- My name's Jim Miller, I'm the co-organizer
of this sequence of conferences with Helena Rosenblatt.
This conference has focused on the many faces of liberalism.
In February of next year at The New School
there will be a two-day event that will focus
on democracy and liberalism.
And very much add in
a sharper focus on democracy in itself and its history,
and in its complicated, I believe,
relationships with liberalism.
Our panel this evening is really the one panel
that joins the two conferences together.
And I thought it would be,
before really turning to the panelists,
I wanted to say something about the premises
of our conferences, and because they're
conveyed elliptically in the title of this panel, which says
Liberalism versus Democracy.
The question mark was added later
to soften my original title.
Helena and I discovered we were writing
at roughly the same time, books on parallel topics,
and were taking a broadly similar methodological approach.
And to put it very simply, we had both been touched
in different ways by the methodological work
of Quentin Skinner, as an intellectual historian,
and specifically a historian of political thought,
who emphasizes from a Wittgensteinian background
to take very seriously the words that are actually used
and the concepts as they're deployed
in discursive practices
in different historical times and places.
Rather than to assume that if you see the same word
at different times and places that it means the same thing,
and also as an heuristic to warn against applying,
retrospectively, terms that we use today onto previous
times and places and what their beliefs and practices were.
And as a result of taking that approach, both Helena and I,
to start with quite independently,
had ended up coming to the conclusion that there is
a broad, particularly in the world
of general ordinary discourse,
a tendency to conflate liberalism and democracy
in the United States that has been pretty deeply entrenched
in most of my lifetime, actually.
It was deeply entrenched in the political science
I was taught, I majored in political science
as an undergraduate, and it seemed to both of us
that it was a mistake historically,
but by separating out the differences
it might lead to an interesting conversation about how
these categories and concepts ought to be articulated.
Particularly if you can show historically that they've often
stood in tension, and I'm going to suggest, contradiction.
I want to put my cards on the table,
Helena did this earlier today.
I'm just gonna read five paragraphs
about liberalism and its relationship to democracy.
Liberalism's a relatively late addition
to our political lexicon, as Helena has explained.
What I want to add to what she said this morning,
and this is quite unlike democracy, which goes back
to the ancient Greeks, liberalism in the United States
was actually only introduced as a key word and term of art,
during the time of Woodrow Wilson,
and around people connected to the journal the New Republic
and even the founders of my university, the New School.
They meant it as a distinguishing label
for people who had been Teddy Roosevelt Progressives
who became Wilson Democrats,
and in contra-distinction to socialists
who pursued a revolutionary program.
And they saw themselves as pragmatic social democrats
in the model of say the Fabians in England.
So here's what I want to emphasize
about the differences between democracy.
Democracy when it first appeared in ancient Greece,
it had almost nothing to do with what we think of liberalism
in any of the possible definitions we've discussed today.
Nothing.
It presupposed shared norms, a shared religion horizon,
a shared projection of egalitarian ideals.
It revolved around periodic public assemblies
in which all citizens met as one,
and had as its characteristic procedure the random selection
of citizens to fill almost all the key offices
of justice, administration, and government.
As Socrates discovered at his trial for impiety
and corrupting the youth in 399 B.C.,
the ordinary citizens of ancient Athens
had little patience for nonconformists
or what Bill Galston was calling individualists.
Their collective freedom to wield their power
was perfectly compatible with the complete
subjection of the individual to the community.
And perhaps most importantly for our purposes today,
Athens was an exclusionary nativist community.
Only people who had both parents
who had been born in Athens could become citizens.
It is the most exclusionary nativist form of rule
that you can possibly imagine.
And you could make an argument that
the exclusions of Athenian democracy,
including women and slaves and all foreigners,
from participation, was what made
the robust directness of Athenian democracy possible.
But whatever it was, it was not liberal
in any sense that I recognize.
Moreover, modern democracy, which I think revolves around
a certainty conception of popular sovereignty that was
utterly alien to the thinking of the ancient Greeks,
and was most powerfully expressed as a democratic category
in Rousseau's political thought,
in his concept of the general will,
also has no necessary connection to liberalism.
This was shown in the course of the French Revolution.
But even the first Protestant champions
of the idea of popular sovereignty in the 16th century
summoned the power of the people for the express purpose
of dethroning rulers with whose
religious views they disagreed.
As Edmund S. Morgan put it, it was not religious liberty
they sought, but the elimination of wrong religions.
Liberalism, I believe, as Bill Galston has said,
profoundly grows out of a modus vivendi
to stop the slaughter that in part was being generated
by early Protestant conceptions of popular sovereignty.
That's all I wanted to say in terms of putting
my cards on the table,
but I wanted to then acknowledge
that there are many different ways to approach
the relationships between liberalism and democracy,
and in our conferences we've tried to be
as open and pluralistic as possible.
And in that spirit I wanted to explain the order in which
people will speak, for those of you who haven't been
at previous sessions, people will speak
for about five minutes and then we'll have
conversation among the panelists.
I'm not gonna give big introductions.
All of you have a program which lists
all the accomplishments of the various speakers.
I want to start with James Kloppenberg because he's written
a magisterial work called Toward Democracy
which is notably
different in its emphasis and approach
to telling the story of democracy than what I've just said.
So I've chosen, and he knew I was gonna ask him to go first,
deliberately, to lead us off.
And then I will turn to Nadia Urbinati,
Ira Katznelson, and Michael Kazin.
Jim. - Thanks, Jim.
Thank you for inviting me, it's a pleasure to be here,
and thanks all of you for being here in the late afternoon.
I've been studying the conjunction of liberalism
and democracy for 40 years now.
My first book was a study of exactly the moment that Jim
was just referring to when people coming out of socialism
move into social democracy
and people coming out of liberalism
move toward progressivism.
So it does seem to me clear that there has been this tension
from the beginning of both a democratic tradition
and a liberal tradition, but I think beginning
in the early 20th century it became clear
that it was possible to bring these two together.
And that's what I've been trying to study my entire career.
Both liberalism and democracy I think are complex phenomena.
I'm a historian, so my first sentence is always,
it's more complicated than you thought.
I'd say that both of these are constituted historically
by the struggles fought by people who were committed
to ideals that are not only in tension with each other,
but that are essentially contested.
The meanings of freedom, equality, justice,
have changed over time,
and they have changed across cultures.
So the idea that there is going to be a single conception
of liberalism or democracy that anyone has agreed upon,
or that we will agree upon, I think, is a phantom.
After having written this book about the rise
of social democracy, I wrote a book called
The Virtues of Liberalism that was focused on
the inadequacy of thinking about liberalism
strictly in terms of rights.
And that's a point that a lot of people
have made in various ways.
It was also about obligations, it was also about the duties
that one owes to the common good.
It may be that liberalism dates from the early 19th century,
as Helena noted earlier today, but the word liberality
comes into the English language from Latin,
and from the beginning it had a dual significance.
It meant either generosity towards one's fellows,
or it meant licentiousness.
And that sort of dual possibility,
that protean word, has been part of liberal tradition,
I think, as it's been understood by its champions
and its critics from the beginning.
I argued in that book that liberalism as it emerges
in the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries,
to use the word anachronistically,
had religious and political and economic dimensions.
The United States as a democratic nation emerged
from the blending of various inherited traditions.
Protestant Christianity, Classical Republicanism,
Lockean empiricism, Scottish Common Sense philosophy,
and Enlightenment Rationalism.
All of those components have been involved
and have been changing in relation to each other ever since.
In the book that Jim referred to, Toward Democracy,
even though it goes back to the ancient world in order,
in part, to make the point that Jim just made,
that Athenian democracy and Roman republicanism
are quite different from what we think of
as modern democracy,
the book begins really with the wars of religion,
because I think it is quite true
that democracy is rooted in an understanding
that something has to be done to keep people
simply from butchering each other.
And so we go first through a phase of absolutism,
monarchism, absolute authority of the monarch,
to a world in which people begin experimenting
with the ideas of popular sovereignty
that then come to fruition in the 18th and 19th century.
It's true I think that democracy requires an institutional
structure, it requires the rule of law,
it requires free and fair elections,
but I think it requires more than that.
I think it requires an orientation toward the ideals
of autonomy and equality and popular sovereignty.
But beyond that, it requires certain predispositions,
certain sensibilities, certain cultural foundations,
pillars, I call them,
without which I think a democratic culture cannot survive,
let alone thrive.
And those I think don't get the attention they need.
First of those is a commitment to deliberation,
to discourse, to debate as a way of making decisions.
Second, to pluralism, or diversity,
toleration, as we were saying earlier today.
And finally to what I call an ethic of reciprocity.
Could call it The Golden Rule if that's more familiar.
But without that one who loses an election would never agree
to cede power to the opposition.
All of these I think are values that have to be
balanced against each other.
If they aren't, just to take one example,
if majority rule is your only value,
any group of three can yield a majority of two
committed to enslaving the other one, right?
So you need a robust conception of autonomy to push back
against something as simple as the idea of majority rule.
So I think of liberal democracy as a heuristic,
or an ideal type.
As Ann pointed out, it's certainly not a reality
for most people in the world now, or ever.
It is a horizon that's always receding, historically
no matter what culture you're in.
Because it's not only about laws and institutions,
but it's also an ethical ideal,
as John Dewey never tired of pointing out.
So there are tensions between liberalism and democracy
certainly, as Jim pointed out,
but I think they should be seen in the 21st century
as mutually constitutive, as dynamic,
and as multi-dimensional.
So why is liberal democracy in such crisis
in the 21st century?
From my perspective as a historian,
the underlying reasons are cultural.
They are not only the absence of commitments
to robust ideals of autonomy, equality,
and popular sovereignty, but also
an absence of commitment to the underpinnings of democracy,
to deliberation, to pluralism, and above all
to an ethic of reciprocity.
Thank you.
(audience applauding)
- Thank you, I'm continuing on the same line,
because I almost agree on everything that you said.
So, it seems that I have nothing to say more,
but something more I guess to say, actually.
So, I like to push a little bit farther this issue
about liberal hyphen democracy
and say that the liberal-democracy package
is so widely admired today
that people tend to forget that it is in fact a package.
And as also has been said,
it is the outcome of a long history
that's sometimes contradictory, sometimes in conflict,
from the moment in which the universal suffrage
was achieved, liberalism became more anti-democratic,
and when this split between the two was achieved,
the situation was dramatic.
So fascism was achieved when it was able to separate the two
and to claim against both of them.
So my point thus is, against forms of
nationalism, of populism re-emerging today,
the project could be perhaps that of
reuniting more than before
the liberal and the democracy two moments.
Does this package, it needs to be seen together
in trajectory, but also today in the 21st century,
to be appreciated as one made of two,
one reality made of two components.
So political scientists have identified the achievement
of constitutional democracy after World War II,
with the achievement indeed of liberal democracy.
And this morning, Moyn told us
that liberalism during the Cold War
became a kind of ideology.
And we have to save ourself, or this legacy,
from that ideology.
So liberal-democracy, with the hyphen,
as it is being constructed through the Cold War,
may be perhaps the problem we have to get rid of,
or at least to moderate,
or to change a little bit.
Why I say so, because there is today
the assumption that it's possible to have
not only liberal-democracy, but also illiberal-democracy.
According to me these is the real problem
we should consider,
because when,
or ban rights for instance, that
democracy can be in the illiberal form,
and as I am democrat, although I am not liberal,
we should be very concerned about this junction.
So in the hyphen terminology that we are familiar with,
it seems possible to oppose liberalism to democracy
by ascribing a protection of freedom to liberalism alone,
and seeing democracy as autonomy power and majority rule.
I think this is somehow
problematic today in some sense.
Now although the ancient and modern democracy
of course are different on many many
concern, they are very different, they can,
they have something in common though.
The idea that it's possible to be in dissent or dissent,
you go to change your mind and thus vote.
And this question of changing our mind,
the question of dissent, is one of the reason why democracy
needs inside of itself, individual liberty.
Because dissent and the ability of say,
the opposite of what you said yesterday,
and the ability of being in disagreement even with yourself,
with your loyalty, which is what democracy allows you to do
because this is what about majority-minority is about,
then this means that democracy has inside
the ability of having liberty, individual liberty,
and the liberty of free speech in the public,
freedom of association with others,
and freedom of the press today we would say.
So there is a sense of potential
for internal evolution of liberalism from within.
Why I say so, because in my view this has been
also seen in the concern that many political theories
and democratic theories had
when they had to respond fascism or totalitarianism.
I'm quoting from Hans Kelsen, 1945.
The will of the community in a democracy is always created
through a running discussion between majority and opposition
through free consideration of arguments for and against
the certain regulation of the subject matter.
This discussion takes place not only in Parliament,
but also and foremost at political meetings, in newspapers,
books, and other vehicles of public opinion.
A democracy without public is a contradiction in terms.
Insofar as public opinion can arise only when and where
intellectual freedom, freedom of speech,
press, and religion are guaranteed,
democracy coincides with political,
although not necessarily economic, liberalism.
I take to be these an important point to stress,
and thus, just to conclude
because I think I'm running against time,
I would like to,
to use an expression, or a very interesting
generalization made by Kant when he was talking about peace.
And I apply what Kant said about the perpetual peace
to what I just said about liberalism and democracy,
or democracy with liberty, or liberalism inside.
So I say thus that liberal-slash-democracy is a pleonasm
in a very same way in which Kant used to say
of the perpetual peace.
I'm quoting from Kant, since peace means
the end of all hostilities,
a mere suspension of hostility is not peace, but a truce.
Hence, to attach the adjective perpetual to peace,
is already suspiciously close to pleonasm.
So if we attach liberalism and democracy,
we imply that they can stay separated
and can develop well separately,
and I think this can be a pleonasm.
And I use it in the same way.
So I will say that
a counter-argument against that,
that comes from the fascists themselves,
we forget sometimes that when they arise in the '20s,
and I don't want to make any parallel,
but simply to give an idea of why I'm insisting so much
on keeping together always liberalism and democracy,
fascism was neither a form of democracy without liberalism,
nor was it democracy, nor was political liberalism.
It was none of them.
And indeed, I just printed
the Manifesto of Fascism of 1925,
among the many things against the liberalism,
against socialist, is against democracy.
Democracy is a kingless regime infested by many kings
who are sometimes more exclusive, tyrannical,
and destructive than one.
Thus this means that these many tyrants
are a fantastic way of neutralizing tyranny.
So thank you.
(audience applauding)
- Well those were really the first two, terrific start.
Colleague Kloppenberg gave us a very rich
account of the elements that compose democracy,
not as a fixed element, but which compose the family.
And without the elements you mentioned,
autonomy, popular sovereignty, et cetera,
and the undergirding values, we don't have democracy.
I want to ask as my first question,
what are the elements that compose the liberal family,
or at least the political liberal family,
without which we don't have a family of instances,
not that liberalism is fixed,
but that absent these elements,
there is no such thing as political liberalism.
And the list is familiar.
Bill Galston already spoke about government by consent.
I would add to individual rights,
which always is on the list, public rights.
Press freedom for example isn't just a matter
of the individual, it's a matter of collective expression
and collective opposition.
Rule of law, not just law, but something beyond law.
Fascism had law, communism had law,
but liberal law is a rule of law, and of course,
the meaning of that is a subject of great debate.
That would be third.
Fourth, and not in lexical order, just as a list,
political representation, which didn't originate
with liberals and liberalism,
but absent political representation under modern condition,
we cannot have liberalism.
And finally,
but more contingently as as a historical matter, toleration.
But pluralism and respect for pluralism,
and therefore toleration, is a key feature,
and I would argue without which
you might have some forms of liberalism,
but it would be a very injured form of liberalism.
Now if these are the core elements, none fixed,
but no decent regime can do without them,
then what, we're asked to think about,
is it's relationship to democracy.
And a democracy, really building on what
has already been said,
entails minimally rules of participation,
entails a peaceful transitions of leadership,
and entails procedures that produce
provisional policy outcomes.
So the question, one question we might ask is
what are the mechanisms of connection between democracy
and liberalism with the characteristics I mentioned,
and there, in addition to norms,
we have to talk about institutions.
Institutions that have come to include political parties,
parliaments, elections.
These are the sights within which
the key liberal principles and key democratic practices
must get expressed.
And therefore as those intuitions weaken
or become illegitimate, or become sights of
anxiety about their capacity to solve large problems,
both liberalism and democracy, alone, separately,
and together, come to be in deep problems.
But if we take a longer view, not just about the present,
it seems to me there are three sets of issues, or zones,
I like to call them zones of transaction,
which are central to liberalism and about which
democratic contestation debates,
and arrives at provisional policy outcomes.
And the deepest premise one could argue of the liberal,
liberal ontology as it were,
is the existence of separate spheres of state, economy,
and civil society, not reducible one to the other.
And therefore, the most important political questions
are how state to state relations will be managed,
how state economy relations will be managed,
and how state civil society relations will be managed.
And the premise of that remark is to say
that liberalism itself is premised on the existence
of modern states.
It is stateness as it were as a value all the way down.
The question for liberals is how to control
that potential monster, and how to do it,
how to protect people from predatory rule,
and predatory rulers.
How to maintain an independent economy
and an independent civil society,
and how to manage external relations so as to protect
the capacity to have these separate spheres.
But, and here I want to close, liberalism qua liberalism,
married to democracy or not married to democracy,
but especially when married to democracy,
has three profound zones of vulnerability.
And we're seeing them at work today.
One is the following, liberals and liberalism,
and I would say democrats and democracy,
thinking of the ancients,
have never solved the problem of membership.
Once you have a polity with boundaries,
the question of who inside those boundaries,
and who gets into those boundaries from outside remains
an astonishingly vexing and difficult question.
The only thing liberals and the liberal tradition
have to say, quoted earlier,
when Locke was quoted, is a criterion of rationality.
A liberal citizen is meant to be a citizen who can reason
and deliberate and participate in the process
as an autonomous independent player.
But who is autonomous?
Well, in long history, certainly women weren't thought to be
capable of autonomous reason and deliberation.
Slaves weren't, you can make a long list.
So this is a cultural question,
not just a political question, of who qualifies as a member.
And liberalism, and democracy, have been quite content
to have very narrow definitions
as well as broad definitions.
Second of the three great vulnerabilities
comes in the area of security in the stateness of states.
Hamilton writes in Federalist 23
that under conditions of exigency, and I quote precisely,
there shall be no constitutional shackles.
Well if liberalism is about limited state,
is about shackling the state, and shackling democracy,
what happens when the circumstances of exigency
are either understood to be, or actually are,
sufficiently great that the very durability
of liberal democracies is called into question.
Shall there be really no constitutional shackles?
And finally, one we're gonna devote the evening session to,
so I won't go on at all about it,
is the question of property,
and the relationship of property and sovereignty.
How freestanding, and/or how regulated?
And I would say that as we know,
there's an enormous range of answers
that democrats and liberals give,
but there's no fixed set of answer from within liberalism,
or from within democracy.
Final sentences.
It seems to me that the marriage of liberalism and democracy
not only faces these areas of vulnerability,
but under some conditions, the democratization of liberalism
poses deep problems for liberalism under certain forms
of the politicization of questions of membership,
security, and property.
And we see that exactly at work in American politics today.
Finally, just I want everyone to reread,
or read, an essay I've just reread with some students
of Judith Shklar on obligation and loyalty,
reminding us that obligation and loyalty
are not precisely the same.
Obligation is in the realm of reason.
You spoke earlier, Bill, about obligation.
Obligation comes out of being located
in determinate circumstances, therefore liberal citizens,
as democratic players, have obligations, not just rights.
But loyalty is a matter of emotion.
And no decent liberal democracy will survive absent loyalty.
That is the emotional constellation that ties people to it,
and makes them willing to defend it.
And the great question for us it seems to me
is that under conditions of deep contestation
about membership, security, and property,
how do we achieve sufficient and robust,
but decent kinds of loyalty and obligation
to secure the marriage of liberalism and democracy?
Thank you.
(audience applauding)
- I got to admit at the beginning,
I'm a bit of a fraud here.
I've never written about the marriage
or divorce between liberalism and democracy.
I'm a historian of social movements and politics,
so that's what I'll talk about.
And I want to raise the question,
which can ramify in different directions,
why is there not and for the most part never has been,
a liberal social movement?
Called that, or I think in many ways,
even by most definitions.
There have been liberal intellectuals,
there have been liberal politicians,
liberal theorists of course, but
it's difficult to identify a liberal mass movement.
In the United States for example,
the major movements in U.S. history,
in the 19th century and into the middle
and late 20th century,
have been the Prohibitionist movement,
which lasted for a hundred years, which was certainly not
a liberal movement if you're talking about toleration
and of religious difference, and of moral beliefs.
Obviously the socialist movement was not.
The labor movement I don't think was either.
One can argue the abolitionist and suffrage movements
were in certain ways,
but I think they were all in different ways
about democracy certainly.
About those who felt exploited by those on top
and wanted to have a voice,
a voice that was enshrined in law,
and they also wanted to have power.
And liberals I think have always had a
ambiguous relationship with power.
And we've been talking about, around that in some ways
all day long I think.
Also I think, and going back to Skinnerian ways of analyzing
the kind of wonderful books
that both Elena and Jim have written,
do this really beautifully for their different subjects.
As was mentioned before it's really only a hundred years ago
with the Wilson administration
and the Wilsonian intellectuals
that liberalism becomes a term that people talk about.
But it's certainly true too that Wilson was primarily
influenced in using that term, I think by Gladstone
and by the Liberal Party in Britain.
There's an old book by a historian named Robert Kelley
about the Gladstonian persuasion, transatlantic persuasion
where he puts Gladstone right in the center of that.
And Gladstone was Wilson's favorite,
he was his hero when he was younger.
And of course as most of you know he hankered after
a parliamentary system for a while before changing his mind.
But I think it's important to note this because
when the terms gets appropriated by other politicians,
Franklin D. Roosevelt especially,
and turned into a synonym for the New Deal.
It has a different connection than it did
I think for Wilson and for the most part
than it did for Gladstone too,
and for most of these movements.
It has a connection as we know to economic reform,
to positive liberty,
to the embryonic welfare state
that has in many ways retreated in recent years,
Obamacare notwithstanding.
And the term as we know, since the 1960s, has been,
has adopted, if that's the right verb, a taint of elitism.
We all know that.
Steve Fraser, a very fine labor historian,
wrote a book last year called Limousine Liberal
where he talked in wonderfully complex ways
about why that term took off.
It was invented by a Democrat, Mario Procaccino
when he was running for mayor against John Lindsay,
who did proclaim himself a liberal, but also was
as you all remember, most of you, many of you remember,
was very much sort of had an elitist way
of carrying himself and speaking, and dressing.
And now liberalism of course means
for most Americans I think almost anything
but economic reform.
A certain proclivity to support environmentalism,
cosmopolitan values and tastes,
racial and gender justice.
It's a far cry from the way FDR used the term,
and from the way many people on the socialist left
used the term in the '30s as well,
especially during the popular front.
Harry Bridges, the longtime head
of the longshore union on the west coast,
who was probably a member of the Communist Party
for many years.
Gave a speech in 1939 where he hailed the victory
of a pro-labor Democrat in California by saying
the victory was won by all liberal,
laboring, and progressive people.
Notice how these, all three synonyms basically.
And so I think, you know, I was thinking about this session,
some reason the famous line from Peter Brook's Marat/Sade
popped into my head.
We want our rights and we don't care how,
we want a revolution, now.
In many ways I think that's a contradiction in terms.
Because as much as liberalism is associated with rights,
has been historically and very much is today as well,
few people make revolutions or form social movements,
at least mass social movements
because they feel deprived of their rights.
They do them because as I mentioned before
they feel they are powerless,
they are exploited by those who have power,
they want a voice.
They want a way to get power over their lives.
Not because primarily at least
they feel their rights have been violated.
Turn to the absence of a liberal movement
in the United States at least.
There are many people who care very deeply
about civil liberties and human rights of course,
here and around the world.
And it's accurate to call them liberals.
They certainly have organizations,
NGOs especially with a good deal of influence.
The primary liberal organization in the United States today
I think is the American,
the ACLU.
The ACLU was founded almost a hundred years ago.
It was founded out of a social movement.
The movement against World War I in this country,
which involved Democratic segregationists
and Republican pro-civil rights progressives
like Robert La Follette, socialists and feminists
and anarchists and other groups.
It began as the legal arm of a social movement
but over its history the ACLU has migrated
until at least recently to a more neutral stance,
as we know, about defending
the First Amendment rights of everybody.
Nazis, socialists, anarchists,
civil rights demonstrators, whoever.
But more recently, since Donald Trump's been elected,
it's become a legal arm again of a social movement,
though one might even call, might call it an insurgency.
Not sure it's actually a social movement,
that is the Resistance.
Is the Resistance concerned, is this a liberal resistance?
Certainly most of the people in it
probably consider themselves to be liberals.
But again, I don't think they're primarily interested
in rights, not primarily interested
in protecting other rights.
Primarily interested in protecting the gains
of a liberal state, perhaps,
and mass movements against the attempt by Donald Trump
and his administration and his supporters
in the Republican Party to erode them
and to demolish them if possible.
Environmental protection, healthcare protection,
corporate regulation, labor unions,
and the rule of law more generally.
And finally to talk a little bit at the end
about our current
controversy, debate in this country,
which of course is Christine Blasey Ford
versus Judge Kavanaugh
and the masses of people on both sides.
Interesting in a way that the defense that
Kavanaugh has made and those conservatives,
mostly conservatives, who defended him,
is one based on rights.
The rights of the accused.
Whereas though who believe in and defend
Christine Blasey Ford, of which I include myself among them,
I think are more concerned with exploitation,
with the power of men over women,
with the way in which these accusation,
these kind of harassment and sexual abuse,
which she and many other women have suffered,
are devalued and denied and pushed under the rug.
So again, those who defend Ford,
who consider themselves liberals
are really thinking about power.
And those who defend Brett Kavanaugh
at least define what they're doing
in the language of rights.
So there's an interesting contradiction there perhaps,
or at least a kind of complexity.
Like Jim I'm an historian
and so I take refuge in complexity.
But in many ways I think we're arguing,
when we argue about Ford and Kavanaugh,
we're arguing about who has the power to define
what is going on.
Who has the power to define what the people actually want.
Whether women and their supporters
have the power to define that or whether men
who say this has not been proved and so Kavanaugh
should get the benefit of the doubt
and should be confirmed to the highest court in the land
for a lifetime appointment really are the ones
who should get the benefit of the doubt.
So these are some reflections
on why I think it's very difficult
to talk about a liberal mass movement.
And that's part of the reason I think why liberalism
is in trouble and arguably has always been in trouble
as a positive vision.
Because it's not a positive vision which really
inspires and grips people to devote their lives
to fighting for it, as opposed to fighting for democracy,
fighting against exploitation of class, gender,
nation, or race.
Thank you. - Thanks.
(audience applauding)
As in previous panels I'd like to give
the panelists a chance to ask each other questions
or make comments on what you've heard.
I have a question I want to ask
because I've heard it several times today now
that liberalism has no positivity.
I don't believe it.
And I'm gonna speak in very colloquial terms here
to try to get at something
that is in the background I think of,
knowing what everyone on this panel has written.
I think in the period, and now just to talk
in the United States, the birthplace of populism is America.
It was born in the United States
as of course Michael Kazin knows,
that's where the term originates.
It is a popular mass movement that rises up
to put pressure on political parties
and it forms for a brief time its own political party.
It fades away and in its wake we get progressivism
and then liberalism of the classic American sense
in which liberalism and democracy are conjoined as one
by Woodrow Wilson, quite self-consciously.
What comes out of that moment,
I don't think Patrick Deneen is here any longer.
There you are, I was not sure.
Is that there is an interpretation of Wilson
which based on his manuscripts and early writings
I think has some, there's something to it,
that what he tries to do in this fusion
is create a very positive conception of state power,
which leads directly to the modern administrative state
and the regulatory state.
And that in the minds of most Americans
to say that liberalism is purely negative
would make no sense.
The people who are hostile to liberalism often see it
as a enormous administrative apparatus that oversees
many of the liberal protections
that Ira was talking about
in terms of enforcing the observation of individual rights,
making sure that political representation
is applied equally.
Workplace safety rules, statistical bureaus,
et cetera, et cetera.
And eventually this apparatus takes over
the question of security and creates secret organizations,
the FBI is perhaps the first,
that operate in secrecy in the name of
a state of emergency,
which to begin with under Wilson
had to do with the Red Scare.
So it seems to me there is this kind of positivity
about liberalism, and that
the part of the what fuels
later populist revolts in the United States
is the sense that what's happened here
is that a technocratic elite of credentialed experts
has been implanted in charge of state power
at great remove from ordinary people,
and that in fact liberalism in this form,
it's a fake democracy because it actually
deeply fears ordinary people.
It fears what they would say, it fears how they would act,
it hides behind the cloak of protecting minorities
because it's fearful of an actual majority,
and it actually is a complete sham
as a democracy.
And that part of this apparatus is invested
in suppressing, molding and manipulating a popular will.
And that, that.
So I'd like somebody on the panel to speak to this,
what I think is a fairly obvious fear
of a form of liberalism that,
you know maybe it's not accurate or true, but you know.
- I'd like to respond to it just quickly,
maybe other people probably do too but.
Well in some ways you're backing up what I was saying,
I think, I mean nobody demanded an administrative state.
There was not, you know, people didn't go to the polls
demanding an administrative state of course.
Administrative state as you know evolved
because it was the only way to enforce certain bills
that people did want,
but there's a wonderful book some of you probably know
by the political scientist Elizabeth Sanders
called the Roots of Reform, in which she talks about
how the populists and other anti-monopoly groups
composed mostly of workers and farmers
in the late 19th century,
they wanted a more powerful government
but they didn't want a more powerful state, you know.
They wanted people basically to get all this great stuff
from the state and get this protection from the state
without having a bureaucracy carrying it out.
Now you can argue that was naive.
You can't have a big state without state building,
but nevertheless that's what they wanted.
And I think in some ways
the germ of the problem that liberals
and the liberal state have had
with the exception of '30s to early '60s,
and talk about that if we have time,
is that the administrative state
has never been popular even though,
bureaucracy's never been popular,
however, what people get from that state has been popular.
- [Jim] Jim.
- Yeah, I think this is really the central issue
in 20th century American political history,
and the way you described it Jim, I think is the controversy
that historians of progressivism have been fighting over
for half a century now.
There are multiple wings of progressivism,
including the wing that begins with
the New Republic liberals and Louis Brandeis,
that really does see itself in its origin
as doing the people's business.
As carrying forward much of what was
a popular demand for regulation.
What happens very quickly though is it
comes to be perceived as something
by which elites manipulate the people, as you said.
And the contrast between Max Weber
on bureaucracy on the one hand,
and John Dewey and his acolytes and students
in the New Deal on the other, is a really striking contrast
because Weber sees before there's any
bureaucracy to speak of in the United States
precisely what the promise of bureaucracy is
and the reason why it's going to be
in such tension with democracy.
Whereas Dewey and his allies
believed that you can democratize bureaucracy,
many of the New Deal agencies were put in place
with the understanding that they would administered locally.
Now when you ask yourself how the New Deal's
gonna be administered in Selma in a way that's fair,
you see the problem that Weber had already
put his finger on.
The universality of rules and the particularity
of local governance are in tension with each other.
And so I think the challenge has always been
to take this regulatory ideal
that comes into being exactly when you identify it,
and make it do what it was designed to do
rather than what it ends up doing.
Now Lippmann, Walter Lippmann,
one of the founders of the New Republic,
was the first person to identify this
in his book Public Opinion.
His first two books are very much a call
for this kind of democratic reform in public opinion.
Having been part of Wilson's inquiry during World War I
he says wait a minute,
it's actually very easy to manipulate the people,
it's very easy for elites to cover themselves
with a mask of democracy and instead
decide how it is that the people are going to come
to knowledge, or what's going to count as knowledge.
And from that point on, that critique of democracy
as ruled by elites becomes a part of social science.
And it's a tension that I don't think anybody has resolved.
- So, when very shortly after Franklin Roosevelt
took his oath of office, Herbert Hoover wrote an article
in the Saturday Evening Post in which he complained bitterly
that Roosevelt had stolen the word liberal.
"We are all liberals in America," he said.
This is our common value, it's not a partisan value.
And it means liberty.
It was a certain version of an argument that Harts made,
and I know we don't completely agree with Harts,
Harts made two decades later, but in effect,
whether or not you think Harts had it right or wrong,
the punchline it was that
for Harts and for Hoover, the issue wasn't whether Americans
were liberals, but what kind of liberalism
we should wish to have.
And once we ask that question, it seems to me two big
puzzles, again more puzzles, come into play.
What kind of liberalism should we wish to have with respect
to the thrust that Tocqueville put front and center.
Not just a quality but popular sovereignty,
which is the essence of demo, one essence of democracy.
Chapter four of Democracy in America,
Tocqueville writes the most extraordinary sentence.
He says, "In America the people rule
"as God reigns in the universe."
And it's called Popular Sovereignty, that chapter.
Well, the people, who are the people?
Is it a multitude of people with proper names, like us?
Is it an abstract people, we the people of the United States
is not proper named people, it's a concept of a collective.
Or is it something in between the two,
a kind of citizens bound by rules, procedures and norms,
which is I think where the founders wanted it essentially,
but the first big puzzle for liberal democrats is
how do we move between and among
these levels of popular sovereignty.
And when should the people appear in different modes,
in their modus constituent powers,
the abstract we the people, legitimating a regime.
Or in the form of a multitude,
or in the form of a institutionalized citizenry.
And the second big puzzle, and I'll stop with this,
is the fact that the liberal tradition itself,
leave democracy to the side,
I think it's true of democracy too.
The liberal tradition is very porous.
It is not,
all those values I spoke about earlier,
they're not just high walls and thick walls around them,
they're are permeable walls.
Liberalism has bonded over time
with the republican tradition.
It's the theme of a book I wrote with Andreas Kalyvas,
called Liberal Beginnings.
Liberalism has bonded with socialism.
The welfare state is a kind of liberal socialism.
The welfare state has, and you've written about this
in your early work.
Liberalism has bonded with racism
and indeed allowed forms of what I like to call
sanitized representation, when southern Democrats,
as soon as they crossed the threshold,
despite being elected by almost nobody
in a one-party system,
became liberal representatives like everybody else.
And liberalism has bonded with
different kinds of forms of authoritarianism.
And we could talk about that.
So in the end the question for liberals and Democrats
and especially for those of us who are liberal Democrats,
is not simply as Nadia put it to defend,
or others have put it, the basic core principles,
which I agree with, but it's also to have to confront
the hard questions of what kind of liberal democracy
should we wish to have.
Not only whether, but what kind.
- Yes, excellent, so two brief questions, issues.
The first one, bureaucracy.
Bentham introduced, as we know,
the greatest perhaps attempt to reorganize
the entire state or system and bureaucracy
changing completely the method for recruitment
and the method for distribution of good and services
to introduce an element of impartiality
that would (mumbles).
So today what we witness,
particularly in the transformations of
party democracy into populist democracy
is not that, the target is not the bureaucracy
because they want to demolish bureaucracy,
but they want to conquer bureaucracy.
To politicize bureaucracy to the point that bureaucracy
is in the end of those rule.
Exactly going back against the tradition
that Bentham introduced.
So the problem for, according to me today,
I don't know the state, but I know better Europe,
is precisely the transformation of party democracy,
plural party democracy, into a form of,
let's see, direct representation, the people as one,
represented by leaders, plebiscitary leaders,
sometimes creating their own parties,
sometimes conquering existing parties,
in order to re-achieve and to conquer the state altogether,
both institutions and those supposedly autonomous
or impartial kind of branches of the state.
So it is a kind of (mumbles)
that claims to have
the only right say and only legitimate say
because it's representing the true people.
The true people, the majority as the true people,
not as one possible majority
or one possible representations of people.
So it is in my view, this one,
one of the several important challenges
representative constitutional democracy is facing today.
That is, question of division of powers.
Questions of the rule of impartiality
and the limits of political decision making.
Divisions between functions of states and parties,
parties are now practically occupying the states altogether,
not simply making in the service of the state
the constructions of law making.
So it is an issue of re,
here liberalism is important,
re-injecting the art of
limitation that liberalism was so capable
in the age of constructing,
or constructions of nation-states
in the 19th century in particular.
So, but those days it was the liberalism of the few
because liberalism was not a movement, a large movement,
and it was never actually,
it was always a kind of elite kind of movement.
And today for this reason it is important
to re-achieve democracy within
the value of liberty I said before.
Because liberalism cannot do that,
it doesn't have any vocation of creating popular
or a kind of mass parties, but democracy has this power.
For this reason, democracy needs to be
reinterpreted within the logic for liberalism
and art of limitations and these tensions
in order to be able to limit itself from inside.
Which is what today is the most difficult task to achieve
because we are witnessing a transformation
of representative democracy and party democracy.
De facto is very different from
the pluralistic kind of party system
with the separation of the medias from the majority system.
Today it is as if there is a coalescing
of all those these forces together
in the ends of those who claim to represent the true people.
I see these as the main issues today.
- Ah.
- Can I raise a question, maybe everyone might respond to,
which relates to some of these comments.
For many Americans today, I think liberalism means
people who are for big government, right.
Big government, and we know liberals, you know,
Bill Clinton struggled with how to address that
and of course Ronald Reagan
famously attacked big government.
But of course, as we know, as realists,
pretty much everyone in this room,
big government is with us to stay, it's not going anywhere.
And the question is who government serves.
So how
do liberal principles help us
either defend government or get away from
the necessity to defend government,
to talk about what government does,
instead of government as this behemoth, supposedly boogeyman
which wants to reach into your lives and control them?
- It's true that big government is here to stay
but there is no consensus, certainly not in this country,
about what I was earlier calling the rules of transaction
between state and economy.
Just think of how many executive orders of President Obama
have been turned in opposite direction by President Trump.
And I'm not taking sides in this,
though I have a preference, but the,
it seems to me both of them were instantiating
very different views of
the role of government and regulation vis a vis the economy.
There's a wonderful document which I stumbled across
recently again on a shelf
of a debate at the American Enterprise Institute
about regulation in 1976 that involved
Ronald Reagan and Hubert Humphrey among other people.
In which they both very articulately
both as liberals in the sense we've been using the term,
certainly Ronald Reagan was
and certainly Hubert Humphrey was,
articulated those points of dispute.
And I would think that in democratic life what's critical
is to define as crisply as possible
the character of the choices,
not just with respect to the economy
but with respect to the nature of interest representation
in civil society, the nature of foreign relations.
There are a lot of deep, thick substantive issues
but what's critical for us
is that the adjudication take place within the frame,
normative and institutional,
that we've been calling liberal democracy.
- Can I say some?
And so, just to add onto what Ira said
just now about Herbert Hoover, who said,
who argued with FDR and others
about the meaning of liberal.
Of course Herbert Hoover was a free market guy
and he said, you know, "I'm a liberal."
But then a few years later,
he finally, the word liberal had gotten
so associated with FDR and the New Deal
that he said, "Oh you can have the word.
"You've raped it of all meaning."
But you know, the argument went on
about big government and small government.
Hayek also I understand at one point
got very frustrated and said, you know,
all right, you know, I started using the word libertarian.
People started to call themselves libertarian
or they would say well we're the classical liberals.
You've, you know, hijacked the term
and polluted it of all meaning.
And I wanted to ask one more thing, if I may,
and you know, contemporary politics is,
people know it's not my thing,
so excuse me if I say something silly now.
But we're talking about populism and what a problem it is,
a liberal democracy and all of this.
But is there a good populism and a bad populism?
What do we do, aren't we asked for people in the, no?
- [Nadia] Bad bad bad.
- But what does it mean-- - It's very polarized up here,
I can tell you. - I'm on the right here.
- [Ira] He's a good good good, she's a bad bad bad.
- You want to go first, do you want me to go first?
I mean, I think, look I'm an American historian and
whenever I go to conferences in other countries and talk,
populism conferences, I'm the only person
saying a good word for populism.
And of course everyone there is pretty much the leftists,
or at least the center-leftists.
I mean, it depend as usual
how do you define the term, right?
But I define it as a political discourse of the moral
hardworking, often God-fearing, but not always, majority
against a self-serving often undemocratic elite.
And if you define it that way,
then it's a promiscuous language
which can be used by different social forces.
I think Bernie Sanders talked a language
that the original populists in the 1890s
would have understood very well.
He didn't talk about the big money,
but he talked about billionaires, same thing really.
And on and on and on,
he talked about Wall Street, so did they.
I won't continue the analogy, but I think Donald Trump also
spoke as we know a language of populism.
There's, you know, very quickly
I think you'd identify two different populist traditions,
at least in the United States with some analogs
what's happening in Europe now too, I think.
One is the more left-wing populism
that Bernie Sanders represents I think,
where you try to sort of fudge or
at least minimize the differences ethnically, racially
and otherwise between the people,
and train all your fire at those at the top.
Especially those at the top economically
and sometimes politically if those at the top politically
are in bed with those economically.
And the other tradition, which is just as strong
in the United States, and perhaps in many ways stronger,
is one Trump in his way represents too.
Which is, there's a ordinary people in the middle.
Almost all white, of course.
And traditionally in America almost all Christian,
and that's not true anymore,
and they see a conspiracy of sorts between those at the top
and those at the bottom with dark skins.
And that was true of the anti-Chinese movement
in California, late 19th century.
It was true many ways of the Know Nothings earlier,
and I think it's very much Trump's rhetoric of
he's running against these liberals
and the mainstream media on one hand
and of course he's also trying to stop
those murderous immigrants from coming to the country
on the other hand.
So I think it can be good, but it's a struggle
between what kind of populism is going to be dominant
and that's how I see it.
- Okay. - May I?
- Yeah. - Yeah?
So, I would say the following.
So populism is so ambiguous that it is
impossible to make a definition that can accommodate
all the experiences.
So leaving aside the question of--
- [Mike] Like liberalism.
- Heh-heh, leaving aside the question of ontology,
and try to see
populism as a movement, contestation, or
in society, fine.
There are many kind of movements
and populism's one of those.
And populism when it gets into power, that is
when populism becomes a majority
within a constitutional democracy, not all kind of populism.
So we situate now, in our time now,
and we see what populism can do in our society,
in our democratic representative democracies.
So when we see it in power,
not as a movement of aspirational desire,
a rhetorical or construction of we the people.
Fine, I mean, it's all parties they do so,
particularly when they go close to election.
But when they are in power we have to see them.
Now there is a tendency of transform in democracy,
representative democracy, without going outside
because otherwise we have another regime,
within the limits and the borders
of constitutional democracy
they make some important changes.
For instance they, although they don't change perhaps
the low to the point that they become
fascist kind of regimes, I agree with that.
But they are very important in doing some important moves.
First, the plebiscitary vocation
of putting a leader as the mouth of the people.
I am you voice, I am like you.
This like you, where a simple, in as we know
in party representation we are not like.
We choose somebody because we consider
sometimes even different, so, like you.
Second, they use elections as a way of
expressing the best which are already there.
So the majority is already in society,
the majority of the good people,
elections reveals that majority.
So elections don't play anymore the goal,
the game of creating the majority, they reveal a majority.
They applause, kind of.
Third, they transform clearly
representations into a game of
embodiment.
The leader embodies the people
and the people is one thing with the leader.
For this reason in my view can be very dangerous
when populism becomes a form of government
and not simply a movement in society.
So this will be.
- I would like to, time is running short
so I'm going to allow two questioners
and if you want to rush to a microphone.
- [Man] Have an auction.
- [Mike] And people are exhausted.
- Yeah, right.
- [Mike] I think Jim should have a chance to.
- Yeah. - No no, it's fine.
- Would you like to close on some grace note?
- Not necessarily on a grace note but I think, I mean,
I agreed with Patrick about one thing
which is that most of us here agree with each other
on most of these issues.
That both the liberal tradition and the understandings
of democracy have changed over time,
that they have to be understood
within their historical contexts,
that they're different within different national contexts
and at different times.
But one of the things that I was struck by
is how many people spoke about the need for
a more robust conception of duty or obligation
or affective adhesion to the community.
And it does seem to me as though that's one of the reasons
why there's been such a crisis
in American liberal democracy in the last half century.
That this sense of being part of a shared enterprise
seems to me have eroded.
And one of the challenges that I think all of us face
is to try to find a way, as Danny noted earlier,
to make connections with people outside our way of thinking
so that we don't seem as alien to them as we do now,
and they don't seem as alien to us as they do.
So we have a chance to meet again in February
and between now and then I'll be thinking hard--
- Well we're gonna meet again at 6:30.
- Exactly.
- And we actually have tried to create,
you know, bring together people who actually disagree.
- Yes, very good, very good.
- It's actually hard.
Okay, 'til then.
- In the morning there was one--
- Thank you. - Okay, thank you.
(audience applauding)
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