Values Meal Posted by David Shorr

As the United States works to regain other nations' trust, it has to convincingly draw connections between American aims and the international common good and combat perceptions of completely self-serving policies. Key to this framework is the notion that the ideals of liberty are indeed universal rather than American or Western. In his speeches at the Millennium Development Goals summit and the annual opening of the UN General Assembly, President Obama addressed the question at some length.

In fact, the president devoted nearly half of his General Assembly speech to this theme. His presentation of the case took 19 paragraphs mainly because he approached it from so many different angles and in so many aspects. And that panoply itself underscored a key point: that progress is achieved, and measured, in many ways.

As I said last year, each country will pursue a path rooted in the culture of its people. Yet experience shows us that history is on the side of liberty - that the strongest foundation for human progress lies in open economies, open societies, and open governments. To put it simply: democracy, more than any other form of government, delivers for our citizens.

The speech emphasized the connections between economic and social rights and civil and political rights -- which have often been counterposed against each other. The common thread is the impact on ordinary people and the need to both empower them politically and ensure decent living standards and rewards for hard work. Woven into the argument were the issues of access to markets (e.g. for African food exports), the bureaucracy and corruption that stifles enterprise, the need to let women and girls play full roles, the freedom to protest and use the internet without censorship, and the will of the people as the only true source of political authority.

Whenever I encounter these issues, I am always mindful of persistent domestic political rancor that surrounds them. These should be near-universal values within our own political culture, especially when painted as this kind of full picture. Yet I am continually frustrated by the way that the case for liberal ideals -- i.e. the test for who is truly faithful to our values -- so often gets collapsed down to whether you're backing the good guys and confronting the bad guys, regardless of other interests, realities, or considerations. For everything we've supposedly learned about the value of institution-building or accountability measures short of free elections, the discourse on upholding American ideals internationally still gets treated as a test of ideological purity. I'll be taking part in a sort-of debate on this topic next Monday; perhaps I'll have further thoughts after that.

Comments

[Dan Kervick]

1948 was an interesting year. Among other things, it was the anniversary of the turbulent and momentous European revolutions of 1848. I was reading recently about the French experience during that latter period, when many French struggled to form what they called a “social republic”. The movement had enduring power, since French constitution still proclaims France to be “an indivisible, secular, democratic and social Republic.” In the events of 1848, and in the reaffirmation of those social and democratic ideals in the reconstruction of the contemporary French republic, the French appealed to their own famous troika of universal values: liberty, equality and fraternity.

Which of those ideals, proclaimed universal by the French, are embraced also by the American tradition?

Sadly perhaps, fraternity plays no prominent role at all in official and elite American political thought, although it has surely been a motivating ideal for various American political communities and movements throughout our history.

How about equality? Certainly, America is officially and traditionally committed to the idea that people are born equal. There is also a strong commitment to the idea that Americans all possess equal rights, and are equal before the law. We sometimes also hear comforting latter day strains of an aspiration toward “equality of opportunity”, a vacillating modern piety that has so far produced a few tootable successes, but has proved lame and abjectly ineffective in encompassing a social outcome even remotely commensurate with its own terms of appraisal.

But what about a stronger egalitarian commitment, one to something approaching equality of outcome or condition? The gateway keepers of the ideological flames are unequivocally hostile to this standard. But there is a good argument to be made that an aspiration toward equality of condition is inherent in the very idea of a commitment to a vibrant democracy – and democracy is surely something to which many Americans, even those who dictate American social and ideological norms, claim to be committed. A democracy is a self-governing community of equals, a system in which all of the people participate as equals in the work of government, and in which no woman or man has a greater voice than others in the deliberative processes of government. But no real democracy can exist where there are vast inequalities of material condition.

Power follows wealth. Wealth consists in the objects of human desire, as evidenced by the fact that it is measured by what people are willing to exchange for these objects in order to obtain them. And so the possession of wealth is the possession of the objects of human desire. To the degree one possesses wealth, to the same degree one possesses the means of influencing others on the basis of their desires. And that means the possession of wealth is the possession of power. Substantial inequality of power is incompatible with democracy, and thus substantial inequality of wealth is incompatible with democracy as well.

The American political tradition extols liberty, but also used to understand the corruptibility of man, the fragility of harmonious social order, the dangers of unbalanced power and the destructive potential of the unchecked individual will. Our liberty is properly constrained by a rule of law that preserves a social order without which liberty is worthless, and so our liberty to exchange and acquire must also be checked and constrained by institutional and moral blocks on the natural tendencies toward inequality, social imbalance and anti-democratic stratification into castes and classes. Liberty within the scope of a democratic order gives us the true freedom to thrive as individuals as we achieve and preserve those great things which can only come about from cooperative people working energetically together to build a common life. Liberty without the check of vigorous, constitutionally protected, ideologically committed and institutionally entrenched democracy is merely license to exploit, subjugate, and dominate. To promote, as some Americans and American politicians do, a system in which each man has equal liberty to make himself a master of many other men, and in which some men are permitted to exercise that kind of liberty and actually acquire such mastery, is to promote a sham temporary liberty which exists only to subvert itself, and to become in short order the possession of only the few.

There was once a vibrant and ascendant left liberal tradition in the United States which was composed of equal and the best parts of the classical liberal tradition and traditions of democratic socialism. This tradition still exists in many prosperous and developed parts of the world as social democracy. But this same tradition was gradually defeated in the US by attacks from the right and the wealthy, persecuted halfway out of existence by the postwar ideological purges culminating in McCarthyism, and killed off almost completely by the Reagan revolution. The long four-decade revolution left us with only a classical, laissez faire liberalism, with no socializing, leveling and democratizing component, and an American descent into incivility and barbarism. The modern Democrat who succeeds in ascending to high levels of government is now farther to the right on economic policy matters than the typical Republican of earlier decades. The false liberty of classical liberalism, American-style, is in fact a license to destroy democracy, destroy social solidarity, destroy the equal protection of the laws, destroy the conditions of a healthy and balanced life, and enslave the insecure and manipulated many to the pleasures of the few.

Modern American liberty – the deranged and self-destructive form of liberty as the unfettered license to contract and exchange which has dominated during this right-revolutionary period – is a fraud and cheat. It has brought Americans violence, uncanny levels of crime and imprisonment, individual isolation and insecurity, loneliness, the dissolution of families, the objectification of personal relationships, the fear and degradation of the natural world and the ugly and shallow commercialization of virtually every kind of interaction with the world external to the individual. Most of the world has turned its back on this radical American extremism, and sensibly continues to turn its back on it. In most other places, the commitment to the community and preservation of a decent, harmonious and livable society take precedence over the greedy individual lust to dominate which is the core of the American romance of individual power and conquest.

Some have argued that the contemporary American commitment to unfettered liberty actually preserves and builds society through the almost supernatural magic of the invisible hand. But given the kinds of decline we are seeing in virtually every aspect of our common social life in this country, it is increasingly hard to sustain this superstition. In any case, the contemporary classical liberal – the libertarian champion of anarchic individual sovereignty, hatred of government and love of personal satisfaction under the banner of human “rights” – doesn’t argue for liberty as a boon to the social order, but seems to be of the opinion that his “rights” are so absolute and sacred that they must prevail over government, even if that destroys society. The radical American individualist is a fanatic who carries out a vengeful permanent rebellion of the alienated individual against order, against the community, against government, against cooperation and against his fellow-citizens. He is a paranoid nut, constantly fretting about being absorbed into the collective, transformed into one of the pod people or being yoked to the herd. It is hard to see these people even as citizens any longer, as hostile as they are to social and republican ideals, as committed as they are to self-interest alone, and as averse as they are to being governed in a fair democratic manner by their fellow-citizens. They are outlaws, and have elevated a kind of outlaw rebellion and obstreperous adolescent uncooperativeness to the status of official national ideology.

American social and intellectual elites are as a group not much interested in equality, perhaps because equality does not benefit them. When they lecture the world, they lecture them on liberty alone. They are interested in liberty alone, because the poorly checked liberty they love gives them the tool they need to preserve their privileges, and extend their domination over others. But like the feudal lords of old, they and their priests lecture the serf on the latter’s inadequate commitment to the ancestral and filial ideals underpinning the very unequal established order.

If America no longer prevails as a moral force in the world, don't blame Americans for insufficient cheerleading on behalf of the established American religion. Blame the established American religion, because to much of that world it looks like the American Way is producing a social failure. If we want our ideas to do better abroad, we need to change a good number of our ideas.

[David Shorr]

I agree with a lot of this critique. Those elements of the Washington Consensus that extolled draconian constriction of the public sector were discredited by Argentina's economic difficulties, and the American model of financial markets would be laughable if it weren't so tragic. And yes, the consequences of stark income inequality should be the lesson of the moment; prosperity does not trickle down. My own political journey has led me to become a latter-day populist (thank you, Paul Krugman and Jacob Hacker).

So then why do I still believe America has anything valid to offer as an exporter of ideals? Because many of the issues the US is pushing -- higher levels of educational attainment, functioning public health clinics, accountability and anti-corruption, political pluralism, broad-based growth -- would make a positive difference for people in other countries.

The root disagreement between you and me usually comes back to the same question. I still believe the US has a lot to offer and can be a force for good internationally. You, to put it mildly, are deeply skeptical.

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David, I don't know how one exports ideals. People will ultimately imitate ways of life that look successful and attractive to them, and they won't imitate ways of life that look unattractive and failed. If American ways of life can benefit other people, then they will imitate those ways of life. For now, can't we just export the products we make that other people want to buy, and leave the ideals to take care of themselves?

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Using the Walter Russell Mead typology, that is the Jeffersonian approach, with a smattering of Hamiltonian on trade. I understand the viewpoint, but am inclined to be a bit more active than this kind of passivity. Recognizing what a muck we've made of things in so many places, I do believe it's within America's capability to support the spread of democracy / accountability / good governance without all the disruption and unintended consequences.

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