The Long Campaign

My elder son, in whom I am well-pleased, is a smart, thoughtful, aware man who follows current affairs and cares deeply about them. He also believes I am politically somewhat dim, so he sends me things to read, sometimes things which he has written and sometimes things from (mostly) respectable journals which publish on-line.

Yesterday, he sent a piece by David Frum, who writes for Newsweek and The Daily Beast but who also has some conservative credentials. Whatever your take on the election and the consequent post-mortem, I think it's worth reading.

There are a couple of points in the Frum piece itself that I want to poke at a bit, but mostly I want to meditate on what I see as the long campaign of which the election of 2012 was only the most recent event.

First, Frum commits a logical error which is shocking coming from someone with his credentials. He contends that Bill O'Reilly is the spokesman for conservatism, quotes O'Reilly's latest silliness, and then criticizes --- condemns? --- that point of view: O'Reilly represents conservatism; O'Reilly is an idiot; therefore conservatism is, at least, suspect. In the world of logical fallacies, we call this a "straw man." It is like ridiculing the concept of monarchy because Joseph DeMaistre supported it (which is actually a pretty good line if you're hip to this particular bit of esoterica). If you're interested in thoughtful and measured post-election reflections by conservatives, I suggest this by Charles Krauthammer and this by George Will.

Second, Frum repeats a trope common over the last 30 years or so, that the political battle is over the center, that advantage shifts from center-left to center-right and back again. I'm not enough of a political scientist to know the extent to which this oft-repeated claim is true, but I am hesitant to accept it, just as I am  hesitant to accept any form of conventional wisdom. There is something about it which just seems too easy.

But the real point of this post is that the election of 2012 is really not very important or interesting as a discrete event (although it will be very interesting to see if the socially libertarian and egalitarian decisions on marijuana and gay marriage turn out to be the wave of the future or something that will not last).

There is, I'm afraid, a certain amount of pedantic exposition necessary here. The election of 2012 is just the latest event in an ideological and practical conflict that goes back to the end of the 19th Century. The North's victory in the Civil War eliminated the split between half a country devoted to modern political and economic principles and other half devoted to pre-modern political and economic principles.

The Second Industrial Revolution, the one of the 1870's, helped propel the United States headlong into industrial capitalism, so that a country which in 1850 had been a non-factor in the world's industrial economy would become by 1920 the great industrial power.

This process had many effects, the most important of which were social, cultural, and political. The democratic capitalism envisioned by Jackson and Lincoln became the corporate capitalism of Rockefeller and Carnegie. The factory system drew larger and larger portions of the population into cities, a process increased further by the second great wave of immigration, this one made up almost entirely of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, almost entirely Catholics and Jews.

As it always has, industrial capitalism led to an improved standard of living, more personal freedom, and more social mobility; but the dynamism which allowed for these improvements also created great and painful disruptions.

The move to the cities had created a situation in which people found themselves living within a mass, rather than in a society, as they had in the small towns from which most of them came. The impersonality, the unpredictability, and the very energy of this new situation were frightening to many, and that fright played itself out in different ways within different populations.

Workers tried to unionize and there were riots. Farmers whose understanding of basic economic principles was drastically upset by the effects of now-global markets demonstrated, organized into political groups, and pushed for currency reform. And corporations pushed harder and harder for more and more control over larger and larger sections of the economy.

Amidst all this unrest, compounded by the mass immigration of people whose cultural assumptions and practices were so different, the middle class felt abandoned. Political and economic forces were at play that seemed to threaten their preeminence in American life. Organized labor, organized farmers, conspiring corporations, and the background "noise" of the profound social changes created by just the presence of the immigrants --- all undermined the confidence and sense of cultural importance of the middle class.

There was a certain sense of fear for survival, but mostly it was a feeling that there were forces at play of which they had little understanding and against which they had no defense. This was a different kind of politics, a politics of competing interests, and the middle class had no organized political representation.

One of the reasons that this had happened was that the federal government, with some notable exceptions, had stayed out of the economic life of the country during the 19th Century. Not laissez-faire, strictly speaking, but certainly something approaching a hands-off policy.

But by the end of the Century, it was clear that the government was going to have to get back in. While it was true that a big part of the reason the government had to get back in was for government to be a counter-balance to the ever-growing power and influence of big business, it was also true that thoughtful people realized that a politics of competing interest groups demanded a disinterested, centralized authority to maintain an orderly and civil political process.

The result was the Progressives, the political group that gave us Robert LaFollette, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson, and that gave us the referendum, the recall, and the ability of the people to put potential legislation on the ballot through propositions.

At some level of decision-making, it was determined that the political culture of the middle class should be enshrined as the defining elements of the new politics, the politics of the new reality, the politics of the industrial and multicultural city.

But it was never quite that simple because the question always was, and still is, to what extent should the government become involved? This is not only an extremely complex question on its face, the specifics are always changing because of the very dynamism of industrial capitalism. No one in 1912 could possibly have predicted the technology that we take for granted in 2012 (see "21st Century Skills") and every one of those technological advances has political, economic, social, and cultural consequences. So even if someone had figured out the exactly right formula for how much, and in what ways, the government should be involved in 1912 (and many tried), that formula would have been outdated by 1922 and completely inappropriate by 1932. And the process of globalization, interrupted by the great European civil war of 1914-1989 but now back in full swing, increases the complexity by factors.

The dynamism of the process which is at the heart of how we live is the very reason that we can't figure out exactly what the right formula is.

If this is what David Frum means by the contest being over the middle, sometimes moving to the center-right and sometimes to the center-left, then okay. I prefer to think of it as an on-going tension within American society in which the body politic pushes in one direction and then the next depending on an almost literally unbelievable --- and ever-increasing --- set of factors.

It takes a real democrat to trust the people in such a process.