Although people like Bill O’Reilly habitually refer to establishment liberals as the “far Left,” they are two very different things.
What we identify as mid-20th century, New Deal liberalism is rooted in the Progressivism of the turn of the 20th century. The Progressives came largely from the white collar managerial-professional classes that controlled the large bureaucratic organizations — giant corporations, government agencies, universities, foundations and think tanks — that dominated American society after the Civil War. Many Progressives in the corporate world came from industrial engineering backgrounds. The kinds of people who made up the demographic base of Progressivism saw American society as an extension of the large, hierarchical institutions they managed, and thought society could be managed the same way way an engineer managed industrial processes.
I have a great fondness for the Left, and consider myself part of it. For liberalism I have nothing but contempt. To illustrate the distinction, Woodrow Wilson — a good liberal — virtually liquidated the genuine American Left during and after WWI.
Karl Hess, in Mostly on the Edge, prided himself that while he had occupied positions on the political spectrum ranging from Old Right isolationist to New Left Wobbly, he could truthfully say he’d never in his life been a liberal.
Speaking of the kinds of people who read The Nation and Mother Jones — people whom I consider liberals — Alexander Cockburn (the kind of Leftist who supported gun rights and hated Food Nazis like Michael Bloomberg and Meme Roth) said trying to get the mainstream Left to accept new ideas was “a bit like arriving at a town in the year 1348 with spots on your face saying, ‘Let me in.’”
People like Rachel Maddow, standing in front of the Hoover Dam and calling on America to again do “great things,” and Michael Moore, calling for Detroit to mass produce electric cars and buses, hearken back to mid-20th century liberalism’s mass-production heart of darkness. Even the Green Party was virtually hijacked by liberalism this year, with Jill Stein’s “smart grid” and “Green New Deal” — betraying an almost religious Galbraithian faith in unlimited economies of scale and the virtues of bureaucratic centralism.
But worst of all are professional liberal thought police who instinctively target any form of horizontalism or decentralism as “right wing.” Thomas Frank has been in this business for years, of course. In a recent Twitter exchange with me Doug Henwood, editor of Left Business Review, essentially channeled Frank in dismissing the P2P and Free Culture movements as a return to the 1990s Web 1.0 era’s Dotcom enthusiasm. That’s right: Henwood, in a display of intellectual sloppiness that would make Robert Welch proud, conflated Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds with Bill Gates because of a superficial similarity in their rhetoric.
Lately there’s a cottage industry of liberals lumping in any decentralist or horizontalist tendency they don’t like as a Trojan horse for the Right. Mark Ames and Yasha Levine have repeatedly written articles for The Nation dismissing the organized backlash against TSA’s invasive grope-or-peep airport “security” regime as some sort of right-wing astroturf effort by the Koch Brothers.
And the Southern Poverty Law Center has taken to including anarcho-capitalists and voluntaryists in its large, amorphous list of “extremists” (aka “things we don’t like”). My friend Katherine Gallagher (Twitter: @zhinxy) compares them to the circuit riders who used to regale breathless Protestant audiences with prurient tidbits about the Papists like secret tunnels between monasteries and convents, and secret graves full of infant skeletons.
Now, as a left-wing market anarchist — or market libertarian socialist — in the tradition of Benjamin Tucker, I find most anarcho-capitalists disagreeably right-wing and given to pro-corporate apologetics. But the suggestion that David Friedman’s or Murray Rothbard’s ideology is even in the same zip code as that of the Hutaree Militia is essentially an affidavit that one is a damfool.
And get this: The SPLC’s circuit riders identify, as a sign of some anarcho-capitalists’ “extremism,” the fact that they regard the Federalist victory as a coup. Now, I’ve read a whole crop of revisionist historians, from Charles Beard to Merrill Jensen to Howard Zinn, who frame the politics of the 1780s as a class struggle in which the plutocratic interests triumphed with the ratification of the Constitution. I never realized those people were “right-wingers.”
I get the feeling people like Ames, Levine and Mark Potok would dismiss Ivan Illich and Paul Goodman as “right-wingers” for hatin’ on “public education.” They’d put Huey Newton and Robert Williams in the same category as Wayne LaPierre for viewing private firearms as a weapon against oppression.
This is a concentration of pure stoopid so dense as to create its own event horizon.
That’s why I — a far Leftist if there ever was one — don’t like liberals.
Translations for this article:
- Portuguese, Por Que Não Nutro Grande Estima Pelos Liberais.
Citations to this article:
- Kevin Carson, Why I Don’t Much Like Liberals, Hernando [Florida] Today, 12/26/12
Excellent.
Not only do we need to make a distinction between progressive liberal managerialism and the genuine far Left rooted in classical socialism, but we also need to make a similar distinction between the liberal-libertarian-anarchist strand of the Left and the Jacobin-Marxist strand and between constrained and unconstrained visions.
Thomas Frank was an interesting political analyst ten years ago, but he sold his soul to become a liberal. He hasn't had much of anything interesting to say lately. Doug Henwood is a friend whose opinions I greatly respect, but he gets thing wrong like I do.
Frank is actually a peer who went to the University of Kansas at the same time as me.
I really wish that Frank would return to the interesting writer he was when he edited the Baffler.
I ought to do a psychohistory of this strand of thought.
Managerial Progressivism? It doesn't deserve the honor of being called a political outlook. Just Frederick Taylor's "Scientific Management" applied to social problems. What happens when middle-management gets political pretensions. Just as plutocracy is what happens when rich people get political pretensions.
Ultimately, I think the gap between the tyrannical boss of the 19th century and the supposedly 'enlightened' ones that followed is narrow. It was merely a shift from intimidation to manipulation; hence, painting alternatives as reactionary and opposed to radical. The intended effect is the same, discouraging people from pursuing them.
What needs to be done is demonstrate how these 'progressives' are, in fact, right-wing.
A very thought-provoking piece. As a Marxist sympathetic to progressive reformism, I love a good critique of liberalism. Here's my (certainly not original) two cents: Just as decentralization isn't inherently bad, neither is state power. The problem with the social democratic welfare state isn't that it subjects capitalism to bureaucracy and centralization, it's that capitalist property relations limit the scope of (and try to undo completely) state protections for the poor, women, the environment etc. Now, I'm all for strong local and international democracy, but I don't see the value for the left of any "horizontalism" that tells us we shouldn't use state power instrumentally against the mechanisms of global capitalism and the class society it upholds. It seems to me that this ideology is as guilty of an idealized vision of "the market" as the liberals and progressives the author derides.
My recent post New video appears to show rebels killing rabbits with chemical weapons
I want to note something about "classical progressivism," which has been given the stupid label "populism." The progressives of the 1880s were focused on abolishing privilege, not "propping up of one side to compensate for the propping up of the other side" as Clarence Darrow put it. This original progressivism grew out of the abolitionist movement, and sought to abolish privilege wherever they found it.
This is pure gold.
We need to expose liberalism as the illiberal cult that it is. When MSNBC-CNN watchers start with anarchists like me, they assume at first that I'm a neoconservative. They think in silly binary; you are either a Glenn Beck watching Bible-thumper or a Jon Stewart worshiping, superficially humanitarian parlor-intellectual. There is no room for the idea that maximizing liberty would also maximize social justice, or that the state is the root of the injustice inherent in capitalism (as it presently exists). We can't blame them; state-run schools don't teach anarchism or labor history.
Keep up this work, Kevin! It's key that we distinguish ourselves from liberal inconsistency as a tool for luring questioning "Progressives" to the cause of liberty. It's insane that the Kochs and company have hijacked the rhetoric of liberty to defend the corporation-state.
@kumarssalehi: http://mises.org/document/1011
The state is inherently bad. It is an unnecessary evil.
Modern US liberalism is THE single most authoritarian ideology and the most representative of what the status quo is in political discourse. Conservatives certainly try their hardest to outdo them as much as possible, but even the worst excesses of the previous administration were inspired by partisans who worked in the gray creaking 20th century tradition of militant (and sometimes militarist) technocracy which informs the thinking of the Democrats.
Guys, Dan Sullivan has a point here. When I was talking about progressivism, I was referring to its New Republic wing. Its "left wing", represented by the populists and later by folks like Darrow and Brandeis and LaFollette, was a worthwhile movement.
It's about even with modern US libertarianism, in which the authorities are the landlords and the money lenders. It's not government that modern libertarians hate, but democratic process.
The classical liberals and the classical progressives were way less authoritarian than neoliberals and neolibertarians, who are kind of mirror opposites of each other.
Kevin I like your work but I cautiously suggest that you misrepresent Dr. Stein's positions on "decentralization" (for lack of a better term). Not that it the opinions of a fringe candidate matter that much, but I my reading of Stein's campaign literature and various interviews suggest that she is quite comfortable with worker ownership and decentralized energy production. I really doubt that Stein would oppose a community-led solar energy project, or something like that.
Rothbard was, at least at one point, a "race realist" and I'm not entirely sure that he would oppose people who organize at least partially on the basis of racial resentment to oppose "big government" policies like affirmative action. Granted, its a gross stretch to say Rothbard is in the same vein as William Pierce or some other random white supremacist but given Rothbard and other mainstream libertarian's quite explicit outreach to "paleo-conservatives" (who are one or two steps removed from clear-cut white supremacists) it's not entirely surprising that Rothbard's name might come to be associated with groups or figures of the racialist right. Maybe it's unfair, but I find it puzzling that anyone who is familiar with Rothbard's history would be surprised.
I think the best way to reach out to "liberals" or the "center-left" is to clearly articulate that effective alternative institutions to the state can be built. I'm not sure that calling them "stoopid" is a useful strategy.
@ kumarssalehi – Re: ” capitalist property relations limit the scope of (and try to undo completely) state protections for the poor, women, the environment etc.”
First, beware of the frameworks utilized to model the ‘aggrieved’, and proposed ‘solutions’, as promulgated by Billionaires via funding of university departments, programs, etc. They don’t do this because ‘they care’ about us – they hijack these valid issues which arise from tyranny, and use them to divide us to prevent us from uniting against our common enemy – them.
Government doesn’t ‘cure’ those problems – it doesn’t end ‘privilege’ or ‘power-over’ systems and, instead, always becomes a dispenser of privilege and power. Think of government as the pharmaceutical company that does not want a cure, because it would have no ‘reason for being’ when no one ‘needed’ its ‘medicine’ anymore.
The symptoms you list are valid, but would be *cured*, instead of only ‘treated’, by equal access to the Earth and its Resources. At that point, scarcity is gone, and with it, the fear and tribalism which it spawns, as groups fight for who gets ‘privileges’ for the master’s table-crumbs – be the master Government or Corporations.
The Earth is the table, and combined with existing technology, there is plenty to ‘go around’ for a tiny labor-input per person.
Amongst people empowered with their share of the Earth, if someone is a misogynist, bigot, or what-not (which is less likely without fear) it is inconsequential – because they cannot have ‘power over’ anyone else; they are no longer a threat – just a silly anachronism which will die out in time.
More and more I find the words 'liberal' 'progressive' 'leftist' and their opposites utterly useless and imprecise.
In the United States the word 'liberal' has come to mean the opposite of its original meaning–a strange Orwellian development. In this perverse reality, 'liberal' means giving more power to the state here and 'conservative' means giving more power to the military abroad. The left/right spectrum is linked to thought-control and thought-regulation.
Personally, I prefer the term 'liberal' to the term 'progressive' and wish the original meanings of 'liberal' could be reclaimed. But it's hopelessly compromised–it means 'left of center' and nothing more.
As far as Stein's "Green New Deal" goes, I see it as both a concession to pragmatic reality and a rhetorical strategy (knowing they would not be elected). The Green Party, unlike the Libertarian party, has the advantage of being able to allude to concrete examples of nations with social democratic traditions. The majority of Americans would prefer a society more like the greener European nations. They want universal healthcare, universal education, less warfare, and better environmental policies. While the Green New Deal would be a means to accomplish these goals, the Greens make 'decentralization' a key value, and Stein emphasized that local communities would get to control how the funds would be spent.
Technocracy with fancy utilitian rhetoric. It's just the more sophisticated form of what people call plutocracy
"Green" is also being co-opted by people with the same approach as those who co-opted "liberal" and "progressive." I was chair of the Allegheny County (greater Pittsburgh) Greens, and an organizer of the 1991 North American Green Gathering in Elkins, West Virginia. We were awash with people advocating alternative medicine, whose primary focus in that regard was to get government *out* of health care. A coup occurred at that conference, led by a group that called itself the Green Left. From that point on, the Greens and their Green Party spinoff increasingly abandoned the Key Values to support a traditionally socialistic approach. Green co-founder Dee Berry wrote,
"As time went on it became apparent to many of us that this Unified Structure provided for a hierarchical, rule-oriented organization easily manipulated by those who wrote and understood the complex rules. More and more people began to realize that this was not the kind of Green organization they wanted to put their time and energy into and simply walked away. This of course made those who remained and controlled the organization mad as hell. (They are still trying to get it back together now under the guise of UNITY."
Shortly after this takeover, Greens started abandoning their key values. Within a decade there was such a turn-around that the group that wanted to get government out of health care was crusading for the Single-Payer Health Care proposal. The terms "liberal," "progressive" and "green" still mean something in Europe, where state socialism is popular enough that state socialists do not have to hide behind some other label. Here in the United States, socialism is so unpopular that state socialists constantly hijack other movements, infuse them with a temporary ascendency, and then drain them dry as the public equates the movement that socialists hijacked with socialism itself.
Apologies to the anarcho-socialists who have tried to construct voluntary communities along socialist lines. They have not been part of this hijacking phenomenon, and have been welcomed by many classical liberals, progressives and greens, even as they (inadvertently?) helped state socialists get their feet into the doors of these movements.
@ "Maybe it's unfair, but I find it puzzling that anyone who is familiar with. . ."
I don't find it puzzling because it's a false accusation. Racial populations exist. That's a matter of fact. Whether there is some ordinal ordering of racial populations or not isn't–and Rothbard, a man of his time, shared the unfortunate opinion with his respective population. The biology of his day was highly eugenic-oriented. It's only recently within the past forty years or so that has changed.
However, it held zero prescriptive meaning for him. Rothbard was an individualist first and foremost, which rules out racialism have any priorities whatsoever.