Sacrificing Ideology at the Altar of Culture

Michael Drew says:

If Mark’s point is that he is suspicious that in the hackneyed liberal protest against welfare reform, “Welfare reform, sure, but we don’t seem to be reforming corporate welfare!” liberals were only using that concern for corporate welfare as a rhetorical device, well, he’s absolutely right. Liberals, at least in that debate but also generally, cared about declining material well-being for the least well-off in the country first, foremost, and exclusively. It’s absolutely true that in a vacuum, they may very well not have launched a campaign against corporate welfare — they make no claim, after all, to being doctrinaire free-market ideologues. Many liberals, in theory as well as in practice, have no real problem with the idea of a corporatist welfare state in which government props up and assists the major corporations and employers in the country to provide the best material circumstances for the working and middle classes as can be devised through such a scheme. Liberals are in this way precisely not inherently reformers and cerainly not radicals or ideologues. They tend to be pragmatists. In their view, post-war prosperity and the corporate welfare state arose in tandem, and to a large extent, broadly speaking that was a very good thing compared to other possible eventualities. Obviously, things have gotten somewhat off track since then — most liberals would say this is because reforms carried out in the name of “free market” ideology took the form of various assaults on the “welfare” (in the sense of concern for the welfare of the common, and less than common, person) part of the corporate welfare state, without following through to the dismantling of the corporate-state component of that societal arrangement. If libertarians can somehow convince liberals that the solution — materially speaking for the broad welfare of the average person (i.e. not merely according to a theory of justice that libertarians merely claim everyone should assent to) — to that partially-completed fundamental renegotiation of the social contract would be now to complete the dissolution of the corporate-state alliance, then more power to them. I don’t see any reason that liberals in theory, pragmatists that they are, were they truly convinced that that was the materially wise thing to do for their interests, should resist it. That would represent really nothing short of the completion of an economic revolution of epochal magnitude in the history of this country, and again, more power to that ideology. But keep in mind, that project — the dissolution of both the welfare component and the corporate-state components of the corporate welfare state — was never remotely a liberal ideological commitment. They were never ideologically or practically on board with it. They merely had to go along with it when their major achievement — broadly-shared prosperity produced by the corporate welfare state — began to show signs of strain and a powerful new idea took hold in the halls of power and among the swing electorate, and was began to be implemented in pieces.

So if, while that implementation was taking place, liberals raised certain alarms about the prartical consequences of the idea, or were suspicious of the order in which the pieces of it were being implemented (hmm, dismantling human welfare programs now, break-up of corporate-state alliance later…), and did so in the terms of the idea and the promises made for it (“Welfare reform sure, but we don’t seem to be reforming corporate welfare!”), it is at this late date a bit rich in my view, after the seeming failure of the revolution (partial though it was, and however much that incompleteness caused the failure), to find fault with liberals now for failing to exhibit sufficient enthusiasm for the completion of a revolution for which they were never partisans, often opposed furiously, and in rare did cases more than reluctantly went along with to get along.

So no, Mark it’s true. Liberals (at least those who were formed by and acted decisive upon events in Twentieth Century America) are not fundamentally committed breaking the bond between corporations and the (welfare) state. Some progressives, perhaps. Leftist anti-corporate anarchists? Of course! But Liberals? Quite to the contrary. In fact, liberals consciously, deliberately, were largely the ones who oversaw and guided that bond to its most developed state, with their aim being the advancement of human welfare in the American nation. Indeed, at a certain point in the last century believed that as a result had achieved one of the most salutary states of affairs economically and politically that had ever been achieved by any civilization in the history of man: the most wealth — and the most broadly-shared wealth — ever seen in one country. But it did take the alliance of the major institutions of power in the society to make it happen (in the Liberals’ view), and because that arrangement is vulnerable to a critique liberty, and because the laws of nature dictate that which goes up must comes down, and that any superlative state of affairs cannot be sustained indefinitely, the ideological pendulum of history swung. Liberals believe their Great Society could have been sustained technocratically, if at more realistic levels of happiness, for a great deal longer. But the operation of historical-ideological change is not a neutral, mechanistic process, but rather a rough, contingent, contested — political — one, and new agents with new ideas stepped into the space created by the waning of the Liberal moment and took control of it. And here is where those ideas have taken us. Liberals would have been perfectly pleased to be allowed to steer the ship they built as far as it took them, but they were not. From the liberal’s perspective, he sees radicals, reformers, populists, anti-corporatists, progressives, localists, ideologues of all stripes, both continuing the initial line of critique (ie for liberty), as well as those who have changed emphasis (against the enduring corporate-state alliance) as springing equally from (and merely reacting to different aspects of the results of) the original rejection of the corporate welfare state, and merely thinks, “If only…” He wryly smiles at being told that he hasn’t held up his end of the bargain implicit in the observation, “”Welfare reform sure, but we don’t seem to be reforming corporate welfare!” Perhaps by the time he uttered that, he had given up his ideological purity and had adjusted to the political winds, but that was in fact a radical bargain to which he never willingly agreed. But that shouldn’t be surprising because being a liberal committed in principle only to the pragmatic pursuit of human welfare, he was never long in the ideological purity department to begin with. 😉Report