There are now growing doubts over whether the promise of growth can be perpetuated. Humanity has confronted both the limits imposed by nature, as the costs of two centuries’ economic growth become increasingly evident in today’s accelerating climate change, and the decreasing likelihood that market capitalism will generate increasing prosperity for every part of society. Recent years have proven the foresight of Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano, that an iron logic within market capitalism—namely the perpetual effort to suppress wages either by finding new low-wage markets or replacing humans with machines or computers—will increasingly reduce all but a few forms of work to drudgery and indignity. This recognition has led to a return of Locke’s basic wager that a system that provided material comfort, no matter the vastness of inequality and absent likely prospects of growth and mobility between classes, would nevertheless satisfy most members of society. The most recent muse of Lockean liberalism is the economist Tyler Cowen, whose book Average Is Over echoes the basic contours of Locke’s argument. While noting that liberalism and market capitalism perpetuate titanic and permanent forms of inequality that might have made dukes and earls of old blush, Cowen argues that we are at the end of a unique period in American history, a time of widespread belief in relative equality and shared civic fate, and entering an age in which we will effectively see the creation of two separate nations. Yet in his concluding chapter, fittingly entitled “A New Social Contract?,” Cowen nevertheless concludes that liberalism will continue to enjoy widespread support:
We will move from a society based on the pretense that everyone is given an okay standard of living to a society in which people are expected to fend for themselves much more than they do now. I imagine a world where, say, 10 to 15 percent of the citizenry is extremely wealthy and has fantastically comfortable and stimulating lives, the equivalent of current-day millionaires, albeit with better health care. . . .
This framing of income inequality in meritocratic terms will prove self-reinforcing. Worthy individuals will in fact rise from poverty on a regular basis, and that will make it easier to ignore those who are left behind.5
Cowen predicts that this low-wage majority will settle in places that look a lot like Texas: cheap housing, some job creation, and subpar government services. Political leaders, he suggests, should consider erecting entire cityscapes of favelas with low rent and free internet, thus offering a virtual world of distraction from the grim poverty and spiritual desiccation that will become a permanent way of life for most citizens. Far from predicting that this dystopia will bring the end of liberalism and precipitate revolution against a social and economic system that re-creates the conditions of the old aristocracy that liberalism was supposed to overthrow, Cowen ends his book on this hopeful note: “We might even look ahead to a time when the cheap or free fun is so plentiful that it will feel a bit like Karl Marx’s communist utopia, albeit brought on by capitalism. That is the real light at the end of the tunnel.”6
RULE OF THE STRONG
Early-modern liberalism envisioned the autonomous individual giving rise to a system that resulted in radically different material attainments. As James Madison said of the world’s first liberal order, the “first object of government” is protection of the “diversity in the faculties of men.” Madison states in Federalist 10 that “from the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results.” The first object of the government enshrined in our constitutional order is the protection of “diversity,” primarily distinctions that are manifest in different economic attainments, but further, whatever differences arise from our “diversity of faculties.” Liberal politics was conceived as a defense of those inequalities. Liberalism’s second wave—Progressivism—argued that the rampant inequality that first-wave liberalism so successfully advanced was, in fact, an obstacle to the realization of true selfhood. Later liberals agreed that the first wave of liberalism had successfully undermined the old aristocratic political and economic forms, but concluded that its very successes had generated new pathologies that needed a reinvented liberalism. Liberalism today is widely identified as the opposite of early-modern liberalism’s encouragement of economic liberty and hence stratification, instead stressing the imperative for greater economic equality.
But this embrace of economic equality was not intended to secure an opposite outcome to classical liberalism: rather, it sought to extend the weakening of social forms and cultural traditions already advanced by classical liberalism, with an end to increasing political consolidation. Under classical liberalism, this end could best be achieved by limiting government’s authority over individuals. For progressive liberalism, it was best achieved by empowering the State to equalize the fruits of an increasingly prosperous society while intervening more actively in the realms of church, family, and even human sexuality.
Still, like its classical liberal forebear, progressive liberalism enlisted the support of the masses it would harm by emphasizing how it would correct the current system’s injustices—in this case, the economic disparities generated by market capitalism. Yet the appeal to economic justice and taming of the market—never realized, of course—was advanced not ultimately in the name of greater equality but to secure the liberation of those living outside the guidelines and strictures of cultural norms by disassembling the social structures and cultural practices that supported the flourishing of the greater part of humanity. The progressive effort to make economic disparities more equal (without actually ever equalizing them) is driven by a deeper liberal imperative to equalize individuals’ opportunity to be liberated from entanglements with others, particularly from the shared cultural norms, institutions, and associations that bind a people’s fate together. Progressivism aims above all at the liberation of an elite whose ascent requires the disassembling of norms, intermediating institutions, and thick forms of community, a demolition that comes at the expense of these communities’ settled forms of life. The deepest irony is that while our politics today is manifested as a clash of classical liberals against progressive liberals, we have seen a steady advance in both economic liberation and personal liberation. This is because progressive liberalism was never actually a foe of classical liberalism. Its true enemy was a kind of lived “Burkeanism”: the way of life of much of humanity.
Nineteenth-century architects of progressive liberalism retained a main ambition of classical liberalism, namely the imperative to liberate individuals from any arbitrary and unchosen relationships and remake the world into one in which those especially disposed to expressive individualism would thrive. Few liberals were more forthright than John Stuart Mill in insisting that this liberation was essential to creating a new ruling class of wholly self-made individuals. In order to liberate these individuals from accident and circumstance, Mill insisted that the whole of society be remade for their benefit, namely by protecting their unique differences against oppressive social norms, particularly religious strictures and social norms governing behavior and comportment. Put another way, Mill argued that “custom” must be overthrown so that those who seek to live according to personal choices in the absence of such norms are at greatest liberty to do so.
In contrast to the argument by Yuval Levin that “the Great Debate” was between Burke and Paine, the “culture wars” of our time have more to do with differences between intuitive Burkeans and forthright disciples of Mill. This may surprise some, since Mill is sometimes taken to be a friend to conservatism, particularly libertarians. But he was no conservative: he was the midwife of modern liberalism, particularly through the arguments advanced in his classic 1859 work, On Liberty. Many of his libertarian admirers tend to assume that Mill’s “Harm Principle” speaks primarily about limiting government’s rule over individual liberty, but Mill was mainly concerned about the constraints that public opinion could forge. He opens the book by noting that in the England of his day, “the yoke o
f opinion is perhaps heavier, [and] that of law lighter, than in most other countries of Europe; and there is considerable jealousy of direct interference, by the legislative or executive power, with private conduct.”7 Writing at the dawn of the era of popular sovereignty, he acknowledged that public opinion might someday be translated directly into popularly mandated coercive government power; but at that moment, “the majority have not learnt to feel the power of the government [as] their power, or its opinions their opinions.” What concerned him was not coercive law but oppressive public opinion.
Forms of oppressive “opinion” were mainly manifest in everyday morality—what Mill witheringly criticized as “Custom.” While Mill at times argued that a good society needed a balance of “Progress” and “Custom,” in the main, he saw custom as the enemy of human liberty, and progress as a basic aim of modern society. To follow custom was to be fundamentally unreflective and mentally stagnant. “The human faculties of perception, judgement, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is a custom, makes no choice.”8
Custom may have once served a purpose, Mill acknowledges—in an earlier age, when “men of strong bodies or minds” might flout “the social principle,” it was necessary for “law and discipline, like the Popes struggling against the Emperors, [to] assert a power over the whole man, claiming to control all his life in order to control his character.”9 But custom had come to dominate too extensively; and that “which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and preferences.”10 The unleashing of spontaneous, creative, unpredictable, unconventional, often offensive forms of individuality was Mill’s goal. Extraordinary individuals—the most educated, the most creative, the most adventurous, even the most powerful—freed from the rule of Custom, might transform society. “Persons of genius,” Mill acknowledges, “are always likely to be a small minority”; yet such people, who are “more individual than any other people,” less capable of “fitting themselves, without hurtful compression, into any of the small number of moulds which society provides,” require “an atmosphere of freedom.”11 Society must be remade for the benefit of this small, but in Mill’s view vital, number. A society based on custom constrained individuality, and those who craved most to be liberated from its shackles were not “ordinary” people but people who thrived on breaking out of the customs that otherwise governed society. Mill called for a society premised around “experiments in living”: society as test tube for the sake of geniuses who are “more individual.”
We live today in the world Mill proposed. Everywhere, at every moment, we are to engage in experiments in living. Custom has been routed: much of what today passes for culture—with or without the adjective “popular”—consists of mocking sarcasm and irony. Late night television is the special sanctuary of this liturgy. Society has been transformed along Millian lines in which especially those regarded as judgmental are to be special objects of scorn, in the name of nonjudgmentalism.
Mill understood better than contemporary Millians that this would require the “best” to dominate the “ordinary.” The rejection of custom demanded that society’s most “advanced” elements have greater political representation. For Mill, this would be achieved through an unequal distribution of voting rights: those with a higher education would be accorded more votes. In less advanced societies, Mill argued, outright enslavement of backward populations might be necessary until they could be sufficiently set on a path of progressive advancement. This would mean, first and foremost, forcing them to work and care more about economic productivity than about wasteful activities like worship or leisure.
Americans, for much of their history, were not philosophically interested in Burke but were Burkeans in practice. Most lived in accordance with custom—with basic moral assumptions concerning the fundamental norms that accompanied a good life. You should respect authority, beginning with your parents. You should display modest and courteous comportment. You should avoid displays of lewdness or titillation. You should engage in sexual activity only when married. Once married, you should stay married. You should have children—generally, lots of them. You should live within your means. You should thank and worship the Lord. You should pay respect to the elderly and remember and acknowledge your debts to the dead.
Mill dismissed these behaviors as unthinking custom; Burke praised them as essential forms of “prejudice.” In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke wrote:
In this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess that we are generally men of untaught feelings, [and] that, instead of throwing away our old prejudices, we cherish them. . . . We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock of each man is small, and that the individuals do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages. . . . Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes part of his nature.12
Mill feared the tyranny of public opinion, expressed through custom, but Burke argued that the tyrannical impulse was far more likely found among the “innovators” and might be restrained by prejudice. It was the unshackled powerful who were to be feared, not the custom-following ordinary citizens. Burke saw a close relationship between the revolutionary and tyrannical impulse, made particularly insidious when the Great could claim the mantle of popular legitimacy: “The spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper. . . . When they are not on their guard, [the democratists] treat the humbler part of the community with the greatest contempt, whilst at the same time, they pretend to make them the depositories of their power.”13
Society today has been organized around the Millian principle that “everything is allowed,” at least so long as it does not result in measurable (mainly physical) harm. It is a society organized for the benefit of the strong, as Mill recognized. By contrast, a Burkean society is organized for the benefit of the ordinary—the majority who benefit from societal norms that the strong and the ordinary alike are expected to follow. A society can be shaped for the benefit of most people by emphasizing mainly informal norms and customs that secure the path to flourishing for most human beings; or it can be shaped for the benefit of the extraordinary and powerful by liberating all from the constraint of custom. Our society was once shaped on the basis of the benefit for the many ordinary; today it is shaped largely for the benefit of the few strong.
LIBERALOCRACY ASCENDANT
The results of this civilizational transformation are everywhere we look. Our society is increasingly defined by economic winners and losers, with winners congregating in wealthy cities and surrounding counties, while losers largely remain in place—literally and figuratively—swamped by a global economy that rewards the highly educated cognitive elite while offering bread crumbs to those left in “flyover country.” Trends observed decades ago by Robert Reich and Christopher Lasch, who decried “the secession of the successful” and the “revolt of the elite,” are today institutionalized through family, neighborhood, and schools, and replicated by generational succession.14 Children of the successful receive preparation for entry into the ruling class, while those who lack those attainments are much less capable of affording, and insufficiently knowledgeable about, the basic prerequisites needed to push their children into the upper echelon.
Charles Murray and Robert Putnam have ably documented the self-perpetuating class divide that permeates modern American society.15 Murray has shown through two fictional towns—wealthy Belmont and down-at-the-heels Fishtown—that the wealthy and powerful today enjoy family and marital stability, relatively low rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock birth, and low incidences of drugs and criminality, while on all these measures, Fishtown is descending into social anarchy. Murray has argued that Belmont simply needs to practice what it preaches—extol the virtues of v
irtue, rather than Millian “experimentalism” and value relativism—in order to instruct the denizens of Fishtown in what’s needed to achieve success. Putnam has urged greater government support for citizens who are being left behind economically, proposing a host of programs to help them break the chain of social decay.
Both ignore what empirical observation should suggest: this condition is not an aberration from healthy liberalism but its fulfillment. From the outset, liberalism held forth the promise of a new aristocracy composed of those who would flourish with the liberation of the individual from history, tradition, nature, and culture, and the demolition or attrition of institutional supports that were redefined as limits or obstacles to liberty. Those who are best provisioned by disposition (nature), upbringing (nurture), and happenstance to succeed in a world shorn of those institutional supports aspire to autonomy. Even as the liberal family is reconstituted to serve as the launching pad for the autonomous individual, a landscape shorn of widespread social networks leaves those without advantages to succeed in liberal society among the underclass. Compounding their disadvantage is the “secession of the successful,” the geographic withdrawal of a social and economic elite to a few concentrated areas, siphoning away those who might once have engaged in local philanthropy and the building of local civil society.
Murray believes that only willful denial born of progressive prejudice prevents the elite from extolling the virtues of stable family life and the personal qualities that help them maintain their social status. His claim neglects a different cause: the liberalocracy recognizes that it maintains its position through the advantages of stable social institutions, which serve ironically as the launching pad for Millian individuals. Such individuals flourish in a world stripped of custom, and the kinds of institutions that transmitted cultural norms, habituated responsibility, and cultivated ordinary virtues. Once such institutions were extensively disassembled—initially leading to the instability of families regardless of social class—the family could be reassembled along liberal lines, now shorn of those social supports but undergirded by support systems that can be purchased: a new form of servant class such as nannies and gardeners, along with modern-day tutors (SAT prep courses) and wet nurses (day care). The reconstructed family thus becomes one of the primary means by which the liberalocracy perpetuates itself, much as the aristocratic family was the source of wealth and status in earlier ages. Where the aristocratic family’s status was bound up in the land and estate—hence emphasized generational continuity and primogeniture—the liberalocratic family rests upon loose generational ties, portable credentials, the inheritance of fungible wealth, and the promise of mobility. Meanwhile, the liberalocracy is studiously silent about the decimation of family and attendant social norms among what Locke might have called “the querulous and contentious,” since the liberated individual who is the fruit of liberalism dictates that these people, now relegated to the underclass, must bear the cost of disassembling the social forms and institutions that traditionally supported families even among the disadvantaged.
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