Nenshi: Right About LRTs, Wrong About Ideology

Calgary's Mayor Naheed Nenshi visited Toronto last week and made some sensible comments about LRTs.  He also made some mushy and poorly reasoned comments about ideology, his ideas are popular, but fundamentally wrong and beliefs like this actually hinder progress on issues people care about.  You cannot wish away ideology.  It doesn't go out of style because it is simply how you view the world, and how you think a better world can be made.  Here's what he said:

“Here’s the thing: nobody cares about those old labels of left or right and liberal and conservative. Is removing the snow a right-wing or left-wing idea? Is fixing the potholes more New Democrat or Conservative? It’s ridiculous,” he said.

This is very unpersuasive.  It isn't hard to find libertarians who disagree with the ideas of having the state tax its citizens to provide & maintain public roads or plow those roads during winter.  Are such people a significant political force on the municipal scene?  No.  But then all Nenshi is saying that the politically potent forces agree on these particular ideological questions.  Even so, you can find plenty of left/right division in the details:  Should the workers providing these services be government employees or private contractors?  Should sidewalks be plowed?  Should homeowners be responsible for shovelling & fined if they don't? etc. 

Further, Nenshi here has (cherry) picked two quite settled matters of debate.  That the contemporary left and right mostly agree about these two things hardly means the End of History and agreement on everything else City governments might do.  Nenshi himself, who has been targetted by right wing forces in Alberta for his urban centric policies must know this.  Try asking conservatives whether public transit should be a subsidized public service or a for-profit business.  Or whether city governments should provide free or subsidized services for their residents from pools to libraries to parks, homeless shelters and sporting fields.  Ask whether urban planning should preference mass transit & higher density construction or sprawl & car-centric roads.  Ideological divisions abound once you stray from the easy matters of largely settled issues. 

The general positions that left and right take on these issues can be relatively easily derived if you understand what the division of "left" and "right" mean.  The labels themselves are arbitrary, a throwback to the French pre-revolutionary parliament.   We could call them "coke" and "pepsi" or "dogs" and "cats" - but the underlying heuristic employed by each camp does not tend to vary much across cultures or time periods.  It's not an accident that these labels have survived centuries & crossed oceans intact.  If you understand what drives the right, you can then understand why say, they want car-centric sprawl and public services minimized.  The eternal cry for "smaller government" applies just as much to municipal government as national ones.

The basic cleavage is this: The left seeks to enlarge the circle of human compassion, and the right seeks to shrink it.  There are other ways to express this, (you can state that the left seeks greater equality and the right greater hierarchy) but this basic division underlies the policies positions on specific issues taken by "liberals" and "conservatives."  This does not mean necessarily that people on the left and right think of their positions as such, in these terms (or even consciously), but the high consistency in finding these cleavages on such a disparate set of issues as handled by the modern municipality it not a mistake.

How is that Relevant to Municipal Politics?

One objection might be that municipal politics are "low-level" nuts-and-bolts issues that should not really concern people concerned with the high questions of the human condition.  But of course this is untrue.  Who needs reliable, affordable and timely public transit more than the poor?  What decides which communities the poor can afford to live in more than municipal policy?  Whether you live in a violent slum or a safe and healthy neighbourhood are largely decided by things like land zoning, provisioning of parks, and how the local schools are funded.  I'm sure some issues exist that don't easily translate into grand questions of social equality, but whatever their prevalance, municipal policy affects such questions in important ways.   

What is Ideology?

Nenshi doesn't use the word (and even mixes in partisanship by referencing political parties) but that's really what he's talking about.  It's important to spend a few words defining "ideology" - never mind whatever dictionaries say, ideology usually has a derisive meaning when used, and you frequently see people trying to dismiss someone else's ideological position in favour of their own ideological position by labelling it as such.  Typically anything that challenges universally accepted ideas is "ideology" but those universal ideas are not understood as such.  Much like "treason", ideology doth never prosper.

So what is it?  Ideology is your heuristic means for understanding how the world works.  It is a set of beliefs, both conscious and unconscious about how people behave, what is right and wrong, and what is the "good life."  Are you pre-disposed to think people are basically honest and will behave ethically with minimal supervision, or that they're dishonest and require monitoring and enforcement to behave themselves?   What do think "right" and "wrong" mean and are decided?  The Bible?  Utilitarianism?  Your ideology decides how you address these.

None of this is to say that all ideological beliefs are empirically or ethically equal.  Evidence matters (says my ideology, at least!).  Our heuristics may lead us to think that say, lowering taxes improves economic growth.  Does it actually do so?  This is an empirical question (to the extent reliable empirical tests of large numbers of people can be accomplished and accurately measured).

Nenshi is rejecting ideology.  That belief is, itself, ideological.  How do you know?  Well if my disagreeing with his ideology isn't enough, let's ask what empirical proof he can provide to prove me wrong?  Two sample consensus issues in a universe of divisive ones?

Yes, Nenshi's Statements Are Popular

“If we went on to Bay Street today and asked 100 people, ‘Are you left-wing or right-wing?’ I guarantee you, 85 of them would have no idea what we were talking about and 11 of them would answer incorrectly. And the rest would be John Tory.’” he said, to wild laughter.

This is also weak. First off it is an argumentum ad populem fallacy.  That most people might have trouble placing themselves on a left-right axis doesn't mean one doesn't exist, it just means many people don't think very much about ideology.  Why should they? 

But at a deeper level, most of those people will be relatively easy to place on such a spectrum if you actually query them on their views of various issues.  Yes, there will be iconoclasts who are difficult to place, and most people have an issue or two in which they differ from their otherwise prevailing ideology.  By and large Nenshi's 100 will divide fairly predictably.  This is an empirical result of psychologists quizzing thousands of people on moral questions and finding wide agreement on the moral issues liberals and conservatives found more important.  The ethical bases of liberals and conservatives are different in significant and persistent ways.  People may widely believe they are not ideological, but that doesn't make it true.

What's the Harm?

We should think about the harm this does.  The biggest harm is that ideology that is not understood as such is the most dangerous kind.  These are the kinds of beliefs that are the most difficult to challenge and change when evidence mounts that the belief is not working.  Those of us who admit our basic ethical systems are ideological and that those systems guide our beliefs about what even municipal governments should do, and how they do it are at least conscious of these choices.  Those who treat their ideolical beliefs as "self-evident" or "common sense" are the least apt to accept evidence to the contrary.

The other major harm is that it makes a negative out of the highly necessary process of democratic disagreement and debate.  Challenging ideology is the surest way to ensure only the best ideas win out.  Many of the worst debacles started with unanimous or overwhelming supermajority votes.  Many of the most cherished and successful government programs started in strife over vehement opposition.  I realize Nenshi did not explicitly say so, but you frequently see this kind of talk followed by calls to "move past" the old divides and "work together to get things done."  Whenever you hear someone say that, ask "get what done?  How?  Why is that thing something that should be done?"  You will quickly see ideology at work.  We cannot "work together" on common goals unless we have those goals in common!  We cannot agree on means to achieve those goals unless we share enough ideology to agree those means will achieve the agreed ends, and further that they don't have ideologically undesirable other effects which outweighs our desire to achieve that agreed goal.

An example may help bring this last, crucial point home.  Let's leave the field of road maintanance and talk about poverty reduction.  Left and right will both tell you (usually) that they agree reducing poverty is a noble goal.  Great.  But how?  The left supports policies like a minimum (or "living") wage, income support programs paid for by progressive taxation, free public education up to and including post-secondary, etc.  The right generally opposes these things, and proposes freedom, choice, deregulation, private enterprise personal responsibility and negative disincentives to poverty (e.g. that you'll starve in the dark if you don't work will incent you) to reduce it.  They may or may not support private charity intervening, funded only by voluntary donations.  To the extent they support government helping out, they want strings attached, from drug tests to "workfare."  The differences between these approaches cannot be papered over.  In fact, the differences are so vast, and the empirical results of right wing approaches so apparently counter-productive that most on the left conclude that the right's support of the basic goal is not an honest representation of its views.  That it is disingenuous.  Whatever, not going to settle this here, but the point is that you cannot wipe away these vital debates over both means and ends and get to some magical place where we all agree on what and how we should be doing.

None of the above is to say that one should consciously self-identify with the "left" or "right" and then adopt the positions of that tribe for the simple reason that they are the tribe's beliefs. That's partisanship, and a very different matter than ideology.  If that were all Nenshi meant, fine. Great. Of course it is better if people arrive at their policy positions by individual thought, and even desirable that intra-ideological debate occur.  What "liberals" believe is not a fixed and eternal quantity.  It can and should change as new evidence arrives as to the results of previous real world policy experiments.  This in fact has already happened, with the major shift of 19th century liberals away from laissez-faire capitalism and toward mixed-mode social democracy.  That liberals today believe in, say, the minimum wage, should not mean they must always believe such.  A sufficient quantity of quality evidence showing that policy is counterproductive to the underlying goals of liberalism should change the beliefs of liberals. 

If it were just Nenshi, one politician saying such things it would not be worth replying at such length, but as he himself says, such beliefs are common and receive applause when expressed.  No one wants to be one of those silly ideologues who are closed minded and unreasonable.  Except the aversion to recognizing your own ideology as such is about as ideological as it gets.  I would infinitely prefer an honest debate between ideologues to one in which some are pretending to be above ideology, claimants to the one, true, pure nature of the world. 

Why Liberalism? Part 2

In part 1, I outlined a view of what liberalism is, and an understanding of what "ideology" is.  In part 2, let's look at some evidence for the views I'm promoting, in summary, the thesis that:

[Liberalism] does not start from a sacred writ that outlines all outcomes and presupposes all solutions.  It attempts to understand how real humans actually behave, and what motivates them and goes from there to find the best available policy options to bring about the desired outcomes in terms of widespread happiness and prosperity, of, as the title of this blog says, autonomy for all.

This piece looks at several issue cases where the liberal, libertarian and conservative dominant positions demonstrate the distinction I am describing.

Money and the Monetary System

The intro to part 1 covers this, but to re-iterate, the general right wing view on "money" is that it is something that should be holy and eternal, of fixed (or even hopefully) growing value and the supply limited by some natural law, like the gold supply.  This post is not the place to get into an extended discussion of why any attempt to make the monetary system work this way is doomed to fail, but I will summarize by saying the most important part:  It has been tried before and failed spectacularly and repeatedly.  The gold standard (or even gold and other precious metals themselves) were the monetary system well up to the early decades of the 20th Century pretty much everywhere.  Frequently gold standard advocates will claim that "fiat" currency is responsible for various economic catastrophes ignoring the myriad of crises, recessions and depressions that plagued the world while under the gold standard.  My favourite of this breed is to remember that the "Great" depression is named such, partly as a means to distinguish it from all the other depressions that had occurred within living memory of the early 1930s, most notably the Long Depression (1873-1879) which predated even the speciously often blamed Federal Reserve as cause for all economic ills.

An infamous moment occurred when Alan Greenspan once apologized to Milton Friedman on behalf of the US Federal Reserve for causing the Great Depression.  While anti-fed gold standard types may think to cheer this admission by a Fed Chair, Friedman's case against the Fed was that it did not create enough money when needed after the 1929 crash.  It stood pat and let the crisis develop.  For awhile, Friedman's view that monetary expansion via an arms length central bank can be employed to allay recessions was nominally accepted by right wing elites, it has never really been accepted by rank and file conservatives and libertarians who mostly want to abolish the Fed, and central banking generally.

The history of the 20th Century shows a progression of iterative steps away from the gold standard in response to the various problems it cause once those problems became acute.  Far from some sweeping liberal ideological statement of opposition to the gold standard issued by John Maynard Keynes from atop some mountain, a variety of hybrid experiments were attempted between the Great Depression, Bretton-Woods and Nixon's eventual full floating of the US dollar as a fully convertible  fiat currency legally mandated only to be usable in paying debts denoted in US dollars.

Right wing ideologues seeking to defend the gold standard or other forms of "hard money" policies often find themselves appealing to literal ancient history (like in Paul Krugman's debate with Ron Paul, with the latter citing Diocletian Rome as if we have anything like reliable records of economic conditions in that period) - this is because more recent economic history provides very little grist for their mills.

Liberalism does not "require" floating fiat currencies.  It does not dictate arms-length independent central banks as the arbiters of a nation's currency.  Instead, we are experimenting to find what works, iteratively and progressively in reaction to the evidence.

Markets and Capitalism Generally

The right wing view on markets amounts to their most salient and powerful infatuation with a simplistic, elegant theory that does not work out as intended when applied to real, living human societies.  There is an old joke about communism that goes "nice theory, wrong species" and this applies very much to the dominant right wing modes of thought about markets being perfect, self-correcting, rational and efficient.

A common right wing illusion is to assume that because liberals and other left wingers differ with their view on markets, that must mean we believe something close to the diametric opposite of them.   They want smaller government, so liberals must want "bigger" government as an end in itself.  They support deregulation so liberals must want endless arbitrary regulations. Hardly so.  Certainly there are such things as bona fide socialists, Marxists and anarchists who actively oppose capitalism and free markets.  Liberalism itself can even allow for these views (if one thinks the evidence supports them).  Yet liberals broadly do not oppose markets and capitalism to the degree that right wing ideologues support them.  Every small-l liberal party in the world, from the US Democrats, Canada's Liberals (and arguably, NDP in my broad definition of liberalism), Australia's Labor, Britain's Labour, and on down the list believe in employing market capitalism to some degree in pursuit of society's aims.  Every economy in the world is some mix of private and public spending, some balance between "socialism" and "capitalism."

Liberals support things like minimum wages and unions precisely because we recognize markets bring certain benefits but wish to limit the evident harms we empirically observed from the periods before such things existed.  There are some on the left who oppose such attempts to ameliorate the harms of capitalism precisely because they wish to see capitalism fail and be rejected by society and liberal harm reduction measures are contrary to that revolutionary goal.

I have written at length on the evolution of liberal thought on capitalism in my piece "One Liberalism Through the Ages" which details the creation of capitalism by liberals like Adam Smith, and the slow liberal realization that while capitalism was better than what it replaced (variations on mercantilism and feudalism) it still needed state intervention in various forms to achieve the real goals of liberalism.  Libertarians (many of whom call themselves "classic liberals" thinking this is some kind of insult to current liberals) have largely (or entirely in many cases) remained fixed on the ideas and form of capitalism liberals developed in the 19th century.  Conservatives too.  Liberalism looks at the Triangle Shirtwaist fire and say "businesses should be required to keep fire exits, extinguishers, etc etc" - right wing thought says "rational actors look at an unsafe work place and find a job somewhere safe, consumers will choose not to buy from businesses that have horrific fires" and so forth.  Their answer to any workplace complaint from wages to safety to harassment is to quit and work "elsewhere" under the assumption that a good alternative exists.  It must, their theory dictates it.  If it somehow does not, the individual is always to blame for not having worked or studied hard enough or having picked the wrong employment skills to pursue (like the cliche and glib assumption often appearing in comment sections that college grads having trouble finding good jobs must have studied "useless" subjects like the arts or humanities).

Taken to their logical conclusion, the right wing view amounts to:  "If you don't succeed in our chosen economic system, that's your problem, and your suffering is no concern to anyone but you."  This is backwards.  The economic system should most broadly serve humanity's needs and wants and if large numbers of people find it impossible to succeed under the chosen system, the system should be changed.  To right wing ideologues, it is humans who should conform to the dictates of the system.

Again and again right wing thought applies capitalism first principles and contrives whatever specious and cherry picked evidence they need to keep face in debates in support of unregulated, minimal (and flat) tax capitalism.  A century and more of experience with the problems such policies cause have not deterred them, as every crisis somehow ends up being the fault of government interference, from the "federal reserve caused the Great Depression" theory to the ones that attribute the 2008 financial collapse to Fannie, Freddie or the Community Re-investment Act.

Sex

A social issue to change the tone, and one where libertarians side more closely with liberals, but where conservatives have the holy dogma:  Sex is properly for procreation, not pleasure.  Pleasure from sex is typically incidental, and sometimes even actively sinful (particularly for women).  At best, pleasurable sex may be enjoyed only between married couples and even then contraception is discouraged.  Thus we have a long litany of conservative favoured laws prohibiting forms of non-procreative sex, sex between same-sex couples, and even banning contraception.  Lately conservatives have taken to conflating contraception and abortion and claim that the most effective contraceptives (the pill, IUDs) and the ones that women have the most control over (not requiring consent of a male to employ) are abortifacients and thus morally abhorrent.

In reality, most people want to have sex for pleasure at least sometimes and usually quite often if they can arrange it with partners they find appealing.  They don't however wish to have children nearly as often as biology would dictate and are happy to employ contraceptives to avoid this.

Conservatives evidently prefer that women suffer the consequences of recreative sex in the form of undesired children (and possibly disease).  They expect people to conform to their views of how we should behave sexually and oppose efforts to reduce the risks associated with the behaviours we evidently prefer to engage in.  Liberalism does not mirror conservativism.  It does not seek to enforce, coerce or do more than mildly encourage people to engage in recreative sex.  Liberalism seeks to accept people as they are, and craft policies to support them in their desired modes of action with as little risk and harm as possible.

Libertarians tend to be closer to liberals with respect to adult consensual sex (though I would note at least the last 3 US Libertarian party presidential nominees have been personally anti-abortion, and libertarian hero Ron Paul believed in state restrictions for abortion) but the distinction with liberals can be seen more clearly when it comes to prostitution.  To libertarians, prostitution is permissible so long as the prostitute is there by choice.  The liberal view on prostitution is that there really isn't one, at least not a single dogmatic one.  Liberals see the empirical reality that very few women willingly choose a career in renting their bodies except by harsh economic necessity and thus have complex views from support of prohibition, to various regulated schemes such as what you see in Amsterdam or New Zealand.  Again, rather than dogma there is an effort to maximize autonomy and minimize evident harms like disease, abuse, slavery and pimps.

Climate Change

By now it should surprise no one that conservatives are the least likely to accept the need for concerted action to avoid a climate change catastrophe.  Yet libertarians are generally speaking just as vehemently opposed if not more so.  Why is this so?  The evidence is abundantly clear and grows more compelling day by day.

In part their denial is a part of their denial of problems with free reign market capitalism.  Markets are perfect and should price everything that needs pricing.  The solutions to climate change all require activist government intervention in markets in some form - whether a carbon tax, a regulatory cap and trade system, sheer flat out government imposed limits on industry emissions or even just massive subsidies for otherwise uneconomically viable green energy technologies.   All of these are anathema to right wing economic holy writ.  So the need for them must be a liberal contrivance to implement their desired redistributive and government growing schemes on an unwitting society.

Conservative and libertarian reasons for denial change somewhat.  Religious conservative denialists cite various bible verses and exhibit certitude that God simply wouldn't permit such a thing to happen to us.  Libertarians simply have faith that if there was a problem, markets would have priced it, and if there's a need for a solution, some for-profit technology will be developed in time anyway.  That the people of Easter Island really did run out of resources and thus die off without finding a solution or alternative means of supporting their civilization doesn't seem to worry them.  It won't happen to us.  It can't.  The dogma says it won't.

As for liberalism, acceptance of the need for action on the climate problem is near universal, but the favoured solutions are a subject of considerable debate.  Again, there is no holy writ on how to solve the climate crisis.  In Canada, we somehow ended up at one point with the Liberal party in favour of a carbon tax, and the NDP advocating Cap & Trade.  In other places, Cap & Trade tends to be the favoured approach of the more centrist pro-business liberals.  Still others believe both schemes unworkable and simply want government to engage in a kind of "Manhattan Project" to develop renewable energy technology to the point of being cheaper than carbon based energy sources.  It is true that liberal policies in response to the climate crisis still seek to maintain or broaden economic equality, but this is consistent with my arguments here.  Liberals also, do not broadly seek to "undo" capitalism and seek some kind of revolutionary alternative economic system which does not yield dangerous levels of greenhouse gas emissions.

Here at last in the climate crisis we have right wing ideologues not just seeking to have humans conform to their views of how the world works, but frankly they wish to have the world itself so conform.  This is the ultimate danger of allowing right wing prescriptive and unchanging ideology to dictate human policy reaction to events.  Conservative intransigence on taxes, money or social issues lead to increased human misery, but these miseries end the moment the bad conservative policies are ended.  Humanity can rebound.  The climate crisis is a disaster that cannot be so easily undone.   It will not heal itself the moment we stop contributing to the problem, and adopt policies that react to the physical realities of the world we live in, rather than ignoring and denying them.

As Paul Krugman finished the post I started on with:

The bottom line is that we aren’t really having a rational argument here. Nor can we: rationality has a well-known liberal bias.

Why Liberalism?

In early January, Paul Krugman wrote something that actually cuts to the heart of perhaps the most important distinction between liberalism and other ideologies, particularly right wing ideologies like conservativism and libertarianism.  Discussing the idea of minting a platinum coin in order to circumvent the Republicans' ability cause a US debt default, Krugman writes:

For many people on the right, value is something handed down from on high It should be measured in terms of eternal standards, mainly gold; I have, for example, often seen people claiming that stocks are actually down, not up, over the past couple of generations because the Dow hasn’t kept up with the gold price, never mind what it buys in terms of the goods and services people actually consume. 

And given that the laws of value are basically divine, not human, any human meddling in the process is not just foolish but immoral. Printing money that isn’t tied to gold is a kind of theft, not to mention blasphemy. 

For people like me, on the other hand, the economy is a social system, created by and for people. Money is a social contrivance and convenience that makes this social system work better — and should be adjusted, both in quantity and in characteristics, whenever there is compelling evidence that this would lead to better outcomes. It often makes sense to put constraints on our actions, e.g. by pegging to another currency or granting the central bank a high degree of independence, but these are things done for operational convenience or to improve policy credibility, not moral commitments — and they are always up for reconsideration when circumstances change.

I submit that this pattern is not unique to the issue of monetary policy.  Krugman has hit upon a nearly ubiquitous theme that underlies the debate between ideological schools over the ages.  Whatever you call these sets of ideas (liberal, progressive, conservative, traditional etc.), and allowing for individuals who evade the norms while still realizing there are meaningful norms, you end up seeing that again and again, the ideologies of the right (though not solely, them, Marxism for example falls into this trap) start with a notion of what "should" be that is abstract and supposedly self-evidently correct, and then insist that policy and sometimes reality itself should conform to that ideal.

So, money should be permanent, fixed value, unchanging (or even growing in value over time) and never mind how the policies that come closest to meeting this ideal (gold standard) don't work very well for the real people and societies they're tried on, that's the ideal, and it should be adhered to whatever the costs.

Liberalism doesn't work this way.  It does not start from a sacred writ that outlines all outcomes and presupposes all solutions.  It attempts to understand how real humans actually behave, and what motivates them and goes from there to find the best available policy options to bring about the desired outcomes in terms of widespread happiness and prosperity, of, as the title of this blog says, autonomy for all.

First:  What is Ideology?

It's impossible to discuss ideology without first defining the thing.  People have a lot of notions about this, and I find most of them wrong.  But this is not the place to debate it.   For my purposes, ideology is simply your view of how the world works, and to some extent your desired organization for it, that best meets your goals for the world.  How do you decide whether tax cuts would be a good policy?  Or mandatory minimum sentences?  Or drug prohibition?  All this must be based on some view you have about how people think and act (either individually or in large groups) that tells you whether human responses to these policies will be desirable or detrimental to your pre-existing goals for societal organization.  If you think lowering taxes leads to increased economic activity and growth, and think "growth is good for society" than you are ideologically in favour of lowering taxes (absent other details like how much, and what government services might need to be cut and so forth).

Even if you think there is a hard, true "pragmatic" set of policies that "work" - you still need ideology to tell you what goals to have for those policies.  A hammer is good for driving nails, but without a plan for what to build, it does not itself build a barn or a doghouse.  Goals matter, and are intricately linked to ideology.  Two people agreeing a hammer is the best tool for building do not share "ideology" if one wishes to build a barn, and the other a doghouse.

Next:  What is Liberalism?

This is another major topic with many plausible perspectives.  Hopefully you need not wholly agree with my definition in order to follow the remainder of this essay.  I have previously borrowed the definition of liberalism supplied by political scientist Alan Wolfe, who supplies a definition I will summarize as "as many people as feasible should have as much autonomy as possible."  But I wish to extend this somewhat today, as that is merely a statement of goals and values - it doesn't specify how liberals approach this problem.  That is a vital and necessary part of what comprises a liberal.

In my last post at Open Left, I hit upon this other side of the issue.  I posit that what brought humanity out of the Dark Ages of ignorance, fear, witch burning and lethal leechcraft was what we now call "the scientific method" - the process by which those we call "scientists" examine evidence, posit explanations for phenomena, contrive repeatable experiments that could invalidate those hypotheses, and analyze the results, ready to modify their theories if the experiments provide a different result than the hypothesized outcome.  Science has no special name for this.  It is not called the "Davinci method" or the "Newton method" - there is no competing or alternative scientific method that tries to grow the field of human knowledge of nature in some alternative way.  It is simply the scientific method.  If you are not employing this method, you are simply not doing science, and anything you discover or learn is sheer happenstance and of dubious value until confirmed by someone using the scientific method.

Science does not claim to have a perfect understanding of anything.  It is always open to revision upon presentation of new evidence.  Even such things that are sometimes called "laws" (like thermodynamics, or gravity) are in fact merely highly regarded theories for which there is no current evidence providing any reason to doubt them.

Liberalism, in short, is that, but applied to ideology, as I wrote:

In the field of pursuing the ideal human society, liberalism is the science of pursuing human well being.  It combines the empiricism and rationalism of science with the goal of maximizing human happiness.  The process is iterative and the specific means change as well meaning ideas are found wanting, and as science improves our understanding of humans themselves and what it takes to make them happy.  There is no other school of thought that both seeks to improve the lot of all, and actually can do it.  The ultimate goal of liberalism is that we should not need the word "liberalism" because no one would need a special word to describe the self-evident way people determine solutions to societal problems.  That's what liberalism is, and why it must win or all humanity will fall back into ruin, scarcity, ignorance and fear.

That is the twofold definition of liberalism's means and ends I wish to employ and distinguish from the primary ideological schools of right wing thought.

This essay will be continued in a second post.

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.

The Economy as a Journey, Not a River

The always insightful Paul Rosenberg has an excellent piece up on linguist Anat Shenker-Osorio's new book "Don't Buy It:  The Trouble With Talking Nonsense About the Economy."  According to Rosenberg, she discusses empirical evidence of how the political metaphor used for the economy affects what sorts of policies voters support.  To conservatives, the economy is water, a river, the tide or just plain Mother Nature herself (bolding added):

First, the metaphors they used reinforced their view of the economy as something natural, and hence best left alone. That described the "what" of the economy. In addition to personifying the economy (hence "ailing, growing, recovering, anemic, fragile" etc) this view was also reinforced by metaphors of water (as in "money flowing, a rising tide lifting all boats", etc) and weather ("economic storms, a cold business climate", etc). Such naturalistic metaphors might seem, well, natural, but the implication is obvious, she reminds us: "You know who regulates the ocean? The moon." The common conservative point of all these metaphors is that human interference is irrelevant and silly at best, and more likely downright harmful.

Liberals on the other hand have been far less consistent in the metaphors we use to describe the economy.  We more often fall prey to using right wing descriptions which makes the intellectual lift of persuading people to support our policies more difficult.  But one model he endorses is a car, which encapsulates the economy as something created artificially by humans, and something that is fundamentally a tool to be used in service of other goals, rather than a goal in itself:

Although they lack discipline, progressives do have an appropriate metaphor: the economy as a human-made object in motion - ideally, a vehicle - which sends the factually accurate message that the economy would not even exist without human involvement, and needs conscious controlling in order to avoid disastrous results.

Although I've never given enough thought to the meta topic of metaphor selection, I have previously used the car metaphor in discussing the economy, for example, in explaining why I thought that the nature of the economic system was not actually the defining issue for liberalism as an ideology, I once wrote:

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. 

I bolded the last part to highlight how the car metaphor lends itself to progressive economic policies.  Too often economic policy abstracts "the economy" to the point of practically anthropomorphizing it, so that public policy aims should serve the economy rather than the economy serving public policy aims.  If we talk about an engine, we may want to invest in new sparkplugs or higher quality fuel or whatever, but if the seatbelts are broken that's easily a higher priority and only when we understand what new sparkplugs or premium gasoline will do to benefit us, the passengers in our journey.

It's a great piece and it sounds like an important book.  Rosenberg's last couple paragraphs on how the journey metaphor lends itself to better ways of discussing inequality as a problem are not to be missed.  Naturally Martin Luther King Jr. got there first on instinct and intuition alone, but it's a great insight into why his rhetoric was so effective and how we mere mortals might recreate some of his magic going forward.

Canada: 40% liberal, 30% conservative

One thing I've found difficult to find for Canada is polling on the underlying ideological beliefs of Canadians, as opposed to party preference.  Our pollsters just don't seem to ask the question very often, perhaps because it's probably viewed as a confusing mess to voters where our traditional two big-tent parties are named after the very ideologies they're supposed to represent.  I don't have empirical data to back it, but based on the confusion over the subject I see online every day, I don't think many people have a clear understanding of the distinction between ideology and party preference.  In Canada-ese we say "small l liberal" and "small c conservative" when we're talking about the ideology, but even that really only makes the distinction clear to people who are clear about the disctinction.

Hell, even highly politically active people have very deep differences of understanding over the meaning of the term "ideology" - just go back to the silly claims of many of the strongest Obama supporters shortly after his election about Obama lacking an ideology and instead being about "what works" as if pragmatism isn't itself a question of ideology. 

Still, any oasis in the polling desert so I'm glad to see pollster Ekos ran a poll on the subject of Canadian ideology not so long ago.  Top line results are that 40% of Canadians self-identify as liberal, 30% as conservative, 26% as neither and 5% as don't know or refused.  Ekos calls this "starkly divided" but I'd call it a clear lead for liberalism.  I'm really glad they resisted providing "moderate" as an option too, though I think I would have preferred to ask on a 7 point scale to reflect on strength of belief. 

Further, if you look at page 6 of the PDF, this is a high for liberalism as far back as the graph goes, to 1997, and the gains clearly come from the "neither" group which has declined to third place for its first time. 

The chart on page 11 with some demographic break downs is also fascinating:

• Saskatchwan/Manitoba (combined probably for sample size reasons) are more conservative at 54% than Alberta at 41%
• Men are barely more liberal than conservative (within MOE) but women are almost 2:1 (42% to 23%) more liberal
• The only age group that is more conservative than liberal are over 65's and it's fairly modest (and within that subsample's margin of error)
• the effect of university appears profound with 53% of university educated identifying as liberal
• Liberal party supporters are more liberal than NDP party supporters 72% vs 61% (more on this below)
• Green supporters are barely more liberal than conservative and the only party to have their leading group be the "neithers" at 38%
• 11% of Conservative party supporters identify as liberal, which really has to be an appealing target for NDP and Liberal strategists:  These should be highly persuadable voters.

liberal Liberals versus liberal New Democrats

On the higher number of liberals supporting the Liberals than the NDP, there's lots of ways to interpret that.  One possibility is that NDP supporters dislike the term "liberal" for its association with the party of that name, even if they are left-of-centre ideologically and hold views most would identify as being mainline liberal/progressive as usually understood in Canada and the US.  Or they may be people who feel they are left of liberalism itself, bona fide socialists or even communists.  Another aspect is the NDP's roots in the praries as the predecessor party, the CCF and its relatively greater strength in places like Northern Ontario where voters may support the NDP but somehow not consider themselves liberal or even left-wing.  It's unfortunate that the poll's regional breakdown combined Manitoba and Saskatchewan because I can buy a right shift in Saskatchewan, but Manitiba's provincial NDP government has been going strong for a very long time.  I realize the provincial NDP in Manitoba are closer to the Liberals federally, but hard to believe they would appeal much to conservatives even then. 

On the Liberal party supporters specifically, the very low number of "neithers" and conservatives tells me that fears of a Liberal collapse entailing half the party's remaining supporters going to Harper are unlikely to come to fruition.  Basically the blue Liberals have mostly left already and what's left are people who are genuinely left-of-centre and just have issues supporting the NDP or abandoning the party of Laurier, Trudeau and Pearson. 

Greens

The Green numbers really back my suspicion that the Green party is a protest vote for a lot of disaffected voters of other parties.  Having "neithers" as their top group seems likely to be akin to the situation in the US where self-identified moderates and "independents" tend to be the least politically aware/informed and most prone to decide "they're all crooks!" and so a party like the Greens becomes an attractive place to park your vote.  I'm somewhat surprised at the high number of conservatives supporting the Greens.  I know the NDP line on the Greens I often hear is that they're a "crypto" conservative party.  There's some truth to that in their policies and platform, but I don't think that matters a whit to most voters, for whom the Green party is literally about the association to environmentalism.  It may be that this is where conservatives who accept the reality of climate change go, since they just can't stand the NDP or Liberals and yet want to register their support for some kind of market friendly action to rein in greenhouse gas emissions.

It also tells me it's probably not worth the NDP or Liberals' time trying to woo Green voters.  Numerically there's just not that many liberals there and they're probably pretty dedicated environmentalists who have real issues with the Liberals and NDP.  I'm doubtful the neithers supporting the Greens are easy to reach either.  If the left-of-centre vote does solidify on the NDP, and some of the existing liberal support for the Conservatives can be pulled back, the NDP can forge a winning coalition.  Chretien managed to find majority coalitions (over 40% support in '93 and 2000) even with the NDP and BQ taking substantial numbers of votes in the 90s and early 2000s.  Even after the right wing parties merged, a badly scandal wounded Martin did eke out a minority in 2004 all the same. 

Canada may just be liberal enough to put a left-of-centre party into government even with four of them vying for that pool of votes.  In fact, if the NDP dominance of the BQ in Quebec continues, we're back down to three effective parties, which isn't much different from the Chretien/Martin days.

Why Autonomy?

Though the name of this blog was sort of a last minute panic to have some place to announce while I still could, I did pick it because it means something to me (though considered some kind of irreverent or semi-comedic name but nothing funny or original enough came to mind).  I first explored the concept of autonomy in my post "One Liberalism through the ages" where I used Alan Wolfe's definition for liberalism:  "As many people as possible should have as much say as is feasible over the direction their lives will take."  


Baked into that phrase is the need not just for "freedom" or "liberty" but the need for something beyond the mere absence of formal restraint those concepts entail.  That extra thing is the positive means to act on goals in addition to the negation of barriers.  That's what one needs to have that say over the direction taken in life. That's what autonomy is, and I think it is at the heart of liberalism.

I thought then and think now that autonomy is a powerful concept that liberals* should promote more often.  As it is a superset of freedom or liberty, we could dispense with those terms as insuffient to describe our goals. As I noted in the piece linked above, I have never liked the term "liberty" very much.  At least partly because it is abused so insincerely by right wing demagogues but also because it really is loved by the powerful as the absence of restrictions on their ability to take from the powerless.

This peculiar use of "liberty" by conservatives could be better broadcast to the public if liberals had a competing and powerful concept to promote, one which allowed them to critique the limits of liberty and point out how it allows conservatives to insist on deregulating business and regulating women's bodies or which consenting adults can get married.  This isn't inconsistent for them:  They're powerful (or wish to be) and regulations on business harm them.  Regulations on women or gays do not (and even empower them in some ways).

One of the powerful tools of persuasion employed by conservatives all these years is the ease with which their pundits and spokespeople can easily link complex policy discussions to simple principles.  They're often wrong or deliberately misleading, but they're good at it, and leave liberals in the disadvantaged position of trying to demonstrate how some small sacrifice of nominal personal choice or money would lead to disproportionately greater net social benefits.  So let them have freedom and liberty and instead sell autonomy.  Does policy X sacrifice autonomy for many to support freedom for a few?  Having comprehensible philisophical grounds to say why right wing policy ideas generally do just that can only help win the message war without trying to fight it the way conservatives do.

Finally, just being able to demonstrate and explain what liberalism is, while challenging conservatives to do the same would make for an important constrast.  One of the themes at Open Left was this idea that most self described conservatives and moderates actually believe in a lot of liberal policy ideas.  Decades of rigorous social science research undoubtedly bears this out, but now after listening to moderate and centrists beat the left up for two years that we can't expect too much from Obama because the country is so right wing, maybe it's time to try and change that imbalance.  We hoped to convert the persuadables by demonstrating the power of liberal ideas in practice (the whole "governing well" thing), but we didn't really get to implement the good ideas that would measurably improve their lot in life.  The New Deal model is a pipe dream for the time being, and America really can't afford to wait for another collapse caused by implementing right wing ideas.  We need a better option than waiting for another Great Depression in order to persuade America to try again for a Great Society.  Autonomy probably isn't the end-all of that but I had to start somewhere, and an attempt at a first principle seemed like the place.
 
* - I generally use liberal and progressive synonymously even though I know some see a distinction.  I slightly prefer liberal so I tend to use it for both.