One Liberalism Through the Ages

This was originally published at Open Left, I am republishing it here as a starting point to further updates on these topics and themes. - D.

Last weekend Paul wrote: Moreover, by the 1870s, British liberals had become quite aware that their previous understanding of economic freedom was a hollow joke, producing vast legions of downtrodden urban poor, and so they began seeking another way to think about freedom, closer to that which slaves have always understood-freedom as a gaining of power for those at the bottom, not to be dominated from above, but to be lifted up by collective support for one another: in short, the New Liberalism of Britain, which 60 years later arrived in America in the form of the New Deal.  I've been meaning to write about this for some time, and now I promised Paul I would, so here's a first installment on the topic.  Understanding the transition liberals made from unfettered free market economics in the mid 1800s to the interventionist government model post New Deal is key to making sense of the ideological morass which humanity transitioned through in the past 400 years.  I know opinions differ on this subject, and many on the left see a meaningful distinction between progressivism and liberalism, or between classic liberalism and modern social liberalism.  I do not.  They're all liberals, even though there can be notable policy distinctions between various groups of liberals, there is still only one liberalism, and it is the same liberalism as began (or at least took form) with John Locke in the late 1600s. This is a daunting topic.  When I first became politically aware in my late teens, and pondered what "liberal" and "conservative" meant beyond the trite caricature presented by the contemporary political parties or newspaper discourse, I discovered that no one of any academic merit had particularly good (or widely accepted) answers to this.  For example, I have written of how Conservatives cannot define "conservativism."  If better read and smarter people cannot reach concurrence, forgive my temerity in making a run at it too.  Ideology is at the core of what drives politics and any improvement of our understanding of the topic is worthwhile.  The confusion about the topic allows a lot of people who aren't liberals (like libertarians who call themselves "classic liberals") to be confused for them, and others who should be allies to create unnecessary distinctions and look at one another with distrust over what are differences not in core ethics, but technical mechanics.  It is strange that we all generally able to spot liberal and conservative ideas intuitively yet seemingly no one can can agree on what these things are.  We are left with too many definitions that rest on the specific policy preferences of the ideological groups at different points in history.  Just as modern conservatives who love free trade are not really different from past conservatives who loved tariffs and mercantilism, today's liberals who want limitations on trade are not a different species from their Corn Law repealing bretherin of 1846.

In this iteration of the project, I'm going to rely mostly on Boston College political scientist Alan Wolfe, a liberal who studies questions of ideology.  It is more of a reliance on appeal to authority than I want to rest this on, but congealing the sea of philosophers and developments into a coherent story is more than I can pull off this week. Ok, What is Liberalism then? To begin to show that "classic" liberals are just liberals operating in a different socio-political environment, we need a definition that could plausible cover both groups.  Wolfe provides a really good one:  "As many people as possible should have as much say as is feasible over the direction their lives will take." In a radio interview Wolfe once gave, he highlighted the concept of autonomy as vital to liberalism.  It is distinct (ironically considering the etymology of the word) from "liberty" (or "freedom").  I have never liked the word liberty.  Perhaps it is because those who extol it most often seem to be referring to the liberty of a predator to consume prey.  What of the liberty of the prey not to be eaten?  Liberty and freedom are negative concepts.  They imply merely the absence of formal restraint (usually by the state).  However autonomy is a richer and more complete concept.  It is akin to the distinction Martin Luther King Jr. once drew between peace that was merely the absence of violence, and peace which contained the presence of justice.  Thus it is not merely enough to remove the chains that bind humanity, if they are left destitute in the street to wander aimlessly and hungry.  Autonomy requires the capacity to pursue goals.  It is still individualistic, but allows for the real support all of us need from without to make any of those goals a reality. A shorter definition from Wolfe's might be "As many people as possible should have as much autonomy as feasible."  Indeed, Wolfe has probably said as much, and likely uses the longer version as the word autonomy requires explanation.  Much more can be said about this, and I think there are even other valid (probably longer) definitions of liberalism possible, but this one satisfies my need.  For one thing it should be evident that conservatives cannot really claim to exist under this definition.  The long history of conservativism, as Phil Agre wrote in a famous piece, is one of hierarchy and inequality.  But what about libertarians?  How are they distinct from this? What Liberalism is not Well for one thing note that Wolfe's definition lacks any mention of an economic system.  Wolfe comments on the topic: The idea that liberalism comes in two forms assumes that the most fundamental question facing mankind is how much government intervenes into the economy. To me, perhaps because so little of the means of production lies under my control, this is a remarkably uninteresting subject. I think of the whole question of governmental intervention as a matter of technique. Sometimes the market does pretty well and it pays to rely on it. Sometimes it runs into very rough patches and then you need government to regulate it and correct its course. No matters of deep philosophy or religious meaning are at stake when we discuss such matters. A society simply does what it has to do.  Agree with that or not (I do), it is not surprising his definition does not require reference to economics.  In my own mental model of society, economics is the engine of the car.  Engines are obviously very important to the overall functioning of the car.  However, they are not the purpose of the car.  They are also able to vary significantly in theory.  So long as it can provide power to turn an axle, who cares how the engine does it?  In practice, car engines almost all work on the same principles, and the laws of physics limit the practicality of many alternative models.  So it seems with economics.  Capitalism may be the greatest economic system possible, or it may be the best we have tried so far, and others still untried will prove much better.  Liberalism can be agnostic on this topic.  If it employs capitalism, it will delve into the best way to tune and tweak that engine for maximum output, but it will remember that the engine is not the car, and what is good for the engine is not necessarily best for the car. Wolfe's definition also does not make reference to the State.  It does not specify a big state, or a small one.  Virtually every definition of libertarianism or conservativism seems to rest upon some goal of smaller government and a minimized state.  In short, for Wolfe, the state should be as big or small as it needs to be to provide the most autonomy for the most people.  The economic system should be the one that does the same. Let me provide a non-Wolfe source to bolster this claim, Francis Fukuyama, discussing the views of Adam Smith: Smith is, however, no straightforward partisan of liberalism. He says that the prototypical bourgeois virtue of prudence earns only our "cold esteem"; his analysis, in the Wealth of Nations, of the deadening effects of the division of labor on the worker in the pin factory served as the basis for Marx's concept of alienation. For Smith, liberal commercial society is clearly second best, to be preferred only because the best regime is incapable of realization. A society in which virtue is placed front and center - a theocracy, for example - produces unexpected and counterproductive consequences, including hypocrisy and moral lassitude in the orthodox, and fanaticism and opposition in the heterodox. Smith preferred a "free market of religions," in which the need to attract followers promotes active belief, and the diversity of sects keeps fanaticism in check - something not unlike the actual condition of sectarian Protestantism in the United States. If religious belief, nonetheless, tends to erode over time, there are other sources of moral behavior.  (Emphasis mine) For some the claim that Smith is a liberal is contentious, and certainly libertarians often see him as one of them, but here we see even Smith is actually not primarily concerned with economics, but morality.  He arrives at his economic conclusions by eliminating other options that do not bring the type of moral society he envisions. Adding More History Still, we are not yet ready to explain why contemporary libertarians fail to meet Wolfe's definition.  We return to Wolfe for a brief synopsis of the development from classic to social liberalism: In the 18th century, legacies of feudalism and the rules of mercantilism created a situation in which free markets could both allow people greater control over their lives and at the same time spread that capacity to others. Smith, although claimed today by libertarians, was a liberal, indeed one of the great liberal thinkers, not because he made such a lasting contribution to economic theory but because he developed a moral philosophy respecting both freedom and equality. Under conditions of contemporary capitalism, by contrast, individual autonomy is threatened by poverty, economic instability, and concentrated corporate power. Using government to control economic fluctuations, as Keynes argued, gave society the capacity both to improve the ability of any one person to become more autonomous as well as to extend the same notion more broadly. Keynes, a member of the British Liberal Party, was never a socialist. He, like Smith, was a liberal because he too respected both freedom and equality.  You have to consider Smith's vision of capitalism in contrast to what it displaced, the mercantilism and even legacy of feudalism which dominated life.  Capitalism was simply better than those in providing autonomy.  A feudal peasant is simply born into a caste from which he can almost certainly never escape.  The mercantilist worker may draw some sentimental happiness from the success of her nation in the zero-sum competition with other nations, but her lot does not really change whether or not her nation secures that choice colony in the New World. Flash forward to a world in which feudalism has shrivelled to nearly naught, and mercantilism has begun to give way to capitalism.  Where are liberals?  They've won a major battle, but now must re-evaluate what they have really accomplished and where to go from there. This is the slow march Paul describes at the start.  After all capitalism was new.  It hadn't been done before.  Smith and other liberals who followed him had high hopes, but the results did not pan out as well as desired.  Better than feudalism?  Sure.  Good enough?  No. Now we're ready to arrive at our answer for the libertarians:  Yes, in many ways their policy preferences today map very well to the policies pushed by liberals like John Bright and Richard Cobden in the UK, Jefferson and Madison in the US or William Lyon MacKenzie in Canada.  The classic liberals.  However the difference is that those men did not have the extra 150 years of experience with the reality of capitalism.  Libertarians have stuck to a set of beliefs that liberals abandoned because they weren't serving the true goals of liberalism.  Rather than assume libertarian thinkers are unaware of this history, we must conclude that they either do not share the same goals as liberals, or lack the rational capacity to reach the correct conclusions about the empirical policy record. While in regrettable individuals it is sometimes the latter reason, most often the difference is the rejection of autonomy by libertarians, and generally all forms of positive liberties.  The mere absence of enforced state monopolies and divinely empowered noble figures dominating life had not proved sufficient to create a society of general autonomy, and so liberals have looked to various ways through the State to provide it.  Libertarians have resisted these.  Liberty outweighs autonomy for them. While that's defensible on many philosophical grounds, it is not what liberalism is about, even if it amounted once to what liberals of a certain era were about in specific policy terms. Libertarians today can worship markets and reject positive liberty if they want, but they're 150 years late to the classic liberal party.  It's a free country, they can call themselves what they want, but they're just revealing that they never understood what liberalism was really about to begin with when they employ the term.  Liberalism didn't betray its roots by embracing the welfare state, that was the natural response to the results of an early iteration of liberal policy real world experiment. There is one liberalism that has pursued the same broad goals through different means. In my next attempt at climbing this mountain, I will try to elaborate more on the specific progression of thought and events along that road for liberals in several nations.

A Casino Will Not Bring Mass Tourism to Toronto

To do the little I can do from my low-traffic blog to push back on a deeply stupid and frankly maliciously preposterous lie being pushed on the public, let's just apply a little common sense to the claim that a Toronto waterfront casino would lead to any significant levels of additional tourism to the city from outside the province.

There's only one place in the world I can name that anyone makes a point of visiting that is famous mostly (or solely) for gambling, and that's Las Vegas.  I don't mean that people from Ontario don't take bus trips to Niagara Falls or Casino Rama, but no one saves up to take a trip to these places as some kind of "you have to see it before you die" trip.  People into gambling no doubt look for opportunities to visit places with casinos, but if you're talking about driving tourism in numbers worth discussing you have to attract non-gamblers to come to your casino.  I'm not a gambler, and I've been to Vegas (once, and that was enough).  I actually didn't even gamble when I was there.  Of course I'm an anecdote, but the evidence from other cities not known for gambling that add a casino (like Montreal) backs this.  A casino is a regional big city attracts people who live a reasonable drive away, but no one visits Montreal who otherwise would not just because it has a casino.  I love Montreal and am happy to visit it when I get the chance, but until this casino debate hit Toronto, I wasn't even aware it had one.  I don't know anyone who has gone to Montreal for the casino.

 A small place like Rama, Ontario will of course benefit enormously from increased regionally local tourism to an attraction like a casino.  Toronto already has all kinds of things to draw people from across the GTA and southern Ontario to visit - major broadway productions, pro-sports teams, international music stars doing concerts, high end shopping, museums, art galleries and on and on.  We're a big city and I find it beyond difficult to believe we'd even notice the addition of a few more Ontarians visiting Toronto for the casino who otherwise don't come to the city for those other things.  In fact, there's lots of reason to think those other things will suffer as people who used to come for them, now redirect their leisure dollars to the casino instead of a play or concert.  Zero sum stuff.

There is one place I can think of that has attempted to make itself into another Vegas, and that's New Jersey's Atlantic City.  Multiple casinos, a beautiful boardwalk by the ocean, and yet, can anyone claim it has worked?  Again, I don't know anyone who's been to the place.  After all, if you're having a Stag and want to do the "big casino town" thing, why would you travel to 2nd place, when a flight to Vegas will be quite comparable?  

Enough.  I really shouldn't be even stooping to argue this as if it was a serious proposition.  Those making the claim that a casino (even some kind of "mega-casino") would drive real tourism have the onus on them to supply the proof.  Whatever arguments we're going to have about having a casino in Toronto (I oppose, pending some convincing proof that enabling more destructive gambling addictions has sufficient upside to be worth it) should be made on non-preposterous arguments that assume a modest regional tourism boost at best.  Maybe having a private developer rebuild Ontario Place or the Ex is "worth it" but that's where the debate should be.  Anyone pushing the big-tourism boost line should be disregarded as disingenuous or delusional.

Bill Kristol Mocks Idea of CRA Causing Housing Crash

The zombie lie that the Community Reinvestment Act was substantially or primarily the cause of the 2008 economic crisis may just have taken a mortal blow; Bill Kristol has apparently mocked the idea:

But here was Bill Kristol reminding the summit audience that the “worst moment, economically, in middle-class Americans’ lives” in recent years was the 2007-2008 collapse, “and Barack Obama wasn’t president then and people were better off by 2012, or seemed to be.” The collapse, he said, “remains a searing experience and Republicans don’t have a clear explanation about it.” He even went so far as to mock the favored conservative talking point for the collapse: that the housing bubble was created by the Community Reinvestment Act passed years earlier to encourage lending to low-income homebuyers.

I know I for one will be only too happy to cite "even-the-conservative Bill Kristol" in mocking this idea when conservatives and libertarians bring it up.  A lie too stupid for one of history's most egregious liars to carry.

Standing Up To Bullies

As part of their ongoing mission to destroy the Enlightenment, the right has latched onto a tweet by Lawyers, Guns and Money's Erik Loomis, a non-tenured academic at a Rhode Island university. 

They're of course trying to get him fired.  It's completely hypocritical, the substance of their complaint is preposterous and too often this shit works.  They stage a disingenuous freak out, some nervous school administrators over-react and someone's career is in tatters to the chortling glee of a bunch of sociopaths.

I have signed this open letter and emailed the University's mucky-mucks.  This post is to do my little bit to raise its profile.

Newtown: Another Expose on Conservative Ideological Bankruptcy

While liberals debate various forms of gun control, improvements to the psychiatric care system, and other actual measures to make slaughters like Newtown less likely, the abject bankruptcy of conservative thought is something to behold.

The Tea Party suggests more George Zimmermans are the answer.  Armed vigilante squads patrolling school zones.

Gun "academic" John Lott suggests abolishing even more gun laws, specifically gun-free school zones.

Libertarian law Professor Glenn Reynolds approvingly cites a pro-gun man who later shot and killed his wife in a botched (?) puerile gun stunt.

Supposed "reasonable" conservative Eugene Volokh says to arm the teachers.

Libertarian individualist Megan McArdle proposes a creative collectivist solution:  Train seven year olds to rush adult shooters and overpower them.

Is there anything one needs to say in response to such stupidity?  They can't honestly believe this egregious nonsense.  This is the utter and complete bankruptcy of conservativism and right wing thought in general.  It is incapable of responding to this, and thus can only provide risible self-satirizing ideas to cover its shame.

I wrote about this some time ago, and this is more of the same.  Conservativism has no useful answers to the problems of society.  They simply wish to leave problems to fester, where action would impose the least inconvenience or costs on themselves.  If some problem magically solves itself, they might be ok with that, but for anything else, we are simply left to endure what we must.   They simply don't really believe problems can be solved. 

There shouldn't be 40% of Americans (and 30% of Canadians) willing to call themselves "conservatives" in the face of this.  This is shameful, and frankly disgusting.  The Emperor has no clothes.  People with ideas this monstrous need to experience sustained criticism and even scorn for refusing to rethink such bad ideas in the face of their self-evident horrific failure.  Teach children to rush at mass murderers?  Encourage more vigilantism?  What has to go wrong in your life that you even could entertain these thoughts, never mind publish it to millions in evident seriousness?

Right To Work For Less Coming to Ontario

My operating assumption is that Tim Hudak's "Progressive" Conservative party of Ontario will win the next Ontario election and form the next government.  I hope I'm wrong, but it's certainly the safe bet after events drove McGuinty out of power and Horwath's NDP haven't managed yet to convince voters they're a plausible non-crazy alternative to the PCs.

One depressing certainty of a Hudak administration would be a war on organized labour.  If Republian Governor Snyder can take on Michigan, Hudak can certainly bring some variant of "right to work for less" to Ontario.  Indeed, he has already (months ago) indicated he wants to:

“In many cases union leaders have become so powerful that many employees in effect have two bosses — their actual employer and the people who run their union.”

To correct that, he would like union membership to no longer be mandatory and would outlaw the “forced paycheque contributions” unionized workers make to political causes.

The arguments will be the same anti-union stuff from the US, but also a dollop of one particular anti-union argument that I really want to see die, it's the one that goes like this:

Unions were important back in the days of the robber barons and the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, but now we have all these fancy labour laws that protect workers, and unions have served their purpose.

I really did see someone say something almost exactly like that, including the Triangle Shirtwaist reference. 

The first thing to say here is that we never stopped having Triangle Shirtwaist fires, we just simply outsourced them to Bangladesh, and other unregulated labour countries where such events are depressingly common.

Naturally these facilities are almost never directly managed by brand name Western companies, but they all make clothing for them, and I guarantee those companies' representatives have visited.  We're talking about places built without fire stairs, smoke alarms, sprinklers and where "fire drill" is a meaningless phrase.  I realize companies probably don't send health and safety experts to assess these places, but it doesn't take a Fire Marshall to realize the damn building has no fire safety measures whatsoever.  They don't care. 

They never did.  The only thing that ever makes them treat workers like humans and take the necessary steps to protect their health and safety are laws.  These laws were almost to a one, brought about by unions.

What happens when organized labour is beaten?  These laws are repealed.  No right wing leader ever campaigns on repealing the building fire code, but they'll talk in general terms about "burdensome regulations" and invent convoluted arbitrary schemes to gut workplace regulations.  Like Hudak has already done.

I'm not in a union and I never was, but I know it is not white collar people like me who make sure my office has a first aid kid, fire extinguishers and we hold an annual fire escape drill.  These are all "burdensome" regulations on my employer and every other.  They also save lives.  The Westray Mine disaster was really not that long ago.  It can and will happen again the weaker these laws are made (along with a host of other labour abuse ills, long forgotten which reemerge the moment the laws prohibiting them are repealed).

It's cliche, but Hudak is shaping up to make Harris look like a moderate.  Past conservative ideologues always seem like moderates but it might actually be true here.

Dirty Tricks Politics Goes Local With Rob Ford Ouster

In the wake of an Ontario Judge ruling that Rob Ford violated the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act and was subject to its mandatory penalty of being removed from office, I've been following the #TOpoli stream on Twitter (which behaves remarkably like the old usenet political debates used to).   So far I have seen two different "petition" sites for outraged Rob Ford supporters to sign.  Both are pretty dubious affairs and I think this deserves some notice, as a sign of the kind of dirty tricks politics that I think should be of concern to Torontonians as we face a likely by-election where Ford is almost certain to be the right's candidate.

1. wesupportford.ca

Democracy Denied!

We the people of Toronto and friends in the rest of Canada who support Rob Ford for Mayor of Toronto.

Our voice was shutdown by an activists who brought Rob Ford to court on a technicality for using the wrong letterhead to raise money for underprivileged kids sports.

Those elitist Ford haters wanted to get Ford anyway they could.

Now it's time to fight back. Let's bring Rob Ford back into the mayor's office with an even BIGGER vote margin.

Sign the pledge.

WE SUPPORT ROB FORD!

First off, this: "an activists who brought Rob Ford to court on a technicality for using the wrong letterhead to raise money for underprivileged kids sports" is a straight out lie (and grammatically atrocious) - Ford was brought to court for voting to save himself from losing $3K out of his own pocket, the most direct and obvious kind of conflict-of-interest there could possibly be.  The reason for that $3K fine has to do with his fundraising for a sports related charity, but that underlying matter is absolutely irrelevant to why he was brought to court.  

The fine could have been for anything, Ford clearly abused his powers as a member of City Council by voting on a matter in which he had a direct financial stake.  If a City Council member voted to cancel all their personal parking tickets, we would all easily understand this was an improper use of their power to vote in Council.  Ford's action was no different.  

Some other features of note in this "petition":

• You can't see who has signed it.  It lists a number of signers at the top right, but we must take the site's word for that.  In a democracy, petitioning is necessarily a public act, where citizens put their name to a particular sentiment for all to see.  That's the point.
• No one is claiming credit for this site.  Who started this petition?  Who will deliver it, and to what authorities?  For what outcome?
• If you sign it via Facebook, it appears to gather an amazing amount of information that the user probably does not intend to provide to the mystery owner of the site, from the source code of the site:user_about_me, user_activities, user_education_history, user_events,user_groups, user_hometown, user_interests,user_likes,user_location,user_notes, user_religion_politics, user_status, user_work_history, email,user_birthday, publish_stream, user_checkins, friends_about_me, friends_checkins, friends_education_history, friends_hometown, friends_interests, friends_likes, friends_location, friends_religion_politics, friends_status, friends_work_history, friends_birthday
  The above means that if you are friends with someone who signs this petition, your info will be provided too.  A better excuse to unfriend any "Ford nation" supporters I can't imagine.
• The site appears to be created by "actgrassy.com" which just screams "astroturf" - a service that creates fake "grass roots" sites for corporate interests.
• Whois records for the domain reveal no individual owner, registered through a service 

2. respectdemocracy.ca

On October 25, 2010, 383,501 Toronto citizens elected Mayor Rob Ford.

At a stroke, that election has been overturned. Why? A politically motivated technical objection over how he raised money for underprivileged kids.

Mayor Ford gained nothing. The City of Toronto lost nothing.

This is unfair, undemocratic, and unacceptable. We elected Mayor Ford to bring respect for taxpayers back to City Hall.

And he’s been doing just that in the face of strong opposition.

We stand with Mayor Ford. We support his appeal. And we support his re-election.

Please show your support for Mayor Ford by signing our petition.  

The similarity in the writing makes me pretty sure the same person or people are behind this too.  Again we have the outright lie about why Ford was in front of that Judge.  We have some fresh sophistry here about whether Ford "gained" anything or the city lost anything.  This isn't really a lie, because I think Ford and Ford supporters really have trouble understanding why Ford's fundraising letter being sent on City letterhead was improper.  Things don't have to require direct financial gains or losses to be a problem.  First of all, if I raise a big chunk of money for some charity, I do gain from that act, not financially, but in social capital.   Being able to say he raised X dollars for charity is good for Ford's political career.  As a public figure, he's likely to get some positive press over it.  He can put it on his campaign site (and he did).  Using the letterhead sends a message to the people who get the letter that Councillor Ford, a person who may be able to help you win some City contract someday, wants you to donate to his charity.  That's plenty of extra reason to give where you might otherwise have passed on this charity.  If Ford someday votes to give one of these donors some City contract, how can we be sure their generosity to his charity was not a factor in his decision?  How could it not be, councillors are human too, someone helps you or helps a cause you care about, you will be emotionally better disposed to them. 

This is all why it is better if public officials steer clear of this stuff.  Honestly, even if Ford didn't use his city letterhead, he is still a city councillor and his donors will know that.  If you got a letter from Stephen Harper asking for money for some charity he likes, how can you ignore the fact that he's the Prime Minister and that you'll gain in his esteem by being generous? 

Again, like the first:

• No one is claiming credit for organizing this, and whois for the domain is a dead end
• You can't see who has signed it, and there isn't even a counter to know how many have done so
• The youtube video linked is a new youtube account with only that video.  Comments and rating are disabled.
• I don't see a nefarious facebook scraping script here, but my HTML-fu is only mediocre.  There's a set of embedded .js scripts which I didn't pursue, so I don't know what happens when you "share" this page on the social media icons it advertises.

I've seen speculation that these "petitions" are just a good way of gathering Ford supporter info for his upcoming campaign.  This makes sense, but of course since no one is claiming ownership, it could be literally anyone.

This is something to watch.