I had a discussion some time ago with Martin Lipset in which I suggested to him that FDR had turned the term "liberal" on its head for slightly nefarious political reasons. He didn't agree, but I didn't find his argument particularly convincing. Thinking it over later, however, I came to the conclusion that FDR had earned the term "liberal" because, by adopting "workfare" during the Depression, rather than "the dole" which was adopted in Germany and Austria (that opened the door to the Nazis) FDR provided a social and cultural context for the unemployed worker that was neglected in Europe. This gave unemployed workers an alternative to the "Politics of Unreason." In other words FDR "saved liberalism."
There were lots of American fascist organizations in the '30s, like the "Silver Shirts" and Father Coughlin, and even Huey Long, but none ever achieved critical mass. In "old Europe" they did. In fact, Paul Lazarsfeld in his classic Marienthal Studies actually documents the process by which it happened in a small town in Austria. It's not pretty. Lazarsfeld documents the increasing isolation of the unemployed worker to the point that people caught in this web eventually had no awareness of or interest in what went on beyond their own backyard, and in extreme cases beyond their front window. Such isolation is crushing, and anyone caught in it, for whatever reason, will seek any sort of social context as an escape, even if it's the social pathology of Naziism. According to Lazarsfeld this was the essential difference between Germanic Europe and the US in the 1930s.
Here's what I do to keep things straight. To my rather uncomplicated mind you're conservative if your tendency when confronted with uncertainty is to cast anchor. You're liberal if your tendency when confronted with uncertainty is the weigh anchor. The only complication in that methodology concerns what constitutes an "anchor," and it's that small wrinkle that introduces all the irony.
The anchor is usually some aspect of the foundational values for a culture, which is usually religion or ethnicity in the case of Europe and many other places. In the US it's something else. It's partly religion... but mostly it's classical liberalism or "whiggism," which was the ideology that dominated the founding of the nation. Thus the dilemma... which I think is both both ironic and healthy. Uncertainty provokes conservative Americans to catch at anti-statist, sectarian, and individualist values (Americanism). The only thing that's left, if you happen to be "liberal" in the sense of weighing anchor and setting sail before whatever fickle wind happens to be blowing, is to oppose what the other side does. And sometimes, when these folks aren't careful, "liberalism" leads them in a reactionary direction. Competing for the title of "liberal" leads them to adopt some strange illiberal postions.
They don't just weigh anchor in other words, they start ripping the ship apart... just because it appalls the conservatives. It has the advantage of "proving" how liberal they are too... which is especially useful when sincerity is the highest virtue to which a politically aware person can aspire. It's crazy, totalitarian, and illiberal, but it's sincere.
It seems to me that the tenets of a Demosophist or Demosophistic movement would involve arriving at the appropriate balance between conflicting conservative and liberal values, or freedom vs. purchase. It's reasonable to argue that the appropriate response to threat is to weigh anchor so that you can maneuver, but it's also important to maintain the option of "staying in place." Such a position preserves the greatest degree of freedom, and to that extent it probably deserves to be called "liberal" in the larger sense.
Thus, I feel comfortable equating Liberalism 3.x with Demosophia. It's the optimization of the greatest degree of freedom within the constraints imposed by maintaining effective social bonds. The economist Ralf Dahrendorf has an excellent discussion of the practical ramifications of these tradeoffs in Life Chances. It's really about "networking."
Posted by Demosophist at August 20, 2004 07:22 PM | TrackBack