Liberal Principles II: People Are Political Animals

This is Part II of a three part article. Part III will appear here tomorrow. Read Part I here.

Ever since the right launched its campaign to demonize the term, liberals have been worrying about their philosophical principles. When asked during the Democrats' You Tube debate, Hillary Clinton suggested that liberalism fell from grace, because it became the party of "big government." She'd call herself a "Progressive," just like those virtuous old farmers taking on the railroads in 1880. Barack Obama's intellectual pal Cass Sunstein calls the candidate a "visionary minimalist."

Like the centrism that fueled the Clinton years, minimalism is a philosophy for losers. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. Democrats were sure losers in those years, so they were probably well-served by a philosophy for losers. It made a lot of sense for them to do what was necessary simply to survive. But if, in light of the Republicans' festival of self-immolation, Democrats actually elect a President and a robust Democratic majority, surely Democrats can do better than continue their wussy ways. I'm no Bill Galston, and it's always easier to tear others' ideas down than to come up with principles of your own, but just to get the discussion going, here are some thoughts for big principles for liberals.

FIRST PRINCIPLE: People Are Political Animals

In yesterday's post I reported that the metaphysical grounding of the conservative revival was, as founding father Frank Meyer, put it, "politics is based on the individual not the collective." This core principle must rest on some commitment to the primacy of the individual aspects of the human condition -- separate bodies, silent thought, etc. Otherwise it would be completely arbitrary, right? The assumption of individualism has been so heavily promoted in the years of the conservative revival that it has all but obliterated competing metaphysical contentions. Meyer cannily invoked the Marxist-sounding "collective" as the only alternative to the Lockean personhood of the 2001 tax cuts, correctly concluding that people would rather be busting their asses at lousy jobs while watching hedge fund billionaires fly over than living in Stalinist Russia.

Ignoring the siren song of conservative dichotomies, what if neither the individual nor the collective, but, rather, the political is primary? Humans may come in separate bodies, but we also have the capacity for speech and reason. Having these capacities, people can live in communities. So the driving image is not Hobbes' physically and psychologically separate men springing up, as he said, like mushrooms after a rain. It is Aristotle's human, raised in a family, ruling in a family, and then the families joining in a polity for the sake of a good, self-sufficient life. Plato put it another way in the Crito: that the polis nourishes its members to life and is the source of their civic education. So the first liberal principle is that politics is based on the political, not the individual.

Aside from the deafening roar of the conservative resurgence, why should this sound strange? Man did not, in fact, spring up like a mushroom after the rain. Instead, as feminist political thinkers remind us, they are of woman born and would not have survived even to pee into the pond, or whatever that Lockean mix your labor metaphor means, alone. Unassailably, individualism has been a part of American thought since the Lockean beginnings of the Declaration of Independence, and there is a reason that the observer, Alexis de Tocqueville, singled it out so strongly in commenting on America a generation later. But even if individualism is a part of personhood, only decades of ideology have swept all other human characteristics from the field. If progressive politics is to get any traction at all, it cannot accept that a Lockean individualism is the only way that Americans can think about politics. If it is, all American liberalism is just rearranging the deck chairs, as they say.

True, the family metaphor for politics originally invoked an unjust institution, the classical family. Aristotle accepted without question the right of men to rule their families (aristocratically, not tyrannically, the little darling), and that unjust foundation gave all arguments from patriarchy a bad name. So when Hobbes came along to challenge the family metaphor, it felt like liberation. And in many ways, it was. That's why we call it liberalism, more properly, "classical liberalism."

But when classical liberals tossed Aristotle's political animal out with the unjust patriarchal family and the patriarchal monarchy, something crucial was lost. Man was still a political animal. And governance still has to come from somewhere. Indeed, as Hobbes, the consummate realist, saw it, absent other institutions, the strong rule. Secular, democratic governments are the antithesis of the hereditary monarchies. Why have conservatives gotten away with suggesting that anything -- the market, the family, the church, Halliburton - is better than being governed by our own elected governments?

Worse than demonizing the word "liberal," conservatives made the word "politician" into a dirty word and "Washington" a dirty place. The Obama campaign's buy in to the demonizing of conventional politics may put him at the head of the government, but it makes the act of governing almost impossible. As Gary Hart said in the Times last week, "He can focus on winning the election to the exclusion of all else and, like Robert Redford in "The Candidate," ask, "What do we do now?" after it is over. Or he can use his campaign as a platform for designing a new political cycle and achieve a mandate for starting it."

SECOND PRINCIPLE: Political Animals Owe Each Other Political Altruism

The revival of the principle of a communal life got a big boost, when anti-government individualism turned out to be inadequate to the inequality and harrowing working conditions created by the Industrial Revolution. At that point thinkers like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill developed the western secular philosophy we call utilitarianism. In utilitarianism, people are understood not as all different and separate but as similar and equal, capable of feeling pleasure and pain. These understandings give rise to some moral obligation to reduce the pain and maximize the pleasure of other humans and to a kind of egalitarianism. Most social programs, from workers' pensions in the Nineteenth Century to health care after World War II, were the products of this "big government" egalitarianism. As Franklin Roosevelt put it in the speech that presaged the New Deal in 1932, the free market is fine, but we must be sure that one man's meat is not another man's poison. His words of political morality are worth reproducing in full:

"Every man has a right to life; and this means that he has also a right to make a comfortable living. He may by sloth or crime decline to exercise that right; but it may not be denied him. We have no actual famine or death; our industrial and agricultural mechanism can produce enough and to spare. Our government formal and informal, political and economic, owes to every one an avenue to possess himself of a portion of that plenty sufficient for his needs, through his own work."

In modern discourse, Princeton University's Peter Singer has done the most to argue for the morality of a robust redistribution of wealth. As Singer put it recently, the moral claim is that "Other things being equal . . . we should redistribute from the rich to the poor until the marginal welfare loss to the rich equals the marginal welfare gain to the poor." Singer quickly admits to the limits of morality: "But of course, if humans need incentives to make them productive, other things are not equal. So when we plan social policies, we must take account of human nature as it is, not as we might wish it to be."

No one is suggesting we live in Singer's World. Here's the crucial difference: conservatives elevate the inevitable claims of selfish human nature to the level of secular political morality itself. Liberals accept the selfish as a constraint on political morality. We ask: how much, not how little, altruism can the secular, representative, accountable polity require?

When I published an earlier version of this essay at TPMCafe, a consistent theme of the comments was that all philosophical principles be abandoned in favor of the particular. Here's an example from one of the many commenters: "Again, I don't think that liberals prefer the collective over the individual...The difference between conservatives and liberals in this area is a willingness to address problems. Conservatives appear willing to allow problems to continue while liberals are more willing to try to do something about it. It's not that liberals are concerned about the collective, it is that when a problem affects people, they are more likely to at least think about whether the problem should be solved. It has nothing to do with whether the collective is the central political unit or not -- it's just that most problems affect a lot of people."

The commenter -- and he or she is not alone -- misses the crucial change that decades of conservative moralizing has wrought in American politics. The conservative philosophy of moral individualism makes ignoring the "problems that affect a lot of people" the moral course to follow. Regardless of how many people the problems affect, where is the commenter's "solution" to come from if "It's your money?" Public solutions, say in the form of taxation, is no better than theft. And if you think this is all, as David Brooks would say, "airy fairy" philosophy, then why do the Republicans call all government run health care proposals "socialized medicine," as if the magic word "socialism" itself were enough to doom the most appealing scheme? Because redistribution is, to them, immoral. Even if everyone around you is sick, it's your money, remember? A subset of the argument is the transparently fallacious claim that all government solutions are less efficient than private solutions, but smarter people than I have already taken that on.

President Harry Truman suggested, in a campaign speech in 1948, that Republican-voting laborers are ungrateful morons. His 1948 speech gave me a Matter-With-Kansas insatiable longing for the time when an American politician could just call the Republicans "the money changers [in] the temple." But the time is long past when redistributive agendas were automatically accepted as the moral course. Maybe individualism is now so embedded in the culture that nothing can be done. But if liberals have any hope of achieving the many policies that have filled our manifesto since we glimpsed the promised land in 2006, we must hope this is not true and that we can change the assumptions by arguing for our principles.

Here's an argument that tries to hit the area between Singer's idealism and the Republicans' moral abdication. Believing people are political animals, modern American liberals believe in a robust moral obligation to other Americans, as members of a common political community (more about the rest of the world tomorrow). Like Plato's and Aristotle's polities, Americans share a set of political institutions and a political history and tradition, which have, over the centuries, protected our productive enterprises from theft and fraud, and given us a civic education in such values as self-government, tolerance, egalitarianism and self-determination. We share a common culture and a common market. Even with globalization and the internet, Americans are more like each other, on the whole, than we are unlike or like the citizens of other nations. Maybe this Independence Day the Democratic candidate should just deliver FDR's Commonwealth Club speech. There is a clear sense that the kind of possessive individualism he confronted was morally unworthy of America's promise.

When some of us are slaves, say, to jobs we hate, because we cannot live without the health care, we vote like slaves, exactly what the founders correctly feared. In another example, when the common political process fails to protect some citizens' economic security and dignity, they may use it to impose other agendas on polity. Pace Thomas Frank, there's nothing the matter with Kansas. Those family values voters were just trying to make themselves felt somewhere. Maybe they had given up hope that the Democrats could add much to their secular well-being so they voted with their economic masters. So there are reasons for the political community both to require and to bound a robust altruism.

There are other arguments for political altruism. The principle rests on the political understanding that too much inequality leads to civil war. More recently, people have also come to support collective action because there are some goods, like climate control, which cannot be achieved efficiently -- or at all -- without it.

These are additional arguments, but they are not a substitute for moral principles. Remember the losing candidate Dukakis and "it's not about ideology, it's about competence?" Liberalism, like conservatism, is not neutral. Liberalism ultimately rests on a deep idea of what people are like. Like the conservatives' separate, indifferent citizens, liberals' similar, linked citizens provide answers to policy questions embarked on a thin, but common political enterprise. Everyone's talking about the obvious example, health care. But the point is that no one can know what is coming. That's why we need our principles.

Comments

[RepublicanBrain]

Communal societies have been tried before. They tried, and failed, in Russia (collective farms) and China (The Great Leap Forward). The people showed themselves to have little ambition when the government stole their work and redistributed it.

As for what becomes primary, the social could never overcome the individual. We humans are trapped in our own skins. No man, woman, or child can ever experience life through the eyes of another. But this is not evil or wrong. We are each a different man, but that is to be celebrated, not reviled. It creates a diversity that the liberal commune could never obtain. Some instances (like racism) deserve to be shot down, but most differences are benign. Whereas in the liberal commune, it is believed that differences are wrong, and the big government must create a society were all is the same. This, of course, ignores the traditional liberal pet projects, like preferential treatment for women and minorities, but that's for another day.

The problem with the proposed altruism is that it automatically assumes it is altruistic. Health care for those that don't have it is assumed to be good for all, when, oddly enough, most people already have it. Thus the person proposing altruism determines what it is. I could very well state that it would be altruistic to deny all preferential treatment on race and gender because people are discriminated with it on both ends, but the liberal commune would not agree.

[rfshunt]

Communal Societies? Talk about your straw man argument. What's next from you - ranting in defense of your precious bodily fluids?

You guys on the right are perfectly happy to toss aside the rights of the individual when it comes to issues like gay marriage or Habeus Corpus.

What you don't seem to realize is that fascist societies have been tried before and they failed. (See, it's no fun when somebody does it to you)

[RepublicanBrain]

Straw man? How so. That is what Russia and China did, attempt to do things communally. They are the example. And it failed. What do bodily fluids have to do with anything. We are discussing government.

If you are referring to the detention of criminals taken overseas, please recall a few things. They are not US citizens, and therefore, have no protection under our Constitution. Furthermore, they are insurgents, rebels, without a country of their own. This classifies them as illegal combatants, not prisoners or war. Thus, they are not granted protection under the Geneva Conventions. Please forgive me if I refuse to subvert the law. As for gay marriage, that is the purview of the institution officiating the marriage. Not only does separation of church and state prevent the state from ordering the church to do something (separation works in two ways, friend), but a church is essentially a private enterprise. There is no law that states homosexuals can't get married in federal law, but neither is there one that says they can. Thus, that has no say.

The right does not advocate fascism. Fascism promotes unity the same way totalitarians and communists do. That has nothing to do with small government. A better example of fascists would be your radical feminists, like Andrea Dworkin. Who was your leftist.

[goldcoastsailor]

Fascism is always for the collective good, whether it comes from the right or left. Therefore the individual must be allowed maximum freedom, whether it's to have an abortion, carry guns, take drugs, or worship the flying spaghetti monster.

[RI]

We humans do have a "social nervous system" and it"s worth figuring out how to balance the needs of the individual and the larger community.

It"s ridiculous that the conservatives, aided and abetted by the main stream media, have brilliantly spun the myth that they are defending the noble, God-fearing individual against a corrupt government handing out unearned entitlements to cheating welfare mothers. Meanwhile, they have used the government to hand out unearned entitlements to cheating corporate overlords.

It"s also amazing that these "individual defending" so-called conservatives seem to have a lot of interest in controlling individuals" private lives, who can marry whom, what families should be like, etc.

[goldcoastsailor]

As a libertarian, I believe that "hell is other people"(Sartre) and "no good deed goes unpunished"(Oscar Wilde). The believer in the "collective good" is doomed to failure because goodness is time and place sensitive. Thomas Malthus believed that war, famine, and disease were good for the human race in that they kept the population in check. A long view tends to be a conservative view.

[oafishcad]

What a crock. Libertarianism is rationalization for greed and selfishness. An excuse for uncaring and hostile relations between human beings. It works for the few at the expense of the many.

[BigBen]

It seems that the caring societies are always socialist or communist; any reason for this?In the non communist or socialist societies people who care are supposed to give what they own to the poor and not try to change anything. Why is trying to change things bad?

[GrainOSand]

From the article, the following statements get at the crux of what to take away from reading the article:

"As Franklin Roosevelt put it in the speech that presaged the New Deal in 1932, the free market is fine, but we must be sure that one man's meat is not another man's poison.
¦
Singer quickly admits to the limits of morality: "But of course, if humans need incentives to make them productive, other things are not equal. So when we plan social policies, we must take account of human nature as it is, not as we might wish it to be.""


It is known that all while the Conservatives publicly champion family values they are privately rolling in the gutter and funding, frequenting, and building red light districts of base and perverse behavior. It is known that Conservatives bemoan the evils of big government. They want government just big enough for the welfare of cronyism, the bloating of defense spending based on manufactured war and ill-advised global conquests. They grow the government to further fund the welfare of the covert military industrial complex with its no-bid contract Affirmative Action for corporations. The GOP has a collective interest where it concerns protection and maintaining of the good ole" boy networks of corporations, political action committees and think tanks. The GOP engages in a collective effort to reward the few on the backs of the masses, they are the true socialists of distortion and divide.

[GrainOSand]

Thank you Mrs. Hirshman, for the well expressed treatment of this granddaddy of all subjects. The question of "who are we" is the question always under evaluation and pressure, election season or not. If we are just a bunch of individuals who can look to government for only the most basic of services and not the grandest of ideas, then the suggestion is we are not very much at all. If we are in a dog-eat-dog existence with only the veneer of humanity hiding our brutal tendencies, then we are not very much at all. Evolution of a species or a society covers not just the mechanical/technological aspects of the object (e.g., the opposing thumb, the space shuttle) but also the spiritual aspect of life. If we can go to the Mars, yet we are intent on killing anything and everything we find there, what is the point of developing the knowledge, generating the money, and rousing the national pride around the technological accomplishment when we are still crawling on our knuckles and dragging a club socially? Life without principle is hollow and dead life indeed! Most good, enriching, and enduring principles are based on foundations of empathy or love. The principled life is the loving life and the loving life is the liberal life that defines levels of courage, altruism, magnanimity, and most importantly, the quality and worth of individual life lived, in relationship to not only self, but to the collective.

[PATina]

In my comments to Part I... I stated that I questioned being taught that sharing is good.and selfishness is bad. Reading part II... I wonder if we can start teaching that all over again. At least it would be a start to this political alturism you speak of.

Can't wait for Part III

[GrainOSand]

I agree PAT, sharing is a much better platform than stealing or selfishness. I also await the next installment. The series is much desired and appreciated in the public dialogue stream for it broaches that most important question that bears heavily on quality of life and that is the question of, who are we, or what do we stand on or for?

[JohnPaulJones]

I think the individual stills serves his own interest regardless of whether it's self, collective or political. Even altruism is grounded in a self-serving feeling of goodness by doing right for others.

Also, this has to rank as the most intellectually stimulating post to ever occur here. I'm actually surprised they allowed something so heady to be posted here, and by the low number of comments, this seems to be way over the head of most HuffPo readers, which is not surprising.

[GrainOSand]

JPJ:

Your assessment is correct there is selfishness in altruism. Selfishness is not a bad thing when applied to altruism for by the dictates of altruism to look outside of self, it keeps the easily corruptible selfish intention neutralized to the degree the intention is utilized to serve others in order to find gratification for self.

As for your comment on the article, I think many think about what is written within, it is the phenomenon of instantaneous gratification that may keep people away from an exhaustive approach to anything. We want "McThought" not deep, probing, penetrating, assumption upsetting thought. McThought gives us a prepackaged and precooked, allowing us to sound informed and intelligent at business functions, or at dinner parties. Deep thought is uncomfortable, unconcerned with pride, sometimes life altering and sometimes life indicting. Most covet not turmoil but stability and so deep thought that challenges one's sense of self is generally avoided in favor of Thought Light or Surface Thought.

[SonofLiberty1]

When LIberals finally realize that an unborn child is just as human as a child born, then and only then will I start listening to Liberals again.

Until that time, if any, I will remain a moderate.

[GrainOSand]

I have no party affiliation. My view on the abortion question is as follows:

1. Abortion should never be used as a method of birth control.
2. Abortion services should exist within a society as an avenue an expecting mother and father can explore for relieving themselves and the unborn from the heavy and life-affecting cost of unprepared, unplanned, and unwanted pregnancy.
3. The pro-life stance is really one of pro birth because these people generally have hollow answers for life born unwanted and unplanned for. These are the very people who rail against government intervention in situations of family crisis. These are the very people who offer help only through the prism of their own limited perspective and thereby diminish the value of any help offered, the Christian way or bust. The pro-life crowd is very vocal before the birth but mostly absent after. I suggest all pro-life people must have at least one adopted child to be credible and they must treat that child as a full-fledged family member not some stepchild or black sheep.
4. All life is important. The unborn is in fact life -- potential life. Quality of life is found in the details of living. In a system that sees individual life as life on its own, you need a tool to thwart instances of the potential life long suffering of a child born with potential but hampered by birth circumstance of family and society and statistical probability.

[HeevenSteven]

Sorry, but a fertilized egg is a bunch of cells, no more human than my kidney. If you want to believe it get infused with a soul at conception, knock yourself out, but when you legislate that belief, you're usurping my freedom to be without YOUR religion.

[RepublicanBrain]

An entire body is a bunch of cells put together. The difference lies in DNA, which is separate from both mother and father. That makes it a separate entity, and thus the woman has no claim over "her body", since genetics proves it isn't actually hers.

[StephenDedalus82]

Really? Not according to Common Law that goes back 1000 years, which is pretty clear about human agency beginning at birth. Only when the predecessors of Pat Robertson and James Dobson came on the scene in the last half-century did an unborn child gain any legitimacy as a full human. Both standards are perhaps arbitrary, but I say we'd have to have a pretty good reason to defy human tradition, and Jeebus says so isn't a good enough one.

[Henry]

Until Fascist Conservatives (repubs) realize that a woman's body is her own, and decisions concerning it remain her personal business and not the issue of facist dictate, then and only then will I start listening to Conservatives again.
Face it friend, nobody is Pro Abortion as repubs brand it!

[RepublicanBrain]

Sure, a woman's body is a woman's body. She can cut off her own hand if she pleases. May not be the smartest thing to do, but she can do it.

A fetus, embryo, unborn baby, call it what you will, however, is not her body. Your body is determined by genetic makeup (someone else's cells are different from yours) and the unborn, as it carries one half from the mother and one half from the father. Thus, the genetic material is different, and such, is not her body. Thus, she has no say over it's life or death.