The Little Red Blog

Re: Distribution

{This is another longer-than-usual post. Look, I’m stuck at home and the bars are closed; what would you expect?}

While we remain in coronavirus lockdown, with 20% or so of Americans now out of work, this is probably as good a time as any to consider a wholesale overhaul of both America’s economic model and its political organization. Who better to guide us in such an undertaking than a man who is a self-confessed monarchist? ¹

John Medaille teaches at the University of Dallas. In addition to longing for a king, he is an advocate of something called “Distributism,” which is both a prescription for a new economic system and a vision for a new political structure. ² Medaille is also a member of a recently formed political party, the American Solidarity Party, which might be described as somewhat to the right of Francisco Franco but to the left of Joseph d’Maistre.

 In an article titled “Distributism and the Polity of Political Economy,” Medaille set out the fundamental problem facing us (the article was written before the ascent of Trump): unequitable distribution of (a) wealth, (b) property, and (c) political power. Redressing those inequities will require not simply tinkering around the edges of the status quo, not just “nudges” or “incentives,” but a comprehensive, systemic change: a revolution of sorts, in fact.

Allow me to quote from Medaille at some length:

Distributism is a system of political economy ³ which lays great stress on the practical need for distributive justice and the wide distribution of productive property. Hence the name. It is distinguished, on the one hand, from economics, which attempts to view the economy as a science separate from politics, and on the other from…capitalism and socialism, both [of which] tend to aggregate production and distribution in vast collectives which are owned either by the state or by largely anonymous groups of shareholders, in whose behalf the collective is presumed to work.

Discussions of distributism usually center on the cultural or economic aspects of the theory. But there is another aspect that is at least as important: the politics of distributism. And by “politics” I do not mean something like “parties” and “platforms” and all the electoral paraphernalia that determine the democratic state. Rather I mean a distributive polity, the organization and constitution of the state and the relationship of the state to the nation.

Distributism, as a system of political economy, requires not only a distribution of property, but a distribution of political authority. As Daniel Webster pointed out, “Power follows property”; that is, as property aggregates in fewer and fewer hands, so does political power. But the reverse is also true: Property follows power; as political power concentrates, those with greater access to that power end up with more property. The two reinforce and reflect each other, and distributism cannot be long maintained in a system of unitary, concentrated and centralized power.

The modern nation-state is a unitary, centralized state. That is, all political power is vested in a sovereign authority, and all other authorities tend to be subordinate to and dependent upon this authority…In America, we tend to think of power as “divided” between the federal, state, and local levels; however, the “supremacy clause” of the Constitution means that power passes to the center whenever and wherever the central state cares to exercise its inherent authority.

Political debates today take place entirely within the bounds created by the nation-state and global capitalism. But they have curious outcome: the debates center on the size and cost of government, but no matter who is elected, the power, reach, and debts of government seem to rise. Conservatives lament that conservative administrations don’t seem to conserve anything, while liberals lament that liberal administrations don’t actually liberate anyone. Indeed, both sides confront the paradox that government and government debt grew faster under Reagan and both Bushes then it did under Carter, Clinton, and Obama.

There is a reason for this: the nation-state is always going to follow its own nature, no matter who is in charge; the nation-state does what it does because it is what it is. There are no alternative sovereignties, no competing sources of authority to check its power. Hence the debates are grounded only in competing ideologies, none of which can escape the logic of the nation-state.

That logic, according to Medaille, has brought us to a crisis point:

We find ourselves in a world with debts we cannot pay, obligations we cannot meet, wars we cannot win, and all dependent on an infrastructure we cannot maintain. The nation-state has over-reached itself and can no longer be sustained. No debates about fiddling with the marginal tax rates for business or about the minimum wage, worthy as those debates might be, will get to the root of our problems.

Medaille dismissed the boilerplate conservative talking point about “Big Government”:

I believe that the argument about the size of government is misplaced. ⁴ Government has always been about as big as it is, about as expensive as it is, and about as intrusive as it is; there is no golden age of “small government”, certainly not where the nation-state is concerned, and likely at no time in history. The amount of goods, cash, and labor that a peasant had to give to the lord of the manor was certainly no less in value than that which a modern worker pays in taxes, especially when combined with the mandatory tithe. The rules imposed by the guild and the city authorities were likely no less [onerous] than those imposed today by federal, state and local authorities.

Size might matter, but it isn’t everything, as Medaille explained:

What is [crucial] is not so much size and cost as the location and rights of participation. The central authorities are always remote and impersonal; the distributed authorities tend to be more local and participatory. But “local” does not mean “smaller” or “less intrusive,” and anybody who thinks otherwise has never had to submit a landscaping plan to his homeowners’ association. The [medieval] craftsman was bound by strong rules, no less than the modern electrician, but he had a say in those rules, and his fees were usually spent in a way that benefited him and his profession, or even (and more importantly) in a way that made him a public benefactor along with the honors that accrued to that title.

I believe that this ancient debate between competing authorities will reemerge as the nation-state succumbs to its own overreach, while the corporations can no longer supply our needs, not only our need for goods but our needs for useful and meaningful work. The economy and the political order will have to be rebuilt, and rebuilt not from the top-down, but from the bottom up. As conditions deteriorate nationally and internationally, the world will be rebuilt locally. Cities and neighborhoods will have to learn to solve their own problems with the resources that come to hand. And as these localities solve their own problems, they will insist on their own sovereignty; the old debates will emerge in new forms.

What is certain is that the system will evolve…largely driven by events on the ground, but [also] affected by our knowledge of the alternatives. And it is important to know that there are alternatives outside the unitary nation-state. With this knowledge, the range of the moral imagination and practical intelligence is extended beyond the cramped quarters of the current debate.

What we are living with today may not be the failure of our “unitary nation-state” per se; it may only be the failure of this abysmal president and his abysmal presidency. ⁵ Even so, no one can pretend that all was well, before Trump came along, with either the American economy or the American polity. Pace John Medaille, I doubt that monarchism is in our future; but authoritarian impulses, especially on the Right, are increasingly hiding in plain sight. As an alternative to that, “Distributism” has much in common with Kirkpatrick Sale’s emphasis on “human scale,” with E.F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful, and with the sort of generous, humane localism promoted by folks at the Front Porch Republic.

The nice thing about thinking small and acting local is that it doesn’t require anyone’s permission—only that of your neighbors: assuming, of course, that neither they nor you are under epidemiological house arrest.

_____________________________________

¹ See:  https://distributistreview.com/archive/why-i-am-a-monarchist

² “Distributism” is not a new idea, nor is it John Medaille’s brainchild. An offshoot of Roman Catholic “social justice” teaching, Distributism had its heyday, such as it was, between 1920 and 1940; it was espoused, in various forms, by the likes of G.K. Chesterton, Hillaire Belloc, and Dorothy Day.

³ In his essay, Medaille provided a brief explanation of the difference between what used to be called “political economy” and what it became, i.e. the “science” of economics. The former was an interdisciplinary field which concerned itself with laws, customs, social mores, and ethics; while the latter, in Medaille’s opinion, amounts to no more than “a calculation of return on investment to the capital fund”. The human element of political economy, including concepts like “justice” and “fairness,” was all but removed from consideration so that an amoral market could be governed by impersonal economic “laws” (supply and demand, profit and loss, diminishing returns, etc.) impartially enforced by the Invisible Hand.

⁴ Conservatives who rail against “Big Government” never specify what the proper size and reach of government ought to be, with the notable exception of Grover Norquist, who forthrightly acknowledge wanting the federal government reduced until it was small enough that he could drown it in a bathtub.

⁵ To update Ronald Reagan: The ten most frightening words in the English language are, “I’m Donald Trump, and I’m in charge of the country.”

Today's Modest Proposal

While waiting to find out if Robert Mueller’s report reveals our President to be criminal or merely grossly corrupt, astonishingly venal, and utterly unsuited for his office: let’s talk about something else.

Pace Elizabeth Warren, we are not going to abolish the Electoral College anytime soon. However, it would be easy enough for the states, acting on their own, to remedy the main problem with the College, which is its “winner take all” nature.

As things currently stand, a candidate who wins a state by a single vote is awarded all of that state’s electors; the losing candidate gets no electoral votes at all, whether in Montana (with three electoral votes at stake) or in California (with fifty-five).

The simple solution is to require each state to award its electoral votes in proportion to the outcome of its popular vote—e.g. if candidate A receives 52% of the vote in California, then she will receive 28.6 of California’s fifty-five electoral votes; candidate B, having received 48% of the popular vote, will receive 26.4 electoral votes. (In Montana, those same percentages would translate into 1.56 and 1.44 electoral votes, respectively.)

There will be some math involved, but it won’t rise to the level of rocket science; electoral shares could be rounded to either one or two decimal places (as above). Third-party candidates will shave off fractions of the vote total—again, based on the percentage of actual votes they receive: if candidate C receives 1% of the vote in, say, Montana, then he will be awarded .03 (1%) of Montana’s three electoral votes. If candidate D manages to get 5% of the popular vote in Texas, then she receives 1.9 of the state’s 38 electoral votes.

Rather than turning narrow popular majorities (or pluralities) into electoral landslides, electoral votes need to reflect the popular vote. There is no reasonable justification for the current system in which a candidate who wins 49.9 of the votes cast in any given state receives no votes at all from that state in the Electoral College; awarding each state’s electoral votes in proportion to the popular vote will more accurately express the (divided) will of the voters.

I leave it to astute political scientists (and math wizards) to calculate what affect this will have on campaigning patterns, on campaign spending, and on the importance of “battleground” states that currently alchemize (as they did, notoriously, in the 2016 election) relatively thin margins of victory into electoral gold. There is simply no scenario in which candidates will (or should) devote a great deal of time or money to sparsely populated states like Montana or Wyoming; those of us who live in such places might well be grateful for the lack of attention.

The caveat in all this is that no individual state is likely to enact such electoral reform on its own; doing so would be a form of unilateral electoral disarmament. Therefore, a constitutional amendment will almost certainly be required, which puts this idea pretty much in the same boat as Senator Warren’s call to abolish the Electoral College completely.

Back, I suppose, to the drawing board…hey, has anyone leaked anything at all yet about the Mueller report? What’s this I hear about federal troops being in place around Mar-a-Lago? Is it true that Trump is on the run in a white Bronco with Al Cowlings at the wheel? If the report is exculpatory, will Trump take back all his anti-Mueller “witch hunt” tweets? Will the Deep State be rehabilitated? 

To paraphrase a Chinese slogan: Let a thousand pardons bloom...

A Better Measure

James C. Scott, in his TWO CHEERS FOR ANARCHY, makes a modest proposal: why don’t we judge our institutions—schools, workplaces, governing bodies of all kinds—by an entirely different metric than the ones we commonly use (productivity, profit, and efficiency)? Instead of measuring our country's GDP (Gross Domestic Product), if we replace quantitative standards with qualitative ones and make the human person the measure, we might arrive at what Scott calls our “GHP" (for Gross Human Product):

What if we were to ask a different question of institutions and activities than the narrow neoclassical question of how efficient they are in terms of costs (e.g., resources, labor, capital) per unit of a given, specified product? What if we were to ask what kind of people a given activity or institution fostered? Any activity we can imagine, any institution, no matter what its manifest purpose, is also, willy-nilly, transforming people. What if we were to bracket the manifest purpose of an institution and the efficiency with which it is achieved and ask what the human product was?

Scott acknowledges that such a concept might defy our ability to measure it (“It is unlikely that we could devise a convincing comprehensive measure of, say, GHP, for gross human product, that would be comparable to the economists' GDP, gross domestic product, measured in monetary units”), but he believes it would be worth the effort:

If, undaunted by these difficulties, we decided to make a stab at it, we could, I think, identify two plausible approaches: one that would gauge how a work process enlarged human capacities and skills and one that took its bearings from the judgments of the workers themselves about their satisfaction. The former is, at least in principle, measurable, in ordinal terms of "more or less."

Factory work, for example, would be judged on its overall impact on the human persons doing the work. Does it improve their quality of life (apart from their income)? Does it add to their skills or to their overall knowledge? Does it make them better human beings, better citizens, or better neighbors? As Scott describes:

What if we were to apply the standard of human capacities and skills to the industrial assembly line? After five or ten years on the assembly line at Lordsville or River Rouge, what are the odds that the capacities and skills of a worker would have been substantially enlarged? Vanishingly small, I would suspect. In fact, the whole point of the time-and-motion analysis behind the division of labor on the line was to break down the work process into thousands of minute steps that could easily be learned. It was deliberately designed to eliminate the artisanal-craft knowledge, and the power this knowledge conferred on workers, that characterized the carriage-making era. The line was premised on a deskilled, standardized workforce in which one "hand" could be easily substituted for another. It depended, in other words, on what we might legitimately call the "stupidification" of the workforce…

Scott has no doubt what the outcome of such an evaluation would be:

Were we scoring assembly-line work by the degree to which it served to enlarge human capacities and skills, it would receive failing grades, no matter how efficient it was at producing cars. More than a century and a half ago, Alexis de Tocqueville, commenting on Adam Smith's classic example of the division of labor, asked the essential question: "What can be expected of a man who has spent twenty years of his life making heads for pins?"

The very nature of assembly-line labor, claims Scott, works against developing capacities necessary for citizenship: judgment, decision-making, mental flexibility, independence of mind, etc. Again, Scott explains:

If we were to apply the test of an enlarged capacity for democratic citizenship, it is obvious that the assembly line itself is a profoundly authoritarian environment where decisions are in the hands of the engineers and the substitutable units of the workforce are expected to do the work assigned them more or less mechanically. It never quite works out that way, but that's the imminent logic of the line. The line as a work process would have a negative "net democratic product."

Scott extends his thought experiment to another vital social institution, which itself bears some resemblance to a factory:

What if we asked the same questions of the school, the major public institution of socialization for the young in much of the world? Universal public education is, of course, designed to do far more than merely turn out the labor force required by industry. It is as much a political as an economic institution...the great tragedy of the public school system, however, is that it is, by and large, a one-product factory. 

What is this product? It is a certain form of analytical intelligence, narrowly conceived, which can, it is assumed, be measured by tests. We know, of course, that there are many, many skills that are valuable and important for a successful society that are not even remotely related to analytical intelligence, among them, artistic talent, imaginative intelligence, mechanical intelligence (the kind that [Henry] Ford's early workers brought with them from the farm), musical and dance skills, creative intelligence, emotional intelligence, social skills, and ethical intelligence. Some of these aptitudes find a place in extracurricular activities, especially sports, but not in the measured and graded activities on which so much now depends for students, teachers, and schools.

Characterizing our educational system as an academic “rat race,” Scott notes the discrepancy between those who excel at “a certain form of analytic intelligence” and those who do not (regardless of what other capacities they may have):

Those of us who [win] this race are the lifetime beneficiaries of opportunities and privileges that would not likely otherwise have come our way. We are also are likely to carry a lifetime sense of entitlement, superiority, accomplishment, and self-esteem that comes from this victory. Let us bracket, for the moment, the question of whether this dividend is justified and what it actually means in terms of our value to ourselves and others, and merely note that it represents a fund of social capital that adjusts the odds of financial and status mobility radically in our favor. This is a lifetime privilege extended to perhaps one-fifth at most of those the system turns out.

And what of the rest? What of the, say, 80 percent who in effect lose the race? They carry less social capital; the odds are adjusted against them. Perhaps as important is the fact that they are likely to carry a lifelong sense of having been defeated, of being less valued, of thinking that they are inferior and slow-witted. This system effect further adjusts the odds against them. And yet, have we any rational reason to credit the judgments of a system that values such a narrow band-width of human talents and measures achievement within this band by the ability to sit successfully for an exam?  

Those who do poorly on tests of analytical intelligence may be incredibly talented at one or more of the many forms of intelligence that are neither taught nor valued by the school system. What sort of a system is it that wastes these talents, that sends four-fifths of its students away with a permanent stigma in the eyes of society's gatekeepers, and perhaps in their own eyes as well? Are the dubious benefits of the privileges and opportunities accorded a presumed "analytical intelligence elite" by this pedagogical tunnel vision worth so much social damage and waste?

As presently constituted, schools, factories, and conventional top-down managerial regimes may well undermine our capacity for self-government:

Political philosophers as varied as Etienne de La Boetie and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were deeply concerned about the political consequences of hierarchy and autocracy. They believed that such settings created the personalities of subjects rather than citizens. Subjects learned the habits of deference. They were apt to fawn on superiors and put on an air of servility, dissembling when necessary and rarely venturing an independent opinion, let alone a controversial one. Their general demeanor was one of caution. While they may have had views of their own, even subversive ones, they kept such views to themselves, avoiding public acts of independent judgment and moral direction.

James Scott poses the question: “Do the cumulative effects of life within [a variety of] hierarchical institutions produce a more passive subject who lacks the spontaneous capacity for mutuality so praised by both anarchist and liberal democratic theorists?

Clearly, says Scott, we need to insist on public policies which “foster institutions that expand the independence, autonomy, and capacities of the citizenry.”  Instead of worrying about growing the economy, why don’t we focus on growing, and sustaining, human beings?

https://www.axelarnbak.nl/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/James-C.-Scott-Two-Cheers-for-Anarchism_-Six-Easy-Pieces-on-Autonomy-Dignity-and-Meaningful-Work-and-Play-Princeton-University-Press-2012.pdf

Three for Thursday

From Claremont Institute, the people who brought you the 2016 blockbuster hit “The Flight 93 Election,” comes a new American epic: “Aristopopulism”. John Burtka IV describes his creation:

“Aristopopulism” describes a two-fold disposition towards preserving what is both beautiful and common within the American experience—a marriage of grit and brains, democratic manners and liberal learning. Imagine Edmund Burke meeting Rooster Cogburn. This synthesis, which served as the backbone of Tocqueville’s America, also happens to be a winning temperament for Republicans wanting to hold Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania and conservatives looking to build a new political program that protects jobs, supports families, and strengthens the middle class.

You may be thinking, “If Aristopopulism is all about “the American experience,” why does Edmund Burke play a leading role? Were there no qualified Americans available?” You may be thinking, “Forget Tocqueville, let’s talk about Mark Twain’s America.” You may also be thinking, “I’m pretty sure Rooster Cogburn would look at Aristopopulism like something he’d just scraped off his boot,” but that would be unkind, and you should be ashamed of yourself for thinking it.

Mr. Burtka goes on to detail his program, but I won’t bother; suffice it to say that Aristopopulism is all about how “elites’ renewed commitment to public virtue can redeem their stature and respect in places where their talent, treasure, and leadership is vital to economic and civic renewal.” If that doesn’t work out, we can always fall back on the Rooster Cogburn Option: “My thought was: I am better out of this.”

https://americanmind.org/features/nationalism-for-the-twenty-first-century/aristopopulism-the-new-fusionism-america-needs/

Good news: our long national nightmare is over, and Jack Phillips, owner of (and creative genius behind) Masterpiece Cakeshop, can go back to refusing service to any potential customer whose lifestyle conflicts with Mr. Phillips’ religious convictions.

A more than six-year dispute between Colorado and Masterpiece Cakeshop over the bakery's refusal to make a cake celebrating a gay wedding because of the owner's religious beliefs has ended, as the two sides agreed to cease all litigation, the Colorado attorney general announced Tuesday. The religious liberty dispute between Colorado and baker Jack Phillips went all the way to the Supreme Court last year.

The Colorado Civil Rights Commission voted unanimously to drop its state administrative case against Phillips and his bakery. Phillips, meanwhile, has agreed to dismiss his case against the state in federal court arguing the commission was continuously hostile toward his religious beliefs.

It would be helpful to the general public if Mr. Phillips were to post guidelines for his services, something along the lines of: Sorry, but no cakes for same-sex “weddings,” transgender celebrations (abominations in the eyes of the Lord), birthdays of children of same-sex couples (little spawns of Satan), or for whatever else may strike the owner of this establishment as contrary to good Christian principles. Remember, God is love; have a blessed day!

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/courts/colorado-masterpiece-cakeshop-end-dispute-pitting-religious-liberty-against-lgbt-rights

One unremarked irony of modern American politics is that the word “federalism” has been coopted by people who despise our federal government. No doubt nostalgic for the good old days, pre-1789, when Americans were governed (sort of) by Articles of Confederation, today’s “federalists” subscribe to Grover Norquist’s lifelong dream of drowning the federal government in a bathtub.

That, however, should not give “localism” a bad name, so long as it is not pursued antagonistically or with the intention of fulfilling Mr. Norquist’s dream. The case for local government is easy enough to make, and Michael Hendrix (Real Clear Politics) does so with admirable brevity:  

Cities and towns have always animated the American project, their local governments acting as the central nervous system of the body politic. Participation in matters of shared consequence can reinforce a sense of the common good, laying the foundation for communities in which citizens share the tasks of maintaining and improving the places where they live. Without functioning local governments, the larger political community is in danger of heart failure.

“Heart failure” will also occur, however, when local governments and their constituents are taxed, literally and figuratively, with more duties than they have the resources to manage. The same is true at the state level; it’s all well and good to want to “devolve” federal authority and programs to the states, but one should first calculate a state’s ability, and its willingness, to properly use the authority and to sustain such programs.

Like anything else, “local control” comes with both costs and benefits. I’d be interested in seeing the results of a series of referenda in which citizens of various states and localities are asked to specify their preference between (a) increased local (and/or state) autonomy as a matter of principle, or (b) continuation of federal benefits and programs along with the regulatory strings necessarily attached to them.

If nothing else, such referenda might provide an answer to the perennial question, “What price liberty?”

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2019/03/04/the_case_for_local_government_111089.html

Two Blinks

{For the uninitiated: "blink" is my term for a post that offers a link to another blog, with selected excerpts interspersed with my own brief commentary.}

At Vox, Tara Isabella Burton cautions against a too-easy acceptance of "assisted suicide" and "the right to die": 

End-of-life debates...raise vital questions for which we, as a society, do not have fully articulated answers. Who has the right to end a life — and why? And what does it mean to make assumptions that a life is, or is not, worth living? At what point do the sometimes competing ideas of “best interest,” individual freedom, and the inherent goodness of life overlap, and where do they contradict each other? And what does the increasing medicalization of death say about our attitude to life?  

For "right-to-die" advocates, "the idea of freedom — that it is a human right to decide how and when one will die — trumps the idea of life itself as a moral and existential good." But opponents like Catholic bioethicist John Paris "[have] expressed concern over an approach to life that emphasized human sovereignty and agency over the sheer fact of existence. “The idea that everyone is sovereign” — and should have control over all aspects of their life and body — is itself a flawed one, [Paris] said."  

Ms. Burton continues: 

The worry, [Paris] says, is that life is seen as something that is only worth living if it possesses certain qualities, and that life is therefore not seen as worthwhile for its own sake. “What kind of a society wants to do that? Life is made simply an option that you have when you’re happy. But if you become distressed or depressed you can end it. You shouldn’t have to suffer for anything,” he says.  

Is there some limit to how much suffering a person should be expected to endure, and, if so, who decides that limit?  Concern about the consequences of socially accepted suicide is not limited to theists; Burton also cites the secular humanist Brendan O'Neill, whose "objections to assisted dying are twofold. First, he argues, it brings what should be an intensely personal sphere into the world of bureaucracies and tribunals, causing unnecessary suffering for the dying. Second, he says, it fosters a culture where those who are terminally ill, or disabled, might be led to believe that their own lives — or indeed, life for its own sake — is not valued." 

Indeed, O’Neill’s argument is very similar to Paris’s when he writes that debates over euthanasia have “become bound up with society’s broader inability to value and celebrate human life today. It is clear that society finds it increasingly difficult to say that human existence is a good thing." He sees a certain “moral exhaustion” in a society that no longer sees life for its own sake as a de facto good.  

“It’s very important that society doesn’t give the green light to suicide,” he said. “That life is worth living, however difficult it might be … is valuable.” Saying to people, “Well, maybe your life isn’t worth living and maybe you should give up,” is an example of what he calls “moral defeatism.”  

There is no easy way to resolve this conflict between "the limitations of freedom" and the inherent value of life--nor should there be. As Ms. Burton recognizes, we have to take this issue seriously and we have to talk about it seriously; lives, after all, are at stake. 

Burton concludes: 

At a societal, cultural level...we haven’t necessarily come to a collective conclusion about what life means. Societally speaking, as we move toward a cultural paradigm that increasingly sees individual liberty as the ultimate moral good, we have to reckon with those instances in which life and liberty do not coincide...Few people would argue that individual liberty is a bad thing. But it’s worth recognizing what we lose when we collectively change our value system to accommodate its supremacy.  

What Paris and O’Neill both tap into, despite their differing perspectives, is that we haven’t necessarily found a way to talk about existence or life as entities in themselves. Is life “worth living” for its own sake? As a culture, we lack a secular vocabulary to talk about what Catholics sometimes call the “sanctity of life.” But [to deal with this issue], it’s a vocabulary we need. 

https://www.vox.com/2018/5/21/17360978/right-to-die-assisted-dying-suicide-david-goodall  

At The American Conservative, Bruce Fein insists that America needs to return to proper constitutional order, by which he means "separation of powers and checks and balances to achieve an Aristotelian mean between rule by Platonic guardians and mobocracy." Fein explains (sort of) what that should mean in practice: 

No law, regulation, policy or government practice should be embraced without a showing that (1) it is authorized by the Constitution; (2) the branch of government responsible for exercising the authority has done so; and, (3) the government has shouldered its burden of documenting with concrete evidence that compromising the individual right to be left alone is justified by a clear, present, and alarming danger to domestic tranquility or national security. ¹ Speculation is not good enough to satisfy the third prong. Neither are remote or ephemeral harms.        

The benefits of this approach would be many and wondrous, according to Fein: 

Probably 90 percent or more of our multi-trillion-dollar warfare state, surveillance state, bail-out state, and welfare state would be eliminated over time if the Constitution were made the battleground of American politics. Among other things, federal taxes and spending would tumble; the national debt would shrink; crony capitalism would die; the economy would flourish; privacy would be honored; and, our nine known unconstitutional, gratuitous presidential wars would cease. 

Most importantly, concludes Fein, "The nation’s individual liberty index—the proxy of national greatness—would climb by orders of magnitude." 

I was not aware that there was such a thing as the "individual liberty index," nor do I know how it might be calculated. What I do know is that, while our constitution enshrines and safeguards a good deal of individual liberty, it also mentions something called "the general welfare," which I happen to think is an even better "proxy of national greatness".

I see no reason why Benjamin Franklin's warning that "We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately" should be limited to wartime; it strikes me as a perfectly good metaphor for how we ought to approach our public life and public policies. There's more to our great national experiment than "individual liberty"; we're either all in this together or we're not in it at all. 

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/our-constitution-must-be-the-battleground/  

¹ The Constitution does not mention any "individual right to be left alone". It would appear that Fein, a conservative, has conjured that right in the same manner as the liberal Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who famously (in Griswold v. Connecticut) referred to the Constitution's "penumbral rights of privacy and repose."  Conservatives have yet to stop mocking that phrase, coined in 1965; but Bruce Fein, at least, has apparently come to terms with the concept of "penumbral rights".

Conservatism, Principled and Otherwise

{Trigger warning: the following is a lengthy but not entirely unsympathetic critique of contemporary conservatism. It could offend conservatives, fans of Senator Ben Sasse, and liberals who think that reading anything about conservatism is a waste of time.}

The exact meaning of "conservatism" is hard to pin down. Sometimes portrayed as a temperament, sometimes as an attitude, and sometimes as a political or ideological stance, post-WWII American conservatism has been an uneasy alliance of traditionalists (Russell Kirk), libertarians (Frank S. Meyer), foreign-policy hawks (Barry Goldwater), "states rights" advocates (James Kilpatrick), promoters of capitalism (Milton Friedman), and--like all vaguely defined movements--any number of opportunists and grifters (Newt Gingrich).

In one of the best essays I've read in some time, Austin Bramwell (at American Affairs Journal) attempts to clarify the matter while simultaneously critiquing what he calls "principled conservatism":

Considered as a political philosophy, principled (or “axiomatic”) conservatism is “principled” in at least three distinct senses: first, it promotes a fixed and well-defined set of policy goals; second, it assumes that those goals are advanced through the spread of ideas or systems of belief; third, it rejects pragmatic adjustment to changing circumstances.

[As to the first], principled conservatives pursue a predetermined list of policy priorities...In a Republican primary debate in 2016, Senator Marco Rubio claimed that “conservatism is about three things,” which he defined as “limited government,” “free enterprise,” and “strong national defense”...George Will explains that “bedrock conservative principles” oppose “government planning” and “enormous executive discretion.” Michael Gerson identifies conservatism with “respect for free markets and civil society.”

It is immediately obvious that the above statements are almost entirely vacuous. "Limited government" does not tell us what the limits of government should be; moreover, no one in human history has advocated for literally "unlimited" government, in part because such a thing is impossible. Likewise, "free enterprise" and "strong national defense" are empty platitudes (what are the limits of freedom for "free enterprise," and who has ever argued for a "weak" national defense?); George Will can't possibly believe that all government planning is illegitimate (e.g. government planning for a strong national defense) nor can he define what constitutes "enormous" (as opposed to "reasonable") executive discretion. Michael Gerson's invocation of "respect" is equally unhelpful; who decides what constitutes respect for the institutions in question?

Bramwell does his best to flesh things out a bit:

Principled conservatives swiftly condemn deviations from the goals of individual liberty, limited government, and free enterprise. Tariffs, they argue, violate free trade; infrastructure spending enlarges government; progressive tax rates stifle work and investment; entitlements substitute state paternalism for individual choice; energy in the executive disrupts the steady administration of law.

Through no fault of Bramwell's, those examples fail to persuade, if only because counter-examples come readily to mind. Military spending, for instance, "enlarges" government every bit as much as does infrastructure spending; "entitlements" and "state paternalism" are mere pejorative terms deployed in place of argument or empirical evidence--it can easily be demonstrated that public subsidies and benefits frequently empower "individual choice" (my Social Security Disability benefits, for example, allowed me to make education and career choices I could not otherwise have made; just as Paul Ryan was empowered to obtain a college education through his Social Security Survivors' benefits); and executive energy can guarantee, rather than disrupt, the steady administration of law (e.g. enforcement of court-ordered school desegregation).

Moving from policy to process, Austin Bramwell again finds "principled conservatism" lacking:

Principled conservatives have not only a set of preferred policies but also a standard model of how those policies can be advanced. The model stresses the role of beliefs, ideals, and ideology. That is, principled conservatives hold that that the success or failure of individual liberty, limited government, and free enterprise depends on the promotion of certain ideas.

Senator [Ben] Sasse ably expresses the theory. Employing the jargon of analytic philosophers, he declares that “America is at her heart a big, bold truth claim.” That truth claim, he says, is that we have rights and dignity that derive from God rather than government. Sasse warns that this truth claim is not as widely accepted today as it once was. To cure our “cultural amnesia,” voters must demand politicians who “understand the American idea.” In short, America can thrive, according to Sasse, so long as Americans believe in their God-given individual rights and liberty.

Sasse is not alone. President George W. Bush asserts that “being an American involves the embrace of high ideals,” such as human dignity and the values of the U.S. Constitution. Like Sasse, Bush holds that the “very identity of our nation depends on the passing of civic ideals to the next generation.” Bush’s former speechwriter and fellow principled conservative, Peter Wehner, claims that Bush has offered a “philosophical alternative” that conservatives should embrace. Michael Gerson admits that his position amounts to “ideological conservatism.” Principled conservatives, he says, do not appeal to prejudices or identity but make “ideological arguments” based on “abstract ideals.”

There is so much here to critique that one hardly knows where to start. First of all, none of the above refers at all to "how policies can be advanced"; instead, it seems to gesture at a kind of "American creed" that, so far as conservatives are concerned, will inevitably lead to adoption of conservative policies. (See below for Bramwell's own acknowledgement that such a conclusion is unsound.)

Second, one hallmark of conservatives from Edmund Burke to Russell Kirk has been the rejection of "ideological arguments" and "abstract ideals"; those were ascribed instead to wooly-headed liberals and utopian thinkers out of touch with ordinary lived reality.

Bramwell supplies the third and, as he admits, most obvious argument against the supposed connection between conservatism and Ben Sasse's American creed:

An obvious objection to the reliance on abstract ideals is that they do not necessarily compel assent to principled conservatives’ policy goals. At least some government, principled conservatives concede, is needed to protect individual rights, but exactly how much government is needed remains open to dispute. Franklin D. Roosevelt, for example, no less than principled conservatives today, championed “the rights and the dignity of all of our fellow men,” as he put it in his Four Freedoms address. Yet Roosevelt concluded that these very rights require a collective guarantee not only of peace and safety but also of jobs, income, and medical care. Philosophers in the liberal tradition have debated endlessly what goods government must provide to safeguard individual rights. Those on the left wing of that tradition would argue that principled conservatives arbitrarily leave many individual rights unsecured.

"Principled" conservatives simply cannot grasp that liberals, too, love their country and believe in liberty. It's as if Ben Sasse et al think that reciting the Pledge of Allegiance will automatically lead to opposing the Affordable Care Act, being against affirmative action, and rejecting laws restricting gun ownership. 

Having acknowledged the error of that line of thought, Bramwell then writes:

But the intellectual coherence of principled conservatism is beside the point.

Austin Bramwell said it, I didn't.

Continuing, Bramwell notes what he charitably calls the "tenacity" of conservatives who are unwilling or unable to adapt to new historical realities:

The final sense in which principled conservatism is “principled”—that it resists the temptations of expediency—follows naturally from the others. In 1960, when Barry Goldwater wrote The Conscience of a Conservative, the Soviet Empire dominated half the globe, and the top marginal income tax rate exceeded 90 percent. At the same time, church attendance had peaked, crime had bottomed, and only a small fraction of births were out of wedlock. Affirmative action and multiculturalism were unknown, while the black middle class was rapidly growing. Labor advocate and activist Cesar Chavez fought low-wage immigrant labor, and the national-origins quota system of the Immigration Act of 1924 remained in force. Western nations suffered no acts of Islamist terrorism.

None of the foregoing remains true today. Nevertheless, principled conservatives not only do not revise their menu of preferred policies but claim a divine warrant for their tenacity...principled conservatism cannot change, as its commitments derive ultimately from God. Here the principled conservative stands; like Martin Luther, he can do no other.

 

Edmund Burke (see below) would be appalled at conservatives' lack of interest in actual historical circumstances and at their stubborn adherence to policy prescriptions that might have been relevant and sensible sometime in the past but are irrelevant and counterproductive today.

Austin Bramwell:

Principled or, as I shall hereafter call it, axiomatic conservatism combines a commitment to liberty with a devotion to limited-government ideology and an unwillingness to compromise on policy. It is possible, however, to remain committed to liberty yet reject one or both of the other elements of axiomatic conservatism.

Friedrich Hayek, a lion of free-market economics, admitted without reservation that the case for a “comprehensive system of social insurance,” provided through coercive government taxation, was very strong. In a wealthy nation, he wrote in The Road to Serfdom, a “minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work, can be assured to everybody.” Later, in The Constitution of Liberty—arguably his magnum opus—Hayek not only reiterated his support for government-coerced insurance but argued that it is compatible with liberty. Axiomatic conservatives remember Hayek’s critique of government planning but often overlook his call for government to furnish a greater share of the goods of a free society.

Bramwell contrasts today's "principled conservatives" with the Burkean, "classical" strain:

Liberty, [Edmund Burke] argued, must coexist with government, public enforcement, military command, taxation, morality, religion, property, order, and manners. Without these, Burke wrote, liberty is not a benefit but merely permits individuals to “do as they please.” The “manly, moral, regulated liberty” that Burke prized, and throughout his career defended, in short, has multiple, intersecting preconditions.

Axiomatic conservatives, by contrast, believe that liberty derives from ideology or systems of belief, which are easy to identify and easy to transmit. They assume away the context that, Burke thought, makes liberty possible in the first place. Burke, and his disciples up to the present day, hold that liberty is embedded within a particular institutional and sociological background. Just how fortuitous and singular one regards the Anglo-American and Western traditions of liberty will almost entirely determine whether one is an axiomatic, ideological conservative or instead a Burkean, classical conservative.

Bramwell goes on to elaborate the contrast between classical, Burkean conservatives and today's ideological "principled" conservatives; he draws from many sources, including the largely forgotten William Graham Sumner. Eventually (it is, as I said, a lengthy essay), Bramwell concludes:

["Principled" conservatism] has powerful advantages and is unlikely to fade. For one thing, it is easy to articulate. Conservative policy principles, and their connection to the ideal of equal liberty for all, can be learned by rote. For axiomatic conservatives, America is not a deeply rooted order but, as Senator Sasse says, little more than a truth claim.

Classical conservatives, by contrast, doubt that the sources of American liberty can even be fully comprehended...there may be preconditions to liberty that are as yet only poorly understood. Like Burke, classical conservatives argue that customs and institutions, winnowed by trial and error, embody wisdom beyond the reach of propositional reasoning. “The individual is foolish; the multitude, for the moment, is foolish,” Burke famously wrote, “but the species is wise, and, when time is given to it, as a species it always acts right.” The classical conservative respect for society as given does not lend itself to slogans.

Fresh off Henry Luce's "American Century" (aka The Century of Carnage), today's conservatives hunger for continued American dominance:

Axiomatic conservatism can thrive as a species of imperial ideology that justifies the rule of multiple peoples under a single government. As axiomatic conservatives boast, their ideology is open to all—and it can be imposed upon all... 

[For classical conservatives] the natural affection for what one has actually known and enjoyed furnishes conservatism a powerful motivating force. That very affection, however, yields inevitably to grief. However manfully classical conservatives may face the ancient cycle of germ and death, they cannot transcend it. As a child loves the thought of his mother but still craves her actual presence, classical conservatives love their country’s ideals but still yearn to preserve its people, manners, and ways. When the latter are lost, classical conservatives have little but sorrow to offer.

Principled conservatives...love America only as an idea. They see nothing of tragedy in our politics and, through every setback, present always a cheerful face. Axiomatic conservatism yearns to outlast the very nation that made it possible.

Principled conservatism may never fully displace the classical conservatism of Burke and Sumner. Like characters in a gothic horror, principled conservatives are drawn more to the necrotic form of the country than to its living flesh. Their countrymen, by contrast, no matter how often exhorted to a mere noetic assent to propositions, may yet retain at least some affection for the country they have actually known and enjoyed. In the end, it seems doubtful that they will surrender the nation as blithely as principled conservatives demand.

Classical conservatives--as Andrew Sullivan recently wrote about Patrick Deneen--see history as permeated with tragedy, paradox, irony, and unintended consequences; they fear hubris and embrace humility. ¹ On the other hand, what Austin Bramwell calls "principled conservatives" are all triumphant swagger and invincible self-righteousness, utterly confident that they can shape history to their purposes.

To paraphrase a proverb: "Man makes plans and History laughs."

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https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2018/02/what-is-principled-conservatism/

¹ Liberals--to oversimplify--see history as a record of progress, are less cautious when it comes to social and  institutional change, have fewer concerns about government overreach, and worry less about hubris than about inaction in the face of social ills. Conservatives and liberals ought not to be seen as natural enemies but as presenting legitimate and complementary approaches to human affairs; just as an automobile needs both an accelerator and a brake, our politics requires both courage and caution.

 

If At First You Don't Secede...

Today seems like as good a time as any to discuss nullification and secession.  

Writing last July, Kirkpatrick Sale claimed that nullification—individual states choosing to ignore and/or refusing to enforce federal laws—is already taking place. His first example was the reaction to President Trump's withdrawing America from the Paris climate accords: 

What was amazing about watching two dozen states and several hundred cities defy Donald Trump’s decision to take the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreement was that so little was made of it. It represented open defiance of the national government and a commitment to follow the principles of a treaty that our elected leader has specifically rebuked. I don’t know what you’d call it, but it looks a lot like nullification, the principle that any American state can refuse to obey certain chosen government laws and policies.  

Nullification. That’s quite a strong position. Some might even call it treason. 

Sale provided further specifics about this "open defiance of the national government"; but for all that, he was wrong on the underlying issue. States and cities that declare their own climate-change principles and policies have every right to do so; there was, and is, no federal statute prohibiting them from such actions. No federal law is being defied; the Paris climate accords, approved by President Obama but not by Congress, were never legally binding. 

Sale's second example, however, seems actually to support his argument: 

Let’s look at the sanctuary movement, which stands clearly in opposition to U.S. laws and practices and specifically to the Trump administration’s demand that cities cooperate with Immigration and Customs officials or face a cut-off of all federal funds. At the moment there are an estimated 476 counties and cities that have declared that they won’t follow the 1996 law that requires cities to cooperate with ICE — and 50 of them were added to the list after Trump’s January executive order threatened to defund them — plus what the Center for Immigration Studies lists as six states (California, Oregon, North Dakota, New Mexico, Colorado and New York) that declare themselves to be sanctuary states. 

That’s nullification again, and on a massive scale. 

Progressives applaud the stance taken by sanctuary cities, but it seems undeniable that such cities are, de facto if not de jure, nullifying federal laws and refusing federal mandates.* Sale also cites the legalizing of marijuana by various states and localities, an issue which may be somewhat less clear-cut but which still amounts to nullification in the broadest sense of the term. 

For Kirkpatrick Sale, this all came as welcome news; he has been part of the "Second Vermont Republic" secession movement for years. Last year, he urged the rest of the country to follow: 

As a confirmed decentralist and anti-authoritarian, I applaud this whole movement toward what might be called states’ (and cities’) rights, and I would like to see such a movement spread, achieving by de facto secession the right to self-determination and self-government that alone promotes liberty. And for those of you...who may at first denigrate this movement, you might consider what would be the appropriate action if the offshore drilling companies actually decide to start their destructive exploration projects off the sea island coast. I can think of nothing better than the local sheriffs and deputies showing up to carry out the wishes and ordinances of the local cities and towns and refuse the oil giants permission.  

Note how easily Sale goes from approving nullification to justifying secession to promoting the ultimate legal authority of "local sheriffs and deputies". That latter authority, of course, is also promoted by the likes of disgraced ex-sheriff Joe Arpaio and by those in the "Constitutional Sheriffs Movement" who insist (mistakenly) that local sheriffs rather than state or federal agents are the highest authorities in the land. Cliven Bundy and his brood support the Constitutional Sheriffs Movement, which ought to tell you all you need to know about it. 

I'm a believer in localism; I'm a believer in decentralization; I'm a believer in the principle of "subsidiarity," which holds that "[social] matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority. Political decisions should be taken at a local level if possible, rather than by a central authority." ** I have long been sympathetic to Kirkpatrick Sale's vision of a "human scale" society structured around "human scale" social institutions. If there were some way imaginable that the United States might amend its federal constitution to align with the above precepts, or that the nation could peacefully be split into several more governable autonomous regions: I would welcome a discussion. 

But I do not believe such outcomes are presently possible, if ever, and I think it is irresponsible to encourage defiance of federal authority; moreover, it is both irresponsible and dangerous to encourage local sheriffs to do so. I say that knowing full well that our federal government is currently in the hands of an authoritarian, that President Donald Trump may take us into a constitutional crisis any day now, and that our democracy is in peril as I write; but that makes this precisely the wrong time for Kirkpatrick Sale to push his agenda—because if ideas like nullification and secession are ever to be taken seriously, it must be at a time when our political fabric is strong and our nation is united. 

No matter what Donald Trump says tonight, this is not such a time. 

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http://www.vermontindependent.org/the-secession-impulse-is-alive-and-well-in-us-cities-and-states-kirkpatrick-sale/  

* For an example of de jure nullification, see the recent announcement by the State of Idaho that insurers in the state do not need to abide by regulations of the Affordable Care Act, a law which, however despised by some, is still in effect—even in Idaho.    

** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity_(Catholicism) Some advocates of subsidiarity tend to gloss over the stipulation regarding "competent" authority, a caveat through which you could drive a truck or even a popemobile.

It's Broke. Let's Fix It. Please.

I am not a greedy man. All I want for Christmas is the establishment of a bipartisan blue-ribbon commission to take a long, hard look at our dysfunctional government and our dysfunctional electoral system. The commission should include all of our living ex-Presidents, a number of retired legislators, a handful of reputable historians (David Barton need not apply), some leading political scientists (Norm Ornstein? Larry Sabato?) and political theorists; and they should be tasked with recommending changes (some of which, alas, may require amending our Constitution) to how Washington does business—more accurately, to how it doesn't do business. 

What, in particular, should the commission attempt to fix and what should it consider? Here's a (very) partial list: 

• Fix our political campaign system and the role that money plays in it 
• Consider exclusive public financing of federal elections 
• Consider universalizing the franchise (every American adult has a right to vote) and making it more accessible 
• Consider ways to protect our elections from tampering, hacking, and fraud 
• Fix partisan redistricting ("gerrymandering") 
• Fix the Electoral College 
• Fix the abuse of the legislative filibuster and other legislative maneuvers (e.g. "reconciliation")  
• Consider a mandatory retirement age for all federal employees (including judges and members of Congress) 
• Consider changing the current two-year terms for members of the House (three- or four-year terms instead) to cut down on constant campaigning and fundraising 

There are, no doubt, other items to add to this list.¹ But, as the old joke goes (about lawyers), these would be a good start.  

Charlie Pierce has called a constitutional convention "the worst idea in American politics" (along with term limits and a balanced-budget amendment); he is probably correct as to the mischief that might ensue. The commission I am proposing would have no authority; it could only make recommendations (hopefully with unanimity), and it would have to rely on the prestige and reputation of its members for those recommendations to carry any weight. 

Perhaps some reforms could be initially instituted in selected states: "laboratories of democracy" and all that. Perhaps some would require constitutional amendments; perhaps some would so threaten the status quo that they would never be taken seriously. But, if nothing else, a commission could put on record some very specific suggestions for improving our national governance. That way, if Washington's dysfunction were to continue apace, at least no one will be able to say there's nothing we can do to fix the mess. 

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¹ How about random drug-testing for members of Congress? How about replacing presidential debates with "Jeopardy" episodes in which candidates are tested on their knowledge of civics, history, economics, and world affairs? The possibilities are endless.

Breakfast Links

Sharon Begley (at Stat) informs us that the heirs of Dr. Frankenstein are making great progress: 

Human brain organoids — no bigger than a lentil and, until now, existing only in test tubes — pulse with the kind of electrical activity that animates actual brains. They give birth to new neurons, much like full-blown brains. And they develop the six layers of the human cortex, the region responsible for thought, speech, judgment, and other advanced cognitive functions. 

These micro quasi-brains are revolutionizing research on human brain development and diseases from Alzheimer’s to Zika, but the headlong rush to grow the most realistic, most highly developed brain organoids has thrown researchers into uncharted ethical waters. Like virtually all experts in the field, neuroscientist Hongjun Song of the University of Pennsylvania doesn’t “believe an organoid in a dish can think,” he said, “but it’s an issue we need to discuss.” 

Yes, by all means; I think we need to talk. Let's begin by talking about this: 

At a neuroscience meeting, two teams of researchers will report implanting human brain organoids into the brains of lab rats and mice, raising the prospect that the organized, functional human tissue could develop further within a rodent. Separately, another lab has confirmed to STAT that it has connected human brain organoids to blood vessels, the first step toward giving them a blood supply. 

That is necessary if the organoids are to grow bigger, probably the only way they can mimic fully grown brains and show how disorders such as autism, epilepsy, and schizophrenia unfold. But “vascularization” of cerebral organoids also raises such troubling ethical concerns that, previously, the lab paused its efforts to even try it. 

“We are entering totally new ground here,” said Christof Koch, president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. “The science is advancing so rapidly, the ethics can’t keep up.” 

"The ethics can't keep up with the science" might be the perfect epitaph for the modern age; sadly, the science isn't inclined to slow down and wait for ethics to catch up. 

https://www.statnews.com/2017/11/06/human-brain-organoids-ethics/  

Like Laurie Penny ("Our Globalized Jitters"), Zachary Yost (at The American Conservative) observes that we Americans are an anxious lot these days. Unlike Penny, Yost believes that our anxiety stems from the absence of the marvelous harmonizing power of war: 

The root of the current level of insecurity stems from the immense growth of centralized political power over the past century. As political scientist Michael Desch has convincingly argued, two world wars and a nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union, as well as other outside threats to the country, reduced internal dissension and promoted cooperation. This cooperation facilitated the growth and centralization of political power. At the same time, the power of individuals has waned as important sources of security—such as family and civil society—have atrophied. 

If you follow the link to "Michael Desch," you'll find a 2016 article by Stephen Walt titled "The Case Against Peace".  Walt was persuaded, as is Zachary Yost, that (to borrow Chris Hedges' phrase) war is a force that gives us meaning. Absent war and external enemies, goes the argument, we become quarrelsome, insecure, and given to fighting among ourselves. Yost elaborates: 

Americans are largely isolated, detached, and rootless. As the work of sociologists such as Robert Nisbet, Robert Putnam, and Charles Murray has documented, American civil society is in a state of decay. Meaningful participation in civic groups such as community associations, clubs, and religious organizations has declined and been replaced by hedonistic atomized individualism, where freedom is viewed as liberation from all duties and responsibilities. This decline is not limited only to civil society, but has spread to the family as well. Sociologist Carle Zimmerman documented the shift from the domestic family, which he described as the optimum balance between individual independence and the social structure of the family collective, to the atomistic family in which the individual is liberated from all bonds and responsibilities. 

The problem with this line of thought is that America hasn't been at peace in any real sense since 1941: the Cold War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, wars in Iraq, Grenada (!), Panama, Afghanistan, and lord knows where else around the globe (Niger, Somalia, Serbia, etc.). All the "decay" to which Yost refers took place in a society backgrounded by military actions and "outside threats to the country". If all that war hasn't brought us together, maybe it's time we try something else. 

In any case, Yost claims: 

The cumulative effect of these factors is that many Americans find themselves riddled with anxiety about the future. In contrast to the average weak, insecure, and anxious individual, there is the government, an institution which wields immense power and influence in every area of life. Those who control its immense power can do nearly anything, especially to those who are defenseless. Logically, this means that the best way to ensure that this power is not wielded against oneself is to see to it that one’s tribe, in the crudest sense of the term, maintains control of this power, lest some other tribe use its power to oppress you. 

Thomas Hobbes famously advocated for a Leviathan government that would be so powerful that “the war of all against all” would cease. However, as can be seen today, concentrating so much power in the institution of the state incentivizes, rather than prevents, conflict. This conflict is the root of the rising illiberalism we see today in groups such as the alt-right and Antifa. These are fringe groups who cannot achieve their aims through the current political system. If other tribes come to conclude that they will not be able to secure the power of the government to defend themselves from other tribes, they too might begin to abandon the political system in favor of more violent tactics. The result would be a downward spiral of violence and open conflict. 

The irony that Yost chooses to ignore (or at least downplays) is that war--the force that gives us meaning--has been the primary factor in the growth of America's central government; "War," as Randolph Bourne said, "is the health of the state." American conservatives have failed to recognize or to understand this for over fifty years: you cannot coherently promote both a stronger military and a smaller federal government.

Whatever else one thinks of Yost's reasoning, however, it seems inarguable that as government grows in power the stakes are raised both for those who want to wield that power and for those who fear being oppressed by it. Just as "regulatory capture" is an unintended baleful consequence of an effective regulatory regime, uncompromising partisanship and winner-take-all politics—not to mention tribalism and open, violent conflict--may be unintended consequences of the government we have fashioned, albeit with the best of intentions. 

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/americans-we-arent-so-tough-and-it-shows/  

Who's Nudging Whom?

At Vox, Henry Farrell expresses concerns about the political consequences of behavioral economics: 

Richard Thaler, of the University of Chicago, just won the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics for his contribution to behavioral economics — the subfield known for exploring how psychological biases cause people to act in ways that diverge from pure rational self-interest.  

Policymakers are more likely to know him for a different reason. Together with his co-author, Harvard Law’s Cass Sunstein, Thaler is responsible for developing and popularizing the notion of “nudges” as a policy tool. Over the past decade, policymakers around the world have taken up Thaler and Sunstein’s ideas, setting up government nudge units and other programs intended to guide people toward choices that are in their best interests. Nudging has become fashionable. 

"Nudging" is all about designing incentives that will increase the odds that people will make particular choices. As Farrell explains:  

Nudges can be used by both businesses and government to shape the behavior of employees, customers, and citizens. A classic nudge would be when a company automatically enrolls employees in a decent 401(k) plan — but lets them opt out of contributing, if they wish. The non-nudging status quo would require the employees to actively decide to sign up for a retirement plan. Studies have demonstrated that opt-out framing leads to higher enrollment.  

Farrell is concerned that nudging will allow unelected technocrats to manipulate the citizenry: 

The problem...is that government-by-nudging amounts to a kind of technocracy, which assumes that experts will know which choices are in the interests of ordinary people better than those people know themselves. This may be true under some circumstances, but it will not be true all of the time, or even most of the time, if there are no good opportunities for those ordinary people to voice their preferences.  

Nudging, argues Farrell, is too sophisticated, too nuanced, and too cleverly hidden; unlike straightforward laws and regulations, nudging escapes notice and thus escapes objection. People might balk at being ordered outright to do something; but subtle nudges, properly constructed, can accomplish the same thing without raising a fuss.   

Henry Farrell is not the only one to find behavioral economics troubling. Richard Broughel (Real Clear Policy) also voices concerns: 

Behavioral economists such as Dr. Thaler are quick to criticize the assumption that people act rationally. But, ironically, many of these same scholars hold up perfect rationality as an ideal against which real-life human decisions should be judged. Any deviation from perfect rationality, the logic goes, is grounds for government regulation. It would seem to follow that any decision people make could justify regulation...Behavioral rationales have been put forth to justify the regulation of everything from payday loans to sugary drinks and even home appliances...Take, for example, recent regulations setting energy and fuel efficiency standards for appliances and automobiles. Energy usage is certainly a legitimate concern, but according to the federal government’s own analyses, these rules will produce negligible environmental benefits for Americans. They are justified instead primarily because they “correct” the supposed irrationality of U.S. consumers and businesses. 

Broughel suggests that government nudging be done cautiously if it is to be done at all: 

Behavioral economics has made valuable contributions to the social sciences, which is why Richard Thaler’s Nobel is well-earned. But this research also poses dangers, depending on how it is applied. The government should put reasonable limits on the use of behavioral economics to help prevent the abuses that will inevitably occur in the hands of overzealous regulators. 

Farrell and Broughel are not necessarily wrong in their suspicions regarding who nudges whom and for what purposes. Oddly, though, neither of them points out the obvious: long before Richard Thaler "invented" the field of behavioral economics and long before policymakers (like Barack Obama) and their advisers (like Cass Sunstein) became interested in it, merchants and advertisers had already been practicing it on customers.¹ Every ad and every commercial is a "nudge"; every detail of store design and product placement is a "nudge"; the names of products are "nudges," as are the sizes, shapes, and colors of packaging. Every "buy one, get one free" is a nudge, as is every "money back guarantee" and every "limited time only!" 

You don't have to have read Vance Packard's 1957 classic THE HIDDEN PERSUADERS to be aware that Madison Avenue, in league with retailers and with all forms of modern media, manipulates us; you don't have to believe in "subliminal advertising" to understand that all advertising is aimed as much at our subconscious as it is at our conscious, "rational" decision-making processes. Over a hundred years ago, "applied psychologists" (unelected!) like Harlow Gale and Walter Dill Scott were laying the foundation for the use of psychological insights and deliberately manipulative techniques in advertising. Americans have been nudged for a century by marketers and profiteers out to capture their wallets.

All that Richard Thaler and other behavioral economists have done is to correct classical economics' long-standing and fundamentally mistaken assumption that Homo Economicus is a purely rational, calculating creature: he is not, which is why he can be nudged, influenced, manipulated, conned, and fleeced in any number of ways.  Should we worry about our governments taking advantage of Thaler's insights? Yes, we should; but we should also worry about—and do something to curtail—the insatiable for-profit exploitation of our desires, fears, and insecurities that forms the basis of consumer capitalism.   

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https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/10/16/16481836/nudges-thaler-nobel-economics-prize-undemocratic-tool  

http://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2017/10/20/the_dangers_posed_by_behavioral_economics_110394.html

¹ It may be relevant to note that Richard Broughel works for the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, which Wikipedia tells us "is an American non-profit free-market-oriented research, education, and outreach think tank directed by Tyler Cowen. It works with policy experts, lobbyists, and government officials to connect academic learning and real-world practice. Taking its name from the Latin word for "market", the Center advocates free-market approaches to public policy. During the George W. Bush administration's campaign to reduce government regulation, the Wall Street Journal reported, "14 of the 23 rules the White House chose for its "hit list" to eliminate or modify were Mercatus entries...Some critics have noted the center's association with the Koch brothers and its founder, Richard Fink, headed the Koch Industries’ lobbying in Washington as of 2010."

Mr. Broughel's arguments ought not to be dismissed merely because he works for a right-wing think tank with ties to the Koch Brothers; but that fact ought to be kept in mind when evaluating his disapproval of government "nudges" and his contrasting silence regarding the ubiquitous nudges of the "free market".