Communitarianism at bay

Conor Friedersdorf is a rising young journalist who blogs at The Atlantic online. As far as I can tell, he is a pretty calm dude, not given to ranting or emotional outbursts. In that light, I was taken aback by the following question addressed last month to Obama supporters:

“How would you have reacted in 2008 if any Republican ran promising to do the following?

"(1) Codify indefinite detention into law; (2) draw up a secret kill list of people, including American citizens, to assassinate without due process; (3) proceed with warrantless spying on American citizens; (4) prosecute Bush-era whistle-blowers for violating state secrets; (5) reinterpret the War Powers Resolution such that entering a war of choice without a Congressional declaration is permissible; (6) enter and prosecute such a war; (7) institutionalize naked scanners and intrusive full body pat-downs in major American airports; (8) oversee a planned expansion of TSA so that its agents are already beginning to patrol American highways, train stations, and bus depots; (9) wage an undeclared drone war on numerous Muslim countries that delegates to the CIA the final call about some strikes that put civilians in jeopardy; (10) invoke the state-secrets privilege to dismiss lawsuits brought by civil-liberties organizations on dubious technicalities rather than litigating them on the merits; (11) preside over federal raids on medical marijuana dispensaries; (12) attempt to negotiate an extension of American troops in Iraq beyond 2011 (an effort that thankfully failed); (13) reauthorize the Patriot Act; (14) and select an economic team mostly made up of former and future financial executives from Wall Street firms that played major roles in the financial crisis.”


It seems that whoever you vote for, you get the same policies. As far as I can remember, this problem goes back at least to 1964 when we were told that a vote for Barry Goldwater would lead to an escalation of the Vietnam War, while a vote for Lyndon Johnson would not. Johnson won the election, overwhelmingly--and proceeded to increase the American military commitment in Southeast Asia.

The sense that everything is rigged serves to undercut an article of faith among the Good Government crowd, and that is the precept that an “informed citizenry” is essential to the maintenance of democracy. Such maintenance calls for active participation at various levels--attending meetings, writing letters, buttonholing colleagues--not just voting.

Well, this year I am going to follow a practice that one is not suppose to talk about: I am not going to vote because I can’t see how it will make much of a difference in matters that are important to me.

Historians have shown that the tradition of political activism and responsibility has a distinguished pedigree, going back to the Civic Humanism advocated by Leonardo Bruni and other Florentine thinkers of the early Renaissance. The American Founders were the inheritors of this legacy. More recently it has taken the form of communitarianism, which appeals to a sense of group altruism.

Today, this tradition seems pretty frayed.

A case in point is discontent with serving on juries. Here is a somewhat self-serving defense of this aspect of communitarianism (an involuntary one) by an anonymous lawyer:

"I got to serve on two juries - one civil, one criminal - when I was 21 years old. Loved every second of it. I subsequently became a trial attorney and love talking in front of juries - the smarter and more interested the better. The system is far from perfect. There are problems in presentation, payment and the like, it’s long, and it’s boring. And there are legitimate reasons to avoid it - illness, disability, and child care chief among them. But the reality is that at the end of the day, most people want to avoid it because it’s inconvenient - it disrupts our schedules, it requires some extra time and some extra work. Sort of like voting; something a large number of people like to avoid as well because, well, you know, it doesn't mean anything and it's inconvenient.

"They should be ashamed. Americans live a life of advantage in what has been one of the wealthiest countries in the world. People fight and die and protest for rights such as a jury trial. Yet many look their noses down at the right as if it were a used Kleenex. Give something back to your country, your community. Go. Participate."

Well, we don't have much choice, do we?

The contradictions of liberalism once more

Many find my reservations about modern liberalism appalling. Only a Neanderthal would abandon the last, best hope of humanity, they opine. I tend to locate the (to my mind) disabling contradictions in the contrast between 19th-century laissez-faire liberalism of the John Stuart Mill type and the interventionist trend signaled by the beginning of the triumph of Britain's Labour Party in the election of 1911.

However, Matt Stoller finds more recent origins:

"Modern liberalism is a mixture of two elements. One is a support of Federal power – what came out of the late 1930s, World War II, and the civil rights era where a social safety net and warfare were financed by Wall Street, the Federal Reserve and the RFC, and human rights were enforced by a Federal government, unions, and a cadre of corporate, journalistic and technocratic experts (and cheap oil made the whole system run.) America mobilized militarily for national priorities, be they war-like or social in nature. And two, it originates from the anti-war sentiment of the Vietnam era, with its distrust of centralized authority mobilizing national resources for what were perceived to be immoral priorities. When you throw in the recent financial crisis, the corruption of big finance, the increasing militarization of society, Iraq and Afghanistan, and the collapse of the moral authority of the technocrats, you have a big problem. Liberalism doesn’t really exist much within the Democratic Party so much anymore, but it also has a profound challenge insofar as the rudiments of liberalism going back to the 1930s don’t work.

"This is why Ron Paul can critique the Federal Reserve and American empire, and why liberals have essentially no answer to his ideas, arguing instead over Paul having character defects. Ron Paul’s stance should be seen as a challenge to better create a coherent structural critique of the American political order. It’s quite obvious that there isn’t one coming from the left, otherwise the figure challenging the war on drugs and American empire wouldn’t be in the Republican primary as the libertarian candidate. To get there, liberals must grapple with big finance and war, two topics that are difficult to handle in any but a glib manner that separates us from our actual traditional and problematic affinity for both. War financing has a specific tradition in American culture, but there is no guarantee war financing must continue the way it has. And there’s no reason to assume that centralized power will act in a more just manner these days, that we will see continuity with the historical experience of the New Deal and Civil Rights Era. The liberal alliance with the mechanics of mass mobilizing warfare, which should be pretty obvious when seen in this light, is deep-rooted.

"What we’re seeing on the left is this conflict played out, whether it is big slow centralized unions supporting problematic policies, protest movements that cannot be institutionalized in any useful structure, or a completely hollow liberal intellectual apparatus arguing for increasing the power of corporations through the Federal government to enact their agenda. Now of course, Ron Paul pandered to racists, and there is no doubt that this is a legitimate political issue in the Presidential race. But the intellectual challenge that Ron Paul presents ultimately has nothing to do with him, and everything to do with contradictions within modern liberalism." www.nakedcapitalism.com