Only Words: Liberalism, Past and Future (Page 2)

A Tolerable Anarchy is a kinder, gentler book, anxious and wistful where The Future of Liberalism is magisterially self-assured and smugly condescending. Jedediah Purdy, who introduced himself to the world a decade ago with For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today, is preoccupied with "the divorce of civic identity from government": the displacement of public virtue by personal virtue in American political life and language. The delicate, shifting interplay between public and private, individual and community, freedom and obligation, in our political rhetoric is, for Purdy, the best index of the condition of liberalism.

A "tolerable" anarchy was Edmund Burke's bemused but approving description of American freedom in its earliest incarnation. Unlike that hidebound Tory Samuel Johnson, Burke thought the new polity struck a sensible balance between propertied authority and democratic equality. (Many debt-burdened Revolutionary War veterans, like Daniel Shays, came to disagree.) Johnson was scathing about the hypocrisy of slaveowners' insistence on their rights and liberties, but Burke shrewdly saw that slavery was an essential part of the American "sensation of freedom," because it furnished a defining contrast.

In Purdy's telling, the prestige of individualism waxed during America's nineteenth century, notably in the writings of Emerson, Frederick Douglass and Walt Whitman. In their expansive conception, habit and tradition--any impediments to forging and asserting one's uniqueness--were a kind of slavery. But then came the chief watershed in the history of American freedom: mass production. Economic self-sufficiency, the old basis of American individualism, vanished into our heroic past. Dependence on large, impersonal economic arrangements became the rule, as business and the state beat back efforts by Populists and the labor movement to regain a modest autonomy.

Woodrow Wilson, according to Purdy, was the first president to reckon with these momentous changes. Wilson "turned from old images of Americans as self-reliant pioneers and entrepreneurs to a new acknowledgment that personal fate depended on vast and impersonal forces, which could willy-nilly crush or elevate a vulnerable individual." In this new environment, only the national government could tame these forces and enable individual Americans to achieve meaningful freedom. Business again beat back the challenge, stymieing Wilsonian Progressivism. But two decades later, economic collapse called forth similar language from Franklin Roosevelt, who decried our "highly centralized economic system" as "the despot of the twentieth century" and promised that government would help solve the "ever-rising problems of a complex civilization." Governmental support would "not hamper individualism but protect it."

This language of government/citizen partnership persisted for several decades, Purdy claims, until Ronald Reagan's "brilliant recasting" of partnership as paternalism. Reagan simply denied that "complex, impersonal systems" often "outstripped individual will and understanding." The essential conditions of social and economic life had not changed, he insisted; Americans could master them, as always, by "common sense and free choice" if government only got out of the way. This adroit rhetorical reversal set the tone for his successors. Clinton reluctantly and Bush II enthusiastically agreed that government intervention eroded individual autonomy--or, turning Roosevelt on his head, did not protect individualism but hampered it.

This rapid survey does less than justice to Purdy's lovingly nuanced account of American political rhetoric. But perhaps Purdy does American political rhetoric more than justice. They're only words, after all. If you want to know what Reagan really stood for, read William Kleinknecht's The Man Who Sold the World, which traces Reagan's "infusion of commercial values into every sphere of American life." If you want to know where he came from, read Kim Phillips-Fein's Invisible Hands, which shows how a few "business crusaders," inflamed opponents of the New Deal, recruited, tutored and financed the feather-headed film star. To assess Reagan's legacy, pore over his works, not only the words of his first inaugural address, as Purdy does.

In fact, Purdy's near-exclusive focus on language sometimes has the effect--as with his attempt to fit the Iraq War into his story line--of raising serious doubts about his grasp of reality. He writes, for example:

Confident in their humane motives, the president and his more idealistic advisers scarcely considered the inhumane effects their acts might have: the heart, astonishingly, seemed to be enough. Trusting that what seemed clear to them must be equally clear to others, the war's supporters imagined themselves in a concert of freedom-promoting motives with Iraqis, an illusion that took months of growing chaos to unravel. Above all, the architects of the occupation were indifferent to the basic institutions of order, allowing the tasks of government to slip through their fingers. They waited for freedom to arise while squandering its preconditions.

Unlike Wolfe's pedestrian prose style, Purdy's has rhythm and lilt. A graceful style can cover only so many sins, though. His précis of the Iraq War is piffle from beginning to end. The invasion of Iraq was initially portrayed as a response to threats to American security. When these were exposed as nonexistent (indeed, fabricated), a new marketing strategy, "democracy promotion," was devised by the government and eagerly swallowed by a docile intelligentsia. Meanwhile, the occupying forces moved immediately to accomplish the invasion's real goals: construction of permanent bases for future Middle East military interventions, exploitation of Iraq's energy resources and conversion of the country into a wholly unregulated investors' paradise. It was a perfectly plausible, entirely coldblooded imperialist project, though unexpectedly it failed. There were no "humane" or "freedom-promoting" motives, no "idealistic" advisers, no "indifference to the basic institutions of order"--the order they really intended to create.

Liberalism has an honorable past, as Wolfe and Purdy are right to remind us. Its future must be more of the same--much more than either Wolfe or Purdy seems willing to advocate. Liberalism has always stood, at least in theory, for government accountability and citizen participation, for broadly based prosperity and the absence of class hierarchy, for social solidarity and against exploitation, domestic or international. It has always, that is, been proto-socialist. It needs to affirm those values far more explicitly and emphatically, even if the word "socialism"--the victim of history's greatest terminological hijacking--is never heard again.

The problem with socialism--the real kind, not the totalitarian travesty--is, as everyone knows, that it would take too many evenings. The problem with contemporary liberalism is that it takes too few. How many Americans meet regularly with neighbors or co-workers to formulate questions or instructions for their elected representatives or evaluate their performance; to hear experts, activists, or officials criticize or defend government or corporate policy; to share information or discuss strategy with fellow citizens in other neighborhoods or workplaces? A nationwide participatory political culture has been perfectly feasible since radio was invented. With current technology--at least until the Internet is privatized and community cable TV is defunded--it's a piece of cake. Yes, it can be tedious. But if we don't meet before this or that local or national institution breaks down or crisis develops, we'll just wind up having to meet afterward, in far less pleasant circumstances.

Eternal involvement is the price of democracy. Refuse to pay the price and you wind up with the catastrophe of Reagan/Gingrich/Bushism: the world's richest, freest country turned into a decaying, plutocratic, militarized rogue state. Marx warned that our alternatives were socialism or barbarism. Since we've agreed not to use the s-word, let's just say that our alternatives are a democratically energized liberalism or a banana republic.

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