(Westfield, MA) Progressives must denounce this statement by Jonathan Gruber in no uncertain terms:

This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. So it’s written to do that.

In terms of risk-rated subsidies, in a law that said health people are gonna pay in — if it made explicit that healthy people are gonna pay in, sick people get money, it would not have passed. Okay — just like the … people — transperen— lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to get anything to pass.

I see partial defenses from the likes of Jonathan Chait, Kevin Drum, and Sarah Kliff, but they won’t do. Calling the American people “stupid” in this context is unjust and deeply damaging. It reflects a subsidiary stream of progressive politics but a real one. When your political movement harbors discreditable views, you must denounce them or you will be associated with them. Michael Kinsley once defined a gaffe as “when a politician tells the truth – some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.” We can’t let this be a gaffe for the whole progressive movement, whatever Dr. Gruber may privately believe.

The Affordable Health Care Act is fine public policy: see the New York Times’ roundup of its positive effects. It could not pass our deeply flawed political system in the face of determined opposition without the kinds of tortured moves Gruber is describing. It is a good thing that it did pass. And it should be more popular than it is.

On the other hand, it is pretty unpopular, and that is because Americans are deeply distrustful of the government as a solution to their problems. Three reasons for their distrust are reasonable: 1) The legislative process is indeed deeply messed up, as Gruber says—but that raises questions about whether government can work for the people. 2) The sheer competence and capacity of the executive branch is questionable, witness the rollout of the ACA. And 3) progressive reformers sometimes harbor arrogant and dismissive views about most Americans. Many do not, but I have personally heard comments about the stupidity of the American voter. I think those sentiments convey to the people they describe, who are then not so keen about handing over money and power.

More broadly, I have argued that the worthy core of conservatism is humility. Actual conservatives honor that principle inconsistently, at best. But it is a valid principle, and the corresponding evil of progressivism is arrogance. I am still a progressive because I believe we can combat arrogance and do some good. But when we see it plainly, we must denounce it.

The post Jonathan Gruber and progressive arrogance appeared first on Peter Levine.

David Brooks makes a point today that is one of my hobby-horses:

[Edmund] Burke is known as the founder of conservatism, but his thought sits oddly these days with the Republican Party and those who call themselves conservative. The party has become much more populist, supporting term limits and political outsiders over those who have been educated by experience. Most call for pretty radical change to the welfare state. It’s the Democrats who fight to preserve the current structures of Social Security, Medicare and food stamps. It’s the Democrats who have been running ads through this election campaign accusing their opponents of being a bunch of wild-eyed radicals. Are Democrats now the conservators of tradition?

I would say: yes. And I would say the same of the European left and even of grassroots movements that view themselves as to the left of the Democratic Party in the US. I’ve argued that America’s most authentic conservative movement is composed of grassroots groups that emphasize community voice, localism, and sustainability. A characteristic leftist stance today is that a given institution (such as the public schools, higher ed, welfare programs, or public employees’ unions) fails to meet criteria of justice, yet we should defend the institution because it’s better than an untested alternative and because we should respect the experience and commitment of the participants (i.e., the teachers, professors, public employees, and their clients). The most ambitious leftist proposals are mostly patches to keep these existing institutions going, not whole new strategies. Therefore, I’ve posited that Edmund Burke would vote Democratic.

To the extent that other people make this argument, it’s often to score a debating point–either to denounce the left for abandoning its radicalism or to tweak conservatives for failing to recognize that their opponents are now more genuinely conservative than they are. For instance, Andrew Sullivan uses the premise that Democrats are conservative to endorse Obama and denounce both neoconservativism and what he calls “progressivism.”* But I intend this point as an analysis, not a polemic. If the left is the true home of conservatism today, that raises some important questions, but it is not necessarily good or bad.

*Sullivan: “As for our time, an attachment to a fixed ideology called conservatism (which is currently suffused with the zeal and passion Montaigne so deeply suspected) or to an ideology called progressivism (which increasingly regards most of its opponents as mere bigots) does not exhaust the possibilities. A disposition for moderation and pragmatism, for the long view over the short-term victory, for maintaining the balance in American life in a polarized time: this remains a live option. You can see how, influenced by this mindset, I have had little difficulty supporting a Democratic president as the most conservative figure, properly speaking, now on the national stage. You can see why I have become so hostile to neoconservatism whose unofficial motto is ‘Toujours l’audace!’”

The post the left has become Burkean appeared first on Peter Levine.

Mitt Romney hurt himself in the 2012 campaign by saying that only 47% of the American people were “makers,” while an outright majority were “takers.” This thesis came from Arthur Brooks and Nicholas Eberstadt. They have argued that people who receive more than they pay into the welfare state will vote to expand it. They have also argued that the proportion of net beneficiaries has risen to become, for the first time, a majority. They see that shift in the political balance as fatal to capitalism. In the age of Ronald Reagan, conservative economic proposals often had a populist and majoritarian ring, but now some leading laissez-faire thinkers are hostile to majoritarian democracy on the grounds that the mass public has lost its commitment to free enterprise.

I don’t know if it has been noted that the current right-wing argument is a mirror-image of the left-wing diagnosis popularized in the late 1950s by John Kenneth Galbraith. The concern then was that a majority had become bourgeois, leaving an outvoted minority in real deprivation. Just as today’s American Enterprise Institute economists dread that voters will kill capitalism, so Galbraith and his social democratic colleagues feared the death of the welfare state at the hands of an affluent majority.

In the Affluent Society, 1958 (40th anniversary edition, p. 235), Galbraith argued that cumulative postwar economic growth had “reduce[d] poverty from the problem of a majority to that of a minority. It ceased to be a general case and became a special case. It is this which put the problem of poverty into its peculiar modern form.”

He explained (pp. 238-9):

With the transition of the very poor from a majority to a comparative minority position, there has been a change in their political position. Any tendency of a politician to identify himself with those of the lowest estate usually brought the reproaches of the well-to-do. Political pandering and demagoguery were naturally suspected. But, for the man so reproached, there was the compensating advantage of alignment with a large majority. Now any politician who speaks for the very poor is speaking for a small and generally inarticulate minority. …

In consequence, a notable feature of efforts to help the very poor is their absence of any great political appeal. Politicians have found it possible to be indifferent where they could not be derisory. And very few have been under a strong compulsion to support these efforts.

The concern for inequality and deprivation had vitality only so long as the many suffered while a few had much. It did not survive as a decisive issue in a time when the many had much even though others had much more. It is our misfortune that when inequality declined, the slate was not left clean. A residual and in some ways rather more hopeless problem remained.

I think Galbraith was right at the time. His argument implied that Reaganite/Thatcherite conservatism would be popular–and its time came. But that doesn’t mean that Romney et al. are completely wrong in their political diagnosis today. Nearly forty years of declining living standards for the median voter and rising economic inequality could shift the balance back in favor of redistribution.

See also “Ulrich Beck v Mitt Romney: makers and takers in the Risk Society” and
“why is oligarchy everywhere? (part 2).”

The post makers and takers, from Galbraith to Romney appeared first on Peter Levine.

Mitt Romney got in trouble by identifying 47% of the population as “takers,” on the basis that they do not pay federal income tax but they receive some kind of government support. Although his formulation of that idea was unpopular, I think it’s quite common to understand the relationship between individuals and society in such a transactional way. It is all about the flow of material resources; one either gives or gets more from the state. It is then natural to see many people as net beneficiaries of the government and to worry about growing “dependency”–if not in the immediate present, then once the Baby Boomers have retired and are drawing federal retirement assistance without paying current taxes.

But that view seems wildly wrong. The problem is not growing dependency but growing exposure to all kinds of risk. People stand increasingly alone in the face of various threats. To understand how that can be, one needs a theory of risk (“bads”) to complement a theory of money and other “goods.” This is where the very influential German sociologist Ulrich Beck is directly relevant.

According to Beck, before and during the industrial revolution, the basic problem was meeting human material needs. Progress meant harnessing nature to produce what people needed, distributing the products fairly (e.g., through taxes and welfare), and not degrading the workers who produced the goods. But production and the control of nature also generated risks–pollution, accidents, surfeits (like obesity), unemployment, and tools that could be turned into weapons. As our productive capacity met and then exceeded our material needs, the problem of scarcity diminished but the problem of manufactured risk grew. The risks became worse–nuclear annihilation, global warming–and the ways that they were distributed became more complex and problematic.

Beck acknowledges that life has always been risky, but he argues that the present is different:

Anyone who set out to discover new countries and continents–like Columbus–certainly accepted ‘risks.’ But these were personal risks, not global dangers like those that arise for all humanity from nuclear fission or the storage of radioactive waste. In that earlier period, the word ‘risk’ had a note of bravery and adventure, not the threat of self-destruction of all life on Earth (Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, Sage, 1992 p. 21).

Beck’s invocation of Columbus raises a serious issue. After all, Columbus’ arrival in the New World led to mass slaughter, slavery, disease, and environmental destruction–not for him but for the people who already lived there. The Amerindian population faced plague, cholera, malaria, smallpox, typhoid, relocation to reducciones, enslavement or forced labor, and the auto-da-fe if they didn’t convert. It is not clear to me that the scale of risk is worse today, nor that the risks brought by smallpox or cultural imperialism involved bravery.

But Beck makes good points about the changing nature of risk and its rising importance relative to dearths:

• Risks in the middle ages or the 19th century “assaulted the nose or the eyes and were thus perceptible to the senses, while the risks of civilization today typically escape perception and are localized in the sphere of physical and chemical formulas (e.g., toxins in the foodstuffs or the nuclear threat)” (p. 21).
• “In the past, the hazards could be traced to an undersupply of hygenic technology. Today they have their basis in industrial overproduction.” The major risks today are caused by modernization, not by nature or human nature.
• Risks are distributed unequally, but it is not always the case that the people who have the least goods or power suffer the most risk. “Risk positions are not class positions” (p. 39). The links between inequality of wealth and inequality of risk are complex, not direct and straightforward. And risk has a different logic from property. For one thing, it can be “contagious” (p. 44). Risks assigned to the poor can spread to the rich.
• Because of the shift to imperceptible risks, the control of knowledge (especially science and technology), is increasingly important, and the control of material resources is becoming less so.

Science is both powerful and problematic. One problem is the appearance of simple objectivity. “Statements on hazards are never reducible to mere statements of fact. As part of their constitution, they contain both a theoretical and a normative component. The findings ‘significant concentrations of lead in children’ or ‘pesticide substances in mothers’ milk’ as such are no more risk positions of civilization than the nitrate concentration in the rivers or the sulfur dioxide content of the air. A causal interpretation must be added …” (p. 27). Whoever decides on the causal interpretation has power.

Because harms can be traced to causes that, in turn, have other causes, we tend to think of “systems” (economies, governments) as the sources of risk. But that way of thinking suppresses responsibility and agency. “Corresponding to the highly differentiated division of labor, there is general complicity, and the complicity is matched by a general lack of responsibility. Everyone is cause and effect, and thus non-cause. The causes dribble away into a general amalgam of agents and conditions, reactions and counter-reactions, which brings social certainty and popularity to the concept of system.”

Indeed, when we attribute causality to something we call a “system”:

one can do something and continue doing it without having to take personal responsibility for it. It is as if one were acting while being personally absent. One acts physically, without acting morally or politically. The generalized other–the system–acts within and through oneself: this is the slave morality of civilization, in which people act personally and socially as if they were subject to a natural fate, the ‘law of gravitation’ of the system. (p. 33)

To come back to Mitt Romney: we may indeed have a problem of irresponsibility, and it does involve blaming “society” for problems that should be attributed to individuals. But irresponsibility doesn’t play out as Romney implied. People are not taking excessive material resources from the state. In fact, the reason that something like 47% of Americans don’t pay federal taxes is that federal taxes have been cut–along with spending. The “takers” are getting very small amounts of support compared to people in other countries and in our own past, and the government provides relatively weak insurance, oversight, and prevention. All this is seen as a natural outgrowth of the laws of markets and technology, not anyone’s fault. The problem of irresponsibility involves the allocation of risk. We are endangering others, both living and not yet born. There are vast inequalities in who creates and suffers risks, although those disparities don’t map neatly onto traditional class distinctions. Overall, people are fearful, and increasingly we face our fears alone.

The post Ulrich Beck v Mitt Romney: makers and takers in the Risk Society appeared first on Peter Levine.