In today’s Times, David Brooks writes that the age of the neoliberal is over.
Neoliberals had a good run in the 1980s and 90s. Championed by journals such as the New Republic, neoliberals were a new breed of liberals — young, funny, practical.
On policy matters, the neoliberals were liberal but not too liberal. They rejected interest-group politics and were suspicious of brain-dead unions. They tended to be hawkish on foreign policy, positive about capitalism, reformist when it came to the welfare state, and urbane but not militant on feminism and other social issues.
Brooks hears the bells tolling for the neolibs, especially in the blogosphere. There’s always some tension between the liberal blogosphere v. the New Republic bloggers.
Kevin Drum, who is actually older than most bloggers, says the difference is generational. Klein’s mind-set, he says, was formed in the 1970s and 1980s, but “like most lefty bloggers, I only started following politics in a serious way in the late ’90s.” Drum says he’s reacting to Ken Starr, the Florida ballot fight, the Bush tax cuts, the K Street Project and the war in Iraq.
Drum and his cohort don’t want a neoliberal movement that moderates and reforms. They want a Democratic Party that fights. Their tone is much more confrontational. They want to read articles that affirm their anger. They are also further to the left, driven there by Iraq on foreign policy matters and by wage stagnation on economic matters.
In the face of all these challenges, the New Republic has changed. Marty Peretz is out. The magazine is now biweekly. Its tone is much more old style liberal.
Brooks is right. The world is growing more left.
The blogger v. Peretz fight was one indication of the growing leftiness of the Democrats, but there are also other indications. Last week’s public opinion polls on universal health care is another sign. And November’s elections.
Are we going back to an old-style liberal, as Brooks suggests? Some yes and some no. I don’t see a lot of pro-union posts on the liberal blogs. These bloggers do not show much reverence for traditional Democratic party allies, like the teachers’ unions. There’s definitely strong support of feminist goals. They are very vocally pro-gay marriage, as are many of the libertarian blogs. They are very much against the war in Iraq.
However, as I flip through the rolodex in my brain of liberal blogs, I also see many differences. I’m not sure if there is enough consensus in thought amongst the liberal bloggers to make too many generalizations.
We’re most likely in the midst of a transition period. Liberals are sorting out the old ideas and the new ones. The public is choosing its priorities. Anti-war feelings are sweeping over the entire Republican agenda and turning heads to the left. I can’t wait to see how far things are going to swing.
Apt. 11d 
If anti-war feelings are the principal driver of this swing “to the left”, then I expect it will be short-lived. The outcome of our alliance with the Iraqi government is not yet determined.
Success has a thousand parents, and failure is an orphan.
Respectfully,
MG
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Poor New Republic. Not sure what it wants to be.
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how can the world be any more anti-Bush than it was 2003? I think Brooks is running out of ideas and so is the rest of the world come to think of it. They know no other country will react the way we do so its’ better the drive the horse from the animal farm down to the glue factory.
what will happen when W is gone and the world is still the same? anti-bushism is nothing more than an empty panacea to deal with (or rather, not deal with) today’s problems. Look at my party, the Dems.
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Brook’s old-style left is a nostalgia, it isn’t represented intitutionally or within mainstream economic and policy circles any longer. I suspect that what’s happening is that emerging progressive elements are attempting to position as old left in order to inherit some intellectual credibility. style institutions.
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If Drum and the left are defining themselves in reaction to Ken Starr, the Florida ballot fight, etc, then it is frighteningly true that they can be manipulated by media selectivity rather than a)facts or b)actual historical perspective. I hope this is wrong.
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“Always after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another form and grows again.”
– Gandalf the Grey
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I don’t doubt that the Dem Party is moving Hard Left, as a result of the big money makers: Kos, Moveon, Soros, and Hollywood. However, I also doubt that this move Left is a winner.
LBJ was the last Dem Presidential candidate to win the majority White Vote in 1964. Minority pandering, special privileges and affirmative action means that most whites will not vote for Dems. Rich elitists who have money and connections are not bothered, but say White Women who want to go to Michigan Law School and can’t get in while lower scoring African Americans or Latinos do tend to resent the taking away of that opportunity (ditto Asians). Dem’s minority and machine politics (special favors for Latinos and Blacks) in a zero sum game means loss of White Voters.
So too do elitist politics against the suburban household, two-parent family, and private auto. All part of the elitist-Green-Radical Dem policies. Al Gore wants people to curtail their standard of living while his mansion burns up energy? Not a political winner.
Abroad, people are tired of the Iraq War but don’t want defeat and don’t want to turn over Iraq to Osama and Ahmadnutjob. Even with Congress turning to the Dems, the Dems can’t vote to end the war which their money men and activists want.
Why?
It’s political suicide. Whatever the wisdom of taking out Saddam, if the Taliban led Afghanistan gave us 9/11, god knows what turning over part of Iraq to America’s two worst enemies: Iran and Osama, would do.
The challenge for America is that modern technology and the modern global economy interconnects Muslims who can’t handle modernism (freedom for women, individual rights, supremacy of man-made vs. Koranic Law, materialism, skepticism of religion, rights for religious minorities etc). Muslims who would have been 40 years ago isolated and totally ignorant of America now have all aspects of their cultural failure undeniably in their face. No Muslim country is a center for anything but terrorism or violence.
This Long War is not going to go away when Bush does. We can turn over Iraq to our enemies and the conflict will still go on. We are not at war with Egypt, Saudi, and Pakistan, but we are at war with substantial if not most of their peoples.
It’s a people’s war: the West particularly America vs. Muslims. It’s a challenge that no Democrat can even acknowledge, must lest articulate a response that’s coherent, different from Bush, and might actually work. [Ignoring it like Nixon through Clinton only gave us 9/11. Think Alexander Litivenko poisoned with Polonium 210, a gamma emitter that has it’s radiation blocked by paper, but is deadly if inhaled or swallowed. No need for lead to shield it, and very deadly. Now scale that up in massive aerosol form at the Final Four, or Mall of America.]
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You know what I don’t understand? I don’t see how the “Florida Ballot Fight” could generate the heat that it has. The thing was, statistically, a tie. Yes, if the butterfly ballot (or any number of small things) went down differently, then Gore would’ve won. So what? If a host of other things had gone differently, Bush’s margin might have been greater (e.g. not calling the state early enough that Panhandle residents gave up).
But what did people expect? For Bush to give up because Gore made some pretty speech about “counting all the votes” (something he specifically *did not* ask for because he hoped to farm more Democratic votes from heavily Dem districts)? Should Bush have just graciously backed out because Jesse Jackson accused him of “vote suppression?” Jackson accuses *everyone* of vote suppression.
Jeez – some people just refuse to see beyond the tips of their own noses.
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There is one problem : Leftism and Bush-hate corelate with a low income.
So unless one also believes that the world will go into an economic stagnation, one cannot believe the world is going towards Leftism.
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There is one problem. Leftism corelates with a low income and intelligence.
The world cannot move to the left without also giving up a lot of economic prosperity.
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You are right. Well said.
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The old left/new left has done real well against the neo-liberals.
Lieberman vs. Lamont is a prime example.
Since the USSR fell that socialism stuff is hard to sell.
Socialized medicine – Walter Reed.
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Old left? Intelletual credibility?
The USSR.
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One election doesn’t paint the entire world blue. And given that this new-old-liberals can’t even get their candidates elected (Dean, Lamont), I’m not about to give them more credit than they are due. If Hillary is elected president in 2008, or even just nominated, there will be a surge of what you call “new liberals.”
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Interesting planet that some of your visitors come from, Laura. The VA healthcare system (to which Walter Reed does not belong; it’s an Army hospital) is delivering the best outcomes at lower prices and with the most satisfied patients of any element of the US healthcare system. On these — admittedly reality-based — axes, Medicare is pretty darn good, too.
Wildmonk, people expected the Bush team to follow the rule of law and to let the chips fall where they may. Instead, the Bush people defined their own personal or partisan interests as higher than the law, and the results set the pattern for the entire administration. Not seeing the difference between your person and the nation is the stuff of tin-pot dictators, and America deserves far better leaders than it has had these last six-plus years.
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The very human nature behind the catastrophic failure of Leftism is responsible for its eternal appeal.
The contemporary Left promises, basically, something (everything) for NOTHING. Those to whom it appeals are asked to give nothing. The funding will come from “them.” You know, the Fat Cats with infinitely deep pockets who can be forced to fund everything.
The contemporary (as opposed to the original French Revolution-Monarchist) Right says, “You can have whatever you are willing and able to work for.”
Which message is more appealing to the average person?
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There’s a lot to be said for the idea that the left does well when business needs statist solutions to get itself out of a fix. Healthcare is the current problem; there is no market solution to this problem, and things have reached a point at which both large and small capital want to deploy the state to stop the health industry screwing them over. The test is whether the Democrats can bring themselves to line up with labour and most of capital against the health industry. They couldn’t in 1992-4, which is why the Clinton proposal was a no-hoper. The left needs to be imaginative, the solution is not obvious, and then it has to be willing to fight things out and show enough leadership to hold a coalition together past the point that the more advantaged elements of that coalition might peel away. We’ll see. I’m a bit skeptical, mostly because I doubt the left has much of a hold in the Democratic Party, which is stil, basically, a wierd coalition of pro-business types, civil rights types, civil libertarians, and lagging behind, labor. I’m with your distinctly odd readers in being pessimistic about the propsects for the left, though I am myself completely of the left (unlike them — though perhaps if they knew something abut the left they’d be less unsympathetic. I mean, Lamont, a multimillionaire candidate of the left? Good grief.)
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The interlopers on the blog are coming from Instapundit. My friend, Jane Galt, sent them here. I’m happy to have the visitors, just as long as everyone plays nice.
Yeah, harry b, I think there’s a transition going on. I don’t think we’re returning to old style leftism, as Brooks suggests, though I do think there is a growing consensus that government needs to step in to deal with public problems. The public opinion polls are showing that. Anti-war feelings are turning to a large scale rejection of the entire Republican platform. The Republican candidates are thrashing around unable to define what conservativism means anymore. On the grassroots front, the time is ripe for a traditional leftie agenda. That said, I am not sure if Democratic leadership is up to the challenge.
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“I’m a bit skeptical, mostly because I doubt the left has much of a hold in the Democratic Party, which is stil, basically, a wierd coalition of pro-business types, civil rights types, civil libertarians, and lagging behind, labor.”
Very well put, Harry. Laura’s sampling of self-identified left-liberal bloggers supports this reading: lots of stuff on Iraq, lots of stuff on various identity-politics issues, comparatively little on comprehensive, egalitarian policies, to say nothing of social transformation. But I suppose that such might emerge, or re-emerge as the case may be, as this grand sorting out period continues.
Incidentally…when did the “transition” begin, anyway? With the end of the Cold War? It seems to me that “conservatism” should have gone into serious internal self-examination back in 1989, but somehow, it managed to avoid doing so until the debacle which is the Bush adminstration. How did everything hold together for so long, with all these internal weaknesses? I blame Clinton, who 1) gave conservatives a unifying figure to hate throughout the 1990s, and 2) conversely gave liberals and leftists the illusion of power during the same era.
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The world isn’t becoming more left; the left is becoming more left.
“Lieberman vs. Lamont is a prime example.”
Indeed.
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Given the example of the Vietnam era, I think it’s very improbable that anti-war sentiment will lead to a long-lasting leftist victory. I don’t know a lot about that era, but didn’t leftism surge and emerge as a mass movement during the Vietnam era, only to collapse with the end of US involvement there? Nixon,Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush II: does that really sound like a leftist victory? I think a leftist surge can only continue if the US continues to aggressively pursue the war in Iraq and the war on terror. The left resurgence will end with the war. On the other hand, there is no realistic end in sight, at least for the war on Islamic terror. So most likely the war and re-energized leftism will continue to exist side by side for a long, long time.
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I read that era very differently from Amy P, as being the replacement of a reasonably stable, defensive social democratic left with a very aggressive and unstable socially libertarian “left” which, in fact, laid the groundwork for small government conservatism (I think of the non-marxist radicals in the SDS for example as being parallel with, rather than opposite to, the Goldwater lot). I don;t mean that is what those folks wanted, but it made sense (distrust the government, never trust anyone over thirty, etc). The old left was largely eclipsed, and didn;t know what to do with the movement; and what was left within that movement was unable (and unwilling, for the most part) to institutionalise itself in a meaningful way.
But, a theme here has been that opposition to a war is no way to revive a real social movement, let alone a political movement? Why? Because it makes it too easy to paper over the real differences in the movement, and renders the task of forging a common vision unnecessary in the short-to-medium term. Bush-hatred similarly. (NEVER invoke hatred of particular democratically-elected figures, however despicable, if you are serious about building a lasting movement that is capable of forging systematic social change).
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When I look at the right, I see a lot of Bush apologists but I do not see a lot of conservatism.
Similarly, I wonder if we can name names here when we talk about left-of-center blogs and what they are talking about. I only read the big ones, so maybe I am missing something. I do see a lot on Iraq, and I think that is justified because it is the single biggest political issue facing the country today. The Republicans want more war, the Democrats want less. Congressional Democrats are figuring out exactly how to get less war from an administration that is famously happy about its war and famously willing to play fast and loose with the laws that the Congress passes. The country, I think, wants less war, and I think that tendency is growing stronger. If there is not visibly less war by election day in 2008, I think there will be a massive sweep for the party that most credibly promises less war. (If I remember my sources correctly, Richard Nixon said in 1968 that he had a secret plan to end the war; it turned out that his plan was to keep it going for four more years and then run on the war for re-election; I do not know if there is a current Republican that unscrupulous.)
Anyway, yes, lots about Iraq on leftish blogs. Identity politics, not so much. (Unless you mean something different than I do Russell.) Egalitarian, mostly in the sense of noting increasing inequality or of ensuring that people have equal access to things that matter, such as education and health care. That I see a fair amount of at places like Tapped. Social transformation, very little indeed, except to note, sometimes with astonishment, at the ongoing transformation being wrought by technological and demographic changes. Tiger Woods’ doppelganger as a wired biotech researcher: that’s the transformed America I catch glimpses of on leftish blogs.
(In terms of sources for this view, I read Atrios, Josh Marshall, Kevin Drum, Crooked Timber, Tapped, Mark Kleiman, Unfogged, Kos, Matthew Yglesias, Brad DeLong, Timothy Burke and the Nielsen Haydens regularly. Drum and Burke I would put as just barely left of center, the others have varying degrees of left-ness.)
The great achievement of the left in the 1960s is the civil rights revolution. The second greatest achievement is the extension of the New Deal that gave us bastions such as Medicare and Medicaid. These were both achieved before Vietnam dominated politics, and the ongoing train wreck of Vietnam policy hurt both. So I think that leftish policies did not rise with the anti-war movement; indeed, I think that the war then contributed mightily to undoing the Democratic coalition that enacted the great reforms of the era.
Amy, what do you think left means these days? And Russell, what would conservatism look like, if were to be anything other than apologia for Bush and defense of selfishness?
I think that what Edwards has been doing in highlighting poverty and exclusion as problems is important to a mainstream left in America. Whether or not he becomes the nominee, I hope that what he has been promoting as a domestic agenda becomes a significant part of our national discourse.
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Doug,
With all due respect, I suspect it’s very unlikely that you read enough conservative blogs to be able to say “When I look at the right, I see a lot of Bush apologists but I do not see a lot of conservatism.” It’s been a long time since Bush has been able to command immediate confidence–right now there’s a lot of trust-but-verify in his relationship with the right. At some point, his support started to erode. Was it “Islam means peace”? Was it the administration’s lackadaisical approach to border security and immigration? Was it Katrina and what it revealed about emergency preparedness? Was it Harriet Miers? I can’t say, but at some point the magic was gone.
As to what the left means these days, I don’t know. I usually just accept people’s self-identification. On the right, my personal rule is that anyone who doesn’t hate conservatives is a conservative, too. You may not have noticed, but conservatives have a tendency to annex even the most unpromising people who agree with them in any one important area, for instance Camille Paglia or Rudy Giuliani. National Review’s Corner has tremendous ideological diversity, and a number of years back, the back page of the print edition was ruled by Florence King, a high Episcopalian atheist royalist bisexual. In education reform (an area that I’ve lately been following closely), a number of the major “conservative” figures are actually liberals (for example E. D. Hirsch) with a large conservative following.
You would earn a lot of points with me if you’d reconsider your assumptions about your political opponents and added a few teaspoons full of nuance. Your side is not composed entirely of archangels, and you are not engaged in some Manichean struggle with the forces of darkness.
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“Your side is not composed entirely of archangels,”
No, of course not. Cherubs one and all. And the odd seraphim. Some of them very odd indeed.
More, perhaps, in time. It’s late Over Here.
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Amy writes, “Given the example of the Vietnam era, I think it’s very improbable that anti-war sentiment will lead to a long-lasting leftist victory.”
Vietnam didn’t just undo support for Republicans, it undid Democrats, too. LBJ’s Great Society program went down in smoke after the protests started. Since everybody’s hands were dirty in that war, it soured Americans about government in general for ten years afterwards. Watergate also helped.
I don’t know if we have a real social movement going on. Leadership and new ideas are seriously lacking. Still, that might come. In the meantime, we’re looking at the real possibility of some positive social changes, at least in health care. The next election is going to be decided in the Democratic primaries. There’s a willingness in the public to try out new ideas. The step to the left may be a small one, but that’s the way things always happen in our country. The country of small steps.
It would be interesting to see if new ideas could come out of the blogosphere. Policies need to be prioritized. I’d like to see ideas for new coalitions that bypass the old dead weight. We’re good at rejecting, but maybe not so good at proposing.
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Sure. Add a few details about your background, if you can–nationality, where you’ve lived, etc.
I’m recently very struck by how foreign even fellow Americans can be too each other. We have our homogenized mass culture, which barely scratches the surface of regional difference. I’m beginning to think that it would be a very good thing to encourage student exchange programs within the US for the purposes of cross-cultural understanding. (We’re contemplating a move from DC to Texas.) There’s also the question of religious difference, and beyond that the gap between the biblically literate and the biblically illiterate. (In the past year, I saw a poster on a highly literate lefty website wigging out because someone had used the expression “mark of Cain.”)
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I read the era Amy talks about basically the same as Harry. The Middle American reaction to 60s may have given the early fusion of small government conservatism and evangelical religiousity the route it needed to present its agenda as serving the wishes of the majority (Nixon’s “Silent Majority,” Falwell’s “Moral Majority,” etc.), but I don’t think that would have happened as thoroughly as it did if you hadn’t already had the liberalism of the late 60s and 70s turn to a significant degree into, as Harry put it, “a very aggressive and unstable socially libertarian ‘left,'” with confrontational and in some ways elitist priorities absorbing the energy and support that once went towards social justice policies. Not that those policies up and disappeared; Carter came into office with as egalitarian an agenda as Johnson or Roosevelt. But the conviction to support them, outside of the core interest groups which benefitted from them, was in rapid decline. (How much of this was due to a new generation of hippie and post-hippie, college-educated liberals embracing ideologies of choice and individual liberation, and how much of it was due to the simple reality that the economics and technologies of personal libertation were more widely available than ever before, is hard to say.)
Doug, I suppose I spoke too broadly. By identity politics, I mean issues usually framed as having to do with race, gender (including abortion), sexuality (including gay marriage), etc. Perhaps that’s an unfair label. You are certainly correct that there’s a reason that Iraq rightly dominates discussion on liberal and leftist blogs today; similarly, you’re right that universal health care and the need to improve schools is much discussed as well. Social transformation? Well, I guess I was thinking about this post by Matt Ygelsias, in which he claims that the fundamentals of how the economic world currently works–NAFTA, etc.–will not in principle be challenged in the future by liberals. I’m glad to see there were a lot of commenters who thought otherwise. And you’re right that Edwards is one of those thinking otherwise as well.
As for what a real conservatism would be today, well, I’ve thought a lot about it on my blog, but really still don’t have a good grasp of it. Whatever it is, though, it isn’t Bushism.
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Great discussion – among the best I’ve seen on the blogosphere because of so many subtly discussed ideas about how we got where we are today. I know I started on the left – Eastern Intellectual Establishment, New Hampshire farmboy, Ivy league. Liberal head; Jacksonian heart. My current position re American politics – if there is no room for Joe Lieberman in the Democratic party, then there is no room for me. Amy P wrote: On the right, my personal rule is that anyone who doesn’t hate conservatives is a conservative, too. I certainly don’t, so by that definition I am a conservative and there is probably a lot of truth in that. And I am not an old style liberal like Brooks is talking about, but I have a lot of time for the anti-totalitarian left. Most, not all, of the Euston Manifesto represents the side of me that still has a real connection to the left. Try Normblog or Nick Cohen’s new book What’s Left? American conservatives should check out this UK left that, while it differs internally over its support of Iraq, refuses to “to excuse (or even support) Islamic fundamentalism or the Iraqi insurgency.” It’s all part of the ‘rethink’ that left is going through and I believe the UK left has taken the debate further in some areas that the US left. There is a US Euston Manifesto too, but that only demonstrates that the anti-totalitarian left is less developed in the US.I don’t know how the left is going to come out, but I agree with most posters that old style liberalism may win an election or two, but it is not going to make a big comeback. I want to add that anyone who thinks conservatism is just a justification for greed needs to read Milton Friedman until they understand the limitations of statism and conservatives who think big government liberalism is totally wrong should read Keynes until they understand the limitations of unregulated capitalism. The debate between these views still is alive and well and facing challenges like the US medical system. Both socialized and capitalist medicine have shown themselves seriously flawed – we haven’t found a good answer yet. The best I know is the Australian system which has both a government and private system – hence no single payer – and I, like a lot of Australians, am covered under both. Apparently redundant, each system compensates for the flaws in the other. I think conservatives need a rethink too of a different kind – to find their center of gravity after Bush. My prediction – 8 years of Hillary much like we had 8 years of Ike after the “mess” in Korea. (Sill is too) Korea really made Republican’s angry too. I got yelled at for half an hour in front of the whole class for putting a picture of Truman on the bulletin board in 1955. A clear case of Truman Derangement Syndrome.
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Yankeewombat,
That was very nice. I hope, though, that you weren’t referring to the US as having “capitalist medicine.” That would be very far from the truth, since there is very little resembling a market in medicine in the US, except maybe in pharmaceuticals. Our problem is how to create a real, functioning market with prices and competition. To get there, we’re going to need a lot of help from smart libertarians.
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From over at Kevin Drum by guest Paul Glastris:
“If by ‘neoliberalism’ we mean the tendency of center-left Democratic intellectuals to spend lots of time and energy attacking those further to the left, I’d say the movement is, like the hero in the The Princess Bride, mostly dead. … There are two main reasons for this. First and foremost is the conservative takeover of Washington. Personally, as a longtime self-identified neoliberal, I’ve been more interested over the last six years in figuring out how the new conservative machine works and how to fight against it than in getting into pissing matches with my friends on the left … Still, back in the day, most neolib-New Dem types I knew shared one main goal: to remove the thorns in the paw of the American body politic that made voters furious at the federal government, so that government could once again play an activist, progressive role in American life.”
That goal has been achieved, he writes, and now it’s time to do more.
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Thanks for adding detail, Russell. I asked for a particular reason, which was roughly as follows. Some time back, framing a political question by attaching it to certain fundamental aspects of a person or group was a way of claiming exclusive right to say something about that question. I’m hazy on the timing because this stretches back into the days when I was a wee lad, but I think this was an approach that was prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s. Nowadays, I see references to identity politics used as a means of dismissing claims by bracketing them within a framework that is presumed to have been discredited.
If the previous excessive claim was “only XY can say something about Z because of their history,” the current claim is, “well, what XY have to say about Z doesn’t matter because it’s just identity politics.” Which is why I asked for greater definition, because it sounded like you might have been hand-waving and dismissing.
(As an aside, I’ve enjoyed your pondering what conservatism really is, as opposed to the movement of today that gives itself that label. I’ve almost never had time to write a comment that does your posts justice, but I’m glad you’re doing them.)
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