In today's Washington Post there is the following article: A New Social Contract By Michael Kazin professor of history at Georgetown University and Julian E. Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. They state:
For the first time since 1964, Democrats have a good chance not just to win the White House and a majority in Congress but to enact a sweeping new liberal agenda. Conservative ideas are widely discredited, as is the Republican Party that the right has controlled since Ronald Reagan was elected. The war in Iraq has undermined the conservative case for unilateral military intervention and U.S. omnipotence. Economic insecurity has led Americans to question the rhetoric about "big" government, while President Bush's embrace of new federal programs has undermined GOP promises to cut spending.
That is one way of seeing why we are at this threshold. There are others. Look beyond the break and see what I am getting at.
During the Bush administration the word "conservative" has taken a beating. Does that mean that conservativism itself has been discredited as these authors claim? I think maybe there is more to it all than that. I hope that the framing of the "big" government issue has been rethought, but am also sceptical about that. In fact their statement that Bush has embraced new federal programs could be a reason why "big" government is even less desireable than before. It seems to me that the reframing of our Social Contract reqires some very careful thought in the aftermath of the last seven or so years. It is clear that the Social Contract we are involved in as citizens of this country has to be simultaneously reevaluated with whatever Social Contract exists between each of us and the rest of the world. That is unless you believe it is totally up to national governments to decide that issue for an individual.
Let us examine this notion of "Social Contract" more carefully. We can use some defining ideas from the Wikipidea discussion.
The term social contract describes a broad class of philosophical theories whose subjects are implied agreements by which people form nations and maintain a social order. Such social contract implies that the people give up some rights to a government and/or other authority in order to receive or jointly preserve social order.
Notice that it speaks of the relation between the individual and the nation. Nothing said about world order. Maybe history will tell us that the notions of Social Contract we rely on are outmoded for the age of globalization? The authors we are reviewing seem to think so:
The new agenda focuses on protecting middle-class families from the insecurities of the global economy. In their primary campaigns, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton advocated proposals to help citizens whose economic welfare has been threatened by the rising costs of health care and education, the slide in the housing and stock markets, the challenges of retirement, and global warming.
How does the "global economy" they are speaking about relate to our national economy? Is there any room left to see the nation's economy as separate from the global economy in any way? This is an important question since the nation can make any contract it wants with its people yet such a contract may be useless if the nation is helpless with respect to systematic forces in the global economy. Isn't that the crux of our current problem? We do not control important variables in this system. Long ago wise people understood that we as about 6 % of the world's population controlled a far greater percentage of the world's resources. We had a wage level far above the majority of the rest of the world. How can globalization result in anything but an evening out of these imbalances? And how can that evening out go in any other direction than a loss of control of some significant portion of those resources and a significant lowering of those wages? The authors tell us:
Now, Democrats are grappling with insecurities faced by entire families, that institution conservatives always claim to represent. The past three decades have produced growing economic inequality and a shrinking middle class. Younger Americans no longer expect to enjoy as good a life as their parents did. Wage-earners fear for the future of their jobs and incomes. No family is secure.
This is the reality of a global, nonunion economy that the new agenda attempts to address. But before the reunited Democratic Party can start to make a forceful case to the nation, it will have to address its great weakness. Democrats have not yet been able to equal what was perhaps Franklin Roosevelt's greatest political success: to offer a bold foreign policy to match his domestic ambitions. FDR had an internationalist vision: that the United States should use military force only against clearly defined threats and with the aid of international, democratic institutions. This vision, with some exceptions, defined America's stance in the world until Vietnam.
That debacle destroyed LBJ's presidency, and the question of how America should act in the world has haunted his party ever since. Democrats have no coherent view about foreign policy that differs from that of conservatives. They agree on finding a way out of Iraq and halting nuclear proliferation. But Democrats are vague about how to combat terrorists (and how to evaluate the threat itself), don't have a clear strategy for solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and are fearful of questioning the size and substance of the military budget. This weakness gives John McCain his best chance to delay or defeat a new liberal awakening.
Yet if Democrats find a way to address Americans' insecurities about their economic futures as well as the future security of their nation, they may be able to emulate the only liberal president who ever managed that difficult feat. And for that achievement, FDR became one of the greatest and most beloved leaders in our history.
That's what they have to say. It leaves me wondering why they wrote the article at all. Something crucial is missing. What I do not see is the answer to my original question which I will repeat again because it needs to be answered:
How does the "global economy" they are speaking about relate to our national economy? Is there any room left to see the nation's economy as separate from the global economy in any way? This is an important question since the nation can make any contract it wants with its people yet such a contract may be useless if the nation is helpless with respect to systematic forces in the global economy. Isn't that the crux of our current problem? We do not control important variables in this system.
Now let us get to the nitty-gritty of that question. What has been left out? What needs to be seen as the central link between the individual and the global economy is the faceless entity in the form of the multi-national corporations. Here's where the problem lies! These organizations are not loyal to nations, nor are they loyal to the workers they exploit. They are loyal to stockholders in a very system driven manner. They do what they need to do to compete successfully with other entities just like them. They are not free to honor higher values or loyalties to nations or their employees since doing so will probably make them loose out in that competition. What effect does that have on the Social Contract? How do we try to do what FDR did, for example, in this modern context? We might even go so far as to say that even drastic measures like revolutionary upheaval will not be able to forge a new Social Contract because that revolution is doomed to be subject to global forces it can not control. In fact, if there is any one central reason why the Russian revolution was destined to fail if it did not spread globally it is just that. I'm going to stick my neck way out and say that any attempt to formulate a new Social Contract in isolation is doomed to an even greater failure now. Nationalism is obsolete whether we like it or not. The system will drive us if we can not figure out a way to design it in a workable way in this new context. I think there is a void when it comes to the modern equivalent of
John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau who were the most famous philosophers of contractarianism, which formed the theoretical groundwork of democracy. Although the theory of natural rights influenced the development of classical liberalism, its emphasis on individualism and its rejection of the necessity to subordinate individual liberty to the sovereign will stands in opposition to the general tenets of social contract theory.
The politics of this country still are being framed in this obsolete context. Where are the thinkers who can show us the way? I do not see them.