The one thing I absolutely don't want this journal to become is another echo chamber on the internet: another place where another writer nobody reads responds to articles nobody cares about except policy nerds, and becomes just a secondary leech on a policy wonk who is already a leech on the actual policies. The amount of intelligence wasted in the political sphere on punditry could power another first world country: it's instant gratification is a bad substitute for the patience required for books - reading them and writing them.
If only I had the patience myself....
But I think there's something useful in responding to this particular article, because it shows exactly where I suspect modern liberalism, and particularly my generation of liberals, lost our way. It became more an ideology than a pragmatic response, and little by little its idealism helped set us on the path to today's militant gridlock. It was obviously unwitting, and it was a reaction to the conservatism's shameless powergrabs, but it was an affirmative answer to the cynical rage of places like Fox News, declaring 'no, we can make the world work.' As we grew up in the right wing noise machine which clothed corrupt cynicism by making excessive virtues of personal responsibility and vigilance, we were determined to be earnest, doggedly optimistic about what humans are capable, and believing in responsibility to community over individuals. We were clearly oriented by the mores of our generation. We grew up being lead to believe we were 'boomers squared' in the 'end of history', and when it turned out we weren't, we were determined to find a way to recapture that lost promise.
For those who know who don't know who Ezra Klein is, he is the most important, influential Washington policy intellectual of my generation. In the same way William F. Buckley revolutionized the political right, Ezra Klein revolutionizes the left, and in the same way the right got away from Buckley's genteel patina on militant conservatism in ways that were entirely predictable, the left is getting away from Klein's overoptimism before his revolution is even over, ways that I suspect Klein always knew would happen, and, like Buckley, encouraged to a certain extent.
I was obviously never part of the Ezra Klein crowd. I wouldn't be pontificating on facebook if I was... but I had three or four friends and acquaintances who moved in his circles, and as always in Washington, the electricity of being once removed from 'power' gave a vague thrill to even the paeans among us.
Klein is two years younger than me. When I was in college he had a blog for the two minutes when people took blogs seriously, and was considered something of a 'prodigy of public health policy' (god Washington is weird...) during the period when liberals drew universal healthcare as their line in the sand. Nearly as much as anything an Obama official did, it was Klein's nitty gritty detailing of universal healthcare's benefits that pushed us over the line to Obamacare after 100 years of trying to get universal healthcare. Klein was also connected to what we once referred to as the 'netroots'. I've already half forgotten what 'netroots' are but what's still obvious is 'netroots' set us on the path to 'grassroots left' campaigning which first gave us Barack Obama, and then Bernie Sanders.
In 2014, Klein cashed in on his clout by founding Vox, an online magazine clearly meant to make left ideology respectable. Let's be clear, Vox makes the left respectable by advocating for 'very soft left' policies, much more economically progressive than socialist, realistic in how dovish foreign policy can get, and sympathetic to intersectional theories rather than advocating for them. During a period where nobody wants to be liberal, Vox moves the dial a little to the left and recasts liberalism as progressivism.
In the modern era, it often seems that all these political concepts come back cyclically: liberalism, progressivism, socialism, communism along with their various right wing equivalents. Like liberalism, progressivism used to mean something very different than it now means, but the end effect is roughly the same. 100 years ago, progressivism was adapted from the 19th century traditions of aristocratic Tory conservatism of Benjamin Disraeli and Lord Salisbury. During a period when liberalism meant unregulated economics, it was conservatism which advocated any policies that looked after the poor. By 1900, progressivism meant implementing the best possible government, administered by the most informed experts, with solutions administered on faith that the experts have enough knowledge to implement the best policies on a massive level, even before they've been empirically tested. Then as now, progressivism has a terrible weakness for embracing fashionable ideas before they're empirically tested. Eventually, some progressive ideas prove themselves loathsome.
Along with all its good ideas and ideals, the progressivism of 100 years ago embraced imperialism, eugenics, temperance, and compulsive sterilization. Woodrow Wilson, the 'progressive President', imagined a world where Europe was free to self-determine along the lines of nation states, and in so doing, created a power vacuum that enabled the rise of Hitler and the vast expansion of the Soviet sphere.
In the same way that 1910 progressivism has its roots in the conservatism of British aristocrats, the 2010 progressivism has its roots in the unfinished projects of mid-20th century American liberals: Roosevelt's economic bill of rights and four freedoms, Johnson's Great Society before conservatives tried to gut it. Modern progressivism sees itself as the liberalism which Roosevelt and Johnson strove for - but it forgets the terrible compromises both of them had to make along the way, and how their progressive visions were accompanied by some reactionary ideas modern progressives would find repulsive - the most obvious example is probably their support of bloody right wing dictatorships to maintain stability and prevent war from spreading around the world again (moreso).
Just like the progressivism of 100 years ago, we don't know which ideas progressives have today that will seem risible in 50 years, but I would imagine they're there among the good ones, and I have guesses which are which that I won't mention here.
Liberal ideas where never really ideas, they were the compromised frankenbits assembled from progressivism, moderation, socialism and conservatism, the bits of each proven to work, and synthesized into a government that doesn't really make sense, but works better by far than anything yet tried. For generations, ideologues have accused liberalism of standing for nothing: but that's liberalism's greatest virtue. One day, perhaps after unfathomable tragedy, liberalism will come back, and it will take the best ideas tried since by left, right, center and other, and reassemble them into something that works for the 21st century... or at least lets us survive for a few generations.
But in the old progressivism, with those progressive flaws and origins, it inevitably followed that the they found some common causes with fascism. There is a reason Henry Ford found a home among progressives. And in the same way, the progressivism of today finds common cause with hardcore socialism.
OK... so let's be absolutely, pellucidly clear before we go on: there is no American socialist politician today who can be considered anywhere near as dangerous as the progressive fascists of 100 years ago, but these processes are dynamic and, to a certain extent, you can see where things trend pretty well. Even by Vox's founding in 2014, the dial had moved past where Klein advocated, and while Klein launched himself into New York Times podcast ultrarespectability, the left still embraces the subversion Klein used to represent, and by 2016 took up the banner of Bernie Sanders as their mainstream.
So... well... look at how unpopular Biden's Israel policy is. Look how much protest it engenders in the younger generations, look at how quickly Biden's support went down in the polls, and you see exactly where the generations after Klein and me trend.
Just like Netanyahu and Hamas depend on each other for power, today's American left depends on our right for power too. Obviously, it's 50x less extreme an example, but given the stakes, it's a much more dangerous game. Just like the progressivism of 100 years ago enabled a leftward trend that eventually embraced Lenin and Stalin, the progressivism of today enabled a rightward trend that embraces... well we'll see but we all know that something dreadful may come.
The Hamas attack proved what my generation of Democrats wants to disbelieve with all its hearts: that the world often has no good options, and it's an exercise in misfortune to pretend there are. So often in its history, progressivism refuses to acknowledge that sometimes, you can only move the dial towards good by making evil a little bit less evil. You just have to choose the lesser evil, resign yourself to the nausea, and reign in the hotheads who want to put emphasis on violence rather than violence's effect.
The problem with maintaining this more realistic view of foreign affairs is that it can so easily curdle into its opposite: a lazy form of neoconservatism that grows its own form of idealistic delusions about how well it can maintain its own security so long as you maximize the blood and minimize the due process. One of my heroes, cold war liberal thinker Isaiah Berlin, said the quote realists should have posted on their office walls: "When a man speaks of the need for realism one may be sure that this is always the prelude to some bloody deed." Well, Berlin aligned himself with national defense often enough that he was surely speaking this as a warning to himself as much as to anyone else. The watchers always have to be watched, and realism can just as easily grow high on its own delusions. War is always an option for which one has to be prepared, but peace must always be offered, because if there are no roads or offers to peace, the lack of moral credibility only strengthens the enemy. If Israel won a series of mid-20th century wars, it's partially because Israel was the only belligerent sensible enough to sue for peace. So long as Israel abandons thoughts of peace, it must resign itself to losing wars.
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