Liberalism Succeeded, So Inequality Keeps Widening
As a trend of recent years, phrases like “the failure of capitalism” and “the collapse of democracy” seem to come up everywhere. I wanted to get a proper handle on this.
I dug through several books, and this one struck me as the most reasonable and rationally written, so I liked it. Here’s a summary as a memo for myself.
Why Liberalism Failed
The author is Patrick J. Deneen. He’s a professor in the political science department at the University of Notre Dame in the United States, and he has previously taught at Princeton and Georgetown as well.
The content is dense and this will run long, so I’ll split it into several parts.
The argument
Liberalism (or liberal democracy) emerged after the medieval aristocratic order and swallowed the world. In the 19th century a current hostile to liberalism took shape, and various alternative systems of governance were explored (communism was one of them), but liberalism defeated all of them and seized hegemony as the world’s sole political system. Even so, several distortions have recently begun surfacing one after another, and the time has come again for liberalism to be shaken. The main points are “ever-widening inequality,” “the individual growing ever weaker while the state grows ever stronger,” and “declining morals.” What makes this deeply troubling is that these are not situations liberalism’s failure brought about — they are happening precisely because liberalism succeeded. In other words, liberalism was destined from the start to end up this way, and yet the world has arrived at this point without discarding it and without constructing a sufficient alternative. Left alone, this will surely just continue.
Here I’ll organize things around the point about “ever-widening inequality.”
Inequality
John Locke, in “Two Treatises of Government,” divides humans into the “industrious and rational” and the “quarrelsome and contentious.” Aristocratic rule wasn’t bad when the people at the top were the former, but when they became the latter, war was virtually guaranteed to break out. Liberalism was thought to raise the probability that the industrious and rational would rise to the top. And the assumption was that in a society where the industrious and rational are on top, society as a whole grows materially prosperous, and even if inequality doesn’t disappear, everyone gets along reasonably peacefully. In other words, liberalism affirms inequality while still promising that people can be happy. President Kennedy quoted Locke when he said “a rising tide lifts all boats.”
Tyler Cowen, in “Average Is Over,” pictures the majority pushed into areas like Texas. Cheaply built housing, so-so employment, public services that don’t reach everyone. But the ending Cowen envisions has something like hope in it. Something like the utopia Marx imagined might be realized in a different form. For example, free internet and abundant free entertainment let the poor immerse themselves and grow satisfied while being kept alive but not thriving.
John Stuart Mill, writing in the 19th century, is precisely the midwife of the innovative liberalism that designed and championed the world we live in now. He envisioned a society where a small number of unconventional, unpredictable geniuses accomplish innovative things. Jobs, Bezos, Gates, Elon Musk, and so on — the world has actually turned out that way.
Marx held that dissatisfaction arises not from inequality but from exclusion. Even the advance of the global economy creates a divide between those who benefit from it and those who don’t.
Liberalocracy produces a new aristocratic class. The family has collapsed, but various capitalist solutions have filled the gap. Gardeners, housekeepers, tutors, nannies — occupations were created that wouldn’t be needed if the family were functioning. The conditions for success in capitalist society are loose family ties, mobility, skills that remain valuable even when jobs change, and transferable inherited wealth.
The winners of liberal society become uprooted, cut off from their hometowns, pursue materialism by taking on risk, stall social change, and accept inequality as fine.
Liberalism is rooted in human nature
Niccolò Machiavelli, in “The Prince,” argues that one should acknowledge humanity’s deep-rooted selfishness and material desire, and think about how to make use of it rather than suppress it.
Self-interest is a byproduct of the exclusion of traditional virtue. It undercuts the public good, encourages zero-sum thinking, and fixates on material concerns.
Humans cannot be happy unless they cultivate self-restraint, because human desire has no limit, while the world does.
Changes in the market
Consumerism makes people believe that their place of belonging isn’t a narrow, limited culture but only the broad, all-encompassing market. It’s a kind of brainwashing. To that end, the market was severed from morality and steered toward treating labor and natural resources as commodities. Concretely: the dissolution of medieval guilds, the industrialization of agriculture, and support extended to employers at the expense of unionized workers.
What follows is a hollowing-out through redefinition rather than exclusion. Commercialized handicrafts. Music mass-produced for the general public. The more choice retail offers, the more culture declines. It’s a story that sounds all too familiar.
Daniel Boorstin warned that technological development carries the risk of gradually flattening the world into sameness. Liberalism promotes homogenization, and the exclusion of subcultures on grounds of economic rationality advances. Calls for promoting diversity end up producing the worldview of advanced liberalism: independent individuals rise with the state’s support, and the state strengthens its control through that very process.
Competitive market principles reduce agriculture to irresponsible, short-term solutions. Administering antibiotics to cattle causes bacterial mutations, and those bacteria become resistant to antibiotics meant for humans. Genetically modified crops resistant to pesticides have, thanks to that very trait, led to vast quantities of pesticide being sprayed over wide areas.
The bottleneck for the expansion of capitalist markets is the depletion of resources. But that in turn accelerates both the opening of new markets among the poor and the reduction of labor through mechanization.
Take subprime lending. In the old days, mortgage lending was considered risky, and banks wouldn’t lend in areas where no loan officer knew the area well — they didn’t sell where they had no branch. That wasn’t law, it was custom. Banks earned their profit because the local area actually generated returns. In short, the subprime problem is a story like turning a university campus into a free-for-all hookup zone — the kind of thing that goes badly wrong. When something like this happens, the public demands stronger regulation, and the power of the state grows. Even here, individualism ends up advancing statism. The bubble, too, actually contributes to the advance of liberalism.
The future that liberalism brings
Friedrich Hayek argued that liberalism fuels inequality, and its survival requires accelerating economic growth. Inequality keeps widening, and eventually it may exceed the gap between king and peasant in the age of aristocracy — but because economic growth is guaranteed, liberalism continues to be supported.
Tocqueville saw that the gap between rich and poor creates a new aristocracy. But the medieval aristocratic class was obligated to support its retainers. The new ruling class simply exploits workers without end.
Socrates said every man seems to live as though in a cave. No political ideology lasts forever. The great statesmen of antiquity knew how to build a system of continuous cultivation of virtue, and knew that no system made by humans lasts forever.
Conclusion: the lie of liberalism is being exposed
The ruling class follows along enthusiastically, but the new class that liberalism itself gave rise to is beginning to see through the lie. The next stage may be the emergence of a firmer, more coercive dark state — one that forcibly imposes liberal order whether people like it or not.
But even if the system were to collapse, what comes after is difficult. Historically, Germany went from the collapse of the Weimar Republic to fascism, and Russia moved from a brief period of liberalism to forced communism. What should be done? First, affirm the accomplishments of liberalism (this isn’t a call to go back to some idyllic era). Second, think about how to cultivate a polis-like life without returning to an age of ideology (the fact that liberalism appears to have won is itself the result of tremendous sacrifice). Third, hope that new ideas emerge from that great cauldron.
The ideals liberalism raised have been betrayed, but liberalism has evolved so that the betrayal is hard to notice. Freedom is considerably constrained. Few people vote believing they can actually influence government. Casting an opposition vote as an expression of discontent is the real motivation. People can choose which car to buy, but they have almost no ability to choose whether to escape from a life that is unbearably boring.
It’s better not to attempt a comprehensive debate as a counter to liberalism. After all, liberalism and other ideologies emerged out of comprehensive debate in the first place, and everyone assumes a conclusion has already been reached. Naturally, if you try to reopen that debate, you’ll be met with suspicion and crushed.
Václav Havel, the Czechoslovak dissident, held that improving the system does not improve people’s guarantee of a good life. Only once life itself starts improving can an improved system develop. One should patiently work at creating a refuge from impersonal order — that is, at building a new form of community.
Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2020/10/375/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.