Cass vs Slade Debate - Part 2
On pursuing the common good
Today we pick up on the debate between libertarians, who were included in an old-style “fusionist” conservativism, and emerging new postliberal conservatives, who desire to be increasingly activist in pursuing their version of the common good, using state power as far as they can to do so.
On Tuesday, I shared a key example of such a debate and invited readers to have a listen. Again, we have here a substantive debate on the right — yet also irrespective of Trumpism — which I think is worth considering in the context of how our society might actually achieve something like Hannah Ritchie’s balanced goal for sustainability. We’ve also been considering that all week. There is something to be said for juxtaposing practical Anthropocene issues with the political and economic (not just technological!) means we have at our disposal for addressing them.
As I suggested, there are at least two questions at stake: a question of ends, and a question of means, of goals or visions for the common or public good and of how to get there. By and large, I am highly sympathetic to libertarian concerns. In fact, I sorely wish in our present system that we could vote simultaneously on two things for every proposed policy: 1) whether we agree with and value the goal; and 2) whether we approve of the means or methods proposed to achieve that goal. So often do I value the goal, the end in mind, yet I disapprove of the means — and it’s easy to get condemned for the wrong reasons, wanting to hold out for better solutions.
The Cass-Slade debate raises all the relevant issues. Let me divide the conversation into four parts and offer some analysis and commentary. Please jump in!
individual freedoms and the common good
how to accomplish large-scale projects
shifting constitutional structures (impacts on the system itself)
domestic vs international policies
The Common Good
As a teaser, last time, I quoted Stephanie Slade’s opening remarks. She is the libertarian thinker from Reason magazine:
I think the main thing that I’m concerned with is a rejection of the classical American conservative commitment to limited government and individual liberty as two of the driving forces behind what it means to be a conservative in the United States of America. There seems to be an increasing comfort among some folks on the right-of-center with seizing the power of the state and using the coercive power of the state to try to get what we want out of society, as opposed to limiting the role of the state to protecting individual rights and liberties, maximizing individual freedom, so that people can then pursue their vision of the good life and the good society. It’s a desire to seize power and use it to impose top-down a vision of society, which necessarily means somebody has to come up with what that vision is and impose it on others, whether they like it or not.
Some folks, well right of center, are changing “what it means to be a conservative” by desiring to “seize the power of the state” and use coercive power to “pursue their vision of the good life and the good society,” i.e. the common good.
Slade goes on to argue that she is in no way opposed to pursuing the common good! It’s just that individual freedom is both a component of this good and also a prerequisite: “Individual freedom in the free markets, free speech, individual liberty, institutions that focus on protecting these things in that sense are also a prerequisite for achieving other aspects of the common good, like peace and justice and material abundance in society.”
The correct way to pursue communal welfare, between the “two spheres” of governmental and nongovernmental action, is generally the nongovernmental. “The power of government and public policy are not the proper ways to pursue [many aspects of the common good] … Individuals and communities and families in their private, non-coercive capacity is the right way to go about pursuing those things.”
There is both a principled claim and an empirical claim here about the “right way” of doing things from a libertarian perspective. There is a “right way” claim first about justice. It’s not right to deprive people of their liberty in the name of (someone else’s) vision of the good. There is also a “right way” claim about what, practically or pragmatically, actually works.
Oren Cass, from American Compass, who represents the new conservative perspective, goes on to ask appropriately about large-scale projects, mostly in an empirical vein.
Large-Scale Projects
Aren’t there any situations where collective action is required? Don’t we need national governments to accomplish what’s beyond the scope or scale of what individuals, small-scale social groups, private business, or local or low-level governments?
(Are there things that, it turns out, can in no way be accomplished through purely voluntary means?)
Dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, building the national highway system (a massive infrastructure project), medical research funded by the National Institutes of Health, and patents as protections for intellectual property are all brought up by Cass in the discussion as specific case studies.
Slade’s rejoinder is consistent.
First, there are other ways to get things done. Private, voluntary, and especially local-level government can usually do the job. Free markets, in particular, can be credited with generating abundance and flourishing.
Slade: “I'm pretty much going to be voting no on most everything... Does it not make sense for this to be done at a lower level?”
Slade: “I want to live in a world with material abundance and flourishing... you don't get that without functioning markets and a profit motive.”
On the other hand, governments so often do a bad job!
Slade: “The reality on the ground is when government does things, often it does it badly.”
Notably, these are all empirical questions. Good data — as someone tackling sustainability issues like Hannah Ritchie does — ought to be able to provide the relevant information.
Shifting Constitutional Structures
Then the conversation shifts to deal with the other kind of “right way” claim and how governmental structures as stipulated by constitutional norms are shifting. It’s a nuanced problem, one more about principle than empirical data.
It begins with Slade noting that there seem to be two (confused) postliberal conservative views emerging, one economic, one concerned with conservative social values, including religious ones.
Slade: It seems to me that there are two related and overlapping, but also in some ways distinct movements on what I would consider to be the far side of the liberalism schism. There’s the national conservative movement that is more focused on economic policy, and I think what you guys at American Compass are up to would fall into this camp. And there’s also the self-identified common good conservatives that are a little more focused on virtue and social conservatism and religious traditionalism. But there is also a lot of overlap… [Proponents] pivot from talking about industrial policy or something to talking about why we need to ban pornography.
Cass, who is primarily on the economic side of the new conservatism (as is American Compass, the organization he founded), nevertheless identifies with both. He sees one basic postliberal movement, which desires go beyond “the whole basic liberal project based on liberal rights and democratic capitalism, that has somehow run its course.” He thinks the same folks can say both kinds of things:
“Gosh, there’s a lot more room for constructive public action in the economic sphere, that is in fact necessary and would lead toward better economic outcomes.”
And: “Gosh, there are a lot of places where social priorities would benefit from greater public policy than the more libertarian right-of-center has been comfortable with.”
More public action. Greater public policy. This is not your grandfather’s conservatism.
Conservatives Level Up
But there is more than just a desire to push a new agenda (vision, version of the common good). There’s a more subtle and nuanced problem of the old asymmetrical approach to government. One major problem in taking a traditional libertarian hands-off approach is that you concede too much.
Cass: There is a broader host of issues on which we have basically disarmed, to use a militaristic term, in fights over all sorts of issues, where you have a left-of-center that is very comfortable using public power to try to advance a social agenda, and you have [had a traditional libertarian] right-of-center whose view has essentially just been to say, “Well, we may or may not have an opinion on this, but we don’t feel that we can have a policy agenda on it.”
…I sometimes hear the argument, well, conservatives shouldn’t be comfortable using any form of power that they wouldn’t be comfortable seeing liberals use… [but] I worry about the extent to which it gets played as a trump card that “thou shalt not explore in that direction” because principle X says there is to be nothing done there.
In the past, there was an asymmetrical approach to policy between liberals and conservatives. Liberals were happy to make policy all day long — naturally according to their objectives — while (old) conservatives, libertarian-leaning, preferred not to make any policy whatsoever, regardless of their goals, which should be pursued primarily privately (as Slade has argued). Cass’s new conservatism, on the other hand, is leveling up now, pushing to make things more symmetrical, as it wants to face off directly against liberals, bringing their own objectives into an equal “battle.” The new conservatives no longer feel “constrained,” as Slade puts it, constrained by the libertarian “principle X,” as Cass calls it.
Shifting Structures
But now things get even more nuanced with a turn towards shifting governmental structures per se. Slade’s problem with the new leveling-up is that key “liberal norms and institutions and legal constraints—the courts, for example—that have done a reasonably okay job at checking the worst excesses of the left in the governmental sphere” are now becoming endangered in their own right.
The system itself is being affected.
Slade (slightly paraphrased): If the right starts using the government in that way, then the credibility of the institutions that have been a check on the left goes away. … Rather than one side unilaterally disarmed and the other firing weapons, now they both say, “Well, we’re not going to abide by any rules of engagement at all.” People have agreed that anything goes, and it’s just a battle for power.
With conservatives no longer championing structural — not ideological — interventions against liberal over-reach, there is now no constraint whatsoever on outright ideological warfare.
The role of the judiciary, in particular, comes up in discussion. Traditionally, conservatives favored judicial minimalism, preferring to leave policymaking to democratic (i.e. legislative) processes, while also relying on the judiciary to actively police too overt political power grabs. These, traditionally, were liberal-only, but now they are both-sided. New conservative activists, admits Cass, are indeed questioning any overly restricted judicial power. Perhaps “the constraints that originalism supposedly places on the judiciary [have] gone too far,” he reports. For his own part, Cass rather advocates holding the line on judicial reform and activism, keeping firm rules of neutrality in place, a strong constitutional system, clear separation of powers, and a judiciary able to “enforce against both sides.”
And yet he still thinks, within the system, within any “structure as agreed upon,” there is plenty of room for advancing conservative policy goals.
There are thus at least two effects of conservative shift here, extending even to the functioning of the constitutional system itself. Talk about weighing carefully the means any side is willing to employ to achieve political policy ends! Conservatives are leveling up to play the game as equals, no long uncomfortable with playing symmetrically and according to traditional liberal methods, which formerly kept somewhat in check not by an opponent but by the rules of the game itself.
For her part, Slade would keep things simple and clearly focused on the question of individual freedoms. Cass may assert that freedom is just part of the equation, relative to other goods to be pursued; it shouldn’t be the only question, or a litmus test. Slade agrees that protecting freedom is not the only question, but it’s nevertheless an absolutely essential one, a sine qua non. She takes the opportunity to reiterate that in any case there are alternatives to violating freedom, to the inevitable coercion involved in bringing state power into the case.
Slade: I think we make a mistake if we reduce the entire life to the question of public policy. There’s a lot going on outside of government, and we should be more interested, I think, in how we can solve problems in ways that don’t involve coercion and essentially violence in the Weberian definition of what is the state: “It’s the entity with a monopoly on the use of violence.”
She cites Max Weber’s definition of the state: “a human community that claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” (“Politics as a Vocation,” 1918) Source: Britannica
Domestic vs International (China)
Cass poses a final challenge in the form of a “paradox” he sees when libertarians argue for free trade with an authoritarian (anti-freedom) country like China. Surely a libertarian will not want to do business with a country like them!
Cass’s paradox:
The idea of free trade and the idea that we want to have a broad open market is a valuable one. [But] it seems to me that it runs headlong into a sort of paradox when the market you’re trying to have free trade with is one governed by an authoritarian, quasi-communist regime. And so I’m very curious how you think about that tradeoff, where on the one hand you would say, “Well, the libertarian, limited-government, free-market model says, no trade barriers between the U.S. and China,” and yet if we do that, we’re effectively including them and their policies and their extraordinary limits on individual freedom and incursion into markets, into our market, and so I just wanted to ask you, how do you think about that paradox?
Here is Slade’s slam dunk on the issue, which I didn’t see coming. Pragmatist considerations come again to the fore. What ultimately gives the best outcome, empirically? Is it a matter primarily of principle?
Slade: At the end of the day though, China is literally a billion human beings, and I care about their wellbeing. And I think not trading with them or trying to cut them out of the global economy because we don’t like what their government is up to…
[citing direct personal experience in Cuba] … I don’t like the idea of just accepting poverty, abject poverty and suffering, on the part of several billion people in another part of the world, in order to make a political statement that we don’t like what their government is up to.
Increased economic liberalization, trade, and the opening up, slowly and imperfectly… the opening up of China to the global economy, has quite literally worked a miracle in terms of reducing human suffering and lifting people out of poverty there.
She raises major point, acknowledged by Cass, re: the use of economic embargoes or sanctions against countries whose policies or human rights violations we don’t like.
The discussion closes with some further nuances in the China case. It’s also worth noting a couple things about this last brief exchange.
In the background here (Slade refers obliquely to this) is the thought, common in the mid-20th century, that economic liberalization would lead to political liberalization, but it didn’t turn out that way in China, the key case in point being Deng Xiaoping opening up China economically but then cracking down brutally on the protests in Tiananmen Square.
Both are “bracketing” national security concerns. This hardly seems like something to “bracket” out of the conversation.
In short, we have here a rich and telling conversation between the representatives of two important factions of erstwhile and now emerging conservatives, on how societies might try to achieve the common good, a vision of the good life and a good society.
For our present purposes, that good, that vision, ought (I will claim) to include a balanced vision of sustainability, applicable both to present and future, and to people and planet.
What, empirically, pragmatically — according to the data — are the options? By what means private or public, voluntary or coerced? At what level of government?
Which means and methods can be justified — on good principle — by such a vital end?
Whose visions are at play politically? In what manner of goods-vs-goods battle?
With what disruptions ensuing into the system itself?
If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading! Your comments and reactions, please.
