Author: AdamRowe

There are instructive similarities between the two natural disasters we now face, the immediate one from Covid-19, and the ongoing one from global warming.  Maybe, just maybe, America’s experience with one crisis will make it more willing to consider the massive public response needed to deal with another. 

I. Speed matters.  Everyone now realizes that even a short delay in responding to the spread of Covid-19 has big consequences.  More people get sick, more hospitals get overwhelmed, more people die.  Hesitating because you distrust experts and scientists, or because you want to believe it’s some kind of political plot, is disastrous.  If you move fast and move big, however, you can flatten the curve and keep a very serious situation from becoming a nightmare. 

We long ago lost our chance to flatten the curve on global warming.  We will have to deal with the consequences, the droughts and rising oceans and dying forests, just as we have to dealwith the consequences of the virus.  But it is not too late to make a difference, and acting today is better than acting tomorrow.  

II. This is not just a technical problem.  No one says about the pandemic that we should count on scientists to fix it and meanwhile we should just go on with business as usual.  We are of course trying hard to find a vaccine and other treatments.  But everyone realizes that this is also an economic and social crisis, and that our responses need to go way beyond the norm.  We are throwing the kitchen sink at the economy to keep people and companies afloat.  We are considering formerly crazy ideas like sending people government checks and offering free government provided medical services. We are changing our personal behavior quickly and radically as we realize that our actions matter to everyone else, and vice versa.

The climate crisis is likewise not just an engineering challenge, though many see it that way.  They hope some technical fix will let us live the same as always, but without destroying the planet.  This is wishful thinking.  Our response requires us to move from one economic paradigm to another.  Many people will face a wrenching transition.  Without support, people will resist, and the transition will fail.  This demands big public programs—training and unemployment benefits and guaranteed healthcare and so on.  

That’s exactly what the Green New Deal tries to do.  Conservatives and centrists scoffed at the cost, but are now eager to throw trillions (with a T) into our pandemic response.  The lesson here is, we have the resources, we just need to have the will to use them.

As with the pandemic, our response to the climate crisis has to include new ways of being in the world.  We will have to consume less, travel less, make do with fewer cheap conveniences.  We will have to be less individualistic—to be blunt, less selfish—and take into account how our actions affect our neighbors, communities, and the world.  Unlike the pandemic, however, these changes will not be temporary.

III.  Nothing works without trust.  Americans can’t just be ordered to comply with social distancing and other alterations of personal behavior.  They have to be convinced and they have to accept facts and understand the consequences of their actions.  One reason our response has been less than stellar is a broad lack of trust in government and in authorities of all kinds.  Half the population strongly distrusts our current leadership.  The other half strongly distrusts almost all sources of objective information, and instead believed initial partisan messages that the coronavirus was a liberal plot to bring down Trump and destroy capitalism. 

China, South Korea, and Singapore seem to be keeping the contagion at bay more successfully than in the West.  China has the power to require obedience, but the fact is most Chinese think highly of their leaders and believe they have their best interests at heart.  There are clear cultural differences at work here that transcend political systems.  It’s a cliché, but in Asia the individual counts for less, and family and community for more.  American individualism has come to its logical conclusion in Trump’s egotism and selfishness:  “America First.”  This is no basis for the cooperation and self-sacrifice any community needs in a time of troubles.  

The contrast between different approaches could have lasting effects.  China is already seeking to capitalize on the perception that it has responded effectively to the pandemic and is a responsible global actor.  If this is successful, China will try to do the same with its aggressive national projects to fight global warming.

In America we have a ruling party that dislikes and distrusts the government that it runs.  It has done its best to discredit, browbeat, and sideline career government workers.  Now it needs them to do their jobs in a no-kidding emergency, but morale is low, key management slots have been deliberately left empty, and incompetent hacks fill many positions.  You can’t kick the dog for three years, and then in year four expect it to leap up and wag its tail when you ask it to protect you.   

The response to climate change likewise depends on trust.  Do we believe what the scientists and experts say?  Do our government and our elected leaders have our best interests at heart? Do we see other Americans as fellow citizens, or potential enemies?  Much of our citizenry answers these questions with a resounding ‘no.’  

We cannot turn attitudes around overnight.  For a long time the prevailing ideology in American life has fortified selfishness and mocked the idea of public interest.  In many parts of our country the notion of disinterested, public-spirited government workers is met with gales of laughter. 

Americans have always been skeptical of government, but the back to back crises of the Depression and World War II changed attitudes by showing that government could improve lives and accomplish big things.  Today that trust is gone, eaten away by Vietnam and Watergate, but also by an unrelenting right-wing critique that questions the very possibility of public service.  This attack on government is a thinly disguised attack on democracy itself.  It is designed to weaken the state and make it vulnerable to corruption by special interests, and it has succeeded in convincing many Americans that government is nothing but a swamp in need of draining by any means necessary.  

Much of the opposition to climate action stems from a reluctance by the public to empower what is viewed as a corrupt and incompetent bureaucracy.  Conservative leaders worry that if government is allowed to act effectively, it will undermine their narrative that only the private sector can be trusted.  But if our institutions are given the support and resources to cope effectively with disease it could make Americans rethink these stereotypes.  

IV. Reality can only be denied for so long.  Today, those who initially downplayed the virus threat have had to turn 180 degrees.  When your spouse or neighbor goes to the hospital, it’s not fake news anymore. The same is happening with climate denial as Australia burns and seas rise and big investors make it clear that it’s time to get out of oil and gas.  Soon a majority of Americans, including conservatives, will abandon their denial and demand action.  

As that happens, we will need to be able to offer clear, believable plans backed by leaders who can be trusted to do the right thing.  There will be plenty of conservative responses that don’t take into account the poor and marginalized, and are designed to enrich corporations and the wealthy. When a crisis hits, it’s too late to come up with new ideas. The ideas that get implemented are ones that are readily available, have been fleshed out, and are already ‘in the air.’  

This is why I think it is so important to make the Green New Deal familiar and to anticipate questions and criticism.  It must be the first thing that anxious leaders reach for when the public demand for action becomes irresistible.  Already many of the specific projects embodied in the Green New Deal are broadly popular.  To the extent possible they should be incorporated into programs to stimulate the economy in this current crisis; this will be the springboard for future action. 

Can We Solve Our Climate Crisis Under Capitalism?  

For much of the past year I have been more and more focused—obsessed maybe—with global warming and what we should do about it.  This is the problem of our time, maybe of all time; it is also, just maybe, our ticket out of self-doubt and a long, low period where we seem to have forgotten the meaning of the public interest.  America used to be capable of big things:  winning World War II, building the interstate highway system, going to the Moon, enacting Medicare and Medicaid.  These efforts pulled us together and made us proud and prosperous.  Today we seem to take pride in…what exactly?  Mostly in clever apps that weaponize our personal information to sell us more junk.

Fighting global warming, as outlined in the Green New Deal, is the kind of great effort that could unite us while transforming our society for the better.  It is a lifeline that could stem what seems an accelerating slide into the populist abyss.  If we have the courage to grasp it. So I want our country to commit to this hard task, to mobilize behind this fight.  

Capitalism and the Climate Crisis 

Thinking about global warming has made me think hard about capitalism.  For decades environmentalists and worriers about population and scarcity have pointed the finger at industrial capitalism and its insatiable focus on growth.  More people, always consuming more, is a formula for eventual disaster.  We have delayed the consequences with better technologies—higher yield crops, cleaner fuels—but it now seems the bill is coming due.  Every few months a new, detailed report shoves our face in the reality of global warming, species extinctions, water shortages, deforestation, and the dire consequences of billions of people in rapidly developing countries demanding (the nerve!) to live like Americans.  It would take the resources of 3 or 5 planet earths to satisfy them.  

A strong-minded set of fellow climate change activists believes that we cannot succeed unless we give up capitalism.  Capitalism, they argue, is a system that cannot exist without constant growth; capital seeks the most profitable investments, and capitalist survival depends on the highest rate of return.  Businesses, even if they wanted, cannot for long survive in a steady state; either they will go under, or be forced by demanding investors or circling take-over artists to increase profits.  Further, the market shapes human beings into consumers who are constantly cajoled, tempted, and bludgeoned into wanting more, more, more.  We are thus driven to use up the earth’s resources—its fossil fuels, its forests, its waters, its fish, its arable land, and on and on.

Naomi Klein, for instance, in her recent book On Fire:  The Burning Case for a Green New Deal, argues for fundamental change:  “The way out is to embrace a managed transition to another economic paradigm, using all the tools of planning just discussed. Increases in consumption should be reserved for those around the world still pulling themselves out of poverty.”  Greta Thunberg was blunter in her September 2019 address at the UN:  “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.  How dare you!”

Even if individuals in the system sense that they are destroying the planet and dehumanizing society, they have powerful incentives not to acknowledge, or to minimize, the harm they are doing.  First, their personal wealth and status depends on it.  As Upton Sinclair famously said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Second, they are supported by a powerful set of ideas that tells them the market is the optimal way of organizing human behavior, and the most moral thing they can do is keep on with business as usual.  Hence we saw ExxonMobil and the oil industry conduct their own research in the 1970s showing global warming was happening and was a serious threat, and then mount a massive disinformation campaign to discredit the science and argue against doing anything about it.  The mastermind behind this, ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond, was steeped in the individualist, anti-government mindset typical of the Texas oil-patch. 

Bill McKibben in his recent book Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out, offers a melancholy picture of how the Ayn Randian thinking that permeates the upper echelons of the Republican Party has led directly to its policies of climate denial.  Her novels are favorites of officials in all parts of the Administration, including Rex Tillerson, Mike Pompeo, and Trump himself.  Rand’s hyperbolic suspicion of the state and conviction that the least accommodation to government leads inevitably to collectivism leads her followers to dismiss any problem that might require government action.  

What we think about capitalism is starting to seep into our politics.  Bernie Sanders, by calling himself a ‘socialist’—though he is not, by most accepted definitions—has done a service by forcing people to at least consider the possibility of alternatives to capitalism.  Other candidates will need to openly state what it is about capitalism that they like.  But even though polls show that younger Americans have declining faith in the capitalist system, it seems unlikely that politicians angling for votes will dare suggest that there is anything fundamentally wrong with capitalism. 

The Case for Capitalism

In these discussions I have so far resisted the idea that we need to abandon capitalism.  First of all, it would be disastrous for creating the consensus we need to act on global warming if we started by saying, “First, let’s destroy capitalism.”  Global warming skeptics already suspect that fighting climate change is a ruse for imposing socialism.  Second, the alternative is never very clear, and the actual alternatives human beings have come up with have not been very appealing.  I spent a good part of my professional career countering the Soviet Union, not a model most of us want to emulate.  

It seems to me that capitalism is here to stay, in the sense that it is the economic face of modernity, of our rational and scientific worldview. While that dominates, so will capitalism.

Fortunately we have a range of capitalisms to choose from.  My preferred model is a more humane, socially responsible capitalism—something more Scandinavian, perhaps.  If we move away from the laissez-fairy-tale, neoliberal version of capitalism, I’ve argued, we can make capitalism work for the benefit of the many, instead of the few.  What we need is a program to save capitalism from itself, before it self-destructs, or destroys the planet.

There are three big arguments, in my view, in capitalism’s favor. One is that it is enormously productive and has proven able, in a fairly large part (though by no means all) of the globe, to eliminate the problem of scarcity and its political counterpart, some form of aristocracy or oligarchy, with a few rich and powerful haves lording it over a mass of have-nots.  Before industrial capitalism the world consisted of a tiny group of aristocrats and oligarchs lording it over a mass of abjectly poor peasants.  The great wealth generated by capitalism has made it possible to raise much of the world out of misery and support a large middle class.  With many exceptions and caveats, the standard of living, the security, and the happiness, of a large part of mankind has gone up.  In principle this rise in wealth means we can have a much more egalitarian human community than was possible in most places in the past.  

In this way capitalism enables democracy, and I think it is no coincidence that our liberal democracy and industrial capitalism began and grew together.  The year 1776, when we signed the Declaration of Independence, was also the year that Adam Smith published capitalism’s ur-manifesto The Wealth of Nations.

Second, capitalism tends to create a less militarized and destructive society. It powerfully directs human pride and desire for status—our spiritedness or thumos—away from war and conquest towards commerce and making money.  The aristocracy of the ancien regime delighted in combat and despised money-making.  Today we honor soldiers but reserve our real admiration for entrepreneurs and successful hedge-fund managers.  Our mores and manners have softened, as Steven Pinker describes in detail in The Better Angels of Our Nature:  Why Violence Has Declined.  We no longer hang people for stealing a loaf of bread. 

The modern shift in political thought that provides the basis for liberal democracy is accurately described as a lowering of goals.  Instead of expecting politics to make people good and pious and taking its bearings by some vision of human excellence, modern politics takes people as they are and tries to create peace, stability, and prosperity without assuming that human beings are angels.  Capitalist dogma about selfish private interests producing public benefits perfectly fits this perspective.  

Third, a capitalist system enmeshes the globe in a mutual inter-dependence that works against open conflict. Business and financial interests tend to see modern war as economically disastrous and to be avoided.  There is money to be made, certainly, in preparing for war and producing the instruments of war, but generally not in actually using them.  And today’s globalization differs from yesterday’s colonial exploitation:  it is pulling developing societies into the modern economy as part of multinational production and distribution chains.    

And the Case Against 

Still, I have started to wonder if an acceptable form of capitalism is achievable.  Unless we make a huge course correction, we seem to have reached a point of diminishing returns.  Capitalism has its own versions of inequality and oligarchy, which if not recognized and thwarted, create a deeply unequal society.  Recent scholarship, aided by new sources of data, seem to show clearly that in the US inequality has been rising for decades.  What appeared to be a permanent era of economic and social leveling after WWII now seems a blip in a longterm trend of greater inequality. Thomas Piketty and others have shown convincingly that this is built into the way the system works, as the returns to capital outpace the returns to labor.  

Further, inequality is inextricably linked to oligarchy.  Great wealth is a source of great power, and great power in the hands of the wealthy is used to grow and perpetuate both wealth and power.  Here in the US we have seen these interests mount a strategic campaign over many decades to shift our institutions in ways that favor money and property over people and voting.  The Koch Brothers and their allies have largely seized control of the Republican Party and turned it into a vehicle for their vision of untrammeled free markets and less government.  Trump campaigned on a different approach, promising to defend the working man, but in practice he has toed the free market line. 

Is there any built-in check on this process within capitalism?  Free market advocates always argue that capitalism is ‘self-correcting.’ According to Milton Friedman and other free market purists, in theory a totally free market would prevent inequality and wealth build-up.  As fast as concentrations of wealth and business are built up, they are torn down by the churn of the market and the constant competition from new actors.  But the theory rests on a simplistic view of human nature that has been debunked in detail by behavioral economics.  In practice markets are never free, and their proper functioning requires energetic intervention by government to prevent monopolies, curb exploitation, arbitrate disputes and correct for market failures.  

The Need for Government: Wealth and Oligarchy

So what kind of government intervention should we have?  Attempts to guarantee equality by doing away with capitalism altogether, such as Stalin’s USSR or Mao’s China, are generally short-lived and hugely destructive.  Many rulers see suppressing competing power centers as essential to a strong state, but suppressing capitalism to this extent ends up weakening the state by reducing growth and innovation.  It cannot be sustained in a world where others take a different path, grow faster, and amass the financial, military, and soft power that comes with prosperity.

Autocrats, especially in the post-Communist period,  have instead sought to get the benefits of capitalism while keeping it under their thumb.  This has sometimes been successful, most noticeably in China, but means in practice that the political ruling elite becomes indistinguishable from the elite of wealth.  Inequality is not checked, or only very partially, and we see a new ruling oligarchy.   Further, China’s success is the exception, not the rule; more commonly autocracy stifles the market under a blanket of corruption and mismanagement, creating the worst of both worlds.

Democratic states have sometimes succeeded at least partially in regulating and overseeing the market to reduce inequality and oligarchy.  This political success largely accounts for the failure of 19^th century Marxist predictions of the impoverishment of workers and the complete concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few capitalists.  The growth of industrial capitalism was met, over a long period of trial and error, by pushback from democratic governments, who under pressure from voters broke up monopolies, regulated wages and working conditions, enabled the rise of powerful unions, created a social safety net, and in a thousand ways limited the reach of the market. 

But these successes are under constant assault from wealthy interests.  The quarrel that the wealthy have with democracy is deep and in some ways intractable.  As Aristotle and many others since have pointed out, the rich are few, and the non-rich—the poor, the middle class—are many.  A system that gives power to the many is potentially threatening to the rich; it will limit their privileges and constrain the way they use property and capital, via taxes and regulations and its control of government to create programs designed to balance the many advantages held by wealthy interests.  This class struggle is inevitable if democracy works as intended and is not entirely ‘captured’ by special interests.  The tools of democracy, the mass political parties controlling the institutions of government, will always to some extent clash with the tools of wealth—its control of business, its access to information and media, its legions of lawyers and accountants and experts, its lobbying and bribery and other hidden but powerful ways of influencing politics. 

This friction can be fruitful when both sides recognize their need for the other and work within limits set by law and custom and shared values.  Democracy can check capitalism’s excesses and provide a strong safety net to shield against the ups and downs of a market economy.  A large middle class coupled to socio-economic mobility acts as a stabilizer, since its more ambitious members see themselves as potentially wealthy and hence resist too much redistribution, while those who are struggling push for greater equality.  

Capitalism Unleashed: Reaganism and the Age of Greenspan

But what had been a successful balance in the US, resulting in the post-WWII boom of shared prosperity and egalitarian economic growth, was upended by the Reaganite shift in the 1980s.  While Eisenhower’s Republicanism acquiesced in the reforms of the New Deal, Reagan made distrust of government—“government is not the solution to your problems, it is the problem”—the center of conservative politics and ultimately of a new conservative identity.  In the Age of Greenspan (another member of the Rand cult), the new orthodoxy of less government, lower taxes, fewer regulations, the unquestioned superiority of the private sector, and privatization of public functions became accepted not just by Republicans but by much of the Democratic Party as well. 

There are many reasons this shift was politically and ideologically successful. But underneath appeals to individual rights and traditional values lies the enduring class conflict and the desire of many businesses and wealthy individuals to limit the power of the people as exercised through elections and democratic government.  Weakening government is a way to weaken democracy, without assaulting it head-on.  The entire long-term program of the post-Reagan conservative movement has revolved around bolstering every aspect of the American constitutional system to emphasize its least democratic features, and exploiting every loophole to increase the power of wealth and property.

This is why we have seen Republicans at the center of gerrymandering, voter-suppression, support for the electoral college, court packing, and a host of new legal doctrines designed to make property rights trump democratic rights.  The conservative mantra that “The US isn’t a democracy, it’s a republic!” reflects the same effort.  Fear of majority rule has risen to the top as conservatives see a country moving demographically towards more minorities, more urbanites, and less Christianity.  How can we stop this, they think?  For conservatives, ‘democracy,’ understood as the rule of the majority, is becoming a dirty word.  And if you want to undermine democracy, a professed love of free markets and a preference for property rights over other rights is an easy cover.  

This makes it very difficult to have a genuine discussion about capitalism and how to reform it.  Even fairly modest policy changes are attacked as tantamount to communism; never mind the much more sweeping and difficult changes needed to address the climate crisis.  This didn’t used to be the case, even here in America. Progressives and New Dealers made frontal attacks on capitalism and big business.  Remember Teddy Roosevelt’s “malefactors of great wealth?”  Remember Franklin Roosevelt’s response to attacks from big business:  “I welcome their hatred!”?  Today this language, used by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, horrifies centrists of all stripes. 

Saving Capitalism from Itself

American progressives have often argued that their reforms aim to save capitalism, not bury it.  And make no mistake, capitalism today is in deep trouble.  If conservatives and capitalists dig in their heels, one of three outcomes is likely.  One, the world’s climate and supporting ecosystems will collapse dramatically, leading to the likely end of capitalism, or at least of many capitalists.  Or two, the people of the world, seeing that their climate and ecosystems are heading for collapse, and a miserly few have hoovered up more and more of the world’s wealth, will rise up and tear down the institutions and people they see as responsible.  Leading to the likely end of capitalism, and many capitalists.  Or three, ruling oligarchies will clamp down more and more harshly to keep unrest from exploding.  Leading to the end of liberal democracy and anything approximating free markets. 

I would like to see us instead try a concerted program of pro-capitalist reform.  Let’s make the effort to get bankers and businessmen to recognize that capitalism is much too important to leave to capitalists, that preserving its positive qualities is going to require more oversight and intervention.  Capitalism today  is drowning in unearned wealth, inequality, failure to price in environmental and climate damage, and oligarchic intervention in politics.  Pace standard conservative talking points, capitalism can thrive with higher taxes and a bigger social safety net.  It does in other advanced industrialized countries.  (Denmark, for instance, is rated more highly than the US in the World Bank’s latest study of the ease of doing business in different countries.)  It did here in the US during and after World War II.  If capitalists join in the reforms needed to deal with the climate crisis, they will thrive, and so will the capitalist system.

But I am not sanguine that we can bring this about.  The desire to make more money, to hang onto it by any and every means, to pass it on to one’s children and heirs, is extremely strong.  Once the institutions and supporting intellectual and cultural framework are in place to make this happen, it is very hard to undo.  The economic historian Walter Scheidel tells us in his book The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, that when inequality and oligarchy have taken root they are only dislodged by extreme means:  civilizational collapse, plague, revolution, or major wars.  Most of us would agree that we would be better off avoiding such solutions.  But Scheidel does not think normal democratic politics is up to the task. 

The economic shift we Americans must make to save our planet is not small.  The right comparison is probably not to the original New Deal, or even World War II, but to the end of slavery.  When slavery was abolished, slaves were the largest single source of wealth in America, and the cotton empire that slaves made possible was fueling the rise of industrial capitalism not just in the United States but the entire Euro-Atlantic region.  Slavery was not ended peacefully. Today the fossil fuel industry is similarly central, and its rapid end would be similarly disruptive.

Recent Critiques of Capitalism

I define capitalism in the fashion of Karl Marx and Max Weber, as the system where most production is carried out with privately owned means of production, capital hires legally free labor, and coordination is decentralized. In addition, to add Joseph Schumpeter’s requirement, most investment decisions are made by private companies or individual entrepreneurs. (Milanovic)

To test my thinking I wanted to look at some analyses of modern capitalism.  Are there realistic alternatives?  Branko Milanovic asks this in his new book Capitalism, Alone:  The Future of the System That Rules the World.  Milanovic has been our great guide to global inequality, the inventor of the famous ‘elephant curve’ showing how globalization has benefited the poor in China and India, and the rich in America and Europe, while hurting the working class in the developed world.

As his title suggests, he thinks the best we can do is shift to a different variant of capitalism.  According to Milanovic, today we have two major variants, the liberal meritocratic version represented by the US, and “political capitalism” represented by China.  They differ primarily in that under the US version wealthy interests rule indirectly, by funding candidates and parties and lobbying elected officials; while in China they rule directly through a fusion of political and business elites.

Unfortunately Milanovic fails to grapple with capitalism’s weak underbelly.  He dismisses any and every threat to capitalism; in particular, he poo-poos resource exhaustion and global warming as examples of the kind of doomsday predictions we have regularly proven wrong.  Similarly he thinks robots and artificial intelligence will end up creating more new jobs than they destroy, with the tired argument that “that’s how it’s happened before.”  The notion that this time might be different doesn’t enter his thoughts.  

More generally, Milanovic doesn’t think that there are resources within human nature, things that we value that are at odds with making money, that might cause us to step back.  He suggests our preference for democracy will fade if we think political capitalism can give us higher growth rates.  Our resistance to becoming commodities is no longer serious, as we have acquiesced to becoming ‘human calculating machines.’  So there is no Rubicon that capitalism might cross, whether it’s replacing us all with robots or re-designing our genome, that is likely to lead to a revolt.   

If that is indeed your judgment, it is hard to see a way out of the box that capitalism has us in.  We crave the wealth that capitalism offers and have no alternative measure for a good life, and acquiesce to being crushed by rising inequality and the ability of the rich to gain control of the levers of power. 

For reasons that are unclear, Milanovic does not advocate that we in the US look to existing social democracies as models, even though he admits they have many of the features he thinks desirable.  For a close-up look at the social democratic alternative a good place to turn is Lane Kenworthy’s Social Democratic Capitalism, which offers a detailed look at realistic policy choices to shift our system.  

Kenworthy is a longtime toiler in the vineyard of comparative economic and social research.  On issue after issue—healthcare, education, unemployment insurance, taxation, overall quality of life—he can show where the US falls short, sometimes very short, of what has been achieved in the best social democracies.  And he can outline what policies are needed to do better.  There is no need for a ‘revolution,’ only for the US to step back from its current willingness to bow down to money and markets.  

Kenworthy’s starting point is empirical and far from Marxism or Randism:  “To this point in history, the most successful societies have been those that feature capitalism, a democratic political system, good elementary and secondary (K–12) schooling, a big welfare state, employment-conducive public services, and moderate regulation of product and labor markets.” 

While none of these are even vaguely radical features, a few seconds thought forces one to acknowledge that moving the US in this direction would be opposed by very powerful forces, who would characterize it as ‘communist’ and ‘un-American.’  Hence while the goals are relatively modest, getting there would require a major political upheaval.  This is because the US no longer has a “democratic political system;” it has instead a type of oligarchy.    

American-Style Capitalism Will Not Stop Global Warming

What about our starting point, the crisis of global warming?  Milanovic thinks the same forces that create and sustain global capitalism will cope with resource strains without any major dislocation.  On this I think he is almost certainly wrong.  The most detailed proposals for a market-based solution to climate change call for a steep carbon tax that would reduce  consumption and promote the development of cleaner and more efficient energy sources.  This is an important part of many comprehensive plans, but few experts believe it would be sufficient.  We will need a lot more direct government intervention—regulations, directed investment, restrictions on consumption, maybe nationalizing key industries—to meet emissions goals. 

Would Kenworthy’s social democracy tackle it? The central question is whether a more genuine democracy, not the oligarchy we have now, would agree to the demands and sacrifices needed for a serious climate change effort.  A society that has strong social programs and supports in place, and in which most citizens think political leaders are reasonably responsive to what the people want, would seem more likely to take the risks associated with climate action than a society where many people feel precarious and marginalized.  If climate action means—as it surely does—revamping the economy in ways that dislocate a lot of people, it would seem these people would accept change more readily if they were confident they and their families will be supported during the transition. 

This is the strategy behind the Green New Deal.  It combines the project of the climate crisis with the project of social democracy.  It asks us to achieve both under the same umbrella.  Criticism that this is too ambitious or that the two projects are unrelated is off the mark.  It is hard to see a lot of Americans saying yes to the economic upheaval of the Green New Deal without the accompanying safety net, and without hope that the upheaval will result in a permanent change to a more equitable society.

Already a majority of Americans agree that climate change is real and we should do more to stop it.  A majority supports universal health care, higher taxes on the rich, and other social democratic policies. What is preventing us is not public opposition but the relentless efforts of special interests. 

It is true, however, that support for a Green New Deal rests for the most part on buying into what is called “green growth,” the argument that we can maintain present levels of consumption and growth while switching to clean sources of energy.  There is no need for major changes in lifestyle.  This is understandably politically attractive, but most experts think it is wildly optimistic.  Renewable energy sources cannot fully replace fossil fuels. Really going green will require us to consume less, drive and travel less, grow and eat food differently, and adjust our lives in a thousand large and small ways. 

This reality is at the center of the emerging “de-growth” movement (which you can read about in a recent New Yorker article “Steady State:  Can We Have Prosperity Without Economic Growth?” ) De-growthers call for a shift in production and consumption, from global to local, from mass markets to local markets, from goods to services. This would have to be triggered by a change in priorities, catalyzed by the threat of climate change, away from consumerism and wealth maximization as the goals of individual and public policy.

Some de-growthers talk about dismantling capitalism, while others speak of “post-growth capitalism.”  Whatever the terminology, this would be a huge change taking many decades—much too slow to meet urgent climate crisis goals. It is also obviously 180 degrees from the drill-baby-drill, all-growth-is-good-growth thrust of current US policy.  

I think there is a plausible path, some version of the Green New Deal, to tackle the climate crisis within an overall capitalist system. However, in America implementing such a program is akin to rebuilding the engine of a ship at sea—it requires putting in place the elements of a robust social democracy at the same time that we put in place an unprecedented program of economic reform.  This is not impossible, but would require tremendous political will and public support.

Unfortunately this is not what we have in today’s America.  Instead we have deep divisions, with one party pathologically opposed to social democracy and climate action, and the other party uncertain of its commitment. 

But China’s Might

Our abdication of leadership leaves the field to others, especially China.  China’s leaders could easily decide that a major effort on climate offers China an opportunity to accelerate development, move ahead of its rivals in the West, and demonstrate the superiority of ‘political capitalism.’  Under Xi Xinping, China sees itself as vying with the US for global leadership in the technologies of the future. Already China is leading the world in making and installing solar panels. It may see a similar opportunity in building nuclear reactors. 

A less likely but not impossible scenario is a right-wing climate strategy, probably originating in Europe.  Europe’s nationalist, anti-immigrant movements are less enamored of the free market and small government than their American counterparts.  They are therefore less afraid of the ‘big government’ implications of climate action.  An ‘avocado politics’—green on the outside, brown within—that justifies a strong state to stop immigration, force a rapid shift to less growth, and keep the rest of the world from using scarce resources needed by the West could be quite popular.  Including, I suspect, here in the US.  

The dominance in America, at precisely this juncture, of the most retrograde version of capitalism poses a terrible danger to capitalism and democracy, not to mention human civilization.  It abandons the high road to China and its authoritarian version of capitalism to take up the mantle of multi-nationalism and savior of planet Earth.  

It is possible, of course, that the US will change course again with the next election.  Americans could find themselves mugged by reality, like Australians during this year’s fire season, and turn away from their current path.  If not, Earth’s inhabitants will draw their own conclusion about which system is preferable. 

American conservatives are obsessed with ‘watermelon’ politics:  Green on the outside, Red on the inside. That’s their basic criticism of the Green New Deal and other big plans to deal with the climate crisis—that they’re leftist plots to impose socialism on America. 

American liberals to some extent agree. They think that going green is inherently progressive.  Eventually conservatives will have to bend the knee to science and accept a liberal program that reins in the fossil fuel industry and redistributes wealth to a new generation of solar panel installers.  

Maybe. But maybe not. The American Right is different from the European Right—and even here it is changing.  American conservatives for the most part remain lovers of the free market and small government.  This is why they dismiss climate science, because to accept it would be to accept the need for big government programs and regulations.

This particular idiocy, however, does not claim the European right.  There, a strong state is seen as a good thing, necessary to protect borders and build national cultures. Tough-minded leaders mobilizing the Volk around big national projects is in the nationalist wheelhouse.  So the facts about climate change are not generally rejected.   

It is true that in Europe Green parties that combine environmentalism with liberal views on human rights have been gaining ground. But so have right-wing parties that want to stop immigration and protect Europe from foreign infection.  Marie Le Pen, who is trying to make her neo-fascist French National Rally party more attractive to young voters, has said that someone “who is rooted in their home is an ecologist,” while people who are “nomadic … do not care about the environment” since “they have no homeland.” For the right, the climate crisis is starting to be seen as a useful lever to gain youthful support while justifying a strong state, empowered to take draconian measures:  a new Avocado politics, Green on the outside, Brown within. 

In American right-wing circles similar ideas are taking root. The El Paso shooter’s manifesto, for instance, justified killing immigrants on environmental grounds.  (As did the Christchurch shooter).  Tucker Carlson said in December that “illegal immigration comes at a huge cost to our environment.”

At first glance a strong climate program would seem uncongenial to nationalists.  Greenhouse gases don’t respect borders, and an effective climate policy needs to build global cooperation and strengthen multinational institutions, the exact opposite of a nationalist agenda.  But climate policies can be envisioned that further right-wing goals.  For instance, the climate crisis can be seen as strengthening the need for strict control of immigration and borders.  As the global south bears the brunt of coming droughts, sea-level rise, and other effects of climate change, Europe and America must gird themselves against refugees.  They must not let themselves sink under an unmanageable wave of the world’s have-nots. 

In addition to defense, the Right argues that Western Civilization must go on offense. White nationalist thinkers agree with liberals that humanity cannot survive if the billions in the developing world use energy and other resources at the same level as the First World. But their conclusion is different.  Rather than sharing wealth and technology to try and midwife a transition to a higher but sustainable standard of living, they want to clamp down on further development.  Here is the analysis of American white nationalist and pseudo-intellectual, Greg Johnson, in support of a right-wing environmentalism (informed by several years sojourning among European nationalists):          

• “So yes, we do need to have a two-tier world economy; we need to have a developed First World—and by the First World what I mean is Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of East Asia, places like Japan, Korea, and China—they have the capacity to do that as well—and the less developed parts of the world need to be, basically, contained. We need to stop feeding them; we need to stop increasing their populations or allowing their populations to increase; we need to basically exercise a certain benevolent control over these people, just like we exercise benevolent control over wildlife.”

In other words, if Indians and Africans try to build coal-fired power plants, or buy more cars, we should stop them.  The more urgent the crisis, the more drastic the response. As Nils Gilman of the Berggruen Institute wrote recently: “…ratcheting up the rhetoric about the urgency of the climate crisis — “We only have 11 years!!” — can just as easily be used to justify the necessity of avocado policies. Indeed, what seems more politically achievable: creating a globally coordinated and democratically inclusive set of new institutions that will enable the resolution of all the difficult trade-offs associated with a “socially just” approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, or shooting brown and Asian people?”

We need to recall that the roots of the modern environmental movement are far from benign.  Many early environmentalists were social darwinists and eugenicists whose prescription for protecting nature was to keep the inferior races from procreating.  The early-20^th century American Madison Grant, author of The Passing of the Great Race (one of Hitler’s favorite books), was also a founder of the National Parks Association. This is only to say that a passionate desire to protect the planet is not inherently and inevitably linked to a love of social justice and concern for marginalized peoples. 

At some point as the climate crisis grows in intensity the US will shed its climate-denying neoliberalism.  But It would be blindly optimistic to imagine that this will lead to a liberal, globalist, inclusive solution set.  The US and other rich first-world societies, gripped by fear, and facing demands from the world’s have-nots to cut back on their polluting ways while sharing more of their wealth, are likely to batten the hatches and begin jettisoning superfluous luggage.  Among the superfluities will be liberal democracy. It is already on the ropes. As the seas rise and the forests burn, a strong hand will be wanted to oversee a wrenching domestic shift to a low-consumption society. It will be doubly demanded to protect against foreigners seen as wanting to share space in the lifeboat. 

A climate-emergency government could take a left or right-wing shape.  The left version will blame capitalism, nationalize major industries, and sharply restrict individual liberties in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A right version will do much the same, but with special emphasis on the need to rid society of dangerous minorities.

Both versions will need to face off against the developing world by pressuring countries like Brazil and Indonesia to preserve their rainforests, stopping new coal-fired powerplants, and preventing the rest of the world from imitating our destructive lifestyle.  A leftist approach, however, is more likely to try to achieve this cooperatively with aid and carrots; a nationalist environmentalism would be more brutal, more confrontational, and much less concerned with the consequences for the rest of the world. 

A critical variable will be which side of this divide China falls on. China needs no changes to its political system to implement a full-scale climate emergency program, and Chinese nationalism as promoted by Chairman Xi in many ways mirrors the Western right in its civilizational hubris. Will it identify with the First World, as Greg Johnson hopes? If so the full weight of the world’s most powerful states will be behind measures designed to keep the have-nots in their place.  If instead China chooses to be the defender of the developing world (something today’s China does when convenient) we will see a confrontation between China and the West, in which climate fears are added to the already considerable tensions related to China’s growing wealth and power.  

Of course the future does not have to look like this.  But avoiding it will take political courage and leadership that is so far not in evidence. People in rich developed countries need to be provided hope in the form of programs that promise a positive way forward.  They need to be convinced that their fate is intertwined with that of the rest of humanity.  If we do not quickly put in place a humane and inclusive framework, the climate crisis will be hijacked by avocados.   

After moving to New Mexico a year ago, and doing quite a bit of hiking, I began to notice something strange.  On many hikes in what seemed to be fairly remote wilderness areas, in thick pine forests, in the mountains, there were cows.  Now I’m from the Midwest.  I spent my summers on my grandparent’s dairy farm.  I know cows.  Cows are big, messy, clumsy beasts who live in open pastures and eat grass and suck down oceans of water and fill the land with cowpies.  What they heck are they doing up at 9000 feet in the arid Southwest?

The short answer is that this is their summer pasture.  Since Europeans came here hundreds of years ago, they have taken the cows up high where there is more water and forage.  But cows definitely don’t belong in the high peaks.  They are an invasive species that tramples delicate ecosystems, dirties the creeks, and deposits tons of manure.  A fine book about New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo mountains, Enchantment and Exploitation:  The Life and Hard Times Of a New Mexico Mountain Range, by William deBuys, describes how years of grazing and overgrazing have destroyed countless acres and permanently altered the face of the Sangres and other New Mexico mountains.  

Today the Forest Service has succeeded in limiting the number of cows in the mountains (often through destructive practices like clear-cutting valuable piñons to turn the land into pasture). But local Spanish communities who cherish the cattle culture—and have little use for the Forest Service—continue to herd cows  even when there is little economic payoff. 

The more I’ve learned about cows, the more I’ve discovered that cows are the secret explanation for so much that has gone wrong in the West.  

What killed the bison and the Indians?  Cows.  Cattlemen saw bison as competitors for rangeland.  Ditto for Indians, who among other sins interfered with cattle drives, claimed valuable land, and had a tendency to rustle livestock.  

What killed the great predators, the wolves and cougars and grizzlies that once adorned the West and kept its ecosystems in balance?  Cows.  Ranchers waged, and continue to wage, unthinking war on every animal seen as a threat to livestock, usually by enlisting the government to shoot, trap, and poison anything that moves.  Further, the millions of miles of barbed wired fencing that ranchers require interferes with animal movement and migration.

Why is the West chronically short of water?  Yup. Cows.  More water is used for cattle than anything else, more than for agriculture or industry.  Water is needed both directly to sustain stock, and indirectly to grow alfalfa and other feed.  On average, a pound of beef requires 1800 gallons of water. The ongoing desertification of the West owes more to cows than anything else.  

Why are so many plant and animal species disappearing?  Cows again.  Huge amounts of public lands—and most cattle in the West live on public lands—managed by the Bureau of Land Management have been overgrazed and decimated; BLM is largely controlled by ranching interests, so it charges nominal grazing fees and resists or overlooks rules designed to protect wildlife and public lands.  Destruction of native grasses and shrubs reduces the ability of the land to hold water, contributes to erosion, and kills habitat for native birds and animals.

What adds insult to injury is that Western cattle are of so little value.  Less than two percent of US beef comes from cattle on public land in the West.  The livestock industry in 11 Western states accounts for only 0.5% of income.  And the industry demands huge government subsidies for roads, fencing, predator control, water projects, and much more.  Grazing fees on public lands are a fraction of those charged by private owners, and ranchers get generous write-offs.  As  Christopher Ketchum writes in This Land:  How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West, “The industry, in other words, is provided all kinds of preferential treatments, and survives on the dole, probably irremediably, because in the arid conditions of the West, where the climate conspires against cattle production, it cannot do otherwise.”

Why, then, do we continue to put up with this bovine invasion?  Incessant and coordinated political pressure is the answer.  Ranching interests embedded at all levels of Western government rely on misplaced nostalgia for the cowboy way of life to deflect all attempts to deal rationally with anything seen as threatening the man-on-horseback.   Today’s ‘ranchers’ are in any case likely to be New York bankers or Hollywood stars; the small independent rancher is a vanishing breed.  But they are expert at lobbying and enlisting politicians who cannot resist the argument that we must keep cattle on the range to preserve that American icon, the cowboy.  

Now, I have nothing against cowboys (though it must be acknowledged that the original cowboy legends were largely manufactured back East by dime-novelists and Teddy Roosevelt).  But the notion that raising Western cattle is a noble calling undertaken by rugged Marlboro men overcoming duststorms, Injuns, ravening wolves, and evil bureaucrats is bunk.  It has from the beginning been a destructive industry managed and bankrolled by rich and mostly absentee investors.  The actual cowboys who—for a very brief period—moved big herds to the stockyards in Kansas and Nebraska were mostly poor slobs who were paid little and cast aside.  The cowboy has long since taken on a life of his own due to Wild West Shows, movies, and TV.  And more power to him.  Go to rodeos.  Wear the boots and hats.  But please, give up the cows.

A dangerous development is that lately anti-government radicals have enlisted some of those same cowboy wannabes as the centerpiece of broader grievances against the hated Federal government.  And it’s worked. Remember the Bundy’s, the ornery, racist clan that fought the government over access to grazing land in Nevada?  The Feds tried to rein in the Bundy family’s penchant for violating the terms of its grazing permit by overstocking and threatening critical breeding grounds for the endangered Agassiz desert tortoise.  Cliven Bundy ignored the BLM for almost two decades, and when finally faced with fines and the impounding of his herd, went into open revolt against the US government.  Militia groups and government-haters sprang into action; confronted by hundreds of crazed and armed Bundy supporters, the government caved, returning his cattle and ignoring the $1.1 million in uncollected fees.    

A few years later when Cliven’s son Ammon, spouting the same anti-government nonsense, occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, the feds eventually arrested him and his followers; but after a comically inept prosecution, Bundy was freed.  BLM and Forest Service employees, meanwhile, were regularly threatened and harassed by Bundyites with no serious response from federal authorities.  Federal workers who took their mission of protecting the land seriously were often hung out to dry by their superiors, afraid of retaliation from Congress.  In short, the pro-cow government agencies failed to defend clear laws and regulations.  It goes without saying that these tendencies have metastasized under the Trump administration. 

The broader environmental and dietary problems with beef consumption are a separate issue.  If you want your steaks and burgers, fine, just get them from cows that live somewhere else.  

As I write this it appears we are approaching a climax to the escalating conflict brought into the open by the last election. A constitutional and legal crisis is upon us as the President refuses all cooperation with Congress; how it will unfold is far from clear. It will be decided most likely by the President’s Republican supporters, who will either continue to defend his ever more bizarre and dangerous behavior, or finally turn on him.

If the former we are headed for conflict, not just in the halls of Congress and the courts but in the streets; for Congress, unless it abdicates, will have no choice but to call on the people to enforce its rights against the executive. It seems likely that even if in the end institutions do their job, millions of Americans will not accept the result and, if prompted by Trump—a virtual certainty—will resist.

The outcome is uncertain because I think large parts of our country no longer hold to a common understanding of what it means to be American. Since the Civil War it has been generally accurate to say that the United States was as much an idea, or ideal, as a normal nation state. When you thought of yourself as an American it was not primarily as a resident of a particular territory or a member of a particular race or religion. The United States was defined by fealty to norms laid out in the Declaration and the Constitution and lauded at every Fourth of July oration: inalienable human and political rights, equality for all before the law, representative government, and the seemingly inextricable corollaries of self-improvement and opportunity and economic growth. Immigrants could come and, by pledging allegiance to these ideals, become Americans. In this way it was different from the Old Nations of Europe and Asia.

I say “since the Civil War” because before then, much of the country gave explicit priority to something else: a system of slavery and fixed hierarchy, where rights to property and ineradicable inequalities outweighed individual rights, including the right to self-government. We flattered ourselves that this view had been permanently defeated, especially after the Civil Rights revolution of the 1950s and 60s. But it had not.

Today we are returning to this pre Civil War America. When push comes to shove, a great many Americans seem ready to throw democracy and equality overboard in favor of other ideals.

o Our plutocratic class believes property rights come first. Democracy is suspect since the majority often seeks to redistribute wealth, and limit the power of money. Members of this class have waged a lengthy war to protect their wealth and power by using money and influence to put into office officials who will employ gerrymandering, voter suppression, and conservative courts to limit popular influence. They have fostered an anti-government ideology designed to discredit “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

o Our white, rural/suburban class believes its culture of racial privilege, patriarchy, and Christian fundamentalism comes first. If progress and democracy in today’s multi-cultural American threatens this way of life, so much the worse for progress and democracy. Anxiety and real economic disruption—perpetrated by the plutocrats—has made this class easy prey to demagogues spouting conspiracy theories and stoking racial and cultural divides.

o Our progressive class is beginning to think fighting climate change and expanding a panoply of identity rights come first. If democracy in today’s America means rule by Trump and a thoughtless embrace of planet-destroying capitalism, then what is there to defend? Recognition of America’s historic flaws and continuing shortcomings has, for some, meant a turning away from everything American.

Of course these are generalizations. Plenty of business leaders recognize the need to protect and expand democracy; plenty of rural, white Christians still see the United States as the welcoming land of opportunity for all; plenty of college kids have not given up on America’s unrealized promise. But there is a growing willingness by disparate groups to say out loud what for a long time was perhaps there but not admitted—we don’t really accept this whole liberal-democracy-everyone-is-equal-give-me-your-tired-your-poor thing. We don’t believe it. It’s not working for us. We prefer something else.

What the ‘something-else’ might be is, for now, not clear. For many nationalists and populists it is out and out authoritarianism in the name of ‘traditional values,’ a la Putin, or the slightly less crude version now being rammed into place in Poland and Hungary. For wealthy elites, it’s a globalized world of weak states where the rich can flourish by manipulating the system (until, that is, they can colonize Mars and create the libertarian paradise. You thought Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk just loved rocket ships??:). Liberals dream of an egalitarian society where all vestiges of hierarchy and exploitation have been eliminated, and smart automation means everyone gets a guaranteed basic income.

It is not clear that we have enough people left who both understand American principles and are committed to defending them. I guess we will find out.

For in every city these two diverse humors are found, which arises from this: that the people desire neither to be commanded or oppressed by the great, and the great desire to command and oppress the people. Machiavelli, The Prince, ch. 9.

The most striking thing about our terrible politics—here in the US, but also abroad—is how the causes seem so disproportionate to the effects. Yes, there are certainly problems here and elsewhere, some of them quite serious. But they are not of a type or magnitude that most political observers, even a few years ago, would have thought likely to split the United States, Great Britain, and other European democracies apart and produce a seemingly unstoppable slide towards blood and soil nationalism.

Of course many countries in the past have fallen apart, or fallen prey to toxic leaders, or both. But in most cases there is some plausible cause, some set of terrible events and traumas, that explain what happened. Germany turned to Naziism after defeat in the greatest war ever known, followed by hyperinflation, and years of quasi-open warfare between Reds and Browns. Russia turned communist after defeat in the same war overthrew its ruling elites, outside powers intervened, and a terrible civil war decimated the country. Here in the US, our own Civil War was the culmination of centuries of slavery and irreconcilable disagreement over the direction of the country.

Nothing like that is happening now. We have troubles—inequality, immigration, racism. (We do have one no-kidding crisis, climate change, but so far this has not been a big driver of our falling apart). But what we seem to be seeing is something different, a self-inflicted destructive spiral, something that makes one wonder if Freud was right when he postulated an instinctual “Death Drive.” When Europe marched enthusiastically into The Great War, one reason seemed to be dissatisfaction with peace (Europe had experienced an unprecedented century without major war), with normal life, with bourgeois prosperity. There was a yearning for some kind of change, to blow it all up. How bad could it be? Imaginations were sadly ill-equipped to foresee the results.

Modern countries with an educated and prosperous citizenry, an open press, free markets, and participatory politics, were supposed to be, if not immune from these dangers, at least inoculated against them. Education and access to information would make people much harder to manipulate and less prone to give in to unthinking prejudices. The fruits of industrial capitalism, even if unevenly spread, raised most people well above subsistence and offered reason to hope they could better themselves. Prosperity, education and liberty made it possible for people to participate in civil society, to be citizens and not just subjects. In a mercantile society, ambition could be channeled into the relatively safe pursuit of wealth, for the benefit of all, instead of glory in battle.

Contrast this with pre-modern societies, where the vast majority lived on the edge of starvation, only a tiny few could read and write, a highly-stratified and repressive class system made any change in status seem hopeless, and ambitious rulers and would-be rulers reveled in violence. Under those conditions, it was understandable that any crisis could lead to disaster. Hopelessness, frustration, and fear could easily lead an ignorant populace to fall prey to almost any sort of fantastic rumor, and follow almost any would-be savior. (For some eye-opening descriptions of how this happened in medieval Europe, see The Pursuit of the Millennium, by Norman Cohn).

But today we seem to have come full circle, back to a world dominated by myths and conspiracies and unthinking prejudice. Demagogues and oligarchs circumvent with ease all the advances that we once thought would protect us. The press and media can be censored and distorted. Democratic institutions can be corrupted or ignored. Scientists can be drowned out and intimidated. From Russia to China to Turkey to the Philippines to Venezuela to Poland to Great Britain to the United States, a similar pattern emerges: lies, naked appeals to race and chauvinism, backed by coercion and threats of force. And it works. This is the most astonishing and depressing fact. Statements that any normal 10-year old knows are false, are accepted at face value. Actions that any normal 10-year knows are wrong, are applauded. Not by a few, but by millions.

We must wonder if our assumptions were wrong. That a majority could ever for long resist clever manipulators. That wealth could ever be tamed. That education and science could offset prejudice and fear. That educated citizens would be willing to solve hard problems according to rules and laws.

I think part of the reason we, here in the US, have either embraced dangerous movements, or been bewildered when so many do, is that we have been raised to think it can’t happen here. We think that ‘other’ countries, far away and long ago, might turn bad, but it’s impossible in today’s America, or in all those countries that now look pretty much like America. We Americans are hugely ignorant of our own history and the history of the rest of the world. On the one hand the history most of us are taught paints ‘us’ heroically and leaves out much that might teach us humility: the centrality of slavery, the destruction of Native Americans, colonial intervention in Latin America, the depredations of our titanic industries, and much more. But it also inadequately describes just how hard it is to do what we aim at. Many think we are able to just snap our fingers and do away with millennia of religious and racial discrimination, oligarchy, and patriarchy.

The “American exceptionalism” that Americans imbibe, on both left and right, is now proving to be our Achilles heel. First, it excuses our ignorance—what lessons do we need to learn? We’re different! So we fail to fix our embarrassing healthcare and tax systems, even though other states have shown the way. Have we ever in our history had a President who knew or cared less about what we might learn from others?

Second, it deludes us into thinking that we are not vulnerable to the most ancient failings and weaknesses of humanity. The default condition of mankind for all of recorded history, since the consolidation of large-scale agriculture-based states, has been oligarchy and autocracy, built on essentialist and rigid divisions of class, caste, race, faith, and gender. The dismantling of some of this scaffolding in the last three centuries can be seen as an irreversible tide, proof of a sharp break with the past. Or it may be a blip, now in the process of being snuffed out by clever oligarchs, skilled at turning modest grievances into existential threats.

Machiavelli said in The Prince there are two types of men. There is an ambitious few who want to rule. And there is a stolid many who want not to be ruled, or not ruled badly. America and other modern democracies have been partial victories for the many. But the would-be rulers are always with us, and like floodwaters they seek every weakness and every opening.

Basking in our largely unearned exceptionalism we have let our guard down, and handed our affairs over to the ambitious few. Most Americans think, correctly, that government has been captured by wealthy special interests. Machiavelli warns that “So too, the people, when they see they cannot resist the great, give reputation to one, and make him prince so as to be defended with his authority.” This describes the election of Donald Trump to a tee—he’s a sonofabitch, but to his voters he’s their sonofabitch. Why not roll the dice? How bad could it be?

Tyrants have ever posed as the friends of the people. And the teaching of the past is relevant again.

Montaigne

In January I took a short seminar at St. John’s College, my alma mater, on Montaigne. We read a few of his many essays—Montaigne is famous for only writing essays (mostly short, though some go on for 20 or 40 or even 100 pages) and for eschewing any type of order or system.

I confess that Montaigne was a favorite author of many of my peers, in college and afterwards, but not of mine. I liked more systematic, grandiose thinkers. My tastes have changed, but I still came to seminar thinking of Montaigne as something of a light-weight. His writings range widely across topics both profound and mundane; the titles include “That to Philosophize is to Learn How to Die” but also “Of Thumbs” and “Of the Custom of Wearing Clothes.” He is perfectly willing to describe the details of his diet and how many times a day he defecates. Montaigne, writing in the late 1500s, joins gleefully with his fellow humanists in debunking Aristotle and anyone who tries to create a system of thought.

The one essay of Montaigne’s that I remembered clearly was a famous one called “Of Cannibals,” in which he skewers European colonialism and assumptions of superiority to supposedly primitive peoples. He describes—it’s not clear how much is based on real events—the observations of Brazilian natives who are brought to Paris, and their shock at seeing people living on the streets in poverty, the abject deference of grown men to a child-King, and other questionable European customs.

I assumed that in our seminar these sorts of socio-political observations would be a major topic, and they were, but I was surprised to find—with the help of some gentle prodding from our seminar leader—that our most important theme turned out to be the Self. What is it, and does it even exist? Montaigne’s refusal to systematize, to start with first principles and build a logical edifice, is based in part on a conviction that human beings, himself included, are far too fragile and changeable to sustain such an enterprise. The essays are meant to illustrate the inherent disorderliness and contradictions of the human mind. We jump willy-nilly from one thing to another, from thoughts of God to scratching an itch. The essays have frequent observations such as this, from his concluding essay “Of Experience”:

o “Men do not know the natural infirmity of their mind: it does nothing but ferret and quest, and keeps incessantly whirling around, building up and becoming entangled in its own work, like our silkworms, and is suffocated in it. A mouse in a pitch barrel [Erasmus]. It thinks it notices from a distance some sort of glimmer of imaginary light and truth; but while running toward it, it is crossed by so many difficulties and obstacles, and diverted by so many new quests, that it strays from the road, bewildered.” (Donald Frame translation).

Now it is not as though previous philosophers had not noticed that our minds are restless and unfocused. But serious thinkers had tried to come up with remedies: better education, dialectical inquiry, more mathematics, self-discipline, submission to God. Montaigne’s fellow-countryman Rene Descartes would, a generation later, doubt our mental capacities even more fiercely but only as a means to establish a rock-solid Method for reaching the truth. (Descartes and his descendants, in fact, are dedicated to building better Selves by ruthlessly discarding what they consider useless and weak parts. No concessions to bodily frailties for Descartes). Montaigne doesn’t go there. His conclusion is a hard skepticism: “To learn that we have said or done a foolish thing, that is nothing; we must learn that we are nothing but fools, a far broader and more important lesson.”

What is hard to tell is what Montaigne makes of this intuition. At times he writes as though more self-knowledge—he reveres the Socrates who teaches “Know Thyself”—will enable him to control his wayward thoughts and passions. When he says “The life of Caesar has no more to show us than our own; an emperor’s or an ordinary man’s, it is still a life subject to all human accidents. Let us only listen: we tell ourselves all we most need,” he sounds like a champion of individual autonomy and self-knowledge. At a minimum he thinks recognizing his own weakness makes him more modest, less judgmental, a better friend and counselor. This Montaigne is a kind of discoverer and champion of the Self; he delights in charting its vagaries, its idiosyncrasies and its weaknesses as much, or more, than its strengths and virtues. See all of it, love all of it, seems to be his message, including our appetites, our passions, our bodies in all their messiness and frailty. This holistic embrace might lead to a new type of self-knowledge and self-control.

At other times though Montaigne seems to stress that the Self is unknowable, so full of changes and contradictions that, like Oakland, there is no there there. There is no point trying to regulate it, tame it, much less know it. All we can do is watch.

These pictures of an unstable, perhaps non-existent Self seems to be something new in Western thinking, and also to stand at the beginning of what has been a lengthy and fierce debate within modern thought. The contemporary philosopher Charles Taylor, in his encyclopedic Sources of the Self, says Montaigne represents a “turning point” who rejects “the virtually unanimous direction of ancient thought” that beneath the flux of the soul stands unchanging reason, our true inner core. But Montaigne also stands for a particular way of being in the world. “The Cartesian calls for a radical disengagement from ordinary experience; Montaigne requires a deeper engagement in particularity. These two facets of modern individuality have been at odds up to this day.”

On the one hand, the primacy of the individual self and its right to development and actualization is a core, usually unchallenged assumption of Western liberalism. It is at the foundation of the American political and social project, and of our attachment to free markets, free speech, freedom of religion. We admire especially the “self-made man” who through gumption and guile imposes form and direction on the Self.

On the other hand, modern (Cartesian) science has been steadily chipping away at ideas of free will, of genuine choice, of some island of autonomy in the soul that is untouched by genes, hormones, upbringing, media, or what song we happened to hear just now on Spotify. We are bundles of impulses and drives that operate for the most part unconsciously. Much of the story we invent to give shape and meaning to our lives is after-the-fact, a fabrication designed to disguise the truth from ourselves and others and make it appear that ‘I’ decides.

Finding and realizing our ‘genuine self’ still seems to have the upper hand in the popular imagination, judging by the New York Times bestseller list. But among the educated, in the universities and think tanks and other elite circles, I think assumptions have shifted decisively. Modernist art from Virginia Woolf and Joyce and Eliot and Picasso arguably softened up the culture to the idea of a fluid, contradictory identity. Now, it is harder-edged work by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and their multitude of followers that rules, pointing out the many, many ways our judgement is flawed and distorted. Every month sees the publication of a new book by Malcolm Gladwell or Dan Ariely popularizing findings from psychology, economics, or neuroscience that call into question our ability to know ourselves or make objective decisions. Oliver Sacks, the late talented writer-psychologist, wrote multiple bestsellers with case studies that showed how damage to the brain could change us in astonishing ways, and also how tenaciously ‘we’ fought to remake our internal stories to make sense of these changes.

I can affirm from my own experience that these findings have worked their way into professional education and training at every level. Usually it takes the form of identifying some way the brain tries to trick us, and exhorting the student not to fall for it. A variety of methods and algorithms can help. But there is a ‘finger in the dyke’ fatalism that I think comes through: our brains are in charge, and there is only so so much we can do to keep from fooling ourselves.

Sometimes explicitly, sometimes not, the message is: your Self is a delusion. At best it is a useful simplifying fiction that helps us navigate a bewildering world; at worst a lie that can make us deeply unhappy and destructive.

Harari

As it happens, while discussing Montaigne in seminar I started reading a new book by the Israeli historian/polymath Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, that was given to me for Christmas. Harari has written provocative bestsellers that I have not read, but based on this book he is a frighteningly learned, earnest, and clear-headed thinker. That this was a book of essays of course made it irresistible to compare with Montaigne.

Harari is concerned with a wide range of contemporary problems and has smart things to say about many of them. I was surprised, however, to find that, like Montaigne, Harari’s underlying theme is the Self. In many places Harari critiques the ways we delude ourselves as individuals and collectively. In his final essay, “Meditation: Just Observe,” he confesses his starting point, which is grounded in Buddhism and meditation (Harari doesn’t call himself a Buddhist and is caustic about organized Buddhism, but his conclusions rest on Buddhist insights). The meditation experience, according to Harari, reveals that the Self is an illusion, that the stories we make up about the Self to give our lives meaning are false, and we need to get over it. When these stories are scaled up to justify our allegiance to a country, a race, a faith they do tremendous damage.

Harari thinks popular culture has now internalized this message. As evidence he cites the recent Disney/Pixar animated hit Inside-Out: “In countless Disney movies, the heroes face difficulties and dangers, but they eventually triumph by finding their authentic self and following their free choices. Inside-Out brutally dismantles this myth. It adopts the latest neurobiological view of humans and takes viewers on a journey into Riley’s brain only to discover that she has no authentic self and makes no free choices.” Dale Carnegie is out, Tversky/Kahnemann is in.

Harari accepts the liberal claim that all Selves and all types of self-actualization (that don’t directly harm others) are equal and there is no way to say one is preferable to another. But his argument is the negative of the liberal vision: that all Selves have immeasurable value and need to be nurtured and developed. For Harari, the beginning of wisdom is to understand that every Self is equally without value—in fact non-existent—and every story is equally false.

Harari wants us to believe that this is a good thing. He is up to speed on the latest scientific and psychological findings. He hopes that more people taking up meditation and abandoning faith in the Self will help inoculate us against outside manipulation by advertisers, political hucksters, authoritarian states, religious fanatics, and so forth. He exhorts us to move fast. According to Harari, the manipulators are reading the same books about our weaknesses and inventing new techniques, riding the social media wave into our brains. Soon ultra-sophisticated algorithms that rest on mountains of personal data will leave us defenseless, even as we delude ourselves into thinking we are making up our own minds.

I share many of Harari’s fears, but count me skeptical about his solution. Convincing people they have no free will and live in a meaningless world (dominated by suffering, according to Harari and Buddhism) does not sound like a recipe for progress, peace, and freedom. In any case, this is a teaching that history shows is only available, in its fullness, to a few; Harari himself points out the many cases of leaders in Buddhist societies waging war and persecuting un-believers, in direct contradiction to Buddhist teachings, including contemporary examples like Myanmar and Sri Lanka.

My fear is that while it is easy to persuade people that OTHER human beings are weak puppets controlled by outside forces, very few will believe this about themselves. They are not taking from this the lessons that Harari—and I think Montaigne—hope for: humility, compromise, a retreat from fanaticism. Instead it is opening the gates for seeing the opinions and desires of other people as illusions. I think we see this already on a mass scale, in the ease with which so many dismiss unwelcome information and science as “Fake News.”

In the end, Harari seems to face us with a version of the same dilemma as Plato’s Republic: genuine knowledge, enlightenment, is the cure for injustice. But very few people are going to attain genuine knowledge. They need some stories, some noble lies, that ideally are compatible with genuine knowledge. More people meditating, or taking psychedelics, or anything that makes them take themselves less seriously, won’t hurt: we Americans especially are in the grip of an extreme version of the Self-actualization story, one that puts the individual and her interests and desires at the center and dismisses any other claims. But don’t imagine that this will be a silver bullet that ushers in a new age of tolerance and mutual respect.

Coda on Hume

Harari combines up to the minute findings in biology and behavioral science with an ancient tradition; he is not the first to point out that Buddhism has many compatibilities with Western science. That two distinct and separate traditions come to similar conclusions helps validate both and convince us this is where the truth lies.

However, this may not quite be the case. In Western thought, the turning point in our view of the Self in a Buddhist direction is usually associated with the British philosopher David Hume (though, as we have seen, Montaigne may have a prior claim). Hume closely analyzed human mental states and concluded in A Treatise on Human Nature, published in 1739, that there was no necessary connection, no causality, between successive states over time. Causality is an illusion (albeit one we cannot escape). There are only perceptions and experience, which are always in flux. The notion that we remain the same, that there is a constant interior substance that constitutes Adam or Sarah throughout our lives, is false.

Like Montaigne and Harari, Hume thought this skeptical teaching would induce more tolerance and moderation, especially about religion. This is apparently a key reason why in a recent poll of (mostly analytic, Anglo-American) philosophers, Hume was ranked as the #1 favorite of all traditional thinkers. ¹Hume’s influence on subsequent Western thought has been massive.

It turns out, though, that Hume’s central insight may in fact have been borrowed from Buddhism. An American philosopher, Alison Gopnik, through an admirable bit of research, established a decade ago that the young Hume spent time in France—at the same time he was writing the Treatise—with Jesuit missionaries who had spent years in Tibet and Thailand and were intimately familiar with Buddhist thought. Though Hume never seems to have acknowledged these contacts, it seems too much of a coincidence not to have had an impact. Certainly Hume was entertaining thoughts along these lines, but it seems probable that acquaintance with Buddhism shaped his thinking and gave him the impetus to come to his radical conclusions. ²

I confess I am not sure what to make of this. Hume after all in the Treatise makes his claims based on the scientific method. He intends to apply the same approach to man that has been used successfully by Newton on the planets. He doesn’t advise his readers to go meditate. He persuades through his arguments and good old-fashioned Western philosophizing.

Still, the foundation comes from asking you, the reader, to look inside yourself and pay close attention to your experience—not that different from Harari’s description of meditation as being still and watching how your own mind works. Meditation advocates often describe it as entirely ‘empirical’, not based on any metaphysical assumptions, just repeated and disciplined close observation. This sounds Humean, if not Montaignean. It is easy to see this approach resonating with a young Hume, who then recast it in terms that would reach his audience.

Maybe the image of separate traditions and cultures is a myth (at least among literate civilizations in Eurasia). Goods, ideas, art, and people have been circulating in often uncharted ways for a very long time. It didn’t start with European expansion in the 15th century. A messy, complicated, interacting world that resists our attempts to sort it into neat boxes—Montaigne would like that.

Coyotes and Indians

A few days after we moved to New Mexico we saw two coyotes just a few hundred yards from our house, which is in the middle of Santa Fe. Since then we’ve seen single coyotes several times, always near a small arroyo down the street. Neighbors tell us they are common, though they don’t venture far from the arroyo.

Like most locals, I expect, we look kindly on the coyotes. They are a dash of southwestern color and confirm that the Wild West is not entirely gone. We share half-in-jest warnings to watch our dogs. Just knowing there are coyotes in the neighborhood makes one a bit more alert and alive.

Nudged by the local fauna, a month ago I bought a paperback called Coyote America, by Dan Flores, a Santa Fe based historian. It was an eye-opener. Flores traces coyote history, from the distant past—coyotes, along with all canids, originated in the American southwest—to today. Coyotes are thriving, thank you, and have recently expanded their range to include almost all of the United States and Canada. They have learned to get along well with man and show up in cities big and small, feasting on the mice and rats that accompany human settlements.

Modern civilization has accidentally done several things to benefit the coyote, despite a determined extermination campaign that has lasted 100 years and is not quite done even today. First, our desire to make the West safe for sheep and cattle proved almost completely effective in wiping out wolves, the coyotes’ greatest enemy. Wolves see coyotes as competitors and will often hunt and kill them, or keep them away from food. The last wild wolves in the lower 48 were done away with in the 1920s. Without wolves, coyotes expanded their territories and generally had the wilderness to themselves.

Another boon to the coyote happened in the late 19th century, when reformers took aim at the packs of wild dogs that lived in virtually every American city. We sent out dog-catchers, rounded them up, and put them in pounds. Soon dogs were on leashes or behind fences, and our cities were easy pickings for enterprising coyotes.

This is not to say, however, that coyotes have had it easy. For most of the late 19th and 20th century America waged a no-holds-barred war on coyotes. State and federal bounties incentivized constant killing, but as governments got involved, these retail measures gave way to wholesale trapping and poisoning, mostly with strychnine. Full-time professionals backed by government bureaucrats made it their business to wipe coyotes from the face of the earth. The rationale was the threat posed to big game like deer and elk, and the desire to make the West a sportsman’s paradise. (The innocuously named Biological Survey, part of the then-new Forest Service, took the lead early in the 20th century. Ranchers argued that if the government was going to create protected forest areas where predators could hide and multiply, then the government was obliged to keep them under control). When scientific studies were undertaken in the 1920s it turned out coyotes had minimal impact on game animals, but this didn’t stop the killing, which had taken on a life of its own. Ranchers and farmers wanted coyotes gone and dominated politics in most Western states.

The popular image of the coyote was overwhelmingly negative—it was seen as an ugly, cowardly, pest, of no more intrinsic value than a rattlesnake or tarantula. Flores blames Mark Twain for a good part of this bad press. Twain penned an oft-quoted description of coyotes in his 1872 book Roughing It that called them “spiritless and cowardly,” “coarse-haired and pitiful,” and so on. This became conventional wisdom, repeated by other observers who often contrasted the coyote negatively with the supposedly more noble wolf. Coyotes were said to be barely worth the price of the bullets needed to dispatch them.

Why, despite these assaults, coyotes didn’t go the way of wolves and grizzlies and mountain lions—that is, disappear—is a fascinating story. For one thing, coyotes respond to pressure by increasing the size of their litters. For another, they are adaptable, able to live in close proximity to man, eating our chickens and lambs as well as our garbage and rats, finding places to hide and breed in our midst. Coyotes are highly flexible in their intra-species relations, sometimes living and hunting in large packs, but able to operate in pairs or solo as circumstances dictate. Coyote behavior has been shaped by its position as a middle predator, always under threat from wolves and larger competitors. Coyotes long ago learned to be cunning, wary, and opportunistic.

Their continued survival of course infuriated the coyote-killers. After World War II the government geared up for a final solution, using new poisons developed during the war. But luckily for coyotes the tide began to turn. The new science of ecology taught that predators like the coyote were not just pests but played a vital role in keeping the environment in balance. The widespread use of poisons came to be seen as dangerous to other wildlife and to the entire food chain, including man. The sheep industry declined, and there was less pressure from below on government to continue with extermination. And the broader culture began to embrace the American wilderness and abandon the dream of a West wholly fenced in and tamed.

We can even thank Hollywood. Walt Disney in the 1950s put out a series of cartoons, and eventually a full-length feature called “The Coyote’s Lament,” which protested the bad treatment of coyotes. Flores remembers this as a turning point in his own views. Wiley Coyote wormed his way into every living room.

In short, the White Man moved a little way towards seeing the coyote the way the American Indian always has. For many tribes in the West, Coyote was a central figure in myth and story: the creator, the trickster, a bundle of appetites whose schemes often go awry, but also a cunning mediator between gods and men. Flores contrasts the affection and deep connection to Coyote felt by Native Americans with the pathological hatred and misunderstanding of most white settlers. It makes for sad and uncomfortable reading.

After reading Coyote America I dipped into the ethnographer Barry Lopez’s 1977 compilation of Coyote stories, Giving Birth to Thunder, Sleeping With His Daughter: Coyote Builds North America. Lopez tells us that “No other personality is as old, as well known, or as widely distributed among the tribes as Coyote.” Coyote stories, as Lopez warns the reader, are not always simple or fit for children; Coyote is full of lust and does many terrible things. “Coyote stories detailed tribal origins; they emphasized a world view thought to be a correct one; and they dramatized the value of proper behavior. To participate in the stories by listening to them was to renew one’s sense of tribal identity. For youngsters, the stories were a reminder of the right way to do things—so often, of course, not Coyote’s way.”

Native Americans didn’t romanticize the coyote or make him a cuddly Disney character; they built on the coyote’s real traits of wiliness and adaptability to create an elemental character of great power. It goes without saying that the thought of doing away with coyotes never crossed their mind.

Here in the Southwest you are forced to confront the history of Native American interactions with Europeans, first the Spanish and then Anglo-Americans. It is impossible not to see the parallels between how Anglo-Americans have treated both coyotes and Indians. After initial cautious encounters we became convinced that it was impossible to co-exist. “Civilization” and Manifest Destiny were deemed incompatible with untamed predators, whether people or animals. Sometimes in hot fury, sometimes more in sorrow than anger, we pursued an implacable policy of extermination punctuated by half-hearted efforts to give the enemy a remote place of sanctuary. We created myths of inferiority and threat that justified our actions. We used the most extreme methods—biological warfare (tuberculosis-infected buffalo skins given to Indians, infectious mange deliberately spread to wolves and coyotes), habitat destruction, traps, poisons. Only after thoroughly transforming and destroying the natural environment that each depended on for survival, and bringing both to the brink of elimination, did we begin to regret what we had done.

Today coyotes as a species are thriving, even if attitudes remain mixed. (Here in New Mexico, like many Western states, hunting clubs and outfitters regularly hold coyote shoots, offering prizes for the most coyotes, the biggest coyote, etc. You don’t need a license, and it is always open season.) In contrast the damage done to Native Americans, in terms of their living culture, seems sadly to be permanent and irreversible. A particularly offensive strategy used with Native Americans that has no parallel for coyotes was the policy of forced assimilation. Since the beginning of the Republic it was thought the height of tolerance to offer Native Americans the chance to change themselves into modern Europeans; if they succeeded, they might be accepted as citizens. To this end Native Americans were forced onto reservations, and children were taken from their parents, to be turned into good Christians and farmers.

While we still have coyotes, Coyote is barely alive, eking out an existence on reservations and in scholarly studies. I doubt my ability, being old and set in my ways, to see the world in a way that includes Coyote, no matter how many stories I read. I hope I’m wrong. I look forward to future encounters near the arroyo.

On New Year’s Eve my wife and I went to something called the “Cosmic Walk” at our local Unitarian Universalist congregation in Santa Fe. This was the first I had heard of this ceremony, which apparently is fairly common in the UU world and elsewhere. It’s frequently held at the Solstice or at New Year’s. We gathered inside where a large spiral had been laid out with evergreen branches. At the center was a bowl with a flame, and smaller bowls with colored LED bulbs. As our minister read from a prepared script, we took turns walking into the spiral, taking a bulb, turning it on, and as we retraced our steps placing it in small bowls scattered at intervals along the spiral. Each bulb was meant to represent a milestone in cosmic history.

The script (here is an example, not the exact one we heard, but similar: https://deeptimejourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/CosmicWalk.pdf.). It starts with the Big Bang and goes through the major developments from then until today: the formation of galaxies, stars, and planets; the coming to be of water, oxygen, and other elements on earth; the beginning of life; the evolution of animals and plants; the origins of mammals, apes, and man; and highlights of human history such as the development of speech, fire, agriculture, religion, and science. It ends today with our awareness of this complex history as revealed in modern science.

The ritual cultivates a twofold sense of wonder: first at the mystery of it all, that there is something rather than nothing and that all this ‘something’ comes from an unknown and possibly unknowable ‘seed’ existing before there was space or time. And second, that somehow all this development and history makes ‘us’ possible. The universe improbably brings forth a being that can be aware of and at least partially know the universe.

I think cultivating wonder is a good thing—philosophy/science begins with wonder, as Socrates and Aristotle told us, and it is spiritually beneficial to be reminded of the small place that we as individuals and as a species play in this large story. In the 150 feet or so of the spiral, human beings are present in only the last inch. So I enjoyed the ritual and its message.

Still, some things about it started me, well, wondering. First, the attempt to use science to invoke wonder and awe is interesting. The ceremony emphasizes the Mystery of the beginning and the further Mystery of the unfolding. A common criticism of science, however, is that it undermines our sense of wonder. Modern science doesn’t see the universe as a reflection of God’s design, or as filled with perfect circular motions, or as influencing us via the movement of the stars and planets. Instead, science tells us the universe is nothing but matter and energy, devoid of purpose or direction, cold and overwhelmingly lifeless.

When Socrates and Aristotle tell us that philosophy, which for them was indistinguishable from science, begins in wonder, it’s not clear whether ‘wonder’ is a good thing. As they describe it, wonder is a kind of perplexity that drives us to think and learn and ultimately replace wonder with knowledge. We begin by wondering at what seem to be the regular motions of the stars and the irregular ones of the planets, but now that we have precisely mapped these motions and sent probes to the planets, revealing they are made of the same stuff we are familiar with here on earth, isn’t it slightly ridiculous to keep wondering? There are plenty of interesting details we still aren’t sure of, but we seem to be in the mopping up stage—hardly cause for wonder.

Parts of the Cosmic Walk narrative seem tailored to teach us that the development of the universe has a direction, namely to create human beings. There is a set of arguments put forth mostly by theologians that the natural laws governing the universe show intelligent design or purpose; if various physical constants were different in only small ways, for instance, the conditions for life would supposedly be impossible. Can it be accidental that the great forces of attraction and repulsion in the universe are so well balanced that it is possible for any kind of stability at all? Is it accidental that exploding suns broadcast heavy elements that turn into planets with the exact chemical properties needed to create life? The “Cosmic Walk” narrative alludes to such arguments.

This is a thesis that, if true, would indeed be wonderful but is, to put it mildly, not one that most physicists or biologists would endorse. The standard scientific view is that the universe changes in accord with laws of nature that are the same everywhere, and that the evolution of galaxies and stars and life is no more designed to create human beings than it is to create bacteria or thunderstorms or supernovae or any other natural phenomenon.

As I listened I was reminded of a line of thought in Catholicism that tries to reconcile science and especially evolutionary theory with Christianity. And when I went home and started investigating, it turns out that is in fact the source: according to one account, the Cosmic Walk “was created in the mid 1980s by Sr. Miriam Therese MacGillis of Genesis Farm in New Jersey, who was inspired by the “New Story,” as then told by Thomas Berry.” ¹ I hadn’t head of Berry, but a few searches revealed he was an American Catholic priest who died in 2009, and called himself a ‘cosmologist’ or ‘eco theologian.” Berry, according to Wikipedia, “studied and was influenced by the work of Teilhard de Chardin and was president of the American Teilhard Association (1975–1987).”

Teilhard de Chardin is someone I encountered with enthusiasm in my youth through a book called The Phenomenon of Man, written in the mid-50s. It’s a somewhat crazy combination of Catholicism (de Chardin was a Jesuit priest) and evolutionary theory (he was also a trained anthropologist who spent years doing original work in China and India on ancient man), arguing that the history of the universe tends to greater and greater complexity and consciousness. This culminates at some time, fairly soon, in the Omega Point where the universe as a whole becomes a coherent, self-aware whole. All this is directed by Christ.

De Chardin is not exactly an orthodox Catholic—the Jesuits banned him from teaching, and his books were officially disavowed—so I was surprised to see that he still has tremendous influence. Recent conservative popes including John Paul II and Benedict VI have praised him. Benedict wrote: “Against the background of the modern evolutionary world view, Teilhard de Chardin depicted the cosmos as a process of ascent, a series of unions. From very simple beginnings the path leads to ever greater and more complex unities, in which multiplicity is not abolished but merged into a growing synthesis, leading to the “Noosphere” in which spirit and its understanding embrace the whole and are blended into a kind of living organism. Invoking the epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians, Teilhard looks on Christ as the energy that strives toward the Noosphere and finally incorporates everything in its fullness.” The current Pope Francis mentions him positively in his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si, which focuses on the environment and our relation to the planet. De Chardin is valued, it seems, for his ability to absorb modern science and in particular evolutionary theory, long a bete noir for believers, into Christianity.

The Cosmic Walk is not explicitly Christian or even religious, but the notion of the universe as a cosmos, an ordered whole designed to bring forth human beings, seems central to its message. Does the existence of human beings—or possibly other beings on other planets who are self-conscious and can know the cosmic order—‘prove’ that the universe was intended from the beginning to be hospitable to us? That, as the Cosmic Walk implies, there is a moral arc from a hot cloud of gas, to a sea of chemicals, to solitary single-celled animals, to cooperation between cells, to animals that care for their young and flowering plants that ‘cooperate’ with flying insects, and ultimately to social animals that create culture?

De Chardin’s vision seems very pagan. There is a Divine Force immanent in the world, and in us. Not outside it. Ross Douthat, a perceptive Catholic writer and New York Times columnist, recently wrote about the rise of paganism in America. ² Douthat defines paganism as meaning “that divinity is fundamentally inside the world rather than outside it, that God or the gods or Being are ultimately part of nature rather than an external creator, and that meaning and morality and metaphysical experience are to be sought in a fuller communion with the immanent world rather than a leap toward the transcendent.” Douthat is critical of today’s paganism because he thinks it doesn’t offer believers much help in the face of disaster, sickness, and the other ills that flesh is heir to. It therefore appeals more to the privileged than the poor and weak. A transcendent God can intervene in the world on behalf of the helpless, and offer an afterlife beyond the reach of this world.

But Douthat respects, even if he does not endorse, the neo-pagan critique of traditional Christianity, that it sunders us from the world. It devalues nature, and especially many aspects of human nature, in favor of denial and asceticism; your essence is not of this world. Classical philosophy, taken up enthusiastically by certain Christian thinkers, reinforced this tendency to denigrate the natural world in favor of a ‘higher’ sphere of unchanging Being. (Nietzsche famously called Christianity “Platonism for the masses.”).

The Cosmic Walk is all about harmony between nature and man, and also about enlisting science in the service of this harmony. The question is, can science be reconciled with paganism? A pagan sensibility is about living closer to nature and respecting, indeed venerating, the world that man is part of. Modern science in contrast is motivated by the desire to somehow stand outside nature, and to subordinate and manipulate it. It was my conclusion, when long ago I studied Bacon and Descartes and the founders of modern science, that their project was in key ways an extension of a Christian worldview, where the natural world was derivative from and inferior to an external power. But instead of God, now Man would be the master. To do this, however, we needed to stop trying to understand the world; we only needed to be able to accurately describe it.

For most of us, today’s science is as opaque and mysterious as the doctrine of the Trinity or Aristotle’s metaphysics. We take its teachings about quantum paradoxes, and what happened in the first seconds after the Big Bang, on faith. It tells us about a natural world that is not just stranger than we imagine, but than we can imagine. Ultimately, there is no scientific reason to think that our little brains, designed to help us survive from day to day, are adequate to unravel the mysteries of the universe.

Given this, yes, a certain kind of wonder is appropriate, but less at how well we fit in the universe than at its ultimate impenetrability. Post-Aristotelian science teaches us to be skeptical of claims that we are outside of nature or different in kind from other animals and other beings. To that extent it reconciles us with the world. But it doesn’t promise an intelligible world, or a world where man feels at home.

Understanding and Restoring Freedom: A Multi-Dimensional View

Introduction

Here in America I think we have a very serious problem with the way we talk about and understand ‘freedom.’ Freedom is one our most precious words. It is central to our self-understanding as Americans, and how we see ourselves in the world and in history. We invoke it frequently, but often in such a cramped and thoughtless way that we run the risk of misunderstanding what freedom means, how to gain it, and how to preserve it.

To state the problem in its simplest terms, America has two distinct political and intellectual traditions regarding freedom. The first, which is dominant today and has been dominant at various times in our past, understands freedom as the absence of external coercion. Defending individual rights and property rights, with the bare minimum of coercion needed to protect Americans from crime and foreign enemies, is the touchstone for judging government. Good government gives individuals the maximum of liberty to interact with one another and employ their talents in a market system to acquire wealth and develop the economy. I will call this the libertarian tradition. In America this vision is associated closely with Jefferson and Reagan, and finds its finest expression in the Declaration of Independence and its ringing claim that every human being is endowed with inalienable rights.

The second tradition sees freedom embodied in democracy and in the mechanisms for determining the public interest and the well-being of the nation and its citizens. Freedom is realized when citizens act together as equals to further the common good. Good government is actively engaged in developing the economy, helping the disadvantaged, and preventing the concentration of wealth and power in a few hands. I will call this the democratic tradition. In America this vision is associated closely with Hamilton, Lincoln, and both Roosevelts and finds its finest expression in the Constitution and its preamble calling on “We the People” to take collective action to secure the blessings of liberty and promote the general welfare.

Of course both traditions intertwine in American history, and for most Americans it is a matter of course that individual rights and participatory democracy are two sides of a coin. There is a natural pendulum swing between periods when one tradition or the other is ascendant, and Americans are taught that both must be taken into account: the will of the majority is decisive in selecting leaders and making policy and law, but majority will is limited by the need to respect individual rights to free speech, due process, etc. However, there is an underlying tension between the two traditions that can lead enthusiasts for liberty to see democracy as a threat to property and freedom, and enthusiasts for democracy to see a too zealous regard for rights as an unacceptable limitation on popular will.

A touchstone for how you see these traditions is how you interpret the Boston Tea Party. Did American patriots throw boxes of tea overboard to say “don’t tread on me”— we don’t like taxes and we don’t want government telling us what to do—as the contemporary ‘Tea Party’ would have it? Or was the message that we want to impose our own taxes and, with democracy as the vehicle, take charge of government for the public good? Today the former understanding is dominant, but I believe the latter is more accurate.

Today we face a Janus-like challenge from both directions. The first and most far-reaching comes from libertarians who seek to use the power of wealth to entrench an oligarchy protected by legal and institutional limits on democracy. Distrust of government, complacency about the strength of our institutions, and poor understanding of how government contributes to individual liberty, have allowed enemies of democracy to dominate our public discourse. For today’s would-be oligarchs, property rights take precedence over democratic efforts to regulate and tax. They seek to hem in the popular will by lobbying, throwing money at politicians, voter suppression, gerrymandering, control of the courts, and flooding public discourse with subsidized experts. The contemporary libertarian-dominated Republican Party, although it controls and is responsible for the national government, has no agenda for actually governing and is instead at work actively undermining the capacity of the federal government.

The second threat is more recent and takes the form of a reactionary populism energized by anger over ‘political correctness’ and the assertion of equal rights by minorities, women, immigrants, and the LGBTQ community. The personality cult around Donald Trump rests on the white majority’s view that its interests are being thwarted, and its identity demeaned, by an excessive concern for these other groups. An often tone-deaf progressive movement has helped fuel today’s populism by focusing relentlessly on the grievances of excluded groups and America’s sins, without a more inclusive message.

I think we can counter these trends with a three-part liberal agenda.

• Reinvigorating and reforming our democratic institutions to make words like ‘citizenship,’ ‘politics,’ and ‘government’ sources of pride, not the butt of jokes.

• Fighting the partisan divide by putting in place ways, such as a modified draft, to actively mix together citizens from different classes, races, regions and religions.

• Uniting the country behind big ideas for the common good such as universal healthcare.

Government and Freedom

The greatest misunderstanding, in my view, has to do with our view of government. The libertarian tradition focuses most of its attention on government as the number one threat to liberty. Government without question can be one of the prime culprits and great attention and skill are needed to devise political systems that prevent abuse. But a single-minded focus on guarding against government overreach ignores the ways freedom can be threatened from many other directions. Our neighbors, our families, our churches, our employers—all these can be sources of coercion. Good government is often the only means to defend ourselves and create the conditions for a free life. If government is too strong and uncontrolled, it restricts freedom and undermines other key institutions; but if too weak, it allows those institutions and individuals to become threats to freedom in their own right. Every system and institution, whether family or church or market or government or whatever, needs to be checked by other independent systems and institutions.

Freedom is also at risk when we live as slaves to necessity and want. The classical view was that to be free meant first and foremost to have enough wealth and means to have leisure, free time to devote to public affairs or philosophy or private interests. No one could really be free who had to spend all their time focused on survival. Given pre-modern conditions, only an elite few could afford freedom—most people were peasants, one bad harvest away from starvation. Greeks and Romans justified their use of slaves, in part, as the necessary means for a privileged few to be free.

Here too our view of government is crucial. For libertarians, government is the enemy of prosperity, always prone to strangle individual initiative and burden entrepreneurs with taxes and regulations. But a supportive government is essential to modern capitalism, and without government intervention to shift resources from the haves to the have-nots, many Americans would live in poverty, and few could afford the education and training needed to advance.

Freedom is also in jeopardy if the fruits of economic growth are captured by a self-perpetuating oligarchy. Some version of oligarchy, rule by the wealthy and those who control the acquisition and perpetuation of wealth, has been the norm for most of human history. The American Revolution was first and foremost an experiment in creating a “new order” without oligarchs. But, as Thomas Piketty showed convincingly in his surprise bestseller Capital in the 21st Century, free markets and capitalism have not changed the powerful human forces that tend to create a small class that captures a disproportionate amount of society’s wealth. Government must be strong enough and autonomous enough to prevent this, a task that, given the rising levels of wealth inequality in the United States, our government is not doing very well. (The United States ranks 32nd in inequality out of 35 developed states).

Dealing with Coercion

Even hard-core defenders of individual rights are prone to misunderstand the central role of government in ensuring those rights and guarding against other, equally dangerous threats.  What are the other sources of coercion that we need to guard against?  Four stand out:  other people; family; religion; and markets.

Other People. In fact, every other human being can constrain freedom. It was Hobbes who invented modern political thought by asking, what is the most important task of government, and answering: to protect us from our fellow man. Left to ourselves in a state of nature, every neighbor, every person we encounter, is a potential threat. Hobbes is careful to stress that even a small and weak person can attack and kill someone much stronger. This war of all against all can only end if we give up our natural freedom to a powerful state capable of punishing and preventing this violence.

Anyone familiar with movies about asteroid strikes, or the zombie apocalypse, knows what Hobbes is talking about. When civilization collapses, there is a terrible fight for food and shelter and the minimum of security. Previously friendly neighbors turn into snarling enemies. Well short of this extreme, we see the same phenomenon in parts of the world—including parts of the United States—where police and the law are weak or nonexistent.

I had lunch in the early years of the Iraq war with the journalist George Packer, who wrote the book Assassin’s Gate about the American occupation of Iraq. After exchanging vivid stories about the collapse of order in Baghdad, I asked—rhetorically—why no one in the Bush White House seemed to remember the basic teachings of Hobbes. “They’re all business majors there; no one knows anything about politics,” was his scathing response.

The Hobbesian solution, an all-powerful state, probably seems extreme to most of us. It prioritizes security and protection against other human beings over every other good, and lacks what most of us would consider minimal barriers to abuse of state power. But reflection and experience tell us that some kind of authority strong enough to ensure personal security, and security of property and property rights, is essential for liberty. It is misleading to think of this as ‘giving up’ some of our freedom in exchange for security. We give up our ‘right’ to use violence against others (except in self-defense), and in return are provided a secure space within which we can plan for the future, build institutions, improve our property, raise families, and in short live like human beings. We have seen more than enough recent examples in places like Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan of what happens when this authority disappears, even when it is grossly imperfect.

In his recent book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker makes a convincing case that in most of the world we have seen a tremendous drop in levels of violence, both domestically and between countries. Murder rates in Europe are a fraction of what they were several hundred years ago. So are rates of robbery, rape, and all manner of inter-personal violence. Our norms and expectations have shifted, so that punishments such as burning heretics at the stake or putting people to death for petty crimes, that seemed normal to our ancestors, are now beyond the pale.

Why this tremendous change? Pinker says a critical factor for Europe was the growth of strong centralized states that, while not (initially) democracies, had an interest in advancing the conditions of their populace. These stronger states brought to heel the hundreds and thousands of semi-independent fiefdoms, petty nobles, landlords, and wealthy churchmen who produced in Europe something close to the state of nature. The first police forces were created in London only 200 years ago. Before that no permanent institution was tasked with preventing crime or capturing criminals. Ad hoc posses, often organized by local landowners or nobles, might go after criminals, often acting as judge, jury, and executioner.

Does this growth in law enforcement and state power mean we are less free? For the vast majority, clearly not. They have moved from being constant victims of crime, random violence, arbitrary punishments, and abuse by their social superiors, to being citizens with expectations of a peaceful life and protection from threats and violence. Those who feel most aggrieved are the rich and powerful, who under weak states were free to do as they pleased. Now they see strong central government as a burden. Just as America’s first wave of robber baron capitalists was devoted to laissez faire liberalism, many of today’s billionaires advocate some form of libertarianism, not because of any devotion to individual freedom, but because government redistributes some of their winnings and (sometimes) stands in the way of their schemes.

At first glance a large group of Americans seems eager to weaken the protection provided by government and take on the job of security for themselves, in effect returning to pre-modern conditions. Being “pro-gun” is often shorthand for being suspicious of the state and happy to trade off less security for an expansive right of self-protection. On closer inspection, however, most 2nd Amendment enthusiasts are not really looking for a weaker government—in fact, they usually extol the military and police, the armed face of Leviathan. They would like those institutions to have more money and more authority. What they don’t like is that the state isn’t doing enough to put down minorities and immigrants and other perceived threats.

Family. Families nurture and protect, and extensions of family—clans and tribes—are how most people provided security and gathered resources to stay alive before the development of the state. Families remain central components of all human society. Clans and tribes have waned in the modern West in favor of the nuclear family, but still matter in much of the rest of the world.

Families, however, are not sources of individual freedom. For most of human history they have sharply constrained individual choices—about marriage, work, dress, faith, friendships and much else. Romeo and Juliet brings vividly to life how family and tradition can conspire to destroy human happiness. Patriarchal families, clans and tribes have subordinated and, often, abused women. Families are not democratic, and are the conveyers and enforcers of traditional norms. In most societies sons and daughters have been expected to subordinate their own ambitions to family interests. Tribes seek ferociously to channel power and wealth to fellow tribesmen, without regard for competence or any broader public good. Shielded from outside scrutiny, it is all too easy to hide exploitation and abuse of children and spouses, and reject children who are gay or ‘abnormal.’

When family goes bad, what recourse is available? Other institutions can intervene; a priest or minister, a benevolent neighbor. But in many societies tradition gives the heads of families tremendous leeway. Exposing and preventing abuse within the family is hard. Think about women living in a society that practices genital mutilation, or the burning of widows, traditions enforced by a woman’s own mother and close relatives. Impartial laws, backed by police and investigative resources and enforced by a strong state, are a necessary option when people face intimidation or violence from a spouse, or a parent.

The ‘state’ as an institution can be understood as the method of governance devised to replace the family/clan/tribe as the source of authority. Francis Fukuyama gives a clear account in his recent multi-volume analysis of the Origins of Political Order—the state comes into being when merit and achievement (and sheer force) replace blood ties as the criterion for leadership, and when membership in a political community derives from living in a given territory rather than kinship. The symbol of this shift is the Chinese exam system, first developed over 2000 years ago, where administrators are chosen from those who master classic texts and key elements of culture rather than bloodlines.

In America and most modern states, government interferes in the family in myriad ways. It requires that parents educate and vaccinate their children. It prohibits polygamy and child marriage. Children can be put in foster care for neglect or criminal behavior by parents. Nepotism is frowned upon and restricted by law. These interventions are justified in the name of individual rights, which trump family considerations for adult citizens. Without this government activism to weaken and counterbalance families it is hard to imagine that most individuals would be free in meaningful ways.

Religion. Religious teachings and leaders—prophets, ministers, saints—can be a critical check on corrupt and tyrannical governments. Religion is the source of law, rules that bind earthly governors as much as the governed under a god or gods from whose lofty heights the difference between kings and commoners means little. Law is not the same thing as freedom, but it is a necessary condition if we want to constrain leaders and neighbors.

The force of divine law speaks through Old Testament prophets who warn the princes of Israel against abuse and corruption. Christianity in Europe gave rise to Catholic and then Protestant churches that were in principle independent of particular rulers and could, on occasion, call them to account. Fear of divine punishment might restrain kings and princes, or lead them to see a common spark of God in their subjects or potential enemies. Religion can be a check on arbitrary power.

The power wielded by religious figures, however, can easily be abused. Recently we heard excruciating details of how the Catholic Church in Pennsylvania fostered and protected sexual predators. The truth was revealed by an investigation from the attorney general of Pennsylvania, acting to penetrate the veil of secrecy and intimidation that had kept thousands of victims from speaking up.

Where would we be if our government, instead of investigating the Catholic Church, was joined with it, was its champion? Who would reveal the truth then? This has been the norm throughout history, with religion and secular power working together to reinforce one another. Only the separation of church and state, achieved first in the United States, has succeeded in keeping these two sources of authority apart and ensuring that state power is not used to put down rival faiths and enforce compliance to the particular beliefs and moral codes of one religion or sect. Religion cannot be used to justify racial discrimination or child sacrifice. No one can be forced to submit to religious restrictions against their will. The essential condition is for the legitimacy of the state to rest on a secular foundation—in the case of the United States, one based on reason and universal principles. Where this separation has not taken hold, as in much of the Muslim world, freedom is severely limited.

Around the world we see attempts in countries with secular traditions to re-combine church and state: Hinduism in Modi’s India, Orthodoxy in Putin’s Russia, Catholicism in Orban’s Hungary, Islam in Erdogan’s Turkey. Aspiring dictators see religious fervor as a way to oust rivals and rally supporters; leaders of the major religion are happy to see state power deployed to put down their religious rivals.  Often this is accompanied by vicious campaigns against homosexuals and others who don’t meet ‘traditional standards.’ While not yet at the same level, determined forces in the US want to redefine America as a Protestant Christian nation rather than a religiously neutral one. Almost half of Americans now say that their identity as a Christian is more important than their identity as an American. Any movement in the direction of re-defining America’s basic principles as inseparable from Christianity is a terrible threat to freedom—and also to Christianity.

This is not to deny that Jerusalem was a source of the vision of individual human dignity and freedom that has animated the United States since its founding. Christianity was arguably a necessary condition for liberal democracy. Necessary—but far from sufficient. The key thinkers and doers who set the stage for the American Revolution and made it happen did not, in my view, act as Christians or for the sake of Christianity. They understood, correctly, that what they were attempting was made possible only by a free exercise of reason unconstrained by dogma, and was contrary to longstanding Christian traditions and the role of Christian churches and leaders in politics.

Markets. In no area it seems to me is there greater misunderstanding of freedom than our discussion of markets. Acolytes of free markets are the most outspoken critics of government for interfering with market forces and, supposedly, reducing wealth and efficiency. Corporations and entrepreneurs often argue that their freedom is diminished by taxes and regulations and unions. Contemporary market fundamentalists dream of returning to the era exemplified by the 1905 Lochner decision by the Supreme Court, which struck down a state law that limited working hours on the grounds that it violated the ‘freedom’ of employers and workers to engage in contracts. Since then our views have evolved to allow government to intervene to protect employees and the public from corporate exploitation.

Markets, however, depend on government in myriad ways: to create a medium of exchange; to enforce contracts; to define and protect property rights; to prevent and punish thievery and fraud, and much more. Most of this is not controversial. More disputable are other ways government arguably makes modern capitalism possible and keeps it from being destructive: preventing monopoly, regulating working conditions, keeping our air and water clean, insuring banks, preventing overly-risky financial practices, etc.

Laissez-faire advocates like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek have tried to argue that much of this can be done by individuals acting freely in accord with market forces. Government is needed, barely, for the first set of goods, not the second. Government efforts to regulate capitalism are counterproductive at best, a slippery slope to communism at worst.

But actual American experience doesn’t bear this out. We can start with slavery, perhaps the ultimate expression of laissez-faire thinking. Attempts to end slavery were resisted ferociously by slave owners on the grounds that they violated their freedom to dispose of their property as they saw fit. Other periods in America when we have been most in love with laissez-faire policies—the Gilded Age, the Roaring 20s, the Greenspan Era—have led to terrible crashes and corrosive economic inequality. The period of our greatest sustained prosperity, a time when the rising economic waters really did lift all boats, was in the 1950s and 1960s when unions were strong, taxes were high, and government programs (the GI Bill, the interstate highway system) took hold to grow the economy and cushion Americans from capitalism’s excesses. Starting in the Progressive Era, government began to see it had a responsibility to restrain the private sector for the benefit of all, and over time developed tools to analyze and direct our market system.

Teddy Roosevelt’s “malefactors of great wealth,” however, have continued to fight fiercely to undermine the legitimacy of public, democratic intervention in the economy. During the 1950s and 60s they wrung their hands about the threat to freedom from socialism and big government, exploiting Cold War fears of international communism to equate all government intervention with Marxism. Few listened until the stagflation of the 1970s, brought on by a foolish unfunded war and OPEC’s manipulation of oil prices, gave them an opening. Wealthy individuals and foundations—the Koch Brothers, the Scaifes and Adelsons and many more—have funded countless think tanks, institutes, university departments, conferences and publications dedicated to free market and libertarian ideas. Their message was embodied in Reagan and his transformative Presidency, whose message was that government itself was the problem. Largely as a result, today many Americans instinctively think that the ‘private sector’ is more virtuous and efficient than anything that involves government. The market is equated with freedom, government with coercion.

But nothing is more inimical to individual freedom than unrestrained markets. Left to itself, capitalism generates huge concentrations of private wealth—an oligarchical system that rests on severe restrictions of individual rights. Marx was wrong about many things, but on this one big thing he was correct: capitalism left to itself will concentrate wealth—and power—in a few hands. Something competing corporations can agree on is limiting the rights of workers and consumers by weakening collective bargaining, labor laws, individual bankruptcy options, environmental protections, class-action lawsuits, and other political and legal protections in hiring and the workplace.

Unfortunately a growing body of legal scholarship, funded by wealthy market fundamentalists, has emerged to defend the rights of corporations on First Amendment grounds, ‘weaponizing’ the right to free speech as a way to limit other rights. This radical new doctrine is well-represented on the Supreme Court, especially with the confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh. Justice Kagan’s dissent, in a recent case that overturned the right of public sector unions to require workers to contribute union dues, is eloquent: “Speech is everywhere—a part of every human activity (employment, health care, securities trading, you name it)… For that reason, almost all economic and regulatory policy affects or touches speech. So the majority’s road runs long. And at every stop are black-robed rulers overriding citizens’ choices. The First Amendment was meant for better things.” ¹

The blunt truth is that many of the rich see democracy as a threat—it was Aristotle who warned that under democracy the people would try to take the property of the rich—and therefore have fought tenaciously to secure the right to use money freely to buy political influence. As explained persuasively and at length by historian Nancy MacLean in Democracy in Chains, the libertarian right under the guidance of the Koch network has used its money to reshape the rules of politics to make sure that their wealth can offset votes. The United States today is already a semi-oligarchy, where wealthy individuals and corporations easily fund candidates, create fake ‘grassroots’ movements, control major media, and lobby elected officials. These efforts are usually sold as ways to enhance individual freedom for everyone, but are in fact designed to enhance the freedom of the haves at the expense of the have-nots.

Freedom and Want

The debate over free markets leads to a second aspect of freedom. The first was freedom from coercion, the second is freedom from want. People who live in poverty and chronic economic uncertainty struggle to be free, even if they have formal political and legal rights. All their time and energy is taken up by ensuring survival for themselves and their family. Their neediness makes them vulnerable to coercion by employers or landowners. This was the normal condition for the vast majority before the modern era.

It is no coincidence that the success of democratic government has coincided with the historically unparalleled growth of wealth from modern technology and industrial capitalism. Today the United States and other advanced economies are rich enough to free most citizens from grinding poverty and provide them with education and literacy. Most have enough wealth and economic security to use their freedom meaningfully in leisure activities, intellectual pursuits, private passions, and public life. We have largely overcome the pre-modern divide between the impoverished and enslaved many, and the wealthy few. The strength of America’s civil society, the multiplicity of associations that are the way most citizens participate in public affairs, noted by Tocqueville and others, rests on both the country’s wealth and its equitable distribution.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, however, Americans have received a crash course in the problem of economic inequality. Inequality has been growing sharply since the late 1970s; income and wealth for the top 10%, and especially the top 1% and 0.01%, has been going up remorselessly. Almost all the gains in national wealth over the past 40 years have gone to a small class, while for the bottom income has been largely stagnant.  To the apparent surprise of some, cutting marginal tax rates sharply in the Reagan (and again in the Bush II) administrations ended up making the rich richer while producing disappointing economic growth, much lower than in the 1950s-60s.

As a result many Americans who thought of themselves as solidly middle-class and living the American Dream have become economically and socially insecure; they no longer expect their children to do better than they did. They are angry at the contrast between the wealth and status of the few, and the declining prospects of the many. Condescending lectures from both liberals (go to college!) and conservatives (work more!) ring hollow when college is more and more expensive, unskilled jobs pay less, and in many families both partners are running flat out and not getting ahead.

The meaning of ‘poverty’ is slippery in a country as wealthy as the US. Even those at the bottom typically have enough to eat and a roof over their heads, not to mention cellphones and flat-screen TVs. But a significant number of Americans still live only a stone’s throw from poverty, bankruptcy, and homelessness. Their lives are dominated by the fear of foreclosure or eviction, losing a low-paying job, being denied government benefits, going to jail for minor fines they are unable to pay, bankruptcy for medical expenses they can’t afford, and an endless array of other challenges. These challenges are of course greater for African-Americans and other minorities. A recent Atlantic article showed that nearly half of Americans would have difficulty raising $400 in cash for an emergency. ² Continue reading “Understanding and Restoring Freedom”