The Problem with Privilege

I had been thinking of writing this post for a while, but I had kind of lost momentum and figured I wasn't ever going to get around to it. Then I saw this tweet:

BLM is just as peaceful as the #WomensMarch — only difference is cops aren't as willing to jump white women. Acknowledge privilege

— Amy Dentata (@AmyDentata) January 22, 2017

Here's the thing about this tweet, which is responding to the astonishing fact that at the Women's Marches yesterday, which featured four or as many as five million people protesting Donald Trump all across the country (and the world), there was absolutely zero violence, and there appear to have been zero arrests. The first sentence is absolutely true! It's true in every dimension, and it's important.

So why do the last two words rub me the wrong way so much?

I think it's because the word "privilege," as it has come to be used, carries with it a connotation of wrongfulness. But in this case it is obvious that the "privilege" enjoyed by the "white women" (who were, of course, only part of the crowds at these protests) of not being "jumped" by the police while protesting peacefully is entirely rightful. It is a privilege against wrongful treatment, one which we should all by rights enjoy. The correct remedy is not to abolish the privilege but to extend it universally; in a good world, peaceful BLM protesters wouldn't get arrested either. (Of course in a good world BLM wouldn't have to exist, but you get the point.)

This is, I think, a general fact about a whole lot of kinds of "privilege." The way privileged people are treated is the way people ought to be treated, period. A video will surface of a white man brandishing a gun at the police and being carefully subdued without a shot's being fired. We all know that this is an example of "white privilege," and it really is! A black man behaving similarly would have been dead within seconds. But the problem here is not with how the privileged white guy is being treated, it's with how the oppressed black men—and boys, and women and girls—are treated. Those of us who are privileged are, in most cases, simply being treated the way we deserve. We should all be so privileged; the horror is that so many are not.

And I'm speculating here, but I suspect this has something to do with the cocktail of grievances and resentments that fueled Donald Trump's support. Because very often, privilege does not really benefit the privileged; oppression does not really benefit the oppressor. Sometimes it does, of course. White supremacy and white privilege are among other things concerned with the distribution of scarce material resources, and the more those resources are plundered from black people the more plunder there is for white people to enjoy. Affirmative action in college admissions, for instance, has this zero-sum dynamic.* But potentially-fatal police encounters are not zero-sum. The police really could treat everyone they meet and have occasion to consider shooting the way they treat white people in that position, and doing so would benefit a whole lot of black people without taking anything from white people to do it. Oppression in these contexts is, in other words, negative-sum. It may even be, like, a bizarro version of Pareto efficient, making some people worse off and no one better off.

And so I suspect that this is part of why it rubs some people so much the wrong way to be constantly told how privileged they are. Because after all, doesn't that make it sound like they lead lives free of woe and strife? They are, after all, privileged! But of course that's not true at all. In so many cases their privilege does nothing real to benefit them, not against the baseline of rightful treatment, of what should happen. And they may have other troubles; they may even partake of other forms of oppression, e.g. along class lines. They feel in other words that their lives are hard, and are no less hard than they should be because they are write. And they're right! White men may be playing the game of life on the "easy" level of difficulty, but there's nothing really wrong with that in most cases. We liberals, who have fought for centuries to make the world a better place, are huge fans of the "easy" mode. We created it, and it is our mission to extend its bounty.

But of course these people, who are told that they are privileged and who cannot square that with their own experience and the difficulties they face in their lives, do exactly the wrong thing with the fact that their privilege does not really help them all that much. They lash out. They want to punish those who accuse them of the horrible wickedness that is being privileged, and in doing so of course they become not just privileged but defenders of privilege, not just people who benefit from racism but actual racists themselves. And to be clear, that is overwhelmingly their own fault. It's entirely their own fault, really, on any sort of moral level. Culpability for racism lies with the racists.

But we lawyers (and I am, as of a couple days ago, a lawyer) distinguish between causation and fault; the one is a subset of the other. And though it is not our fault, those of us on the left, that there are so many goddamn racists, we should probably find any way we can to reduce the number of things factually contributing to the existence of so many goddamn racists. And I suspect, though again this is extremely speculative, that this thing about the "privilege" analytical framework is part of that factual causal problem. Certainly the practice of demanding that people acknowledge their privilege, or "check" their privilege, feels almost perfectly calculated to arouse defensiveness and resentment. I suspect that the better form of outreach to these people would be to say, look, we know you're hard-working, ordinary people just trying to do your best to live a decent life. All we want is for so many of these other people to have the same chance at that that you do, which they unfortunately and unjustly do not, and for you to understand that these other people aren't as lucky as you are and to have sympathy with their struggle to obtain the "privileges" that you so rightfully enjoy. I bet that message, which I think was in large part Barack Obama's message, would piss off a whole lot fewer people.

Again, it is not our job, on any accounting of justice or responsibility, to avoid pissing these people off. It is rather their job to stop being racist. But far too many of them aren't going to do their job, and so unfortunately those of us who do care about making the world a better place for everyone, and especially for the racial minorities and other oppressed groups whose interests a powerful politics of racial resentment so threatens, are faced with a choice between trying to save people from their own goddamn racism and accepting a world with all these goddamn racists. If we're going to try to do the former, which we probably should (though it is such an aggravating enterprise and the impulse is so often to rage-quit), I feel like we'll be better served with a narrative of privilege that is less accusatory and that, where appropriate, recognizes that oppression benefits not the oppressor and that the only problem with privilege is its absence from too many people's lives.



*Of course, things like affirmative action are zero-sum only if you just take their immediate material effects at face value. I suspect that in even in these cases oppression harms the oppressor, by depriving society as a whole of the bounty which the oppressed would have produced had they been given the opportunity. This relates to the arguments for why e.g. sex discrimination in hiring practices are inefficient and irrational. Obviously the conclusion sometimes forced upon those arguments, that employers, being rational, will therefore not discriminate and so there's no need for anti-discrimination law, is a load of bull, but that doesn't mean the discrimination isn't economically irrational. (Corporate boards with more women on them perform better, etc.) And when those oppressed people are prevented from realizing their full potential, society is impoverished and that harms the oppressor class, too.

Even in cases where the raw material math works out such that the oppressors are coming out ahead, though, I still think oppression and supremacy are worse for the supreme oppressor class than equality would be. As my grandfather once said, in his masterful article defending Brown v. Board of Education:

I can heartily concur in the judgment that segregation harms the white as much as it does the Negro. Sadism rots the policeman; the suppressor of thought loses light; the community that forms into a mob, and goes down and dominates a trial, may wound itself beyond all healing.

This was a man who knew whereof he spoke, having grown up as a white man in segregated Texas. Oppression largely offers the oppressors only false promises. In exchange for some small amount of plunder taken directly from the oppressed they impoverish their own society and, on top of that, poison, perhaps irreparably, their own personal and political morality.

And of course the very next line of the same paragraph could not be more on-point:

Can this reciprocity of hurt, this fated mutuality that inheres in all inflicted wrong, serve to validate the wrong itself?

Yes, the Democratic Party Has a Real Ideology: Equality

It's become common, among intelligent, political-science-literate types, to say that the Democratic and Republican Parties are organized in qualitatively different ways. The Republican Party is highly ideological, the thinking goes: it's defined by a monolithic commitment to conservative principles. The Democrats, on the other hand, are commonly described as a coalition, maybe even a loose one, of different interest groups. Paul Krugman's latest blog post is largely in this same tradition, with one major variation; it repeats the "coalition of interest groups" description of the Democrats verbatim, but Krugman describes the Republicans as "an engine designed to harness white resentment on behalf of higher incomes for the donor class"--and, as he notes, "the base never cared about the ideology." It's not very hard to diagnose this particular fault-line in the party right now, since Trump basically represents a rebellion on behalf of the white-resentment-y voters against the donor class-favoring party elites.

But I've always thought that this description of the two parties is wrong. Certainly I think it's wrong as to the Democrats, and it might even be totally backwards. Certainly the common wisdom accurately captures the way the parties seem to behave in practice. But if you look deeper, I'm not sure it's so true. The Democrats do have an ideology. You could call it liberalism if you wanted, but egalitarianism is probably a better name. Liberal egalitarianism is better still, if not so pithy. I like that formulation, though, because I'm using the word "liberal" in its technical or political-theory sense, meaning generally a commitment to expansive individual freedom. I also demote liberalism, in this sense, to the position of modifier, with egalitarianism remaining the noun.

And I like that, because I do think that egalitarianism is the central organizing concept of the Democratic Party.

On Liberals, Politics, and even Democracy Itself

This is partly inspired by the Democratic primary, and an attempt to understand what's behind the Sanders phenomenon, but it's also inspired more generally by just a loose complex of phenomena over the past few years. Here's my basic idea: over the past few generations, America has been engaged in a rather massive culture war. Beginning in about the 1960s, a bunch of people came along who radically disagreed with mainstream, relatively conservative social norms and political beliefs. And these cultural liberals have been winning, spectacularly so. We've reached the point where many, if not all, of the new liberal views are pretty damn mainstream, such that people who violate them are broadly perceived as deviant (e.g. a Mr. Trump). But, quite rightly, we're not resting on our laurels. Nor are we accepting the current, relatively liberal mainstream views on those issues as sacred gospel. Rather, they're works in progress, and of late, particularly in the internet age, a ton of energy has gone into the development of the new progressive norms. The broad principles are increasingly being translated into a fairly comprehensive code of conduct, which aspires to a kind of perfection. For just about any question of "how should I behave toward other people," there's a right answer out there, which you should follow. The older, more conservative norms also prescribed such a code of conduct, although there is one major difference: the new liberal paradigm, more or less tautologically, gives far greater space for individual autonomy. There are a lot of rules that say, basically, "do whatever you want so long as you're respecting what others want." That last part requires a lot of elaboration, though, and it's been getting a lot of elaboration. All of this is great, and it proceeds within a more-or-less agreed-upon analytical framework. Then it's just a matter of proselytizing for the basic worldview that says you should follow these rules, of spreading the message that it's not okay to violate them. It's a work in progress, obviously, but we're working on it.

Like I said, that's all great. And the way that this enterprise aspires, basically, to Perfection, in a certain way, is great. For the first time we have a chance to implement widespread social norms based on genuinely liberal values, and so we have this opportunity to really think about how to get them Right in a way that's kind of new. But the thing is, then you get to politics. And the trouble with politics is that not everyone agrees with you. And I feel like on some level, the focus on developing liberal norms of righteous conduct, and on condemning those who don't follow them, has a bit of a tendency to distract from the fact that the people who disagree with us are within their rights to do so. Specifically they're within their political rights to do so. Their beliefs are wrongful ones, and as a matter of morality they ought to change them, but they do not lose their rights as democratic citizens because of those wrongful beliefs. The point here is not just that we, as liberals, have to be cognizant of the fact that democratic politics is hard and we won't get everything we want. It's that on some level, we shouldn't. Not so long as the things we want are unpopular with the American people. Because the American people really do have the right to make these decisions for themselves, even if they will make their decisions badly.

Now, to be clear, that last point doesn't apply to everything. I'm a big believer in democracy, but more specifically I'm a big believer in liberal democracy, and in constitutionally limited government. And we happen to have a Constitution that, I think, really does protect a lot of liberal values when properly read. That is to say, it really does restrain the political choice of the people in ways that are pleasing to modern social liberals. At the very least it's perfectly legitimate to argue, as to much of the agenda of modern social liberalism, that the issue has been constitutionalized and is not the subject of ongoing political choice anymore. Gay rights are a great example of that: it's absolutely right for us to say that we should win on that issue even if most Americans are against us. "Equal" really does mean equal. But constitutionalism only gets you so far. It's just not plausible that every single item on your agenda will be constitutionalized, and moreover, it would be bad if that were so, because democratic political choice is important and no constitution should lock in a country's entire political program.

I think the specific impetus for this post was actually when I saw some article about how Hillary Clinton's effort to present herself as the candidate of the modern Democratic Party's identity-politics coalition of oppressed groups is unconvincing because, in order for those various movements to be truly "intersectional," I believe was how they put it, they also need to be radically anti-corporate and what-have-you. My reaction to which was, okay, so what are you going to do if you find yourself in a country where "we shouldn't discriminate against women, or racial minorities, or LGBTQ&c. people" commands widespread support but "we should adopt radically anti-corporate economic policies" doesn't? Because the thing is, not only won't you be able to enact your whole "intersectional" program in such a world, there's a very real sense in which you shouldn't be able to, either. Now, again, it may well be wrongful of the public not to support your position on this. But their wrongness doesn't give you a right to govern them against their will.

This ties into something Barney Frank recently said in a column critiquing Bernie's campaign: "What troubles me and many of my former colleagues—among the most liberal members—is the belief that nothing short of this [Sanders's agenda] is worth fighting for." You have to figure out what's worth fighting for that you can plausibly get a democratic mandate for. But it goes further. In a democracy there's a need to accept that sometimes you lose, and that it's legitimate for the other side to enact its policies when that's the will of the people. Again, this is not always the case, and the modern conservative movement is quite generous in its willingness to have its bad-on-the-merits policies also be unconstitutional. But there's always got to be a large area where it's legitimate for the other side to win, and you have to be sort of graceful about that, because otherwise you start attacking democracy itself. This really isn't something we have to deal with in the project of creating liberal social norms; indeed, it's important that those norms be as uncompromised and as near to perfect as possible. But it's important not to lose sight of it in the political realm, not just as a matter of pragmatism but as a matter of principle.

The Sanders Campaign Is Becoming A Problem

When Bernie Sanders announced his campaign for President, I thought, okay, this could do some good. Put some more aggressively left-wing issues on the agenda, help move the party, and presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton, in a more liberal direction, expand the Overton window, etc. But there's always been a lurking danger that it would become something else, that it would start stoking liberal dissatisfaction with the Democrats and with Hillary, in a way that would imperil our chances of holding the White House.

Well, I'm increasingly feeling like his campaign is turning into that more dangerous version. And this "HillarySoProgressive" thing is perhaps the most extreme example of it. This all started when Bernie and Hillary got into a Twitter war yesterday that started with Sanders (or his campaign staff, not actually sure which) saying that "You can be a moderate. You can be a progressive. But you cannot be a moderate and a progressive," and then proceeded to rattle off various un-progressive things Hillary's done: raising money from Wall St., taking a long time before coming out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Keystone pipeline, and supporting the Iraq war. Hillary (or her staff, probably) shot back, with various progressive things Hillary has done, and with repeatedly pointing out Sanders' less-than-pure history on gun control. Now various Sanders supporters have started this HillarySoProgressive hashtag basically mocking the idea that she's any sort of liberal. (Seriously, does no one say "liberal" anymore?) The tweets this Vox discussion of the tag references bring up, in total, the fact that Clinton takes donations from Wall St., the fact that she has, from time to time, been seen in the company of Wall St. executives, that she does not support reinstating Glass-Steagall, and her 2004 opposition to gay marriage. Oh, and also a fake Clinton/Gore '92 bumper sticker design featuring the Confederate flag.

The word that keeps coming to my mind to describe all of this is "disgusting." And not just because of the Tea Party-esque obsession with absolute purity (while, of course, excusing their own candidate's extreme lack of purity on the gun control issue), the strict and exclusive concept of the "progressive" movement, the suggestion that anyone who doesn't agree with them on every single issue is the enemy. It's all of that, too, of course; some of this stuff almost feels like it has an "are you now, or have you ever been, a capitalist?" feel to it.

But also, like... these are remarkably petty things to excommunicate someone from your movement over, aren't they? Bernie's remarks about how she took her time coming out against TPP and Keystone feel particularly silly, to me. I actually know several very left-wing people who thought both of those issues were in fact somewhat complicated, and that the case against each was overstated. And even beside that, like, since when is taking your time to think something over a grievous sin? Is it that one must not only have the right positions but also take all of them quickly enough, or you're out of the movement? That's insane, isn't it?

As of course is this persistent accusation of massive corruption on Hillary's part, which of course is never explicitly stated as such, because that would be "going negative" and "dirty politics," but that's what it is.

Add it all up and I feel like this campaign is becoming so toxic that it's running a real risk of doing serious damage to the Democratic Party and to the liberal cause going forward. It's essentially becoming a larger-scale version of Nader 2000, which, like, do the people supporting Bernie remember how that went? Do they remember George Bush? Have they inspected Marco Rubio's platform? As Matt Yglesias said the other day, it's basically the platform for those who think the problem with the Bush Administration is that we should've tried bigger tax cuts and more wars. In the face of this, do you really want to set up a Spanish Inquisition to root out every last little trace of heresy within the progressive movement?

I'm still hopeful that this can end well, but I'm increasingly unsure that it will. Sanders himself seems to have been bitten by the ambition bug, maybe for the first time in his life, and he's got a lot of work ahead of him repairing the damage he's been causing. When he loses, and he will lose, he better take a page out of Hillary's playbook and give her one hell of a ringing endorsement.

Barack Obama Finally Revealed As A Liberal

I jest, of course. We've known he's a liberal for a long time. Back in 2008, the three main contenders for the Democratic nomination, Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards, were all basically mainstream, run-of-the-mill liberals, with Edwards perhaps a bit more economically populist than the other two. There aren't really any areas of heterodoxy, except that in his capacity as President he's done less to change some things than liberals would've liked, and has sometimes defended those things in the process. (Though he has usually also said stuff about how he'd like to reform them.) But, like a lot of basically liberal Democrats who are politicians with national or quasi-national aspirations, Obama has often had to be a bit skittish about some of his liberalism. There are some issues that are thought to be just so politically difficult that you don't want to talk about them very much, if you can help it.

But not today. Tonight's State of the Union Address was, well, pretty unremarkable in the way that most big speeches are unremarkable; it didn't really "change anything." But I was impressed with how unabashed Obama was about being a liberal Democrat. He basically outlined a pretty thorough broad-strokes policy platform for the American left, and issued a kind of unspoken dare to the Republicans to dislike his agenda (and to try and stop it). And that included, for what I think was the first time in his Presidency, spending a lot of time talking about environmental issues. And not just his usual somewhat weasely, politician-y "all of the above" nonsense, although that of course was there, too. No, some serious environmental stuff. Multiple minutes on climate change, and the need for clean energy. He said he was going to do some sort of executive action increasing conservation through federal lands, or something (it's hard to catch the details of these newly-announced policy proposals in real time, heh). I've long since resigned myself to the fact that we never get a satisfying amount of environmentalism in our Big Obama Speeches, but for once I didn't need to be. I had no complaints on that score.

Oh, and he talked about guns. I suppose he did that last year, too, when the Newtown shootings were very recent, and maybe the year before because Gabby Giffords' shooting was very recent. But this year, he didn't really have to. There have been shootings recently, the whitehouse.gov feed's graphics mentioned four in the last week, but no big national-news tragedies. And yet, talk about guns he did. That's long been a third rail of Democratic politics; the assumption is that Democrats can't talk about guns and win. Maybe that's not really true when Republicans defend positions so extreme that most gun owners don't even agree with them, allowing Democrats to simultaneously play offense and play to the crowd. But I got the sense that Obama didn't even care. He believes that gun control is the right thing to do, so he said so.

The impression I got was of a President who doesn't have to worry about re-election anymore, and knows it, and is enjoying the freedom that gives him. He can say what he wants, and perhaps more importantly he can do what he wants, insofar as he has the legal authority to do so. And so he's gonna do a lot less of the usual persistent appeasement of the hypothetical center, and much more just pursue a legitimately Democratic, liberal agenda. That's always been his agenda, I think; now he's just a bit less hesitant about flying his flag proudly for all to see. It's a breath of fresh air, and I would not be surprised if it's more effective politically than conventional wisdom would tend to suggest.

The Left is More Moderate 'Cause We've Been Winning

Kevin Drum has a post today arguing that there's no great mystery why the Republican Party is so much more beholden to its radical wing than the Democrats are: there are a lot more radical right-wingers than radical left-wingers these days. I think that's basically true, but I have another thought: part of the reason why that's true is that the liberals have been winning. Most notably we've been winning the culture wars. Over the last half-century, American society has been remade in a wildly more progressive, individualistic, liberal direction. We're a long way from perfect application of the ideals of egalitarianism and individual liberty, but as a society we are pretty clearly trying, and committed to trying. And the government's been a big part of that. Sure, there have been a lot of Republican Presidents lately, but almost all of the big stuff they did that liberals dislike was about concentrating the economic resources of the extremely wealthy. That's not a trivial issue, but we're a long way from fighting over segregation or rampant sex discrimination. Notably, since post-Reagan Republicans have embraced deficits just for the hell of it, they're been able to pursue this pro-rich agenda without actually doing too much damage to the anti-poverty parts of the budget; programs have been cut a little at the margins, but the only time a central plank of the social insurance scheme was structurally altered was welfare reform and that, apparently, worked out a lot better than most liberals expected. The point is, someone who thirty or forty or fifty years ago felt the need to demand massive liberal changes both from the political process and from society at large would find that they've received a pretty large chunk of those demands, with more pretty clearly on the way in the near future (on gay rights, Obamacare actually taking effect, maybe immigration reform and some sort of executive action on climate change, etc.)

If, however, you were a conservative those same few decades ago, well, the intervening years have been a horror show. Particularly if you were a social conservative, you are now greeted with the spectacle of all these strange people running around acting like they're your equal. (Women, black people, Hispanics, gays, atheists, etc.) It's now just routine that everyone, not just weirdo free-love hippie types but nearly every ordinary American young adult, has a sex life that would've been considered scandalously promiscuous when you were born. People go around cursing all the time. You get the point: a certain vision of how American society should be structured, one held by a not-insignificant portion of the populace, has pretty much died over the past couple of generations. Which turns yesterday's conservative into today's apocalyptic reactionary, no longer merely making the Burkean argument that we should hesitate to make significant changes but forced to argue that changes which have already taken place are in fact destroying American society. That's a much more radical posture, and I think the frantic sense of doom has been really magnified by the fact that we've got a black President now. Nothing gets people riled up like identity politics, and for a long time now the ascendant American identity has been the liberal one.

I'm honestly not sure what explains the over-the-top hostility found these days among the one group within the Republican coalition that's been making out like bandits over this same time period, namely rich people and financiers. One way to look at it would be that they've transmuted the simple desire to have more money, rooted in nothing more than good old-fashioned rational self-interest a.k.a. greed, into a kind of identity politics, where anyone who doesn't just want to back a truck full of cash (and no small bills, please) up to the gates of their mansion is committing some unforgivable slight. That's a phenomenon in itself, but more broadly I think it's true that the liberal identity has been whupping the conservative identity's ass for generations and that this trend shows every sign of continuing. What more explanation do we need for the perceived radicalism gap?

Bobby Jindal's Poor Batting Average

So, Bobby Jindal apparently gave a recent speech in which he had occasion, for some reason, to describe what he thinks liberals think/believe/want. Here's the excerpt:

The left wants: The government to explode; to pay everyone; to hire everyone; they believe that money grows on trees; the earth is flat; the industrial age, factory-style government is a cool new thing; debts don’t have to be repaid; people of faith are ignorant and uneducated; unborn babies don’t matter; pornography is fine; traditional marriage is discriminatory; 32 oz. sodas are evil; red meat should be rationed; rich people are evil unless they are from Hollywood or are liberal Democrats; the Israelis are unreasonable; trans-fat must be stopped; kids trapped in failing schools should be patient; wild weather is a new thing; moral standards are passé; government run health care is high quality; the IRS should violate our constitutional rights; reporters should be spied on; Benghazi was handled well; the Second Amendment is outdated; and the First one has some problems too.

Let's ignore the first part, about what the left "wants," although it's obviously untrue that American liberals want government employment to approach 100% of total employment. Starting with "they believe," I count twenty-two specific allegations of what liberals believe. Let's run down the list and see which are descriptively false, i.e. liberals don't actually believe those things; which of them correctly describe correct beliefs; and which of them are just bizarre in some other way.

John Stuart Mill Demolishes Libertarianism

John Stuart Mill, whose work I praised in my last post, is most famous for his book On Liberty, a spirited defense of the proposition that people not be coerced, either by legislation or by social pressure, in matters concerning only or primarily themselves. You might think that, if anyone would be included within the bounds of a word such as "libertarian," it would be the dude who wrote a book called On Liberty. Nope. Not by the modern sense of that word, anyway. This paragraph is so good it needs to be reproduced in block form:

Again, trade is a social act. Whoever undertakes to sell any description of goods to the public does what affects the interest of other persons, and of society in general; and thus his conduct, in principle, comes within the jurisdiction of society; accordingly, it was once held to be the duty of governments, in all cases which were considered of importance, to fix prices and regulate the processes of manufacture. But it is now recognized, though not till after a long struggle, that both the cheapness and the good quality of commodities are most effectually provided for by leaving the producers and sellers perfectly free, under the sole check of equal freedom to the buyers for supplying themselves elsewhere. This is the so-called doctrine of "free trade," which rests on different grounds from, though equally solid with, the principle of individual liberty asserted in this essay. Restrictions on trade, or on production for purposes of trade, are indeed restraints; and all restraint, qua restraint, is an evil; but the restraints in question affect only that part of conduct which society is competent to restrain, and are wrong solely because they do not really produce the results which it is desired to produce by them. As the principle of individual liberty is not involved in the doctrine of free trade [my emphasis], so neither is it in most of the questions which arise respecting the limits of that doctrine... Such questions involve considerations of liberty only in so far as leaving people to themselves is always better, caeteris paribus, than controlling them; but that they may be legitimately controlled for these ends is in practice undeniable."

As the principle of liberty is not involved in the doctrine of free trade. Yeah. Chew that one over, modern American libertarians. This is why one can be a liberal, which I think in its modern sense is first and foremost about devotion to pretty much Mill's exact ideas about individual liberty, without being a libertarian: those ideas simply don't tell us anything about the proper scope of economic regulation. Economic activity by one person, basically by definition, affects more than just that one person, and is therefore amenable to regulation where appropriate. It is an empirical question when such regulation will be appropriate, not one that can be settled by reference to grand philosophical first principles.

Earlier in the book, by the way, Mill also says that each individual is responsible to society for doing their share of the work of maintaining/defending society, a share which must be determined by some principle of equity. In modern society we choose the "progressive income tax" as the primary principle of equity, and it seems to me to be entirely within the scope of Mill's ideas of liberty. There really isn't much in this work that's inconsistent with anything in the modern American-liberal platform, and it's the definitive statement of the modern ideal of individual liberty.

No, Conservatism Is Not Individualistic

A number of discussions I've had recently have featured my interlocutor blandly asserting that the Republican Party, and conservative ideology, is individualistic. I would, therefore, just like to take a moment to point out that this is wrong. So that I'm not just making stuff up, I'll even link to a blog post of Kevin Drum's that quotes from a scientific(ish) study about the moral attitudes of liberals and conservatives. (That post is actually about misperceptions of the moral attitudes of ideological groups, but my focus is just on the evidence about the actual attitudes.) The money quote:

 "Liberals endorse the individual-focused moral concerns of compassion and fairness more than conservatives do, and conservatives endorse the group-focused moral concerns of ingroup loyalty, respect for authorities and traditions, and physical/spiritual purity more than liberals do."

The way I'd put it is that liberals value individuals, and therefore, among other things, want group structures to benefit individuals. We want the community to help and take care of the individuals in that community, and the reason we want this is that we care about the individuals. We also want, insofar as it's consistent with the above goal and the welfare of other individuals, to let individuals do whatever they individually want to do. Conservatives, on the other hand, are opposed to the community-helping-individuals thing, at least if the helping is organized through a collective public entity (i.e. the government) rather than through individual private acts (i.e. charity). Basically (and this is painting with a bit of a broad brush) conservatives are okay with individuals helping themselves and individuals helping other individuals (if they want to), but they particularly care about individuals helping the group entity, for the sake of that group entity. Liberals want the group/individual relationship to run the other way. Which of these is more individualistic, do you think? Individuals pressed into service for the good of the group, or group structures created and maintained for the good of individuals? A mix of on-your-own-ism and patriotic-loyalty-ism is not individualism. One might almost call it anti-individualism, since there's very little interest in having public policy concern itself with the interests of the individuals who make up the polity. Or one might just call it conservatism, and admit that that word refers to a philosophy that opposes publicly-coordinated efforts to improve the lives of individuals (poor ones, at least) and favors the firm imposition of community norms and values upon individuals who might like to dissent from those norms.

So the next time you hear someone say that the Republicans are the party of individuals, don't believe them. It's not true.

Barack Obama: Second-Best Democratic President Ever?

I just read Jonathan Chait's excellent piece about liberal inability to feel satisfaction with Democratic Presidents. To a certain extent I think this feeling is understandable: American politics has never come particularly close to producing results that are good enough, and we shouldn't shut up about, or try to forget, this fact. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't recognize and appreciate those people who make American politics get a whole damn lot closer to good enough. So, in that spirit, let me present a list of names: James Buchanan, Jimmy Carter, Grover Cleveland, Bill Clinton, Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, Lyndon Johnson, John Kennedy, Barack Obama, Franklin Pierce, James Polk, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Tyler, Martin Van Buren, and Woodrow Wilson. That's all the Democrats who have been President (counting Jefferson and cohort as members of a different party). Which of them had a greater Presidency than Barack Obama's had so far? Note that by "had a greater Presidency" I mean "did more good things, as a net matter, during their Presidency." We might like Carter's post-Presidential self, or the memory of JFK, better than we like Obama, but that doesn't count. Who was a better liberal President than Obama?