to focus on the fundamentals, in my second post about the future of American liberalism, by talking a bit about the past, as I see it.

After World War 2, countries throughout the West, and also the Axis powers, spent a few decades "cleaning up" the authoritarianism and nationalism that had to some degree been brought in to fight the war. In the U.S., that meant putting restraints on police powers (for example, the Miranda Rights), protesting against the seemingly endless Vietnam War (and war in general), and generally opposing the military-industrial complex. This effort seems to have been successful - not only have Western countries come to revile war and imperialism in general, they have generally increased the rights of defendants, dissidents, and refugees, while limiting the government's paramilitary power (ex. the CIA rule forbidding assassinations of foreign leaders). Empires mostly disappeared, and large-scale war has almost totally stopped.

Also, disgusted with Nazi atrocities and seeking to create a society free of racial bias, Western countries fought to get rid of their long-established inequalities. Civil rights, women's equality, development aid to poor countries, and affirmative action became the norm throughout the West.

Finally, the enormous postwar economic boom gave America the wealth to create an unprecedented middle class, giving generous benefits, minimum wages, and workplace protections that elevated even low-skilled workers to the house-car-lawn level.

This was liberalism, in the post-War half century. Civil rights and equality, restrictions on government powers, and economic policies to spread the wealth around (including the "Great Society"). So what happened? Why are conservatives in the ascendancy, while liberals regularly endure the taunt - even from some of their own - of being "out of ideas"?

One reason I see is that liberalism is partly a victim of its own success. We have civil rights, minority protections, and a high degree of women's equality. So, while some want to carry on the minority rights crusade to its absolute outer limits, most Americans believe the equality struggle to be a thing of the past, a battle won long ago. The same can be said, to a lesser extent, of the battle against authoritarianism - only now, with the Patriot Act and the Iraq War, are a significant number of people starting to worry that the U.S. is drifting back toward heavy-handed pseudo-fascism. On the environment, always a marginal rather than a central liberal crusade, the only issue that really gets the American public spooked at this point is global warming.

In my view, the American public has not changed its opinions on most of these social issues. But in the public's eyes, most of these battles have already been won - or won to a great enough degree that there's more important things to take care of. Liberalism has got almost all the mileage it can out of civil rights, restriction of government powers, and even the environment. This means that, if liberals keep pushing these as major issues, Americans will keep agreeing with liberals and keep voting for conservatives.

On economic issues, liberalism is more a victim of its own failure. The Great Society failed to bring about a long-term reduction in poverty rates. The generous worker benefits that were easy to give out back when America had 50% of planet Earth's GDP are now increasingly impossible to give out in the globalized marketplace. The American public may like the idea of government-sponsored wealth-spreading, but it's looking increasingly impossible. On economic issues, liberals have been a victim not of their success, but of their lack of success.

So that's where liberals are left today - still pushing the same basic package of economic policies that people don't want and social policies that people like but think we already have, and losing out to conservatives as a result.

But, as I plan to argue in my next post (stay tuned!), liberalism's basic philosophy about government's role and human well-being hasn't and shouldn't change very much. Our job, if we are to bring liberalism back to the top of American ideas, is to craft economic policies that work and social policies that address pressing, unmet needs. It is the quest to agree on and fight for such policies that will define the story of American liberalism in the next 50 years.