There’s an important exchange about government spending in Ezra Klein’s long, wonky interview with Hillary Clinton.
Klein notes that the government can currently borrow very cheaply, paying virtually no interest. The US has grave infrastructure needs. Businesses normally borrow in order to invest: they don’t pay for a new factory the same year they open it. So why shouldn’t the feds accept the markets’ offer of “free money?” “Shouldn’t we be doing more deficit spending for infrastructure, for middle-class tax cuts—and worrying less in the near-term about deficits?”
Paul Krugman recently put the same case even more forcefully. “Policy makers should be … accepting the markets’ offer of incredibly cheap financing. … America’s aging infrastructure is legendary. …. So why not borrow money at these low, low rates and do some much-needed repair and renovation?”
Clinton responds to Klein that our infrastructure needs are great, and we should “look for ways to pay for our investments. … But I’m not going to commit myself to [borrowing] … because I think we’ve had a period when the gains have gone to the wealthy. … I think we can pay for what we need to do though raising taxes on the wealthy.”
Klein summarizes her answer: “I’ve not heard you say it that way before. So part of the argument of doing pay-fors in the near term is not just balancing the budget or reducing the deficit but also bringing distributional fairness to the aftermath of the recession.”
If liberals could design and implement a coherent policy, they should borrow now to take advantage of the rock-bottom interest rates, and structure the repayment so that upper-income people bear the costs over time. But Clinton is not in a position to write and implement a multi-year policy all by herself. If she can do anything at all, it will have to be a compromise with Republicans in Congress. Her view is that she can get more infrastructure spending and tax equity by paying for everything right away, with some kind of surplus tax on the rich.
I respect her expertise and don’t have any desire to argue with her about economics, but I wonder: 1) How much revenue can really come from upper-income tax increases next year, given the political balance? Couldn’t we get a lot more money by borrowing? 2) Politically, will voters support a tax-and-spend program, given their extremely low trust in government to create jobs? And 3) Shouldn’t we be challenging the widespread assumption that good government requires never borrowing to make investments?
(See also “why Hillary Clinton appears untrustworthy,” in which I proposed that her failure to argue for infrastructure spending exemplifies a general tendency among technocratic liberals to refuse to say what they believe because they don’t trust the American people to understand or accept their reasons.)
One core question of political theory centers around how much trust we should put in humanity. Theorists tend to interpret that question through their own judgements of which types of people ought to trusted, but the fundamental question remains the essentially the same.
Earlier this week, for example, I compared the work of Walter Lippmann – who had a great distrust of “the people” as a mass entity – with the analysis of James C. Scott, who highlights the awful acts elites can execute if given too much power.
Both differ in their specific fears, but they share a similar conviction that humanity is imperfect and fundementally lacks the capacity to engineer a better society.
Scott is particularly concerned with the danger of believing the opposite: it is not just elites who wreak havoc, but elites who are audacious enough to believe that they do have the capacity to engineer a better world.
Lippmann, too, shares this concern in his own way. It is not only that the people are not up to the task of governing, but that our current political failings can be traced directly to the belief that humanity does have this capacity. Until we recognize the public as the “trampling and the roar of the bewildered herd,” until we put the public “in its place,” our system is doomed to failure.
Lippmann’s argument is often contrasted with that of his contemporary, John Dewey. While Lippmann bemoaned the rule of the people, Dewey encouraged it. To Dewey, the problem wasn’t that the people had too much power, but rather that they had too little. The nominal role of citizenship encouraged people to not fully engage in democracy as a way of living, it undermined the who democratic endeavor.
Dewey was certainly aware of humanity’s imperfections, and he agreed with Lippmann on the general prognosis of civil society, but his remedy was entirely different. Rather than penalize the public for poor political acumen, he argued that the flaw lay in the systems and institutions. Give the people a real voice and real agency in their political lives and they will rise to the challenge. If civil institutions educated citizens to live fully; to see themselves as intricately connected to the whole and to engage with others in collaborative imagination and problem-solving, a Great Community would be realized.
He didn’t aim for some perfect, static utopia – impossible to achieve because needs and contexts are always changing – but Dewey imagined a future in which diverse people could work together as equals to continually grow and improve themselves and the world around them.
As Erin McKenna describes of Dewey’s philosophy, faced with current problems and our imperfect system, “we must try to do something. Old ideas often hang on because we have nothing with which to replace them. Here, imagination must fill in and try on new possibilities and critical intelligence must evaluate how well they work.”
The limiting factor, then, isn’t humanity’s fundamental capacity to achieve a vision, but rather a lack of imagination to conceive those visions.
Roberto Unger takes this vision to extremes. In False Necessity, Unger argues: “People treat a plan as realistic when it approximates what already exists and utopian when it departs from current arrangements. Only proposals that are hardly worth fighting for – reformist tinkering – seem practicable.”
He proposes wild and dramatic changes to current political structures, and argues for creating a branch of government solely tasked with uprooting and reforming and institutions which have become complacent.
Unger fully embraces the capacity of humanity. Our current systems are so broken that we must boldly reimagine them, and we shouldn’t let ourselves be held back by concerns about what seems practical or achievable. We must stage a revolution in which every institution as we know it is wholly reformed.
Implicit in this argument is the assumption that we – or whomever stages the revolution – are capable of designing better systems. It is exactly this sort of brazen social engineering which Scott fears.
Lippmann, Dewey, Unger, and Scott cover a range of political views, but their all of their work circles around this question of humanity’s capacity.
If you assume that people are and always will be flawed, that there are serious limits to any person’s capacity to design good social systems, then you might lean towards the work of Lippmann or Scott – building institutions with a humble sense of your own failings and the failings of those who will govern after you. These systems seek to diffuse power, to protect a people from themselves. But in doing so, they may create the very citizenry the designer’s fear – people who are incapable of governing.
If you have a fundamental faith that some people do have the capacity to govern – whether you put this trust in all human beings or only in certain strata of society – then you may find yourself pulled towards the radical revolutions of Unger or the egalitarian optimism of Dewey. These approaches favor systems which are open to change and reformation; governments which truly empower people to shape the world around them. In doing this, though, you build a system that is vulnerable to corruption or poor judgement, in which serious damage can be done at any point in time by empowering the wrong person or persons.
Listening to an interview with historian Nancy Isenberg, author of the new book White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, I was struck by Isenberg’s reference to the United States as a “democracy of manners” – an idea, she says, which came from an Australian writer.
“We accept huge disparities in wealth while expecting our leaders to cultivate the appearance of not being different,” Isenberg argues. Our democracy is all about manners; success is all in the performance. I highly doubt this is a unique American phenomenon, but in building off Isenberg I will keep this post in the American context.
From Andrew Jackson to the current presumptive Republican nominee, populist candidates have been successful by showing themselves able to play the part of a poor, white American – to eat the right foods, to say the right things with the right mannerisms. These are the candidates you want to have a beer with.
Importantly, the actual background of these candidates is not particularly relevant. Jackson did grow up in rural Appalachia, but more recent populists have come from among the upper tiers of society. But that doesn’t matter; what matters is the act.
Embracing a democracy of manners is a failure of genuine democracy. It encourages citizens divest their civic responsibilities to actors who can merely play the part of representing them.
I haven’t yet had a chance to read Isenberg’s book, but I get the impression this democracy of manners is a core challenge which creates a self-perpetuating cycle along several dimensions. In dismissing the fundamental human value of the white poor, white elites create a class they can scapegoat for all of society’s ills. Obvert racism among white poor allows upper classes to pretend as though racism only exists among the uneducated poor. It creates a class who will protect themselves by tearing down any other groups poised to breach elite power.
And, through the democracy of manners, it creates a class that will continually vote against their own self-interest, supporting candidates who look like them and talk like them, but who ultimately serve elite interests.
