Published Fall/Winter 2007
 
Whither Socialism
(on John McGowan's American Liberalism: An Interpretation for Our Time [Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2007] and Paul Smith's Primitive America: The Ideology of Capitalist Democracy [Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007])
by Daniel Markowicz | ns 69
Since the dismantling of the welfare state and the resurgence of unilateral military hubris, the left has attempted to come to terms with the conservative shift in American politics. When the unrestrained market is declared the mantra of the age, the need for state regulation to curb the private sector's worst abuses and the promotion of full employment and economic security through government programs seem outworn ideals from a bygone era. But this neoliberal and neoconservative triumphalism is not without its adversaries. Opponents of privatization see free trade less as the liberation of and by the market and more as a reorganization of class relations where low wages and high inequality is the norm. What's more, the neoconservative agenda seems less orientated to spreading democracy and more to, as William K. Tabb put it recently in the Monthly Review, securing the "global dictatorship of the US and core corporate governing elites." Given the current hegemony of neoliberalism yoked with a neoconservative foreign policy, what are the alternatives for a less brutal and more equitable society?
Paul Smith's Primitive America: The Ideology of Capitalist Democracy and John McGowan's American Liberalism: An Interpretation for Our Time present two alternatives to the present conservative climate. They share a concern for the growing disparity of wealth and power within America and the arrogance with which the US has asserted its dominance over the world since the Bush administration's occupation of the White House. Both denounce the unprecedented sovereignty of the executive branch and the cleavage between the political class and civil society while inquiring into the foundational structures and belief systems that constitute the making of the republic. Where they differ is in their accounts of how the neoconservative right secured dominance in American politics. Smith argues that the ascendancy of the neoconservative right is a symptom of the interplay between progressive, modernizing aspects of American society and culture and fundamentalist instincts. Accordingly, America's rightward shift since 9/11 was prepared for by the underlying contradictions that have structured the republic since its founding. McGowan, on the other hand, looks to America's foundational texts as guides to establishing a just society under the banner of political liberalism. For McGowan, current American politics have strayed from the ambitions of the founding fathers, necessitating a recommitment to American liberalism's core values: equality and freedom. While Smith is less interested in advocating a particular political antidote, his rooting of social inequalities in the coercive drive of capitalist accumulation suggests the need for a radical transformation of economic substructures. McGowan sees the problem of inequality as derived from disproportionate representation in politics, concluding that an expansion of politics to include everybody is the best guarantor of widespread social justice.
America began its tragic departure from liberal values, in McGowan's account, sometime in the 1970s. For Smith, the period immediately after 9/11 marks the acceleration of conservative dominance, although he insists that his book is not about 9/11 per se, nor is it intended to join the ranks of anti-Bush polemics that have proliferated in recent years. Smith's concern is with the "underlying structure" that made the War on Terror possible: an interplay of "hot" and "cold" elements in American culture. "The dynamic and progressive" elements of productivity, mobility, and growth are "hot," while "cold" describes "rigid social forms and archaic beliefs" (xi). America has always operated under a fundamental contradiction between the aspirations of a "super-charged modernity" and prevailing "primitivist" logic, and, since 9/11, America has undergone an "ascendancy of the primitive" (xi). The theme of Smith's book is that America's most primitive characteristic is the unquestioning "dedication to one central process, the process of capital accumulation," and his burden is to inquire, "what happens to an understanding of the condition this republic now finds itself [in] if one maintains and insists on the crucial factor of the politico-economic structures and formations of this nation" (xv). It is with such an understanding that Smith attempts to account for the ideological premises behind the contemporary political conjuncture as symptoms of American primitivism.
Smith borrows the terms "hot" and "cold" from cultural anthropology, specifically from the work of Lévi-Strauss. What Smith sees as promising in adopting the hot/cold distinction is that it assumes a coevality of progressive and regressive cultural forms. In labeling the "cold forms" of American culture primitive, Smith wants to emphasize their unwillingness to consider or even acknowledge challenges to the status quo. These tendencies have been legitimated by 9/11, fostering a "rigidly ethnocentric view of the world and a general indifference and lack of empathy in regard to the claims of other subjects and other cultures" (40). Such "narcissism" goes a long way in explaining the current US campaigns against so-called terrorist sanctuaries and its refusal to countenance protests, both international and domestic.
Another manifestation of America's primitivist tendencies lies in an ideological commitment to the "ancient" texts of America's founding, demarcating a cultural atavism not too unlike that of radical Islam. For Smith, the invocation of shared values constructs a "we" that looks to certain mythologies and fictions for authority. Most important for Smith are the notions of "equality of condition" and "freedom." The unquestioning obeisance to America's founding texts entails two problems. First, that the core values of equality and freedom are essentially contradictory where they are thought to be synonomous—that is, the public commitment to equality of condition is in tension with a private commitment to individual freedom. Second, this contradiction can only be maintained by removing empirical evidence of the fundamentally unequal nature of American society. However, both of these elisions are symptoms of a more fundamental primitive instinct at work: an absolute devotion to America's peculiar form of capitalist accumulation and the maintenance of a rigid wage relation and class structure.
Smith's insistence on taking the economic seriously allows him to link what seem disparate phenomena both international and domestic, including the flagrant disregard of human rights, designation of political prisoners as "enemy combatants," the peculiar nature of US imperialism, the increasing authoritarianism at home, and the ire against "activist judges" and suspicion of the judiciary as a whole. These phenomena collaborate in expanding and deepening the wage relation that serves the continued accumulation of capital. But the neoconservative right is not the only party guilty of eliding the economic. Smith's last chapter, "Precarious Politics," charges the academic liberal left with a similar inattention, mostly through a biting critique of Judith Butler's Precarious Life: The Power and Mourning of Violence (Verso, 2004). According to Smith, Butler displays the same tendencies as mainstream critics and political commentators of the post-9/11 debacle, limiting the level of analysis to moral and ethical concerns without making connections to the politico-economic substructures, "foreclos[ing]…discussing the general conditions of capitalist America" (120). Smith sees Butler's refusal to engage with material conditions as symptomatic of oppositional discourse in America in general, where the cultural is largely disconnected from its "politico-economic determinations" (124). Cultural criticism, because it assumes the relatively autonomous status of culture, can neither provide a coherent critique of economic deprivations nor envision a different society.
Fundamentalist commitments to both the mythologies enshrined in the sacred texts of the founding fathers and the unquestioning devotion to capital accumulation constitute the American republic, meaning, ultimately, that America did not change with the aftershocks of 9/11. If Smith insists on historical continuities between America's current rightward shift and the republic's founding, McGowan suggests that America has lost its liberal promises of preventing tyranny and promoting freedom. Listing a litany of abuses defining the current era, such as the attacks on public services, concentration of wealth at the top, evisceration of job security, and increasing power of the executive branch, McGowan sees an erosion of liberalism steadily taking place over the past forty years. Accordingly, his project is to resurrect liberalism as a political ideology that "gives us our best choice of living in peace with other Americans—and with people in the rest of the world" (4).
McGowan's optimism regarding the potential of liberalism is a nice reprieve from the cynicism by which the political is often evoked. Instead of raising another epitaph to the political as such, McGowan joins such thinkers as John Rawls, Martha Nussbaum, and Richard Rorty in championing liberal democracy as the antidote to social stratification. He believes that liberalism is a highly misunderstood concept and that its critics suffer from misinformation. Hence his book is a "basic civics lesson" more than an academic study, providing a "coherent and comprehensive" account of the "principles and values" that make American liberalism "the path our country should take" (2). In determining these values and principles, McGowan refers to the writings and ideas of Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, particularly The Federalist Papers. The commitment to equality and the need to create political institutions as a safeguard against tyranny are what compelled the founding fathers and what "we, as a nation, are in danger of losing" (5). What is distinctive about the American variant of liberalism is its mixture of idealism and realism, of a moral vision and political expedients. Its task is to distribute power evenly throughout civil society, ensuring that no particular faction gains a monopoly, and to mitigate conflict among a pluralist society in which interests and goals will necessarily clash. Such a vision calls for political structures that are ad hoc, flexible, and contingent, where sites of power are distributed among various factions.
For McGowan, it is just these values that make liberalism such a healthy companion to democracy, and it's the illiberal nature of our current democracy that he sees as most pernicious. McGowan's democracy is not so much a good in itself, but in securing a peaceful coexistence among warring factions. Here, McGowan sanctions a form of democracy that is deliberative, allowing a "period of public debate prior to decision" in a revived public sphere wherein all parties have access and decisions are reached collectively. The "mysterious feat" of liberal democracy is that stability and civil peace are maintained despite inevitable disagreements, and a truly democratic political system will gain legitimacy through consent of the people, even those factions and individuals who find themselves on the losing side. At the same time, a commitment to liberal democracy would refuse to countenance the infusion of money under the aegis of campaign financing and the gerrymandering of voting districts that restrict full access to political decision-making in the contemporary moment.
McGowan is most polemical when he takes on conservatism, which suffers from "monological thinking"—a commitment to orthodoxy with the aim of incorporating "the many under the rule of the one, whether that be the market, a certain moral vision, national security, or true patriotism" (133). As a counterbalance, he also criticizes the "nonliberal" or "cultural" left. It is not entirely clear who his targets are here, other than a melding of various identity-based movements and postmodernism. Where they get it wrong is grounding politics in some form of determinative origins above legal structures, inaugurating a damaging separatism, retreat from the political, and an evacuation of the public sphere. What's more, "notions of subliminity or the ineffable" only produce irreparable "differences" that prevent the compromises and agreements cherished by liberalism. In general, they overvalue theory. McGowan throws down the gauntlet by saying that the debates in which the cultural left engages are no more than an "intramural academic spat" that is "largely irrelevant to the polity as a whole" and distracts well-meaning critics from the "real threat on the right" (139).
For McGowan, the difference between liberals and conservatives is mainly a moral one, but moral beliefs do not always cohere with concrete history—a history of which McGowan makes too little. The principle moral virtue for liberalism is tolerance and respect when dealing with adversarial positions and ideas. But the ideals of freedom and equality motivating the founding figures of the American republic often contradicted the "real" history of disenfranchisement. McGowan acknowledges racial and gender discrimination evident of American history, but holds that the guiding virtues of tolerance and respect ensure ever-expanding parameters of social and political inclusion. Yet, the problem of liberalism is that it falls short on socio-economic matters. For McGowan, it is clear that capitalism itself is not a problem, so long as its worse excesses are reined in by a state accountable to civil society. While McGowan includes such setbacks to American labor as the loss of job security, the decline in real income, and the erosion of union power as evidence of the need for liberal democracy, his primary focus on morality suggests that the mistreatment of workers can be mitigated if employers simply respect their employees. It seems to me, though, that such respect has been a facet of American capitalism for some time, especially when such respect is garnered through working hard without complaining (and, of course, refusing to join a union). Perhaps McGowan's position here assumes a certain shared interest between employer and employee in maintaining the optimal conditions for securing "effective freedom." But a stronger economic analysis would assert that the interests of labor and the interests of capital are antagonistic, and that what's called for is not a moral change of heart, but a structural change. The failure of liberalism is its lack of imagining that kind of change, and such a political imaginary is designated hopelessly utopian or alarmingly extremist, consigned to the fringes of the far left.
While McGowan insists that we stand at a "crossroads," the only two choices he offers are a recommitment to America's liberal tradition or continued acceptance of the neocon agenda. Any sort of socialist alternative is left off the table. It is typical that a whole tradition of Marxist thought and socialist experiments is swept aside, and its "irrelevance" often repeated as an established fact. But surely the history of labor struggle inspired by a socialist politics offers lessons for the contemporary moment. If its primary tenent is the social rather than private ownership of property, socialism would seem a worthy option for undermining the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small elite. Consigning the nonliberal left to the enclosed corridors of academia ignores the "actually existing" union movements and grassroots campaigns for economic justice and even their academic allies. Even if the labor movement is a shadow of what it once was, it seems more important to nourish the efforts of Jobs with Justice, Unite Here!, and the SEIU than to render them an antiquarian throwback. In a time of wildly unequal distribution of resources and when the political class exists only for its own narrow self-interest, a class-based analysis seems more appropriate than ever, even when it goes by the illiberal name of Marxism.
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