Right Reason

Sundry Meditations on Neoliberalism

Yesterday, the Adam Smith Institute declared that it is no longer a libertarian think-tank. Instead, it is a neoliberal think-tank:

Although I would have much preferred them to call themselves a ‘liberal’ think-tank and to thereby rededicate themselves to advocating Adam Smith’s “obvious and simple system of natural liberty,” I don’t think that much emphasis should be put on their choice of adjective. ‘Libertarian,’ ‘neoliberal,’ and ‘liberal’ mean too many things to too many people to have a definite preference for one. Whatever adjective helps the Adam Smith Institute advance liberty the most effectively is the adjective they should use. (That being said, ‘neoliberal’ has too much of a whiff of the class of people that Nassim Taleb titles the ‘intellectual but idiot’ for me to go anywhere near the adjective for my own description.)

In the coming out piece, “I’m a neoliberal. Maybe you are too,” Sam Bowman enumerates a canon of beliefs for a would-be neoliberal. The list is worth reading and comparing to one’s own belief. Here, I shall focus on one particular profession, that of being ‘a liberal consequentialist.’ Mr. Bowman writes:

A system is justified if it is the one that best allows people to live the lives that they want to live, or makes them happiest or more satisfied than any other. There are no inherent rights that override this. People’s wellbeing is all that matters, and generally individuals are best at defining what is best for themselves.

I’m very sympathetic to the idea that the notion of ‘right’ in modern thought is best abandoned. Not only have the list of rights, which were once safely limited to life, liberty and property, been expanded to include everything from a $15.00 per hour wage and high-speed internet, but the modern world has entirely lost the plot context of early-modern rights talk. Without a notion of a creating Deity who bestowed rights from without the system, people now think of themselves as being the authors of their own rights within the system and that confusion has lead to the unnecessary multiplication of rights. Myself, I would much prefer that we talk about virtues and which institutional ecosystems best promote human flourishing.

 

The troubling thing is that Mr. Bowmen has made no such aretaic turn. Instead, he swears by the mushy word that is ‘wellbeing.’ Although ‘wellbeing’ lends itself well to quantitative studies, it is a notion of human flourishing that can muddle the very aspect of human nature that makes liberty worthwhile: Individuality. A life spent lying on a couch being pumped full of soma, although it may measure highly in wellbeing, is not worth living and can scarcely be given the dignity of being human. As John Stuart Mill persuasively argued in On Liberty, individuality is a necessary factor for human flourishing and that any system that squashes individualism, even if it does so for the wellbeing of society, is despotism. By providing each person with a private sphere to pursue his own vision of the good life, liberty protects individualism from any would-be despots. The language of rights, however much it may be muddled and confused, still provides a persuasive rhetorical focal point for defending the private sphere as integral for virtue.

Asserting that “generally individuals are best at defining what is best for themselves” is not a robust substitute for that rhetoric of rights. Here, I must pursue the obvious question: To what degree does ‘generally’ hold? Is it 90% of the time? 99% 50% Surely an exact estimation is impossible, but I would like to know just how confident the author is. I simply don’t think that ‘generally’ establishes a robust presumption of liberty. Instead, I think that it provides a very easy standard to vault over. “Generally people choose well for themselves, but in not in the case of sugary drips of more than 16 oz.” “Generally people choose well for themselves, but not in the case of pornography or marijuana.” With a legion of Harvard-grad IYI’s, any regulatory agency can make easy work of proving that people can’t choose well for themselves in the particular case in question. When decoupled with the rhetorical focal point of rights, ‘generally’ provides but a fig-leaf of protection to individual liberty.

 

How do I think we defend liberty? I think it’s by advocating, as a matter of principle corroborated by historical experience, that Adam Smith’s natural system of liberty is the best way of ordering society and that it orders society for everyone’s benefit. Following John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, liberals should assert as a matter of principle that: “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.” Maybe we mean it only 99% of the time, but that categorical statement provides a far more robust defense of liberty that a probabilistic one.

JS Mill's Significance in an Age of Trumpism

 

 

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called, and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.

-John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

 

 

The idea of liberty is difficult to pin down with a single system. Whenever we try, many of liberty’s salient aspects inevitably slip from our account, however well-formulated it may have been. To paraphrase Walt Whitman, liberty is large, it contains multitudes.

Liberty must therefore be appreciated and studied from many perspectives, such as a birthright that must be defended against encroachment or as the rule giving rise to the division of labor benefiting all of humanity. But none of those perspectives alone can suffice. To defend liberty, we must be catholic in how we approach the idea of liberty, fitting our perspective to the challenges we face. In the midst of Donald Trump’s ascendance in the Republican primary, inebriated on a dangerous cocktail of nativism and economic nationalism spiked with blind anger, we can advance liberty in our day best through the perspective of John Stuart Mill.

 

Unlike many other philosophers of liberty, Mill was never satisfied with characterizing liberty simply as a force for circumscribing the power of the state. In On Liberty, he emphatically argued that there was a wider role for liberty than constraining leviathan. He singled out individuality as an essential ingredient to human flourishing and reasoned that liberty must serve as a force that promotes the individuality each person in society. After all, to be able to make one’s own opinions about the good life and to act upon them was a part of a life worth living.

Liberty, Mill contended, must justify the right of each person to cultivate their own individuality and provide them with a social space for doing so. It is more than a bulwark against the political class, it is also a bulwark against prevailing opinion and the tyranny of the majority. If it is to truly contribute to human flourishing, liberty must safeguard experiments in living against whomever would aggressively interfere with them.

 

Trumpism is an explicit rejection of Mill’s philosophy of liberty. Donald Trump’s successful coup of the Republican party demonstrates why a robust defense of liberty must extend beyond ideas of limiting the political class and that it must also extend to protect people against prevailing opinion. One of the greatest advantages that Trump has had so far in that endeavor has been that his brand directly appeals to the white-identity politics with the party that most other Republicans only flirt with. Rather than validating the dignity of people at the margins of prevailing opinion, Trump belittles them in order to raise the prestige of the prevailing white identity.

A sizable fraction of his voters believe that they—the white, Christian, non-college educated portion of the American population—are the ones under threat and need protection from the government—protection that Trump is selling. The American National Election Studies’ The 2016 Pilot Study attests that independent and Republican voters who esteem their white racial identity as important are 30 points more likely to support Trump than those who do not similarly esteem it. These are the people who believe that they have been left behind as they watch both manufacturing jobs go overseas and their status in their status in society be diminished.

 

In his campaign, Trump has gleefully exploited their fears and apprehensions. His appeal transcends matters of policy and revolves around an unapologetic affirmation of his supporters white identities. Trumpism isn’t a collection of ideas, it is a force for white identity consolidated under the cult of personality of its leader: The Donald, who with his WWE appearances and his hard-constructed aura of capitalistic success, immediately appeals to disaffected whites within the Republican party.

‘Make America great again’ can be translated as ‘make the white identity prestigious again.’ Whether it’s bringing back jobs from China, negotiating with Iran or passing a new health-care plan, Trump is simply going to make his followers important again in the world. He is going to ensure that they should be respect, and feared, the world over. How is Trump going to do this? If what he has said is to be believed, he’s going to triumph because he’s the winniest winner who has ever won. Being the consummate alpha male, the strength of Trump’s will shall simply overwhelm all who oppose him.

Suiting the style of identity politics, Trump’s rhetoric has demonized those who do not neatly fit into Trumpism’s notion of whiteness. Muslim refugees are branded as terrorists. Mexican immigrants are reviled as drug-mules and rapists. Of course, when Trump was confronted with a question about David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan, he had to do some research before repudiating them, later rationalizing the entire incident as being caused by a faulty earpiece, even though he had repeated Duke’s name to the reporter. All in all, Trumpism seeks to retreat Americans back behind the walls of a secure white identity and to raise the drawbridge up behind them.

 

John Stuart Mill’s philosophy of liberty is a useful, and much needed, palliative against Trumpism and its prejudiced emphasis on white identity as being the sole identity to be esteemed in society. Mill’s philosophy teaches how a drawbridge-down approach to the world is how we come to learn more about ourselves and the world around us. Against Trumpism’s confidence in the superiority of a single identity, On Liberty reveals how openness to the wider world, not hostility towards it, is how we achieve virtue and flourishing. Even Pope Francis has expressed a similar opinion when said that no one who only thinks of building walls, rather than bridges, could be a Christian.

Liberty also wasn’t an academic curiosity to Mill. During his life, he championed the individuality and dignity of the people at the margins of his own society, including women, slaves and religious nonconformists. As a Member of Parliament, he advocated women’s suffrage and the legalization of contraceptives. Today, he would certainly be writing about how black lives matter, speaking out against those disparaging Mexican immigrants and advocating the cause of Muslim refugees. Against Trumpism, Mill would defend a robust drawbridge-down stance as a force that benefits and enriches the societies that adopt it.

 

Liberty flourishes in an environment in which people are free to cultivate their own individuality. Trumpism, with its unmitigated glorification of white identity at the expense of those at the margins, represents a threat to that environment. To palliate Trumpism, those who love liberty need to inject some of the themes of Mill’s On Liberty into their political discourse. We need to emphasize that theme in Mill’s On Liberty that liberty is about more than just constraining the state, that it is also about justifying those at the margins of prevailing opinion, whether they be Mexican immigrants, Muslim refugees or just those who do not conform to the white identity at the heart of Trumpism.

Suiting the style of John Stuart Mill’s philosophy of liberty, all lovers of liberty, whatever political labels they may take, need to condemn those who would raise the drawbridge behind a single comfortable identity, even if it may be their own. To once again quote Walt Whitman, they must take seriously that “whoever degrades another degrades me.”