Great discussion. For myself, I've come around to simply believing in liberal democracy, as the empirical achievement of the 20th century (with roots obviously going back further but the form as we know it really came to be in that century). There's also a pretty decent range in terms of what's been specifically tried, within that category, along a number of margins, including the ones you discuss here. Thinkers like Rawls and Hayek and other theorists can be helpful for trying to think about why some aspects of it are good or bad, but not, to my mind, for devising some ideal replacement that's utterly different from it. I've been reading a lot of Kukathas lately and he's wonderful for thinking through these things precisely, though ultimately his "archipelago" bears only passing resemblance to a full fledged liberal democracy.
I agree with you that contemporary "constitutionalists" seem to think that written constitutions are about taking things off of the table of politics, which is ridiculous. Part of this of course is just how impossible it is to amend the Constitution here. In my mind, it's simply a good thing to devise instruments for enabling long term commitments that you can get supermajorities on board with. It's just important not to make the commitment so firm that it takes an impossibly large supermajority to change. Most other countries with written constitutions don't struggle with this like we do, and individual States have changed the constitutions hundreds of times, and replaced them entirely more than once, in the same period that the federal Constitution was amended a couple of dozen times. It can be done. But we'd have to change the ratification process first.
I am struck by how FRAGILE the economic Right seems to think Capitalism is. It is a wonderful wealth-producing, poverty reducing machine that is very delicate and liable to be destroyed by an increase in tax collections from well-off individuals, a minimum wage, a tax on net CO2 emissions, or subsidized purchase of health insurance. Socialism is always just around the corner.
Very good. Any chance you'll get Danielle Allen back on Model Citizen to talk about neo-republicanism? She and Elizabeth Anderson have pretty interesting ideas about social justice-updated republicanism, I think.
How much of American reliance on courts is due to gridlock in legislatures, in turn partly due to the absence of an effective party system before the recent collapse of bipartisanism. If public policy preferences can't be put into effect through legislation it's natural to turn to the other two branches, courts and executive. With disciplined parties, and the end of barriers like the filibuster, legislatures will become more important. If the Republican party were a normal opposition party, that would be a good thing.
This is a great question, John. I'm not sure. But I do know that in my 20-ish years in and around the right, there's been consistent long-term plans to reshape the judiciary and effectively constitutionalize the right's preferences. The dysfunction of congress never comes up as a reason for it. Indeed, the same people pretty consistently argue that gridlock is a good thing, except when the GOP has unified control. The overarching theme is that it's better if the popularly elected branches of government make as little policy as possible while the courts continually reduce the space for permissible legislative policymaking. As for the the left, I think Democrats got carried away by a handful of big judicial victories in the 1960s and 1970s and hope to do it again, but aren't realistic about the extent to which their structural disadvantage in the Senate makes it practically impossible to keep up. If Democrats were as cut-throat about political hardball as Republicans, we'd already have five new states.
I don't think it is necessarily the result of gridlock, but that there is a resort to the courts after recognizing that the normal democratic process won't deliver the outcome. I don't really know what the answer is, but my preference is for a more active Congress.
American reliance on the courts is due to our impossible ratification procedure. The Germans ratify theirs with 2/3rds of each legislative house, and they've managed to do it dozens of times. If we had the same procedure we wouldn't be able to ratify a new amendment _tomorrow_ but we would have done so hundreds of times by now, likely. And that lessens the power of the court because if they interpret the constitutional text in a way that a supermajority dislikes, they can just change the constitutional text.
I wonder if it would reduce societal tensions in the process. John Gray (the political theorist, not the Mars and Venus guy) argued in “Two Faces of Liberalism” that the tendency in the US to resolve highly contested political issues through the courts rather than legislature could lead to serious civil strife and violence, as large sections of the population are divided into “winners and losers” without a stake in the decision-making process.
“First, I had been underestimating the value of democracy”—mea culpa, buddy, mea culpa, you and me and the majority of Americans.... I’m afraid if we fail to save American democracy, most of us won’t understand what we’ve lost until some fairly dire consequences affect them personally. Question: Why are we so often so bad at gauging risk and danger?
I think its fine to do ideal theory as long as you understand that ultimately politics has to be done by grubby pragmatic people and you can't take the politics out of politics.
Paydirt: "The basic Aristotelian observation that human life is inherently political, and that democratic politics in particular is about managing evolving disagreements that never resolve into permanent consensus — that pluralistic liberal political life is an essentially agonistic, contestatory, factional, turn-taking, distributionally high-stakes affair — are points that finally sunk in thanks to the mixed influence Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt and Jeremy Waldron. Once you’ve accepted this, I don’t think it’s possible to be the sort of libertarian I used to be, even if you retain libertarian-ish policy preferences."
So many question you raised in my mind reading this.
Some kind of Aristotelianism motors the anti-liberal (often Catholic) intellectuals from MacIntyre to Dineen; it's as though they think liberalism was a kind of wrong turn in history because it was premised on a false philosophical anthropology--of Hobbesian/Lockean individualism. What I think they fail to see is that what Dineen calls "progressive liberalism" v. "classical" (and what seems to align with Rawls' position in your piece here) is trying to correct for the hyperindividualism of classical liberalism (of which libertarianism would be a descendant) by drawing attention to the social/political dimension of our being. My sense is that Dineen and co. conflate these two forms of liberalism, failing to see what is new, and seek refuge is traditionalism (the endgame of which is Dreher's Benedict Option which, being an option, revels in contradiction in wanting to secede from the liberal order). How do you locate these (conservative?) folks relative to your views here?
You seem to indicate that it's not about one of these ideologies being "right," but recognizing that politics is the necessary and, ultimately, good process of optimally balancing their relative truths (while providing more or less effective hedges against pre-liberal authoritarian traditionalists like Bill Barr from touching public policy). This sounds a lot like a theorist I've been reading lately, Steve McIntosh, whose book is called Developmental Politics. It draws quite a bit on the World Values Survey model I've seen you reference before, as well as Ken Wilber's integral theory; he calls it "post-progressive." Love to hear your views on that if you happen to check it out.
Lastly, I kept thinking of Rorty's Achieving Our Country while reading your essay. He put forth a view of democratic process that sounds similar to yours, coupled with a critique of the ideological problems in progressivism and how that would provoke an authoritarian traditionalist backlash (back in the 90s!). Very much against ideal theory and the idea of reaching some end goal with one ideology victorious. Curious if you're familiar with the text and if it informs your views at all.
Lots of good stuff in here, and I especially appreciate the critique of constitutionalism. I'm curious though -- even as I share your belief in democracy as a fundamental positive principle beyond its utility as a means to an end, and despite its potential to frustrate my preferred political vision, how do you envision incorporating expansion of democracy into actual concrete political programs? Any politics that has a chance of surviving is necessarily very concerned w/ building & maintaining power; the tension is obvious. My personal politics (of a populist socialist bent) are among the best suited imo for incorporating expanded democracy as a core ideal, and even there the urge to compromise this ideal when inconvenient is very real & common.
I get the complaint about ideal theories, but if iterative improvement cycles are the only path, how can large-scale strategic challenges (i.e. ones that require deeper structural change or paradigm shift) be tackled? It seems like a recipe for being stuck at a local maximum, and myopic mediocrity.
Take climate change, as the obvious example. Small forward steps can look negative in the short run - there are situations where it seems you have to go down in order to go up. Is democracy capable of these kinds of moves?
Or do you just need a supervening cycle of revolution on top of democracy, as fundamental to the model for progress? Democracy for small-bore change, and revolutionary disruption when democratic incrementalism runs aground? Democracy+revolution: Is that the full model?
And then: are we due? And what does that imply for your fusion in such a context?
I am also coming to wonder to what extent the Right’s emphasis on “cultural” issues is really just an electoral ploy to better defend economic interests, or whether it has become an end in itself. “Owning the Libs” is worth any amount of structural deficit, restriction economically productive immigration and increased obstacles to trade and investment.
Great discussion. For myself, I've come around to simply believing in liberal democracy, as the empirical achievement of the 20th century (with roots obviously going back further but the form as we know it really came to be in that century). There's also a pretty decent range in terms of what's been specifically tried, within that category, along a number of margins, including the ones you discuss here. Thinkers like Rawls and Hayek and other theorists can be helpful for trying to think about why some aspects of it are good or bad, but not, to my mind, for devising some ideal replacement that's utterly different from it. I've been reading a lot of Kukathas lately and he's wonderful for thinking through these things precisely, though ultimately his "archipelago" bears only passing resemblance to a full fledged liberal democracy.
I agree with you that contemporary "constitutionalists" seem to think that written constitutions are about taking things off of the table of politics, which is ridiculous. Part of this of course is just how impossible it is to amend the Constitution here. In my mind, it's simply a good thing to devise instruments for enabling long term commitments that you can get supermajorities on board with. It's just important not to make the commitment so firm that it takes an impossibly large supermajority to change. Most other countries with written constitutions don't struggle with this like we do, and individual States have changed the constitutions hundreds of times, and replaced them entirely more than once, in the same period that the federal Constitution was amended a couple of dozen times. It can be done. But we'd have to change the ratification process first.
I am struck by how FRAGILE the economic Right seems to think Capitalism is. It is a wonderful wealth-producing, poverty reducing machine that is very delicate and liable to be destroyed by an increase in tax collections from well-off individuals, a minimum wage, a tax on net CO2 emissions, or subsidized purchase of health insurance. Socialism is always just around the corner.
Very good. Any chance you'll get Danielle Allen back on Model Citizen to talk about neo-republicanism? She and Elizabeth Anderson have pretty interesting ideas about social justice-updated republicanism, I think.
It's a great idea. I keep intending to develop some republican ideas soon.
How much of American reliance on courts is due to gridlock in legislatures, in turn partly due to the absence of an effective party system before the recent collapse of bipartisanism. If public policy preferences can't be put into effect through legislation it's natural to turn to the other two branches, courts and executive. With disciplined parties, and the end of barriers like the filibuster, legislatures will become more important. If the Republican party were a normal opposition party, that would be a good thing.
This is a great question, John. I'm not sure. But I do know that in my 20-ish years in and around the right, there's been consistent long-term plans to reshape the judiciary and effectively constitutionalize the right's preferences. The dysfunction of congress never comes up as a reason for it. Indeed, the same people pretty consistently argue that gridlock is a good thing, except when the GOP has unified control. The overarching theme is that it's better if the popularly elected branches of government make as little policy as possible while the courts continually reduce the space for permissible legislative policymaking. As for the the left, I think Democrats got carried away by a handful of big judicial victories in the 1960s and 1970s and hope to do it again, but aren't realistic about the extent to which their structural disadvantage in the Senate makes it practically impossible to keep up. If Democrats were as cut-throat about political hardball as Republicans, we'd already have five new states.
I don't think it is necessarily the result of gridlock, but that there is a resort to the courts after recognizing that the normal democratic process won't deliver the outcome. I don't really know what the answer is, but my preference is for a more active Congress.
American reliance on the courts is due to our impossible ratification procedure. The Germans ratify theirs with 2/3rds of each legislative house, and they've managed to do it dozens of times. If we had the same procedure we wouldn't be able to ratify a new amendment _tomorrow_ but we would have done so hundreds of times by now, likely. And that lessens the power of the court because if they interpret the constitutional text in a way that a supermajority dislikes, they can just change the constitutional text.
I wonder if it would reduce societal tensions in the process. John Gray (the political theorist, not the Mars and Venus guy) argued in “Two Faces of Liberalism” that the tendency in the US to resolve highly contested political issues through the courts rather than legislature could lead to serious civil strife and violence, as large sections of the population are divided into “winners and losers” without a stake in the decision-making process.
“First, I had been underestimating the value of democracy”—mea culpa, buddy, mea culpa, you and me and the majority of Americans.... I’m afraid if we fail to save American democracy, most of us won’t understand what we’ve lost until some fairly dire consequences affect them personally. Question: Why are we so often so bad at gauging risk and danger?
I think its fine to do ideal theory as long as you understand that ultimately politics has to be done by grubby pragmatic people and you can't take the politics out of politics.
Paydirt: "The basic Aristotelian observation that human life is inherently political, and that democratic politics in particular is about managing evolving disagreements that never resolve into permanent consensus — that pluralistic liberal political life is an essentially agonistic, contestatory, factional, turn-taking, distributionally high-stakes affair — are points that finally sunk in thanks to the mixed influence Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt and Jeremy Waldron. Once you’ve accepted this, I don’t think it’s possible to be the sort of libertarian I used to be, even if you retain libertarian-ish policy preferences."
So many question you raised in my mind reading this.
Some kind of Aristotelianism motors the anti-liberal (often Catholic) intellectuals from MacIntyre to Dineen; it's as though they think liberalism was a kind of wrong turn in history because it was premised on a false philosophical anthropology--of Hobbesian/Lockean individualism. What I think they fail to see is that what Dineen calls "progressive liberalism" v. "classical" (and what seems to align with Rawls' position in your piece here) is trying to correct for the hyperindividualism of classical liberalism (of which libertarianism would be a descendant) by drawing attention to the social/political dimension of our being. My sense is that Dineen and co. conflate these two forms of liberalism, failing to see what is new, and seek refuge is traditionalism (the endgame of which is Dreher's Benedict Option which, being an option, revels in contradiction in wanting to secede from the liberal order). How do you locate these (conservative?) folks relative to your views here?
You seem to indicate that it's not about one of these ideologies being "right," but recognizing that politics is the necessary and, ultimately, good process of optimally balancing their relative truths (while providing more or less effective hedges against pre-liberal authoritarian traditionalists like Bill Barr from touching public policy). This sounds a lot like a theorist I've been reading lately, Steve McIntosh, whose book is called Developmental Politics. It draws quite a bit on the World Values Survey model I've seen you reference before, as well as Ken Wilber's integral theory; he calls it "post-progressive." Love to hear your views on that if you happen to check it out.
Lastly, I kept thinking of Rorty's Achieving Our Country while reading your essay. He put forth a view of democratic process that sounds similar to yours, coupled with a critique of the ideological problems in progressivism and how that would provoke an authoritarian traditionalist backlash (back in the 90s!). Very much against ideal theory and the idea of reaching some end goal with one ideology victorious. Curious if you're familiar with the text and if it informs your views at all.
Lots of good stuff in here, and I especially appreciate the critique of constitutionalism. I'm curious though -- even as I share your belief in democracy as a fundamental positive principle beyond its utility as a means to an end, and despite its potential to frustrate my preferred political vision, how do you envision incorporating expansion of democracy into actual concrete political programs? Any politics that has a chance of surviving is necessarily very concerned w/ building & maintaining power; the tension is obvious. My personal politics (of a populist socialist bent) are among the best suited imo for incorporating expanded democracy as a core ideal, and even there the urge to compromise this ideal when inconvenient is very real & common.
I get the complaint about ideal theories, but if iterative improvement cycles are the only path, how can large-scale strategic challenges (i.e. ones that require deeper structural change or paradigm shift) be tackled? It seems like a recipe for being stuck at a local maximum, and myopic mediocrity.
Take climate change, as the obvious example. Small forward steps can look negative in the short run - there are situations where it seems you have to go down in order to go up. Is democracy capable of these kinds of moves?
Or do you just need a supervening cycle of revolution on top of democracy, as fundamental to the model for progress? Democracy for small-bore change, and revolutionary disruption when democratic incrementalism runs aground? Democracy+revolution: Is that the full model?
And then: are we due? And what does that imply for your fusion in such a context?
I am also coming to wonder to what extent the Right’s emphasis on “cultural” issues is really just an electoral ploy to better defend economic interests, or whether it has become an end in itself. “Owning the Libs” is worth any amount of structural deficit, restriction economically productive immigration and increased obstacles to trade and investment.