Herbert Croly Against Equal Opportunity

In 1967, John Schaar published, “Equality of Opportunity, and Beyond” in Volume 9 of Nomos. The article remains, by my lights, the best or at least most entertaining critique of left-liberal defenses of equal opportunity:

The present-day ‘radicals’’ who demand the fullest extension of the equal-opportunity principle to all groups within the society, and especially to Negroes and the lower classes, are really more conservative than the ‘conservatives’ who oppose them. No policy formula is better designed to fortify the dominant institutions, values, and ends of the American social order than the formula of equality of opportunity, for it offers everyone a fair and equal chance to find a place within that order. In principle, it excludes no man from the system if his abilities can be put to use within the system. We have here another example of the repeated tendency of American radicals to buttress the existing framework of an order even while they think they are undermining it … Before one subscribes to the equality-of-opportunity then, he should be certain that the dominant values, institutions and content of much of our recent serious literature and social thought---thought that escapes the confines of the conservative-radical framework—warn that we are well on the way toward building a culture our best men will not honor. The facile formula of equal opportunity quickens that trend. It opens more and more opportunities for more and more people to contribute more and more energies toward the realization of a mass, bureaucratic, technological, privatized, materialistic, bored, and thrill-seeking, consumption-oriented society—a society of well-fed, congenial, and sybaritic monkeys surrounded by gadgets and pleasure-toys (230-231).

Schaar draws on Michael Young’s influential critique of “meritocracy,” which remains a favorite punching bag for contemporary left-liberal political theorists. The core point is that it is irrelevant to insist on an equal opportunity to achieve success in a society if the core structure of that society remains hierarchical and corrupt.

I’m interested in a related (though distinct) left critique of equal opportunity developed by the greatest theorist of American progressivism, Herbert Croly. In both The Promise of American Life (1909) and Progressive Democracy (1914), Croly attacks American liberalism for its fixation with equal opportunity, a feature of America’s more general commitment to moral individualism.

Croly acknowledges that in a certain sense democracy must be committed to equal rights. A society “ceases to be a democracy, just as soon as any permanent privileges are conferred by its institutions or its laws; and this equality of right and absence of permanent privilege is the expression of a fundamental social interest” (Promise 222). At the same time, the obsession with individual equality leads to a tangle of unproductive contradictions. The most stark of those contradictions concerns the apparent belief in “equal opportunity” and repudiation of “equal outcome:”

The democratic principle requires an equal start in the race, while expecting at the same time an unequal finish. But Americans who talk in this way seem wholly blind to the fact that under a legal system which holds private property there may be equal rights, but there cannot possibly be any equal opportunities for exercising such rights. The chance which the individual has to compete with his fellows and take a prize in the race is vitally affected by material conditions over which he has no control (Promise 222).

That metaphor—the race—is of course ubiquitous in American debates over equal opportunity. It is given its most famous statement in LBJ’s 1965 Commencement Address at Howard University:

But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough to just open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.

That’s the same conclusion Rawls famously reaches by distinguishing between two forms of equal opportunity: “careers open to talent” and “fair equality of opportunity.” The race metaphor seems to imply that no strong line can be drawn between equal opportunity and equal outcomes. Every outcome is another opportunity, and so a true commitment to equal opportunity requires some form of equalizing conditions.

Notably, this is NOT the conclusion Croly draws. He does not take from the race metaphor the conclusion that a true commitment to democracy entails a commitment to REAL equal opportunity. He concludes, by contrast, that the fixation with “equal rights” is too individualistic and altogether unhelpful:

No formula whose effect on public opinion is not binding and healing and unifying has any substantial claim to consideration as the essential and formative democratic idea. Belief in the idea of equal rights does not bind, heal, and unify public opinion. Its effect rather is confusing, distracting, and at worst, integrating … The principle of equal rights encourages mutual suspicion and disloyalty. It tends to attribute individual and social ills, for which general moral, economic, and social causes are usually in large measure responsible, to individual wrong-doing; and in this way it arouses and intensifies that personal and class hatred, which never in any society lies far below the surface. Men who have grievances are inflamed into anger and resentment (Promise 227).

Croly rejects any political philosophy that aims at explicating, expounding, and realizing a true vision of equal rights. The problem with all such individualistic liberalisms is that they undermine the possibility of establishing a constructive democratic politics in service of collective purposes. When we are preoccupied with the correct balance and calculus of individual entitlements, we are unable to think coherently about the genuine national interest. Indeed, the entire race metaphor is a kind of fraud that perpetuates an illusion of impersonality and impartiality. Rather than be impartial, the democratic state must be willing to rig the game of society to serve the true social interest:

It is in the position of the bank at Monte Carlo, which does not pretend to play fair, but which frankly promulgates rules advantageous to itself. Considering the percentage in its favor and the length of its purse, it cannot possibly lose. It is not really gambling; and it does not propose to take any unnecessary risks. Neither can a state, democratic or otherwise, which believes in its own purpose. While preserving at times an appearance of impartiality so that its citizens may enjoy for a while a sense of the reality of their private game, it must on the whole make rules in its own interests. It must help those men to win who are most capable of using their winnings for the benefit of society (Promise 236-7).

Croly makes the same point in Progressive Democracy. He offers the race metaphor to mock the philosophical contortions of liberal theorists attempting to discover the true meaning or requirements of equal opportunity:

American democrats have usually hugged the illusion that equality of right would automatically bring with it equality in the exercise of rights. When the result of the exercise of presumably equal rights has been gross inequality of benefit, they seek constantly to repair the damage by abolishing or attenuating rights which seem to be fruitful of inequalities. They argued at first that, inasmuch as the whole field started from the same line, the whole field had had an equal chance to win. When it was found that the fleetest runners were always winning, the privilege of starting with them from the same line seemed to be a poor consolation for constant defeat. The natural inference followed. If the great object of the running was the prize of victory, and if all deserved an equal opportunity of winning the race, the only fair race was the handicap. Instead of starting equally and finishing unequally, they should start unequally in order that they might finish equally (PD 114).

These are endless, unproductive, stupid debates. They derive from a foolish fetishization of “equal rights." A progressive, constructive democracy will not waste time agonizing about whether a given distribution of opportunities or outcomes is fair or just. It will focus instead on whether the social structure as a whole serves the public interest. The correct emphasis is social contribution not individual entitlement:

Society is undoubtedly interested in affording everybody an opportunity to win prizes in the race; but it is still more interested in arranging for a fast race, a real contest and an inspiring victory. If for the present a large part of the spoils must belong to the victors, it is the more necessary to insist that the victors shall be worthy of the spoils (PD 115).

This abstract critique of liberal rights-talk and individualism is meant to articulate Croly’s repudiation of Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom agenda, which derives ultimately from a Jeffersonian ideal of individual self-sufficiency. Wilson and his closest advisor, Louis Brandeis, favor trust-busting, for example, as a means of distributing an equal opportunity for individuals to build their own businesses and establish a degree of economic independence. They attack big business in order to give the little guy a fair shot. For Croly, that vision of antitrust policy remains trapped within a conservative ideology of liberal individualism. The goal for progressives should not be “true equality” or “true opportunity.” The goal is the construction of a society that serves the national interest. That might mean some form of antitrust. But it might also mean the embrace of corporate consolidation if the trusts can be induced to serve the common good. As he puts it in The Promise of American Life:

The concentrated leadership, the partial control, the thorough organization thereby effected [by the monopolies] was not necessarily a bad thing. It was in some respects a decidedly good thing, because leadership of any kind has certain intrinsic advantages. The trusts have certainly succeeded in reducing the amount of waste which was necessitated by the earlier condition of wholly unregulated competition. The competitive methods of nature have been, and still are, within limits indispensable; but the whole effort civilization has been to reduce the area within which they are desirably effective; and it is entirely possible that in the end the American system of industrial organization will constitute a genuine advance in industrial economy. Large corporations, which can afford the best machinery, which control abundant capital, and which can plan with scrupulous economy all the details of producing and selling an important product or service, are actually able to reduce the cost of production to a minimum; and in the cases of certain American corporations certain results have actually been achieved. The new organization of American industry has created an economic mechanism which is capable of being wonderfully and indefinitely serviceable to the American people (Promise 142).

For Croly, if your commitment to “individual rights” or “equal opportunity” leads you to repudiate the most innovative and efficient institutions in American society, it is time to revise your point of departure.

Lukacs and Tocqueville on Democratic v. Aristocratic History

The central tension of Marxist history is summed up in a famous passage from the opening lines of the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” (I've blogged about 18th Brumaire here and on Gramsci's reading here).

On the one hand, men make their own history. History is the product of human deeds, be they conscious or unconscious. The history of emerging class consciousness is a history of achieving ever more deliberate control over the shape of that history, a deliberate control that will only be fully transparent and voluntary in a society of revolutionary communism. On the other hand, the terms by which men make their history are dictated by inherited material conditions: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Thus Marxists famously claim that history is shaped by laws of evolutionary development.

Georg Lukacs insists that a proper understanding of Marxist history must incorporate these two dimensions—history is the product of human will constrained by structural tendencies bound up with the existing conditions of society.

To take on board only one of these two dimensions—an omnipotent will OR eternal laws—is to think one-sidedly.

Those who believe that history is determined by natural laws (like the overly scientific materialist Marxists) are prone to the dangers of passivity, while those who favor a purely Promethean vision of historical change make the mistake of Great Manism.

In “Class Consciousness” he summarizes the two visions. First, against a vision of history as governed by immutable law:

In the first case it ceases to be possible to understand the origin of social institutions. The objects of history appear as the objects of immutable, eternal laws of nature. History becomes fossilized in a formalism incapable of comprehending that the real nature of socio-historical institutions is that they consist of relations between men. On the contrary, men become estranged from this, the true source of historical understanding and cut off from it by an unbridgeable gulf. As Marx points out, people fail to realise “that these definite social relations are just as much the products of men as linen, flax, etc” (49 in Livingstone)

So the problem with the law-based theory of history is that it reproduces a mistaken reification. It forgets that what we call “laws” are themselves human creations and are therefore ultimately subject to human control. By forgetting that fact, we transform something WE create into an ALIEN FORCE that constrains us. “Supply and demand” are not laws of the universe, but artifacts of unintentional human construction.

Second, against a vision of history as the putty of omnipotent will:

In the second case, history is transformed into the irrational rule of blind forces which is embodied at best in the “spirit of the people” or in “great men.” It can therefore only be described pragmatically but it cannot be rationally understood. Its only possible organization would be aesthetic, as if it were a piece of art.

Marx transcends these one-sided errors. He shows that history is both created and law-like, subject to the control of human will but characterized by certain structural tendencies.

Lukacs makes this point again in his “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat:”

As a result of its incapacity to understand history, the contemplative attitude of the bourgeoisie became polarized into two extremes: on the one hand, there were the “great individuals” viewed as the autocratic makers of history, on the other hand, there were the “natural laws” of the historical environment. They both turn out to be equally impotent—whether they are separated or working together—when challenged to produce an interpretation of the present in all its radical novelty (158). 

Many socialists—even vulgar Marxists—are too quick to accept a vision of history as governed by natural laws. So doing, they fall into a destructive fatalism. It is critical, therefore, to distinguish “fact” and “tendency” (183). The proletariat, Lukacs argues, is the true revolutionary agent, and as such embodies the dialectical solution to the central problem of German idealism: overcoming the gap between subject and object, between agency and world.

The proletariat consciously makes its own totalizing history, thus combining will and reason, the revolutionary power of the voluntarist agent and the objective reality of a rational order. Lukacs summarizes:

The self-understanding of the proletariat is therefore simultaneously the objective understanding of the nature of society. When the proletariat furthers its own class-aims it simultaneously achieves the conscious realization of the—objective—aims of society, aims which would inevitably remain abstract possibilities and objective frontiers but for this conscious intervention (149).

Very interesting.

What strikes me as also interesting is the similarity between Lukacs’ diagnosis of the two failed, one-sided visions of history, and the dichotomy Tocqueville offers between democratic and aristocratic history. Tocqueville writes in a chapter of Democracy in America titled “On Certain Tendencies Peculiar to Historians in Democratic Centuries:”

Historians who write in aristocratic centuries generally attribute everything that happens to the will and humor of certain individuals, and they are likely to impute the most important revolutions to the merest of accidents. They shrewdly elucidate the smallest of causes and often fail to notice the greatest (569 in the Goldhammer translation).

This is a mistake akin to Lukacs’ one-sided bourgeois historian who imagines that great men and contingency drive history. Historians in democratic societies, Tocqueville continues, fall into the opposite extreme:

Most of them attribute almost no influence over the destiny of the species to the individual and no influence over the fate of the people to citizens. On the other hand, they ascribe great general causes to the most insignificant particular facts (569).

Like Lukacs, Tocqueville criticizes this deterministic approach to history as yielding a pathetic, helpless passivity:

Thus historians who live in democratic times not only deny certain citizens the power to act on the fate of the people but also deny peoples themselves the ability to shape their own destiny, thereby making them subject to either inflexible providence or a sort of blind fatality. According to such historians, the destiny of every nation is irrevocably fixed by its position, origin, antecedents, and nature, and nothing it does can change that. They see each generation as firmly linked to the preceding one, and in this way they proceed backward in time, from era to era and necessary event to necessary event, all the way back to the origin of the world, forging a long, closely linked chain that encompasses and binds the entire human race (572).

Tocqueville favors the aristocratic history at least as a corrective to democratic passivity: “The historians of Antiquity taught men how to command; today’s historians teach little but how to obey.” (Fair enough, but perhaps Tocqueville's famous proclamations of the "providential fact" of democracy make him a teacher of passivity).

Still, I see plenty of truth in the joint Lukacs-Tocqueville diagnosis. We today are slaves of forces the economists purport to understand: Supply and Demand, Bond Spreads, Gresham’s Law.

On the one hand, shouldn’t we believe—with Marx and Lukacs and Tocqueville’s aristocratic historian—that these economic forces are simply inventions of human institutions? Shouldn’t that imply that we can change them should we so desire?

(I distinctly remember failing to understand in 2008 how the entire global economy could collapse all at once. I recall asking my father, an economist “if everyone is bankrupt, can’t we just reset and start over?” I know that was a stupid question, but I'm not entirely sure why).

Yet at the same time, OF COURSE these laws are real. Even if they aren’t fundamental facts of the universe, they are structural tendencies that OF COURSE constrain what we can and should do. 

Gramsci says something helpful about this. He writes about the problem of economic “laws:” how can we simultaneously recognize their existence AND their contingency? Gramsci writes:

Given these conditions in which classical economics was born, in order to be able to talk about a new science or a new conception of economic science (which is the same thing), it would be necessary to have demonstrated that new relations of forces, new conditions, new premises, have been establishing themselves, in other words, that a new market has been “determined” with a new “automatism” and phenomenism of its own, which present themselves as something “objective”, comparable to the automatism of natural phenomena. Classical economics has given rise to a “critique of political economy” but it does not seem to me that a new science or a new conception of the scientific problem has yet been possible. The “critique” of political economy starts from the concept of the historical character of the “determined market” and of its “automatism”, whereas pure economists conceive of these elements as “eternal” and “natural”; the critique analyses in a realistic way the relations of forces determining the market, it analyses in depth their contradictions, evaluates the possibilities of modification connected with appearance and strengthening of new elements and puts forward the “transitory” and “replaceable” nature of the science being criticized; it studies it as life but also as death and finds at its heart the elements that will dissolve it and supersede it without fail 

...

It is from these considerations that one must start in order to establish what is meant by “regularity”, “law”, “automatism” in historical facts. It is not a question of “discovering” a metaphysical law of “determinism”, or even of establishing a “general” law of causality. It is a question of bringing out how in historical evolution relatively permanent forces are constituted which operate with a certain regularity and automatism. Even the law of large numbers, although very useful as a model of comparison, cannot be assumed as the “law” of historical events (412).

(See here for more on Gramsci’s views of historical materialism and the balance of agency and determinism). Lukacs and Gramsci hope to make sense of a Marxist theory of history that is simultaneously historicist and rational. That is the permanent problem of dialectical history.

But I suppose the niggling fear for the communist (or any generally sane person) is that we have already reached the end of history, and that the structural regularities that govern bourgeois capitalism are, in fact, here to stay. Perhaps calling market forces mere products of reified consciousness will prove hopelessly utopian. Violently breaking things—a practice I oppose—may be the only way to find out. 

Populism, Technocracy, and the Liberal Critique of Democracy

Democracy is not much in fashion among liberals today. Reeling from the perceived disasters of Trump and Brexit—and the near misses of Le Pen and Corbyn—many of today’s most perceptive liberal commentators have rediscovered every traditional elite’s distaste for demotic populism. Even as they excoriate red states for curtailing voting rights, a growing body of intellectuals vigorously campaigns to devalue the vote as much as possible. The hope is that further empowering a class of sober experts and technocrats can counteract the hysterical extremes of mass democracy. There are good reasons to embrace such a thesis. After all, American school children are still rightly taught that ours is a republican form of government, not a direct democracy. Long after the death of Socrates, we know better than to place untrammeled faith in The People.

But today’s defenses of elite rule leave much to be desired. It is easy enough to lament the decisions of the demos. It is easier still to succumb to the technocratic temptation: If democracy is the problem, less democracy is the solution. But as the most assiduous students of American politics have always understood, democracy in this country is a providential fact. The impulse to push it aside and to ignore popular sentiment will inevitably result in evermore explosive reaction. Even with the most sophisticated of institutional implements, populism cannot be excised like a tumor from the body politic. It must be tamed through the hard work of deliberation and persuasion. Neither simplistic plebiscitary elections nor simplistic technocratic autonomy will adequately balance the legitimate demands of deliberative independence within our government with a respect for popular opinion within our society. For the diseases most incident to democratic government, only democratic remedies will do. The problem is too little politics, not too much. 

The liberal critique of democracy

Examples of liberalism’s rediscovery of the elite critique of democracy are not hard to find. Indeed, vulgar versions of Plato’s critique of the demos spring aggressively from the nation’s storied liberal institutions. In a recent issue of the New Yorker Adam Gopnik takes aim at one of the few intact elements of America’s national mythology: the moral triumphalism of the American Revolution. Revisiting the legacy of America’s founding is, of course, nothing new. Intellectual conservatives from Fisher Ames to Russell Kirk have always agonized over the Enlightenment faith of our novus ordo seclorum. Progressives since Charles Beard (or rather William Lloyd Garrison) have celebrated the Revolution’s emancipatory promise while lamenting its suffocation by a conservative constitutional settlement. But a left-liberal critique of the American Revolution itself—specifically of the radical democratic principles underlying it—is relatively rare in our history.

Yet this is precisely the line Gopnik takes. He suggests that we might all be better off had our colonial rebellion been snuffed out from the start. Using categories from recent works of history by Justin Du Rivage, Alan Taylor, and Holger Hoock, Gopnik laments the triumph of Radical Whiggism over Authoritarian Reformism in resolving the American Question. The former camp—which counted as members the entire founding generation—championed Enlightenment ideals and an abiding democratic faith. The Authoritarian Reformers, on the other hand, were the managers and technocrats of the day. Their members included such forgotten figures as William Murray and Matthew Decker. Though guided by relatively humane, liberal moral sentiments, Gopnik’s reformers were far from enthusiastic partisans for utopian transformation. They were experts and bureaucrats, immune from great swings of popular fervor and uniquely capable of driving the nation toward her true interests.

Gopnik suggests that the path of Authoritarian Reform might have been wiser than the bold experiment in republicanism we began. Under their sober rule, America might even have ended slavery without a civil war. As the piece’s title insists, “We Could Have Been Canada.” Orson Welles’ Switzerland too may serve as a counterfactual ideal: instead of warfare and genius, centuries of peace and cuckoo clocks.

It may help to understand Gopnik’s preferred regime of technocratic governance by imagining the state as a massive corporation, managed not by voters and their elected representatives, but by a board of shareholders. The shareholders are each invested in the long-term wellbeing of the polity. That interest allows them to see beyond the hysteria of today’s demotic demands. They are uninspiring men, of course. Bureaucrats always are. But that too is a feature, not a bug, of the system. Inspiration breeds utopian enthusiasm and the cult of charisma. These, Gopnik warns, lead on to “theatrical violence” and Trump.

(As an aside, if that analogy is just, Gopnik finds himself with some surprising ideological bedfellows. The reconceptualization of the state as a firm and its rulers as shareholders is prominently laid out by Mencius Moldbug, a leading alt-right figure of online “neoreaction.” Of course, sharing a particular ideal of political governance with such a thinker need not imply anything about Gopnik or the view—or about Moldbug, for that matter. But pointing out such intellectual concatenations is one of the more amusing pastimes available to us amidst the crisis of today’s political institutions.)

Gopnik’s historical counterfactual of America as Canada is best read as playful and provocative, not as historically rigorous conjecture. It is silly, after all, to believe that America’s brutal racial history would have been painlessly erased if only bureaucrats had more power. With a fifth of the nation enslaved at the founding and with slavery economically flourishing throughout the early nineteenth century, our country seems to have been destined for a bloody end to that chapter of our history, regardless.   

Still, Gopnik’s ruminations can helpfully broaden our imaginings of what an America without (or with less) democracy might look like. That theme is picked up in a more scholarly tone in a recent paper by Jonathan Rauch and Ben Wittes. Both senior fellows at Brookings, another of our nation’s august liberal institutions (and my current employer), Rauch and Wittes make explicit the core assumption implicit in Gopnik’s essay: The American electorate is too ignorant to be trusted with the serious business of governing.

Working readers through a body of empirical research that is by now old hat to political scientists, the paper catalogs the myriad respects in which voters are incapable of making complex policy judgments. It’s not that voters are stupid. They are just rationally ignorant—too busy with life to develop the expertise needed for judicious policymaking. Of course, Rauch and Wittes chafe at the suggestion that they are somehow anti-democratic. They run through a cursory discussion of democracy’s various moral advantages and of the political legitimacy conferred by episodic elections. One need not be a dedicated Straussian, however, to read that portion of the argument as a bit of esoteric misdirection.

Nevertheless, Rauch and Wittes rightly point out how progressive efforts to democratize the political process have produced much of the political sclerosis that now afflicts us. Building off Rauch’s fine essay in the Atlantic last year (about which I blogged at the time), they argue that transparency comes at the expense of compromise. Political reforms that weaken party bosses and equalize campaign financing unintentionally favor charismatic demagogues who can bypass the enabling constraints of back-room deals and the quid pro quo.

There is a great deal of truth in all this. Effective political deliberation requires space between voters and legislators. A golden mean must be struck between outright political corruption and unrelenting popular pressure. If an earlier moment of American politics was too extreme with respect to the former, today’s political culture suffers from the opposite plight. Who, after all, can recognize Publius’ sagacious upper house in the actual workings of the American Senate?

Unfortunately, Rauch and Wittes’ prescription is ill suited to the disease they diagnose. They call for an invigoration of America’s “intermediary institutions,” a category under which they unhelpfully lump everything from the Democratic National Committee to the National Security Agency to the Federal Reserve Board. The only discernible thread unifying these various institutions is their common anti-populist character. But intermediary institutions in the spirit of Tocqueville and Madison aren’t just mechanistic barriers that obstruct popular opinion. They certainly serve to temper populist impulses, but they do so by channeling prejudice, not by blocking it. Their essential purpose, in Madison’s memorable telling, is to “refine and enlarge” the public views. With this ultimate telos in mind, only some of Rauch and Wittes’ preferred institutional reforms will do. Greater privacy in legislative deliberations will help; empowering unaccountable bureaucrats won’t.

Rauch and Wittes focus overwhelmingly on the checks-and-balances within the national government. But that’s only part of the story. Many of our most important mediating institutions aren’t constitutional veto-points; they are the spaces between voters and the national government. Everything from local government and political parties to organized religion and the media must be considered. Schools and workplaces are especially indispensable loci of citizen formation and education. Focusing excessively on parchment barriers, Rauch and Wittes exhibit a classic liberal conceit. They aim to construct the state as a kind of perpetual motion machine, capable of churning out progress regardless of what inputs are thrown in. Precisely because most citizens spend so little time thinking about national politics—the cause of the ignorance Rauch and Wittes diagnose—politics needs to begin from the worlds most people do inhabit. Both institutionally and culturally, a democratic politics must meet voters where they are.

The wisdom in prejudice

The anti-democratic turn in liberalism has no shortage of scholarly antecedents to draw upon. Recent work in political philosophy and political science—Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels’ Democracy for Realists, Jason Brennan’s Against Democracy, and Ilya Somin’s Democracy and Political Ignorance—forms the regular basis of highbrow critiques of populism. But better guide to the complexities of democratic life is Bryan Garsten’s 2006 defense of rhetoric and politics, Saving Persuasion. Garsten brings out the roots of today’s liberal ambivalence toward democratic politics. His chapters on Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant make painfully clear the typically unspoken premises that guide Gopnik, Rauch, and Wittes. The canonical figures of early modernity cut to the core of our contemporary discontent with democracy. Democratic politics relies on the judgment of the people, but that judgment is so often commandeered by the demagogic forces of zealotry and factionalism. Few observers emerging from the horrors of Europe’s sectarian history could place much confidence in popular wisdom. The only solution, Hobbes and his intellectual successors declare, is to alienate private judgment, to chain oneself to the public reason of the sovereign. Individual citizens are too unreliable a ground to build a stable politics. Their private judgments must be restricted to the ever-shrinking confines of a private sphere.

Garsten’s readers cannot help but sympathize with the retreat from a politics of rhetoric. A Kantian sovereignty of scholars easily seems preferable to the whims of public opinion. But the attendant technocratic temptation to sever private judgment from the work of government simply will not do in a society like our own. Perhaps a purer aristocracy could flourish in a different place or a different time—on this front, western political thinkers may be guilty of an excessive ideological imperialism. But for all our constitution’s institutional complexity, Tocqueville reminds us, there is no such thing as a “mixed regime.” A deep democratic spirit is our national patrimony. That is no counsel of fatalistic despair, it is a call for us to preserve and to elevate the best in our democratic tradition.

Rauch and Wittes rightly point to intermediary institutions as needed remedies, but they give no way to identify what those institutions are beyond not being democratic. Garsten provides a sounder point of departure: a commitment to deliberation and rhetoric. An obsession with voters’ ignorance leads many to minimize the role of these foundational democratic practices. But as Garsten reminds us, that impulse invariably proves counterproductive:

Liberal strategies of political and moral disengagement, strategies that ask in one way or another for citizens to allow their private judgments to be replaced by judgments made from a separate public perspective, tend to produce forms of opinion more dogmatic and less prone to deliberative engagement than those they initially sought to displace. (Garsten, 185).

Today’s liberal critics of democracy join the early moderns in warning us that public debate and deliberation reward zealotry and demagoguery. That fear of sectarianism leads liberalism to elevate sovereign “public reason” over factious “private reason.” The aim is to demoralize politics, to take ideology out of public debate. Government must be built around agreement over mutually beneficial political procedures, not a thick conception of the good. The goal is a politics of dispassionate reason, often best administered by an insulated, independent political class.

But as Leo Strauss pointed out in a 1941 lecture on the rise of rightwing “German Nihilism,” the attempt to remove life’s most consequential moral debates from politics is itself the cause of the most dangerous forms of populist reaction. Instead of bypassing the dangers of passion, the liberal regime breeds deep discontent. Few will long be satisfied by “the prospect of a pacified planet, without rulers and ruled, of a planetary society devoted to production and consumption only.” Moral passions are inescapable features of human psychology. If repeatedly frustrated and ignored, they produce revolution, not pacification. The democrat’s task is to take seriously these deep-seated convictions, not to relegate them to an increasingly narrow private sphere.

The past two years have witnessed populist backlash throughout the West against an unaccountable “political class.” It almost beggars belief that so many commentators respond by calling for less accountability and more technocratic governance. In America, the Supreme Court’s usurpation of so many issues from the public domain has hardened popular discontent, eliminating the cathartic possibilities of politics. Likewise, the accretion of power in our administrative state has radically empowered the presidency at the expense of the Congress, destroying the possibility of legislative deliberation and transforming presidential elections into precisely the plebiscitary referenda liberals fear. How can it be responsible to react to such phenomena with a call for more technocracy?

Institutional reforms are needed to confront the dangers of a populist politics. But those reforms must entail a commitment to tutoring and refining the wisdom embodied in popular opinion. At its best, democracy begins from a basic respect for the beliefs and emotions of ordinary people. Yet that is the opposite of what is accomplished by the moralizing lectures that dominate contemporary politics. Cultural elites no longer see themselves as embedded within a common culture. As the Onion captured with characteristic clarity, they too often see themselves as the possessors of a special wisdom. “If only the people weren’t so ignorant...” the lamentation runs. “If only they could be a bit more rational."

Rhetoric, Garsten reminds us, is the forgotten link between popular and elite opinion. It is the means by which political elites respect ordinary people’s convictions, while aiming to persuade them of something new. Through this back and forth, we rule and are ruled in turn. Rhetoric, therefore, is in large part the art of trust-production. But today, much of the American elite has abandoned that art. Millions of America have lost all trust in established organs of elite opinion. In moderation, that skepticism is a healthy feature of our democratic culture. But it is taken to unbearable extremes when fueled by transparent disdain from the nation's progressive elite. Trump’s call to “Build the Wall” was widely understood by supporters not as a serious campaign promise, but as evidence that this candidate actually respected people's deep-seated concerns surrounding immigration and identity. Likewise, the visceral condemnation of “political correctness” popular today on the political right reflects the deep disrespect many Americans experience from their social betters.

Importantly, respect for popular prejudice isn’t just a demand of prudence. It reflects a genuine appreciation of the wisdom latent within popular opinion. Bill Buckley’s famous quip that he would rather submit our government to the first 100 names in the Boston phone book than to the Harvard faculty was not simply a denunciation of our elite. It was a reflection of the close connection between popular prejudice and the truth. In the case of immigration, for example, the bipartisan refusal to engage with popular discontent wasn’t just politically unwise. It was a major mistake as a matter of public policy.

With an academic and professional class increasingly detached from these founts of popular wisdom and common sense, we risk falling victim to the ideology of a self-contained clique. If a class of people or a set of views is systematically ignored, the merits of their beliefs are easily overlooked. Their genuine grievances go unanswered, challenging popular trust in government and undermining the public weal. 

As the anti-federalists were quick to point out during the ratification debates, a ruling class that fails to resemble the country loses its legitimacy and is more inclined to govern in the interest of the narrow, ruling class it does represent. More recently, Jane Mansbridge has revived the case for descriptive representation. As she argues, being represented by people like you is a valuable means of keeping the government responsive to the opinions and interests of a wider share of the country. 

Of course, popular prejudice can harbor insidious strands of bigotry and self-interest. If left in its crudest forms, it can be dangerous and myopic. All the more necessary then that we preserve the means of its refinement. Corrupt views cannot be bludgeoned out of the popular consciousness. They must be respected and engaged through the dedicated appeal to shared values and collective identity. A commitment to a politics of deliberation takes seriously the liberal critique of populist democracy, while proposing a more workable and desirable political alternative.

What then is to be done? An indispensable first step is a renaissance of legislative authority. As Richard Reinsch argues, a Congress willing to reassert its constitutional powers will go a long way in restoring a more deliberative tenor to our politics. Reforms within the Congress will help as well. Rauch and Wittes’ call for greater secrecy in legislative deliberations reflects a genuine need for more independence from constant public oversight. At the same time, devolving political decision-making to more local levels of government is needed to restore mediating institutions between the citizens and Washington. Most overlooked, however, is the need to re-train a people that is losing its taste and its capacity for judgment. As all aspects of our society grow increasingly rigid and routinized, our social institutions no longer provide a sorely needed education in practical wisdom. There is no quick fix to that problem. It demands a broader cultural shift in favor of more humane workplaces and deliberative social institutions.

Addressing our society’s deep cultural pathologies will be enormously difficult. Technocracy offers what appears to be a convenient shortcut. But if history is any guide, aristocratic prescriptions are no cure for democratic ills. Arbitrarily restricting public debate by empowering unelected judges and experts will only inflame populist hostility and social dysfunction.

Conclusion

Institutional and cultural reform is needed to protect a fragile politics of deliberation. Today, that politics finds itself under siege from both mass democracy and elite pretensions of enlightenment. Through deliberative politics, we do not disregard and denounce unconsidered prejudice. Instead, we respect the wisdom embodied in popular opinion, as well as the wisdom needed to refine and enlarge the public views. 

In a free society, sovereignty cannot be singularly located in any individual or institution. Layers of overlapping authorities provide the institutional infrastructure of any humane political community. It is just as dangerous to glorify national referenda as it is to place excessive faith in the wisdom of experts. There is no authoritative voice of The People. There is nothing magic about the opinion of a naked majority. Brexit and Trump command no profound legitimacy as the expression of popular sovereignty. Still, such results can be valuable rebukes of a political class thoroughly out of touch with significant segments of the country. The revolt against the Establishment throughout the West is a wise if crude corrective from an enraged Tribunate. We ignore the Tribune’s warnings at our peril.