This recent essay by my long time friend, Greg Cusack, also an American historian and former state Representative in Iowa, offers a good historical look at realities that most Americans are no longer aware of—K.W.
In struggling to arise above the inchoate, often content-empty “discussion” that passes today for civil discourse, I have been rethinking the curious reversal, in our history between the positions occupied by today’s “liberals” and “conservatives”.
Please note: By “conservatives” I am referring to people like the principled men and women with whom I once served, folks who voice thoughtful positions, listen carefully to those with whom they disagree, and welcome meaningful compromise. Clearly these are not the same people as the rabble-babble of the far Right that has captured the Republican Party of today. These latter are more properly understood to be radicals and not “conservatives.”
The origins of modern “liberalism” can reasonably be fixed around the beginning of the 19th century, spurred by both the ongoing path of the industrial revolution and the social and political consequences of, and reactions to, the French Revolution of 1779 and its aftermath.
1. Laissez-faire economics
Whatever your political leanings, it might surprise you to learn that laissez-faire economics – such a prominent feature of Republicanism after Reagan – was originally embraced by liberals of a couple of centuries ago as a means of liberating the economy from the “dead hand” or control of the state and of traditional guilds (a development of the Middle Ages) in order that innovation, invention, and entrepreneurial “risk-taking” could lead the way towards greater prosperity (and, of course, enhanced wealth for the risk-takers!).
In fairness to our ideological ancestors – since I consider myself a liberal/progressive – it must be said that they had no idea of, nor experience with, the kind of industrial/financial capitalism that has come to dominate our world when they advanced their then-modern agenda.
Clearly – at least for those who view the world through lens crafted by fact and data – “hands-off” economics has proven to be a disastrous today because it allows funneling of disproportionate wealth to the already rich while largely ignoring the interests of the increasingly marginalized and the ecological needs of the planet. The nation desperately needs appropriate governmental regulation of the economy to ensure a just distributional system to all citizens.
2. Universal suffrage
While most assume that this is a logical consequence of living in a democratic republic, its effects are not uniformly positive.
Remember that our own Founders rejected this idea, not only by limiting voting rights to free, white males who owned property but also by allowing them to directly elect only the members of the House of Representatives. (In the original scheme of the Constitution, the members of the federal Senate were to be selected by the several state legislatures and the president by “electors” identified by state legislatures as those men most likely to choose wisely and block the ascension of anyone unworthy for – or dangerous to – the office.)
For the liberals of the early 19th century, however, what they confronted in Europe was a system of franchise that was extremely limited and that, in effect, gave voting control only to landed aristocrats. In fact, the original push to expand the franchise came from the then-excluded rising ranks of the merchant class (a more accurate term than middle class) who insisted on their right to participate. Within a few decades of the 19th century liberals began to insist that all men (women were still excluded) be given the right to participate.
A similar expansion of the franchise occurred in the United States as gradually all links to property were eliminated and we thought that this expansion would make politics more inclusive, fairer, and wiser.
However, when this expanded franchise was realized it soon became apparent that giving every male the vote was not a guaranteed path to a more liberal republican (as opposed to monarchic) order. As the populations in all countries then was still overwhelmingly rural and peasant/farmer based, liberals discovered to their dismay that this element of the population was more likely to be traditional – and, hence, conservative – than in any sense liberal, let alone radical!
As events of the next 150 years demonstrated, while rural forces could briefly be “radical” in some respects – moving, for instance, to support the overthrow of such despotic regimes as in Tsarist Russia – they always reverted to more traditional positions within a relatively short time. As we now see, this tendency of rural and small town residents appears universal.
Moreover, as repeated studies in the United States over the past 70 years have shown, the average voter even today is abysmally ignorant of all but the most immediate, provocative events. Surveys exploring voter knowledge about, say, the structure of the US government under the Constitution demonstrate the shocking non-knowledge most citizens have, let alone on such questions as how laws are proposed and enacted, the names of their own congressional and state representatives, or in foreign relations.
The idea that the universal franchise would bring a welcome flood of broadened and informed voters to the table has been shown to be illusory. Conclusion: There should be urgent attention given to how to ensure that the most important public questions can find ways to command public attention and, thus, enhance citizen knowledge. The alternative of limiting the franchise only to those “most informed” is filled with demonstrable pitfalls that should prevent us from “going there” at all!
3. Nationalism
This, too, was once a liberal response to perceived fragmented states in which monarchs ruled over parts of “a people” – as was the case in the numerous German states in the early 19th century or over a mix of different “peoples” such as existed in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
This surge towards nationalism resulted in the unification of both Germany and Italy by the middle of the 19th century, something celebrated at the time as a clear “good.
It also led, however, to a sense of inter-national rivalry and a competition as to which nation-state was, or deserved to be, better or on top. Such national rivalries were a major source of both late 19th century European colonial imperialism and the Great War of 1914-1918.
Nationalism is a fairly logical development of the tribal instincts deeply woven into human DNA, and while it can serve as a unifying force by creating or reinforcing a sense of commonality among peoples of diverse origins and beliefs, it can also be severely divisive both between and within states when nationalism devolves into a darker form that insists on distinguishing between those who are the “pure” people and those “others” who are not.
4. Self-determination of ethnic peoples
This was one of the rallying points in Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points which he hoped would frame the guidelines that would govern the establishment of a just and lasting peace following the horrors of World War II. [Although the Germans sued for peace on the basis of the terms contained therein the leaders of France and Great Britain instead imposed a harsh settlement upon Germany intended to forever keep Germany in “second place.” And we all know how well that turned out!]
Again, much like universal franchise, the idea of self-determination appears to be an “obvious” good thing. But, as was quickly demonstrated in the Versailles Treaty and has been a glaring reality ever since, just where to draw the geopolitical lines is an impossible headache, especially as during more recent years self-determination has not only been associated with nationalism but also with tribal identities within nations.
At Versailles, for example, among those pleading for recognition as deserving of independent status because of their ethnicity were the Vietnamese (in the person of Ho Chi Minh, no less). But, since Vietnam at the time was one of the colonies of France – one of the major powers that had prevailed in World War I – this request was ignored. And then, as part of the harsh punishment meted out to Germany, some territories were taken from Germany and given to France even though the majority of the occupants were German.
And there are people within established nations today that could argue from the basis of history and self-determination that they should be allowed to enjoy some degree of relative independence or autonomy from the central government.
As if this were not difficult enough, waves of immigration in recent years – and the anticipated even greater disruptions that global warming will cause by making large portions of our globe uninhabitable in coming years – have added even greater emotion and a sense of urgency to this matter.
Many historians have portrayed the last several hundred years as a period when unified nation-states came to prevail over smaller political units. More recent events, however, raise questions about how enduring this “triumph” may yet prove to be as centrifugal forces within states seem to be growing in power. Is the future likely to see a renewal of the several German and Italian “little states” that existed prior to the 1860s? Will the United States become disunited in fact as it already seems to be in rhetoric and political preference?
5. Tension between individuals and the community, or self-interest vs. that of the common good
While the Founders of this country certainly recognized the pull of individual freedom, both their intellectual heritage of the Enlightenment of the 18th century and their struggle to achieve independence from Great Britain caused them to emphasize striving to attain and preserve the common good as being of the utmost importance.
As is apparent in several sections of The Federalist Papers, they certainly understood and respected both the rights of individuals and the powerful pull of the pursuit of self-interest. But they tried to harness these inherent impulses to the common good through the structure of government they devised and through their emphasis on the primacy of always teaching citizens how to embody republican civic virtue, that is, the understanding of the necessity of always placing the common good above individual self-interest without which, they warned, our new democratic republic could not long survive.
Despite this, the behavior of many Americans from the very beginning challenged such hopes. Part of this is because the integral logic of capitalism is individual advantage and part is because Americans, feeling themselves liberated from the many class and social structures so dominant in Europe felt newly free to pursue “who they were” (even if they would not likely have used such a term in those days).
The idea that the “good of the country” could most likely be achieved through the pursuit of individual self-interest came to be widespread, if more in practice than in theory.
When the Transcendentalists came long beginning in the 1830s, while they too emphasized the importance of the individual, they nonetheless retained the earlier connection between individuals and the larger common good. While, on the one hand, they carried forward the momentum of the scientific and intellectual revolution of the previous couple of centuries in challenging long-held – but largely unquestioned assumptions (including the role and teachings of the Church) – they also believed that the fruits of individual liberation from dogmatic rigidizes would redound to the benefit of the larger society. Thus, their individualism was tied to the organic whole, in a much healthier way (to my mind at least) than was found in the logic of unrestrained capitalism.
For a brief time during and after the Civil War, the idea of the national interest once again achieved primary importance. However – and it is one of the reasons the Reconstruction effort failed – the lures of profit, economic and physical expansion of the country, and the many opportunities thus available for individuals to make a fortune (even if more in myth than fact) served to make the closing decades of the 19th century one of the most ruthless periods of capitalism in US history so far (as our present years are proof of a resurgence of Gilded Age tycoon dominance).
Then, in reaction to the consequences of this self-serving individualism, there were two periods in the last 130 years when the larger common good once again came – however tenuously – to predominate: the Progressive Era of the early 20th century (extinguished by WWI and its immediate aftermath) and the longer period from the Great Depression through most of the 1960s when the common man and woman – as well as the survival of the United States – came to be the focus of public focus and private concern.
However, by the time Reagan had become president, the pendulum was already swinging back to the idolization of individual primacy as realized through untrammeled capitalism. As is still evident today, the idea of any common good is quickly thought by many (most?) to be a threatening idea of socialist/communist origin.
As a much-needed corrective to this line of belief, I recommend to you Cathonomics: How Catholic Tradition Can Create a More Just Society, by Anthony Annett, which correctly – to me, at least – frames how individuals and our behavior fits within the larger context of all of us – i.e., the common good. This book helps remind us that every act of ours is both political and consequential to the rest of us.
In all of this rationalizing over the role of the individual, liberals have waxed, waned, and wobbled! Just like the larger society.
While 19th century, pre-Civil War liberals did celebrate and defend the rights and roles of individuals, they did so within the context of multiple checks upon excess individualism, such as the many ethical and moral codes constantly reinforced by church and synagogue as well as the controls upon individual economic excesses still extent by states and localities.
Liberals were among the earliest to join with others in calling for the abolition of slavery and, much later, for women to achieve equal political rights as well as men. Liberals were also prominent in both the Progressive Movement and the New Deal.
However, beginning with the period of the Vietnam War, liberals once again began to get their feet muddied by complicity in supporting the war effort and, more consequential in the long run, for eventually going along with the “new economics” that led, among other things, to the largely unregulated “globalism” that has wrought such devastation upon working-class citizens and so many once-thriving communities, large and small. These same “neo-liberals” enthusiastically embraced the beginning of our forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
More recently, many liberals have also – quite mistakenly, in my view – gone “overboard” in their celebration of identity groups that have morphed into identity politics. It is important to recognize that this divisive position is not just the purview of the Right alone! In so doing, they have once again forgotten that individuals apart from the whole are not only isolated but powerless in preventing the collapse of the common good.