Time to Be Progressive

It's possible to understand both of our two major political parties as having led America into a crisis. The Republican Party – in control of the US federal government and many states and in the hands of ideological and religious extremists – has been captured by an immoral egotist with no capacity for governing. In pursuit of elite interests and “conservative values,” Republicans have launched an assault on everything good in how our government has come to serve the common welfare since the days of Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt.

Democrats have not been on the playing field. They threw away the 2016 election by passing the presidential nomination through a politically correct form of primogeniture. The candidate threw it away through own goals and writing off voters in certain groups and states. Lacking any coherent vision to address the economic and social effects of globalization, the Democratic Party instead played to niche politics and appears to have little to offer beyond waiting for Trump to crash and the Republicans to burn.

Joe Biden does have a heart and could oversee cleaning up the mess the Republicans leave behind. But there must be a cohesive progressive agenda to go beyond that. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren understood that presenting voters with one could begin the process of putting the country on the right path again. A progressive agenda must begin with embracing the progressive income tax. Government needs money to serve the common good. Our tax system must be made more fair and taxes sufficient to meet our needs. (The Republicans have sought to subordinate this to cutting spending and a regressive taxing system favoring the owners of capital.) It need not be confiscatory but should treat the fruits of labor and capital equally with progressively higher tax rates on individual and corporate income no matter where it comes from and with very limited exemptions.

With adequate funding, the federal government can attend to the chief challenges facing American society in the 21st Century: healthcare, jobs, inequality and education.

Healthcare should be treated as a basic right as it is in other advanced Western societies. It need not be done through a government entity but perhaps with needs-based expansion of Medicare, a non-profit public option and/or payments to purchase insurance on open markets.

In the 21st Century, technology and globalization have conspired to reduce the need for human labor. There simply may not be enough good paying jobs for everyone. A reduction in the work week from 40 to 32 hours plus an increase in the minimum wage may help in opening job opportunities to a greater number. Federal funding to pay for some of the increase in the minimum wage could help reduce the burden on small businesses. Insofar as training will help prepare workers for new roles, government needs to fund that as well.

Inequality undercuts democratic community through making life for many nasty, brutish and short. The federal government should ensure some minimum income for those unable to work and those for whom jobs do not pay enough to rise decently above poverty.

Federal funds should support quality, free public education by focusing on providing modern facilities and adequately paid teachers and staff for all local public school systems. Federal oversight of local schools should be kept to the minimum required to ensure equal access.

Some elements of a progressive agenda need not require additional funding:

Money’s role in politics needs to be removed through campaign financing reform. A national commission on redistricting should oversee the drawing of congressional districts. Each vote should count equally.

A pathway to citizenship should be created for those now in the US “illegally.” A cross border agreement should be made with Mexico (and possibly with the Central American countries) so seasonal workers may go back and forth legally.

The role of contractors and lobbyists in the budgeting process – especially as concerns the military – should be subject to tight limitations.

The Democratic Party needs to begin talking to this agenda in the next three months and not only focusing on Trump’s disqualifications. Waiting for the Republicans to march lemming-like over their cliff might still not be enough and would nevertheless leave the country without a clear direction forward. Biden appears to be getting this.

COVID-19: The Great Equalizer

By now, the human species has been altering the natural order for some 11000 years. It started with the advent of agriculture and went through urbanization and industrialization which transformed the surface of the earth and began changing a host of natural systems including the climate, animal life, forests and oceans. We humans have known about this for a while. But most of us – especially those of us in the advanced economies and not living too close to the rising waters – could see the impact of our disruption of natural systems as something that would affect other people – future generations, the poor, those living in low-lying island nations – and not so much us in the here and now. COVID-19 has altered that by bringing to all of us the results of our changes to the earth. It has equalized the impact of the destruction of natural environments (which stresses what lives in them thereby making them more prone to diseases that can jump to us), the way we use animals (including how close we live with them and the antibiotics we use to fatten them) and the close quarters (in large numbers) in which we live. Add to this the way we use hydrocarbons to travel and transport, the interconnectedness of our ways of life and economies and the varying shortcomings of our political systems. We should not have been surprised by the current bio-crisis. It’s not that any one of these caused the virus but that the total impact of what we have wrought was largely hidden until now though very much operative.

So COVID-19 shows us that the bill won’t wait to be delivered and that everyone must pay. The rich may be able to retreat to their enclaves and private transport. But their world will change as ours does. The species as a whole will survive. But this is the wake up call. The future disrupted world is upon us now. Returning to “normal” – whenever and whatever that turns out to be – may well be just a breather before the next episode. We need to take the next step in our evolution – remake our economies and politics, restoring nature even if gradually and treating each other more equally – and start now or the humanity that makes it to the 22^nd Century may be unrecognizable.

Continuing Notes on Sabine's "A History of Political Theory" -- Episode 31

For episode 30, see here

The Theory of the Nation-State: The Moderns

XXXI. Marx and Dialectical Materialism
 A. Marx transformed Hegel's struggle of nature into a struggle of
     classes thereby taking away nationalism, conservatism and
     its counter-revolutionary character and becoming a powerful
     form of revolutionary radicalism. 
       1. Marx accepted dialectic as a logical method.
       2. For both the driving force of social change is the struggle
           for power.
 B. Marx perceived the importance of the rise to political self-
     consciousness of the industrial working class. 
 C. Saw the French Revolution and the resulting rise of natural
     rights in politics and economics as a prelude to social 
     revolution. 
 D. Marx and Hegel provided cause greater than oneself as the
     only reward to individual.  
 E. History (with a big "H") takes the place of God for Marxist
     revolutionist because Historical necessity provides cause and
     effect, desirability and moral obligation.
 F. Marx studies Hegel at the University of Berlin under materialist
     Hegelian, Ludwig Feuerbach.
 G. Economic materialism sees that social development depends
     upon the evolution of the forces of economic production.
 H. Marx tended to equate "materialism" with "scientific." 
       1. Also implied radical rejection of religion.
       2. Materialism and dialectics suggested a new and far-reaching
           revolution by giving materialism an ethical dimension:
           economics as the root of social inequality.
 I. Marx's belief that socialist society would extend political liberty
    never depended on analysis of socialism but only on a priori
    belief that in a developing society, nothing of worth would be lost.
 J. Understood through the dialectic, economic determinism did not
    mean cause and effect but through economic factors operating
    as semi-personalized agents of creative energies.
 K. The individual counts mainly through his membership in his
     class because his ideas reflect the ideas generated by class.
 L. Marx's theory of cultural development:
       1. A succession of stages each of which is dominated by a
           typical system of production and exchange of goods.
           i. The system of production forces generates its own
              characteristic and appropriate ideology including;
           ii. law, politics, morals, religion, art and philosophy
       2. Whole process is dialectical with its motive force supplied
           by internal tensions created by the disparities between a
           newly evolving system of production and the persisting
           ideology of the old.
       3. The forces of production are always primary as compared
           to the secondary, ideological consequences.
       4. Dialectical development is an internal process of unfolding
           or of vitalistic realization.
 M. Marx and Friedrich Engels rejected the idealist interpretation of
      dialectic as self-development of thought, saw instead the self-
      development of nature itself reflected in thought.

"The notion that ideology may in some cases affect what figures in a
society as a standard of truth has, however, produced the rather large
body of theory now known as sociology of knowledge."

 N. "Ideology," "economic determinism," and "class struggle" are
     core theoretical concepts of Marx's social philosophy from
     which two divergent political strategies emerged:
       1. Evolutionary party socialism.
       2. Revolutionary communism.  

Next week: Communism
     
 

Continuing Notes on Sabine's "A History of Political Theory" -- Episode 30

For episode 29, see here

The Theory of the Nation State: The moderns

XXX. Liberalism Modernized
 A. "Collectivism" as a spontaneous defense against social
     destructiveness of industrial revolution began to replace
     economic liberalism.
 B. Liberal theory had to meet realities of industrialization.  
 C. John Stuart Mill on Liberty
         1. Mill's philosophy, in a broad sense, is an effort to modify
           the empiricism in which he was bred by taking into
           account Kantian philosophy.
       2. Granted differing degrees of pleasure in moral qualities,
           thus departing from greatest happiness standard.
       3. Abandoned egoism and saw moral goods as good in
           themselves apart from contribution to greatest good.
       4. Argued for popular government and liberty not as merely
           efficient means but as producing and giving scope to a
           a high moral character.
       5. Saw that behind liberal government there must be a 
           liberal society.
       6. But while arguing for individual freedom, the area for such
           freedom -- must have no effect on others -- is reduced to
           insignificance.
       7. Mill never clarified what the individual ought to decide for
           himself and could not appeal to a notion of natural rights.
       8. Abandoned laissez faire in economics.
       9. Mill's liberalism:
           i. added respect for human beings to utility
           ii. accepted political and social freedom as good in themselves
           iii. liberty is a social good as well as an individual good
           iv. the function of a liberal state in a free society is positive
               not negative
 D. Mill saw that Bentham had neglected role that institutions play
     between individual psychology and concrete elements of given
     time and place and did not recognize historical development.
 E. Auguste Comte hoped to make concept of society not speculation
     but science. 
       1. Proposed existence of general law of "development" of
           societies.
       2. The "comparative method" of examining societies became
           "science".
 F. Mill tried to incorporate Comte into utilitarian tradition enlarging
     "empirical" from basis in individual psychology to include the
     study of social institutions and especially their growth.
 G. Herbert Spencer
       1. Also came from philosophical radicalism tradition.
       2. Blended utilitarianism ethical and political ideas with the
           new conception of organic evolution.
       3. While Mill went back to Bentham's empiricism, Spencer
           went back to rationalist tradition of classical economics
           using evolution to reconstruct system of natural society
           with natural boundaries between economics and politics.
       4. In his Synthetic Philosophy, he tried to set up a rationalistic
           system spanning whole range of human knowledge with
           progression from energy to life, from life to mind, from mind
           to society, from society to ever more complex civilizations. 
       5. Saw moral improvement of social well-being achieved through
           the survival of the fittest. 
       6. The state would wither away as society grew more complex 
           through an extension of laissez faire.
       7. Legislation mars this move towards perfection that nature
           itself tends toward via survival of the fittest.
 H. In response to the growing claim of labor to more than subsistence
     existence, and public support for this claim, liberalism needed
     revision to give positive role to government.
 I. Oxford idealists -- T.H.Green, Josiah Royce and John Dewey --
     provided this revision in the late 19th Century.
       1.With Hegel, they shared the general idea that human nature
           is fundamentally social.
       2. Brought to liberalism the problem of the mutual dependence
           between the structure of personality and the cultural
           structure of its social milieu. 
       3. Green saw deprivation as not only economic but also moral.
           i. with the Greeks, saw politics as essentially an agency
              for creating social conditions that make moral
              developmemt possible.
           ii. posited concept of positive freedom to enjoy something
              worth doing or enjoying -- as opposed to Bentham's
              negative freedom from legal restraint -- as freedom must
              include actual possibility of developing human capacities
           iii. requires a genuinely increased individual ability to
               share in goods produced by society and a greater ability
               to contribute to the common good
           iv. consistent with the core of liberal philosophy, the idea of
                a general good capable of being shared by everyone and
                providing a standard for legislation
       4. Green's two elements of rights:
           i. claim to freedom of action in acquiring subsistence as
              part of an individual's impulse to realize his own inner
              powers and capabilities
           ii. general social recognition that this claim is warranted
               and that the individual's freedom really does contribute
               to the general good 

"A moral community from Green's point of view, therefore, is one in
 which the individual responsibly limits his claims to freedom in the
 light of general social interests and in which the community itself
 supports his claims because the general well-being can be realized
 only through his initiative and freedom." 732

 J. Green accepted the state as a positive agency to be used where
    legislation could contribute to positive freedom.
 K. Problems arose in dispute between two of Green's disciples,
     Bernard Bosanquet and  Leonard Hobhouse.
       1. Centered around two ethical relationships:
           i. between individual and community, and 
           ii. between society and state
       2. Bosanquet argued the more Hegelian view of a "social
           self" as what a person would be if fully moral and fully
           intelligent when not impeded by one-sided give-and-take
           with society in charge. 
       3. Hobhouse attacked metaphysical usage of the term "state,"
           introduced to English usage by idealists because it could be
           used to justify illiberal political regimentation or social
           stratification.
 L. Green was also compatible with liberal socialism such as the 
     Fabians.
       1. The Fabians seek to regulate the economy because of the
           bad effects of unregulated ones, not because of class
           struggle.
       2. Extended the critique of economic rent to the accumulation
           of capital.
 M. Liberalism has two usages now, both with valid historical
      background.
       1. As a midpoint between conservatism and socialism, 
           favorable to reform but opposed to radicalism. 
       2. As equivalent to what is popularly called democracy as
           opposed to communism and fascism.
           i. liberalism in this sense means the preservation of
              democratic institutions
           ii. can be identified with whole Western civilization while
               the first meaning can be identified with the middle class 
 N. In the aftermath of WWI, fascism and communism set up
     transcendent collective entity based on race, nation or community.
      1. Conflicted with core elements of liberalism: individualism
          and the moral nature of the relationships between individuals
          in a community.
      2. The moral nature of society inevitably came to be expressed
          as some version of natural rights.
       

Next week:  Marx and Dialectical Materialism            
      

Notes on "A History of Political Theory" -- Episode 25

For episode 24, see here

The Theory of the Nation State

XXV. France: The Decadence of Natural Law
 A. English consolidated their revolution and political theory
      shifted to France.
 B. French concern for political and social theory resulted from
      decadence of royal absolute rule.
 C. Discussion typically popularized rather than created.
 D. Tendencies
       1. Mixture of logically incompatible ethical and political
           utilitarianism with natural right theories.
       2. Growth of philosophical romanticism hostile to
           empiricism and rationalism.
 E. Rousseau untypical of 18th Century French thought.
 F. Through Voltaire and Montesquieu philosophy of Locke
      became foundation of French Enlightenment. 
       1. Reason, tied to tradition in English thought, was placed
           in opposition to custom and fact in France.
       2. No fundamental law or gradual transition of ideas or
           institutions in absolutist France. 
       3. French political thought thus radical and often little
           more than propaganda.
 G. Urban middle class was conscious of itself and saw clergy
       nobility as social parasites.
 H. Characteristic of social thought of 18th Century was belief
      in possibility of happiness and progress guided by reason.
 I. Montesquieu (Spirit of the Laws, 1748) 
       1. Undertook sociological theory of government and law
           by showing they depended upon circumstances in
           which a people lives.
       2. Also analyzed constitutional conditions of freedom.
       3. Saw "reason" as manifesting itself through different
           institutions in different environments.
       4. Saw separation of powers (in England) as prime 
           guarantee of liberty.
       5. Made separation one of the legal checks and balances
           between parts of the constitution.
           i. Didn't specify the parts
           ii. But did assume some form of legislative supremacy
 J. Voltaire
       1. Sought to popularize Newton's physics and Locke's
           philosophy.
       2. Especially admired England's freedom of discussion 
           and publication.
       3. Pressed struggle for civil liberties but did not connect 
           that to a basis in political liberty.
 K. Helvetius
       1. Presented an elaboration of Locke's psychological of
           association (Pain and pleasure as basic motives).
       2. Made it basis for the reforming legislator and conveyed
           greatest happiness principle to Beccaria and Bentham.
       3. Legislator must make general interest consonant with
           individual interest and spread knowledge of how public
           welfare includes that of the indivudual.
       4. Notion that everyone's happiness could be maximized
           at once was nothing but old belief in harmony of nature. 
       5. Belief that one man's happiness ought to be counted as
           the same as that of another based on natural equality.
       6. Using pleasure and pain could in fact lead to harmonizing 
           interests through focus on utility.
 L. Physiocrats (economists)
       1. Regarded pleasure and pain as two springs of human action
           and enlightened self-interest as rule for a well-ordered
           society.  
       2. Assumed harmony would result if man was let alone.
       3. No legislator should regulate, must instead not interfere 
           with natural operation of economic laws. 
 M. Holbach
       1. Made atheist, or materialist, attack on religion.
       2. Also attacked government as representative of parasitic
           classes excluding the middle class whose special interest
           defined the general interest as well.
       3. Man was not born bad but made bad by bad government.
       4. Remedy was to give free scope to the "general will" arising
           from the harmony between self-interest and natural good.
       5. Education would reform man because men are rational and 
           need only to see their own true interest.
 N. Enlightenment thought did not necessarily lead to democratic 
      doctrine; power still based on property. 
 O. Turgot and Condorcet turned idea of progress into a
       philosophy of history.
       1. Saw history as series of progressive stages.
       2. Condorcet saw progress following three lines:
           i. growing equality between nations
           ii. elimination of class differences
           iii. a resultant general moral and mental improvement

Next week:  Rousseau and the rediscovery of community
          
           
      
           
 
 

  
         

Notes on "A History of Political Theory" -- Episode 22

For episode 21, see here

The Theory of the Nation State

XXII. Radicals and Communists
 A. Radical individualism also arose in left wing popular democracy during
      civil wars.
       1. Dissolution of traditional institutions and resulting economic
           pressures were facts not theories.
       2. Individualism grounded in these facts.
 B. English civil wars mark first appearance of public opinion as important
      political factor.
 C. Levellers: radical middle-class democrats.
 D. Diggers: beginning of utopian communism, considered political reform
     superficial unless it included redress of economic inequalities.
 E. Levellers
       1. Movement started by radical soldiers of Cromwell's army concerned
           that the reforms of the revolution would be lost.
       2. Sought political equality and the end of priviledge.
       3. Connected to religious Independents. 
       4. Argued that unnust law was no law at all, even if traditional or
           common.
       5. Saw innate and unalienable rights for which legal and political 
           institutions exist only to protect.
       6. Was party of men of small property facing officers who sought 
           only moderate reform leaving power in the hands of landed
           gentry.
       7. Saw Parliament as stand in for the sovereign people.
       8. Every man had right to consent to law through his representative.
       9. Argued for representation of individuals not interests, paralleled view
           of community as a permanent reality vs. conception of nation as
           simply a mass.
       10. Levellers made natural law into a doctrine of individual rights
             (with property right as primary) .
 F. Diggers
       1. Saw natural law as a communal right to means of subsistence.
       2. Individual had only the right to share in the product of common
           land and common effort.
       3. Private property the root of evil and social abuse.
       4. Gerrard Winstanley's Law of Freedom saw in human nature two
           opposed tendencies toward:
             i. Common preservation -- the basis of commwealth
             ii. Individual preservation -- the basis of kingly government or
                government by buying and selling. 

Next week: The Republicans: Harrington, Milton and Sidney