Corey Robin on that Thatcher quotation

As the heat around Margaret Thatcher's death begins to cool a bit, I thought I would post something that addresses some larger questions around her career. Here is what Corey Robin had to say about the famous quotation about the nature of society.

Left critics of neoliberalism—or just plain old unregulated capitalism—often cite Margaret Thatcher’s famous declaration “There is no such thing as society” as evidence of neoliberalism’s hostility to all things collective. Neoliberalism, the story goes, unleashes the individual to fend for herself, denying her the supports of society (government, neighborhood solidarity, etc.) so that she can prove her mettle in the marketplace.

But these critics often ignore the fine print of what Thatcher actually said in that famous 1987 interview with, of all things, Woman’s Own.  Here’s the buildup to that infamous quote:

Who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families…

It’s that last phrase (“and there are families”) that’s crucial.  Contrary to popular (or at least leftist) myth, neoliberals are not untrammeled individualists. In many ways, they’re not that different from traditional conservatives: that is, they see individuals embedded in social institutions like the church or the family or schools—all institutions, it should be said, that are hierarchical and undemocratic.

Thatcher isn’t alone in this.  For all their individualist bluster, libertarians—particularly those market-oriented libertarians who are rightly viewed as the leading theoreticians of neoliberalism—often make the same claim.  When these libertarians look out at society, they don’t always see isolated or autonomous individuals; they’re just as likely to see private hierarchies like the family or the workplace, where a father governs his family and an owner his employees.  And that, I suspect (though further research is certainly necessary), is what they think of and like about society: that it’s an archipelago of private governments.

To my eyes, the connection between this and Ron and Rand Paul is pretty clear.

Image:  ...as in "A man's home is his…"  That's "a MAN'S home!"

Condemned out of his own mouth – Rand Paul

A few days ago Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, the great hope of the new libertarianism, went to Howard University and spoke to mostly African-American students in an attempt to show them that it was the Democrats back in the 1850s who showed themselves to be hostile to African-American interests, and one should never forget that, while nothing the Republicans have done since 1964 should be held against them.

When challenged on this, Sen. Paul said, according to Salon

 “The argument that I’m trying to make is that we haven’t changed — there are some of us that haven’t changed,” Paul said. “We don’t see an abrupt difference” between the party of Lincoln and the party of Richard Nixon.

Anyone who can't tell the difference between those two parties, or says he can't, should not be trusted as far as you can throw him.

Focus on what they do -- and their priorities

Paul Rand is a Libertarian/Republican candidate for a seat in the United States Senate. Having won his local primary election, he has been making statements about policy and political philosophy as fast as he can. In one such statement he went back as far as 1964 and said that he always opposed any kind of discrimination, but his belief in the limits of government power meant he could not support the ban on discrimination by private businesses contained in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

This led people to wonder whether he was a racist. He is, after all, running for the Senate in a state where Jim Crow legislation existed back in 1964. One of the people who commented on Paul's statement was Josh Marshall, founder and editor of talkingpointsmemo.com, a progressive Democratic news and commentary site. What he said and his reply to the criticisms of some of his readers are well worth looking at. You will seldom get this kind of instruction at a university.

First post:

TPM Reader SW wrote in this morning cautioning that we make clear that opposing all civil rights legislation on libertarian grounds doesn't mean you don't support civil rights. I think this is far from an uncontested claim. ...

First here's SW's email.

You write that Rand Paul is "...against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Americans with Disabilities Act and supporting abolishing the Department of Education..."

It's worth noting that Libertarians are against the Civil Rights Act, but not against civil rights. Indeed you'll find no stronger defender of civil rights of any type than libertarians. For us its a matter of approach. ...

He's not against civil rights, people with disabilities, or against educating today's youth.

Let's start the conversation by agreeing that as a technical matter, this is true. Libertarianism is a political philosophy rooted in a belief in radical limitations on state power. And I'm inclined to follow my friend Mike Lind's argument that unlike a lot of mishmash conservative claptrap libertarianism is a political philosophy I can disagree with but still recognize as internally consistent and rooted in important principles. As Mike wrote once, I simply think its assumptions and understanding of human nature are off. But this is hardly the end of the story.

Political philosophy can never be free of history. And there is no denying that similar states rights or libertarian arguments have been the arguments of choice for those who want to defend racial discrimination since avowed defenses of racial prejudice and subordination became publicly unacceptable outside some parts of the South in the early second half of the last century. That's simply a fact. In principle, it doesn't delegitimize libertarian political philosophy. But we don't live in classrooms or treatises. We live in an actual world where history and experience can't be separated from philosophy.

When he ran for President in 1964 Barry Goldwater ran on opposition to federal Civil Rights legislation on what he claimed were states rights grounds. And there's some reason to believe that for him that really was what it was about. But it is entirely clear that his political punch came from supporters in the South who wanted to keep Jim Crow in effect. Again, that's just a fact.

So that's the history.

Then there is the simple matter of priorities. To a degree the argument Paul is making is something like saying that I don't like rape or murder, I just don't believe in a police force to prevent it or a judiciary to punish the offenders. The reason we, albeit imperfectly, have equality before the law and in the society at large (in terms of public accommodations and so forth) on racial grounds in the whole of the United States is because of federal legislation that forced that to be the case. The reason we don't have white and colored drinking fountains or pools for whites only, etc. You can say you think all those things are awful and you may be telling the truth. But what are you going to do about it? The variant of libertarianism which Paul espouses, while internally consistent in theory and separate from race, has you saying, I wouldn't do anything about it -- though I'd decry it as an individual.

Folks who espouse this kind of philosophy deserve to be held to account for that fact, whatever their inner beliefs about race and equality may be.

His follow-up post:

In response to my previous post on this topic, a number of you have written in to ask whether I'm not offering a rationalization of what are simply egregious views. I'm not. I would hope that that is clear.

What I'm arguing is something different: It's very hard to know what's in people's hearts, especially if they're making no clear efforts to make it clear. And in any case it can be a fruitless endeavor in the realm of public debate. It's also true that there are libertarians who believe in radical limitations on state power for reasons that have nothing to do with any personal animus on race issues, even if those beliefs dictate policies that would be disastrous for civil rights.

These I think are the bounds of the relevant conversation. And within them, the important point -- the one I was trying to make -- is that we shouldn't get distracted by what people feel in their hearts and focus on what their preferred policies would actually do and what that says about their priorities.

Thank you, Josh.

Libertarianism and feudalism

If you haven't had enough of theories and critiques of libertarianism, have fun with this.

If you are a medievalist, there is some danger your head will explode. On the other hand, that danger may be only marginally greater than it is for anyone else.

American political debates and (world) history

I often have trouble restraining myself from commenting on US politics in this blog. The USA is a big, important country and no matter what definition of "world history" you adhere to, just ignoring it would wildly distort my commentary. On the other hand, we have so much American news available that it's easy to look at everything from a US point of view.

Sometimes, however, internal historical-political debates in the USA are really important for outsiders to have some acquaintance with, simply because some positions adopted by Americans are a little hard to believe. And American readers of this blog may find it interesting to consider why outsiders might feel that way.

So much for prologue. Today's example comes from the debate over health insurance reform in the USA (I consider that a more accurate term than "health care reform.")
Opponents of HIR have made all sorts of dire claims for the evil consequences of the Obama program, to the point that some of them are harking back to the policies of nullification and secession that defenders of slavery championed, in the name of liberty, in the early 19th century. Some justify their hostility by appealing not so much to "conservative" principles (since many American "conservatives" have proved to be pro-big government) but to "libertarianism."

Self-proclaimed libertarians tend to be cranky individualists, so it's hard to say how much common ground any group of libertarians have. So maybe some of you readers will find it interesting to look at a debate that has spilled out over some forums in the last little bit.

It started at Reason.com with David Boaz writing an article on the theme "There's no such thing as a golden age of lost liberty," which the editors of Reason paired with a critique by Jacob Hornberger which included this passage:

Let’s consider, say, the year 1880. Here was a society in which people were free to keep everything they earned, because there was no income tax. They were also free to decide what to do with their own money—spend it, save it, invest it, donate it, or whatever. People were generally free to engage in occupations and professions without a license or permit. There were few federal economic regulations and regulatory agencies. No Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, bailouts, or so-called stimulus plans. No IRS. No Departments of Education, Energy, Agriculture, Commerce, and Labor. No EPA and OSHA. No Federal Reserve. No drug laws. Few systems of public schooling. No immigration controls. No federal minimum-wage laws or price controls. A monetary system based on gold and silver coins rather than paper money. No slavery. No CIA. No FBI. No torture or cruel or unusual punishments. No renditions. No overseas military empire. No military-industrial complex.

As a libertarian, as far as I’m concerned, that’s a society that is pretty darned golden.

And that really got people going. There were a number of responses, notably at Crooked Timber in this post and its many comments. I think the critics have the better arguments, but whatever you think you may find the debate itself instructive.

Let's go back to the moment to nullification and secession. Some state governors in the USA have found this an appropriate moment to celebrate or even revive Confederate History Month, while of course doing their best to disengage their proud heritage from slavery and Jim Crow. Of all the responses, this one byTa-Nehisi Coates, "The Ghost of Bobby Lee," may be one of the best possible. It's very thoughtful and no one passage can catch its high quality and complexity, but here's one I put on Facebook because I felt it had something to say about how the living use all kinds of history:

What undergirds all of this alleged honoring of the Confederacy, is a kind of ancestor-worship that isn't. The Lost Cause is necromancy--it summons the dead and enslaves them to the need of their vainglorious, self-styled descendants. Its greatest crime is how it denies, even in death, the humanity of the very people it claims to venerate. This isn't about "honoring" the past--it's about an inability to cope with the present.

Image: Politics in the American golden age (it actually is called The Gilded Age): "Bosses of the Senate" by Joseph Keppler, 1889. Click for a larger, more legible image.

Update: a punchy cartoon comment on Confederate History Month.