It is easy to point to the forces that obstruct realization of a liberal vision today. Corporate campaign financing, systematic media bias, religious fundamentalism, political corruption, a "vast right-wing conspiracy"--these are some of the usual suspects. It is more difficult to examine the contradictions, biases, and distortions that afflict one's own thinking. Notwithstanding the power of liberalism's opponents, deficiencies within the "liberal paradigm" itself are partly responsible for its decline since the 1960s. These are harder for liberals to understand. Reading Douglas S. Massey's recent book, Return of the "L" Word: A Liberal Vision for the New Century (2005), provides an opportunity to consider the adequacy of contemporary liberal thought.
A professor of Sociology at Princeton University, Massey is a good representative of today's liberals. The word "liberal," he declares, should be "a source of pride rather than an emblem of shame." His effort to develop "a political agenda to serve as a basis for a liberal revival" reflects how many of us think. Liberal Democrats have "ceased to lead," Massey tells us. The Republicans have "a principled, logical, and convincing political program," but Democrats, who lack "clear convictions," have become "followers, weakly appropriating the slogans of Republicans." To bolster his cause, Massey lays out a political agenda, describes the conservative machine that liberals are up against, and suggests how a winning political coalition could be built on the ground.
Massey argues that liberalism should move away from "its obsession with identity politics and political correctness and toward a pragmatic materialism that could explain to ordinary people how, by embracing liberal values, they could improve their own welfare." The preoccupation with collective identity, in his view, has led to a deep contradiction in American politics.
As a result of liberal reforms enacted over the course of the twentieth century, Americans in 1970s were freer, healthier, richer, and more equal than ever before in U.S. history. Yet at the moment of liberalism's seeming zenith, conservatives were successful in turning voters away from the policies that had brought social and economic well-being to an unprecedented number of Americans. Over the next three decades, an increasingly radical conservative movement took control of the Republican party and sent liberals into full ideological retreat.
The main paradox is economic. Since 1975, the wealthiest 20 percent of American households have grown richer, while the incomes of the rest of us have stagnated or declined. In 1970, the top one percent of Americans received 6 percent of all income, but by 1997 this share had grown to 16 percent. More people are working harder today for less money. As tax payments have grown more regressive, real earnings have declined. Massey ably summarizes these trends. The mystery, though, is why so many Americans have supported the leaders whose policies produced this widening gap in wealth and income. Massey's explanation boils down to this: Liberal Democrats have ignored voters' real, material interests, while alienating them on cultural issues.
Much of the problem stems from the very success of the civil rights movement. Liberals succeeded at dismantling the formal legal institutions of segregation in the South in the 1960s, but when they sought to address deeper cultural and economic issues in the North as well as the South, they encountered formidable resistance to racial integration. As Massey sees it, this new phase of the civil rights struggle heightened the class divisions between liberal elites and more socially conservative (i.e., racist) members of the working class. "In the end, liberal elites failed to appreciate the sacrifices being asked of middle- and working-class Americans to remedy the nation's sorry legacy of racial inequality," he tells us; "and rather than reaching a political accommodation to offset the real costs with concrete benefits, they sought to use executive and judicial power to force change upon an apprehensive and fearful public while decrying all opponents as narrow-minded bigots." Liberals alienated voters by accusing them of "racism, sexism, homophobia, social conservativism, and perhaps worse, stupidly in not recognizing their own material interests." The real effect of this was to stimulate irrational resistance to liberalism on the part of the working class. "The public shaming and humiliation of people for holding `politically incorrect' views only foments reactional anger and deepens resistance to progressive change, allowing people's emotional reactions to override their rational economic calculations."
Massey mentions, though he does not emphasize, the direct political repercussions of the civil rights reforms. Regardless of struggle for school and housing integration in the North, the success of the civil rights movement in the South provoked Southern Democrats to defect to the Republican party. Massey also calls attention to ways that liberal elites failed to respond to the economic interests of the majority of voters. He points out, for example, that many Americans were pushed into higher tax brackets during the inflationary period of the 1970s, and this stimulated a middle-class tax revolt. Badly conceived liberal urban renewal programs destroyed many viable ethnic working-class neighborhoods, and the Vietnam War was fought mainly by working-class recruits, who were unable to avoid the draft by going to college. But the main thrust of Massey's criticism is directed against liberals who failed to respect the values and interests of ordinary, working-class voters. For example, Massey describes how in the 1972 presidential election, "youthful activists took control of the Democratic party and managed to communicate quite clearly the contempt they felt for the patriotism, faith, and social conservativism of the white working class, whom they derided as `hard hats,' `red necks,' and `racists.' Faced with such overt contempt, Northern ethnic voters and Southern whites deserted the Democratic party in droves to produce a landslide for the Republicans."
It is interesting to observe that Massey accepts one of the principal contentions of the neo-conservative movement--that liberalism is a movement of cultural, economic, and intellectual elites. Whether or not this is true today, it was certainly not true in the era of Lyndon Johnson, much less F.D.R, which raises the question of how elites came to dominate the Democratic party in the first place. But I want to examine a different problem here. For Massey's remedy is to build a platform addressing voters' material interests. Although culture is part of the problem, evidently it is not part of the solution. Here is how Massey summarizes his agenda for liberalism:
I want people not to shrink and dissemble but to answer back firmly: "Damn right I'm a liberal and this is what I stand for. I believe that government should invest in people by seeing to their health and education, for people are the ultimate resources in society. I believe that markets are not states of nature, but human inventions with imperfections and fallibilities, and that government must work to ensure they function for the good of the many rather than the benefit of the few. I believe it is the obligation of government to make sure that needed markets exist, that competition within them is fair, that transactions are apparent, and that competition is accessible to everyone. I believe that because markets are fallible, and that they can and do break down from time to time, government must create public institutions to protect people from periodic market failures, Finally, I believe that government must ensure equal civil, legal, and political rights for all citizens regardless of background."
With the exception of the last sentence about rights, the rest of this statement concerns "resources," "markets," and "transactions." Elsewhere Massey spends a good deal of time discussing economic sociology, which basically argues that markets are social institutions created and maintained by law and the state, and that there is no such thing as a "free market" properly speaking. Thus, it is not a question of whether or not to regulate the market, but what kind of regulation, or what kind of market, we should have. Massey also discusses problems of economic globalization, free trade regimes, and international competition. His discussion of these topics is clear, and positions on such issues certainly must be a part of any liberal political agenda. Yet, when he calls for "a liberal program of government that will work in the best interests of citizens who inhabit postindustrial societies, where wealth is generated through the creation and application of knowledge and the manipulation and control of information within globalizing factor markets," I cannot help but feel that Massey is trapped in an old paradigm--one that New Left activists would have recognized at once. "In a liberal political regime," Massey writes, "the ultimate goal of government should be to maximize human capabilities, for human beings inevitably constitute the ultimate resource for progress. It is they who develop knowledge, devise new forms of social organization, and creatively combine existing stocks of land, labor, and capital to ensure the expansion of markets that are capable of ensuring steady material improvement and of broadening access to wealth and income."
People do have material needs, and it is essential to provide voters with good jobs and a nice quality of life. But do we really want to regard them as "economic resources?" Does everything ultimately come down to work, labor, production, consumption, investment, savings, commerce, and finance? Perhaps Massey is correct to say that liberal elites have disaffected the working class by pushing alien cultural values on them, but another interpretation is possible. Maybe even working-class voters--not just affluent people--don't really care all that much about material goods, once their basic needs are met. According to some survey research, after the most basic material conditions are satisfied, more consumer goods don't really make all that much difference to how happy people report themselves as being. Could it be that Massey's program is exactly the wrong thing to advocate? Liberals have been emphasizing material needs since the New Deal, and their economic reforms have helped to create the "affluent society" Galbraith described forty years ago. But the New Left seriously questioned the materialism of life in post-War America, expressing "existential" concerns that found their way into religious, self-help, and personal transformation movements in the 1970s. Perhaps these were alien (European?) values, but the popular evangelical movements that fuel the Republican party are no less culturally oriented. Have the Republicans succeeded because, unlike the Democrats, they recognize the importance of ethical and spiritual values in politics?
The question of Materialism becomes especially important when one consider the impending environmental holocaust. We are entering a period the next fifty years when population growth, industrialization, and climatic instability will have unthinkable ecological and humanitarian consequences. At such a time, when Americans need to be drastically reducing their consumption of energy and natural resources, do we liberals really want to be advocating policies to promote economic growth and consumer affluence? Or should we be advocating ethical and spiritual values which transcend the materialism of the last fifty years? I will not say that Massey is wrong to argue that liberals can benefit from appealing to voters' economic interests. I only want to suggest that, despite constant pressure from corporate advertising and the mass media, even "working-class" voters--and nearly all of us are wage-earners in fact--are already coming to place ethical values above material interests. And adapting to a sustainable, post-industrial society will demand not only economic policies but also reforms in ethical conduct.