This post of Ross Douthat’s reminds me why, let American conservatism desiccate as it may, I will never, never become a liberal – er, I mean progressive. He quotes Chris Bowers:
Tell me that instead of the Iraq war, maintaining a massive global military deployment or doling out a series of narrowly targeted government programs, we are going to do other great things as a nation. Tell me that we are going to have a New Deal for America. Tell me we are going to build a Great Society. Tell me that we are going to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Tell me that we are going to win and end the cold war. Hell, even tell me that we are going to secure freedom around the world, because at least that is a national project that sounds worthwhile. These are the sort of transformative proposals we need from Democrats, and right now we just don’t have any. Technocratic, transactional politics just is not as appealing, and ultimately secures a non-ideological mandate and a lack of purpose for the country as a whole. Until we offer just such a sense of purpose, we will never complete the progressive realignment towards which the progressive movement has been building for nearly a decade.
Good heavens, no. I mean please, please no. “Projects” are for individuals, for families, for businesses, for communities and voluntary organizations; they are not the province of nations. The greatest of the “great things” that “we” can do is to leave ourselves well enough alone, free to determine and pursue our own ends. Note well the plural: there are families to feed, children to raise, gardens to tend, sports to play, and jobs to do. None of these are things are “transformative” in Bowers’s sense, nor can any of them be done “as a nation”; each, though, is exactly the sort of activity that provides a “sense of purpose” to the lives of the citizenry.
Indeed, I can think of very few things that would make me happier than to discover that “the country as a whole” had somehow begun to suffer from a “lack of purpose”. For it is only by passing through such a state of transitional anomie that we can replace the collectivist nationalism that has dominated American political life for the past hundred-odd years with something more like, well, the regionalism that once made us “who we were”. (And we were once a great many different things.) What we need, in other words, is not to “offer” people a sense of purpose, but to enable them to find their own, and to build their lives around them in the ways they see fit.
End the war and bring home the troops, by all means. But then let’s keep our feet firmly on the Earth, leave the New Deal and the Great Society in history’s dustbin, secure freedom at home, and let the rest of the world take care of itself. The progressive movement can offer us few projects more “worthwhile” than those which our newfound moments of leisure will enable us to dream up on our own time.
Filed under: conservatism, politics, war
[...] Ross Douthat, subsidiarity Fellow grad student blogger Peter Boumgarden responds to my rant against National Purpose Progressivism, which he helpfully relates to the excellent Jim Manzi post [...]
I wonder if you’re not giving the forces that drove us away from regionalism in the first place short shrift as projects of individual citizens or more local groups….
Particularly for something like civil rights, which eroded local autonomy in ways that few other movements have, access to the overarching structure of the federal government was the primary way in which local forces (families, churches, communities) could leverage power. And only by limiting the power of distinctively southern political and cultural arrangements, i.e. by intitating what looked amazingly like a great, nationalized project, could the movement achieve anything close to its goals.
Partly this supports your point, in that civil rights was instigated not by the federal government but by citizens acting in concert, but it also shows that local action is far from guarenteeing a more regionally defined America; for some of the most devisive issues, it all but mandates a greater unity and the ideological implications that come with that.
This is John the undergrad from Phenomenology, btw. I stumbled on your blog from Pomo Conservative… (“Not that Schwenkler!” I said to myself) Excellent stuff. Keep writing it.
Hello John,
Thanks very much for your comment, and good to hear from you. It’s funny – I actually just met the PoMoCon himself at an IHS/AFF event yesterday evening.
I think that the point you raise is a really important one, and to be honest I’m somewhat at a loss for things to say in response to it. In the first place, I’d note that much of the kind of stuff that Bowers was advocating in the post I was reacting so strongly against – man on the moon, freedom across the globe, and so on – is different in a lot of important ways from the goals of the civil rights movement. This relates to one of the points that I tried to make here, namely that creating national projects simply for the sake of giving “meaning” to our lives is very different from turning to the federal government to deal with pressing social ills. It’s also worth emphasizing, as you did, the “organic” quality of the civil rights movement (it “was instigated not by the federal government but by citizens acting in concert”), though this is a tricky point since in this case there was also a good deal of support and direction coming “from above”.
But those are only very superficial points, and they don’t address what I think was your most important observation, namely that successful locally-driven action very often “all but mandates a greater unity and the ideological implications that come with that”, and so ends up undermining regionalism rather than contributing to it. There is a lot of truth to this: I can certainly think of any number of pet issues – the injustice of abortion and preemptive war, for example – where I’d be very happy if Americans would go ahead and settle on some sort of national consensus that was a good deal closer to, well, my own convictions, and I do think that in lots of cases one of the best ways to help build that sort of consensus is via the imposition of just laws. But what I’d want to do here is differentiate this kind of ideological consensus-building from the (top-down) creation of national projects: it’s one thing to share a bunch of convictions in common, and quite another to think that the kinds of endeavors that are the most politically “worthwhile” are the ones in which we all join together “as a nation”. What we want, in other words, is a lot of intra-national “regions” (individuals, families, business, communities, voluntary organizations, and so on), each of which respects some very basic principles about what can and can’t be done and then goes on to pursue its own projects in ways that respect those boundaries. This seems to me to be the model on which America was founded, and I find the kind of “national purpose” rhetoric that many progressives (and conservatives!!) tend to employ to be very deeply at odds with it.
Does that seem at all sufficient as a response to your challenge? I feel like I’m not really doing it justice …
Thanks very much for your kind words about the blog, by the way. I only started it up quite recently, and – as you can probably imagine – it’s been a bit of an uncomfortable project. But it seems to me that the potential consequences, whatever they might turn out to be, of “outing” myself and my convictions in these sorts of ways are inescapable parts of the duty to speak the truth. Plus, it’s kind of fun, and it’s better than working on my dissertation. But I’m very glad to know that at least one person has found it “excellent”.
Hmm… I guess my worry with your response is that I’m not sure there is a practical distinction between consensus building and national projects, particularly once the regionalistic elements are taken into account. Although not all processes by which localized concerns get adressed have to go through the “project” route, it strikes me that both our most consensual and contentious issues have some point at which they assume that status, and either fail or succeed as consensual norms largely because of their success or failure as national projects. The failure of roe v. wade to establish the moral hegemony of choice would be one example of how that process could fail… desegregation would be an example of how it succeeds; but in both cases, the stage at which the goals of the movement become a collective undertaking is also the point at which the possibility of consensus (or the possibility of conflict) becomes most apparent.
I almost wonder if the distinction we really need here is between organic and radical social projects, rather than local versus national or top-down versus bottom-up… If the distinction between national projects and universal consensus is going to blurry, then it seems like the real question is about what kind consensual projects we undertake, either individually and as a nation… and that’s where our relationships to our shared past, to family, and our environment are the most important. The commitment to small scale actions working their way up to national conversation and consensus would follow naturally from that, at least within the American context.
I worry I’m rambling here…
Concerning the blog: Yeah, I can imagine it’s got to be a little wierd from a professional standpoint. But still, I think questioning how our our unlimited commitment to consumerism connects a broadly conservative outlook is really really important… Its something that even a grouchy midwestern green can appreciate, which is saying a great deal. So yes. Continue outing yourself, by all means.
John,
Insofar as the goals of, e.g., the civil rights movement were concrete, policy-oriented ones, I have no problem at all with their being the object of nationwide action. But when what we’re trying to do is to change the culture – end racism and prejudice, for example, or get rid of poverty or “establish a culture of life” – it seems to me that we’re dealing with the kinds of tasks that can only be carried out regionally. This is why, for example, the success of the civil rights movement in ending the Jim Crow era hardly managed to bring an end to Southern (and Northern!) racism; such things can only be accomplished one local “consensus” at a time, and it’s institutions like families, churches, and schools that are going to make them possible. And so my problem with things like the New Deal and the Great Society (not to mention putting a man on the moon, which is just silly, or spreading freedom around the world, which is impossible) is that they try to cure what are really very deep social ills by way of the clumsiest of would-be cures, namely federally-driven action. Working to help the poor and undermine problematic social inequalities are tremendously important projects, but they are best left to communities that can suit their methods to their particular situations, and try new things when old ones fail.
The “organic versus radical” distinction is an important one, though to be honest I think that many of the sorts of social changes that this world needs are pretty damn radical ones. And radical projects can be driven organically, too: abolitionism was a very out-of-the-mainstream movement at the beginning, and in the present political climate any sort of position that takes a principled stand against wars of aggression has a similar character. Again, though, the key point is that the only way that the kinds of cultural (as opposed to merely legislative) changes that such “projects” require can actually be brought about is via regional means.
But perhaps I’ve just repeated myself. Does any of this help, though? I’m really enjoying this exchange, so thanks.
One more thing, John: part of what really drove me crazy about that Bowers post was the idea that we need to come up with some national projects simply for the sake of having something to do, and not because there are pressing problems that require nationwide solutions. Insofar as we have identified problems that we regard as really important, it then becomes an open question, which will of course have to be answered on a case-by-case basis, whether we should make them a “national project” or leave them to smaller social units. But the idea that politics ought to be the cure for social malaise strikes me as deeply irresponsible, and in fact downright dangerous.
I think I can see your point, even if I’m not entirely convinced on the original regionalism breeds regionalism point… On the vaccous national projects being bad as a collective therapy, I’m in complete agreement. (I’m glad you brought this up actually; it was one of the things I liked best in the original post)
I guess the big (and admittedly somewhat tangential) issue remaining for me is whether all of the federal government’s efforts are going to be, as you say, “clumsiest of would-be cures,” or whether a project like say, rebuilding our educational and economic infrastructure, can succeed with federal action dispersed in a regionally sensitive way. This is something I get to think about daily, going to a small, public liberal arts college that puts a lot of effort (and money) into maintaining tight local ties. It strikes me that in the sense that we provide a whole raft of services to the community that would not otherwise be there, both in terms of education and technical expertise, and that our providing those services helps the community interface better with the rest of the region(s), we represent a fairly good model of how federal and state government can reinforce the values we’ve been talking about, without being a heavy-handed force for monotony. I wonder if that kind of regionally sensitive national project (provided its not all vague-but-purposeful handwaving) might be more teneable…
I recognize that might seem a bit far afield, but considering that the next non-trivial federally driven campaign, addressing global warming, will likely unfold along these kinds of lines, I think it’s something that merits discussion, if not here than at some later point… I’m discovering that this is easily the most powerful tool for procrastination since solitaire, dangerous stuff when you have to write 60 pages in the next seven weeks.
Sorry if that last comment ended abruptly and uneditted… I got thrown out of the room I was writing it in… As much as I like living in a small town, people’s sense of when to be open and closed is often, uh, a bit odd. The perils of being regional, I suppose.
To sum up: All I was trying to say at the end there is that this is really an interesting set of issues, regardless of how little time I have to devote to it. Which isn’t to say that I lack it; 7 weeks is still a long time to my mind. So yeah…
Hi John,
Wow. Really good stuff. I think the example of your local university is a really excellent one, and the focus you describe on “maintaining local ties” is very much the sort of aim that I think governmental projects ought to have.
As to global warming … yeah, that’s going to be a topic for another day. Good luck with your writing.
[...] was defending here: While I don’t think that we need the types of programs Bowers is for and Schwenkler is against, I think Bowers does highlight how support is generated through capturing the [...]
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