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common good
Postliberals Against the Common Good: An Urgent Warning
Sep 06, 2023
“The Republican Party is the most dangerous organization in human history,” says Noam Chomsky. It seems like a ridiculous statement. “Has there ever been an organization in human history that is dedicated, with such commitment, to the destruction of organized human life on Earth? Not that I’m aware of.”
But Chomsky has a point. Even the Nazis didn’t want to destroy civilization itself; they wanted to kill millions of people and dominate civilization, not bring it to an end. The Republican Party is much more ambitious, and more nihilistic: it is the capitalist id, or rather the capitalist death instinct, adopted as the organizing principle of a vast political force: Profit over people at all costs, including acceleration of global warming—not to mention demolition of organized labor, the welfare state, the regulatory state, progressive taxation, public resources like education and transportation, and the whole legacy of the New Deal. For Republicans even more than Democrats, enslavement to the business oligarchy is the highest good.
This being the case, one might be perplexed that so-called “postliberals” and other conservatives who pride themselves on their concern for “the common good” do not devote all their energy to defeating Republicans and organizing a popular movement for social democracy. In fact, they tend to do the opposite: they praise and endorse Republicans (especially pseudo-populists like Donald Trump, Josh Hawley, and J. D. Vance) while denouncing the “progressives” or “democratic socialists” who are struggling to build movements that will defend the common good and repair the social fabric rent by hyper-capitalism. On issue after issue—from protection of the environment to the resurrection of labor unions to the dismantling of psychopathic mass incarceration—it is organizers on the left, not the right, who are actually trying to conserve society. In this sense, it is leftists—materialist leftists, not identitarian liberals—who are the true conservatives.
"Republicans and business reactionaries love to keep the political focus on things like the decline of religion, the ostensible immigrant invasion, and the excesses of liberal identity politics, so that they can go on smashing the working class, appropriating most of the world’s wealth, privatizing and atomizing society, and destroying the prospects for human survival."
The political attitudes of most postliberals are approximately those manifested in Patrick Deneen’s new book Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future. It’s a very flawed book, as I explain in a forthcoming review. Here, I want only to note the incoherence of its political stance, which is that of right-wing postliberalism in general (as opposed to left-wing postliberalism, such as Adrian Pabst’s). As in his earlier book Why Liberalism Failed, Deneen deplores the atomization of modern society and the decline of community, stability, family, and traditional norms of social obligation. But he blames this social crisis on “liberalism,” a constellation of ideologies (some of which, historically, are mutually contradictory), rather than the material social relations of capitalism, as Marxists have done since the Communist Manifesto of 1848. In Marx’s famous words, “The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations… All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned…” Since capitalist class structures are the real basis for a way of life—an atomized, profit-obsessed, consumerist, hedonistic way of life—postliberals have gotten the very name of their philosophy wrong. It should be called postcapitalism, assuming the goal really is to create a cohesive, communal society.
What a postcapitalist world would look like is hard to imagine, but it would at least do away with the antagonistic and exploitative production relations that are ultimately responsible for the atomization postliberals lament. Ordinary people would control their work, in the form of worker cooperatives and democratic government coordination of large industry (possibly still in a market-oriented economy). The 1912 platform of Eugene Debs’ Socialist Party isn’t a bad place to start. If the notion of some degree of “government planning” seems unrealistic or tyrannical, we should remember that even today, the U.S. government engages in economic planning on a colossal scale, for instance through its subsidies to high-tech industry, its trade and tariff policies, its military procurement programs, and its regulation of all sectors of the economy. During World War II, in fact, government planning was remarkably successful, leading to full employment and setting the stage for the prosperous 1950s and 1960s. Let's remember, we don’t live in a true market economy.
Instead of taking their “communitarian” values to their logical, anti-capitalist conclusion, however, most postliberals remain on the level of culture, identity politics, and other half-measures. Deneen, like his co-thinkers Gladden Pappin, Chad Pecknold, Adrian Vermeule, Yoram Hazony, and others, advocates restrictions on immigration in the hope that this will somehow shore up the national community and protect wages. (He disregards the fact that the presence of undocumented immigrants and refugees stimulates the economy and creates jobs.) He argues that we have to renew the “Christian roots of our civilization” by making politics “a place for prayer” and reinfusing religion into public and private activities. Broadly, “an ennobling of our elite,” such that it is selflessly concerned with the well-being of “the people” and “work[s] to improve the[ir] lives, prospects, and fate,” will revitalize society and community. He fails to explain how such an ennobling of the ruling class can ever occur in the context of advanced capitalism, characterized by the global hegemony of unfettered greed.
"Postliberals are in danger of being useful idiots for the most insatiable sociopaths on the planet."
In fact, Deneen even deprecates social democracy and its “progressive liberalism,” claiming without evidence that redistribution of wealth to workers has “led to extensive damage to the broader economic order.” He seems unaware that postwar social democracy, created through overwhelming pressure by unions, socialists, and communists, was the closest modern society has ever come to protecting families, communities, and social stability.
It isn’t hard to criticize the idealism, political naïveté (as if class conflict isn’t endemic to capitalism!), and historical ignorance of conservative postliberalism. But the basic incoherence of the ideology is that its attacks on liberalism and the left, and its defense of conservatism, only serve to empower the forces most dedicated to sabotaging the very values postliberals claim to uphold, values like “national resilience,” “common purposes,” and the “social covenant.” Republicans and business reactionaries love to keep the political focus on things like the decline of religion, the ostensible immigrant invasion, and the excesses of liberal identity politics, so that they can go on smashing the working class, appropriating most of the world’s wealth, privatizing and atomizing society, and destroying the prospects for human survival. Postliberals are in danger of being useful idiots for the most insatiable sociopaths on the planet.
Will it be denied that the Republican Party is as bad as all this? Consider the evidence. Donald Trump is supposedly a populist, someone trying to turn Republicans into the party of the working class. It turns out that his administration, like all Republican administrations since Reagan’s, was utterly slavish to the most misanthropic sectors of business. His NLRB waged an “unprecedented” attack on workers’ rights. He weakened or eliminated over 125 policies that protected the country’s air, water, and land. His budgets savagely slashed benefits for low-income Americans, continuing a longstanding Republican practice. All this is the exact opposite of protecting the “common good” that postliberals say they value so much.
What about the great “populist” senators Hawley and Vance? They give, at best, tokenistic and rhetorical support to the working class: neither has even cosponsored the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, and Hawley, according to the AFL-CIO, has almost always voted against the interests of workers. Vance, a venture capitalist, finds it much more congenial to spew racist “great replacement” nonsense—an identity politics of the right—and blame those with a low income for their own failures than to actually do anything to help the latter. If this is the record of Republicans who present themselves as pro-worker, it isn’t hard to imagine how bad establishment Republicans are.
Perhaps the greatest crime of the Republican Party is that it is almost rock-solidly opposed to even the mildest proposals to address global warming, which threatens not only working people but all life on earth. The sweltering summer the world has just experienced—the hottest consecutive three months since records began—will likely be seen as a gloriously mild one thirty years from now, when wildfires are raging everywhere, ocean levels are much higher, and whole continents are descending into chaos.
"Perhaps the greatest crime of the Republican Party is that it is almost rock-solidly opposed to even the mildest proposals to address global warming, which threatens not only working people but all life on earth."
The Republican plan to address the coming cataclysms is…to make them worse. Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for the next Republican president, calls for “shredding regulations to curb greenhouse gas pollution from cars, oil and gas wells and power plants, dismantling almost every clean energy program in the federal government and boosting the production of fossil fuels.” The inadequate Inflation Reduction Act, which provides $370 billion for investment in clean energy, would be repealed. Allied nations would be encouraged to use more fossil fuels, and the National Security Council would be forbidden to consider climate change worthy of discussion.
Nihilism on this scale, an explicit embrace of something close to species-suicide by a major political party, is unheard-of in history. It is collective criminal lunacy, worse than Nazism, as Chomsky rightly notes. And yet how many postliberals, how many conservative proponents of the traditional values of family, community, and morality, are strongly speaking out against it, against this brazen threat to all families, communities, and morality itself? Their priority, rather, is to denounce “critical race theory” and keep out immigrants, as if that will heal the country.
Postliberals claim to favor policies that support marriage and family, singling out for praise Hungary’s initiatives to offer paid leave for parents and financial incentives for three or more children. They also support government spending on large infrastructure projects. So why didn’t they aggressively lobby Congress to pass Biden’s original Build Back Better bill in 2021? This bill, which couldn’t pass because of Republican opposition, would have been an immense boon to working families through its investments in childcare and preschool, paid family and medical leave, community college, child tax credits, physical infrastructure, affordable housing, health care, and environmental protection. It was the most ambitious measure in generations to repair the social compact and encourage family formation. Not a single Republican supported it.
"[The 2021 Build Back Better bill] was the most ambitious measure in generations to repair the social compact and encourage family formation. Not a single Republican supported it."
It is hard to imagine that any party has ever been more committed to destroying families than the Republican, yet the self-proclaimed defenders of family values aim their ire at Democrats. However bad Democrats are, they are the party responsible for the New Deal, for Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, for the almost-passed Build Back Better bill, for Biden’s NLRB that is as supportive of unions as Trump’s was hostile towards them. We should recognize, then, a perhaps unpalatable truth: since Republicans will never do a single thing opposed to the interests of the billionaire class, the only hope for the United States is to keep them out of power at the same time as popular movements are pushing Democrats to the left. Had the Democratic Party won a few more seats in the Senate in 2020, transformative laws on voting rights, union organizing, family welfare, and environmental protection that were passed in the House might have been enacted. It was a tragic missed opportunity, but, with the defeat of Republicans and the election of leftists, such opportunities can appear again.
Postliberals can contribute positively to politics, but only if they follow the recent example of one of their own: Sohrab Ahmari, who has written an impressive book on corporate America’s plunder of the working class, entitled Tyranny, Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—And What to Do About It. Ahmari still seems to have some illusory hope regarding the likes of Hawley, Vance, and Marco Rubio, who wouldn’t be in the Republican Party if they really wanted to help people. (Token populist moves shore up their voting base.) But at least Ahmari has apparently realized that the battle against liberal identity politics is less important than the battle for a left-wing economic agenda—and in fact that the right-wing crusade against wokeness sabotages the struggle for workers’ rights and a livable future, since it empowers Republicans.
One hopes that more postliberals will, similarly, come to their senses.
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The Commodification of the Commons Is Killing Us All
Whether it's oil barons, giant utilities, private schools, drug companies, insurance predators, or greedy ranchers who want to use public lands to graze their cows without paying a public fee that would help maintain and restore those lands, the commons are under continuous low-level assault by greed and the neoliberalism that celebrates it.
Apr 14, 2023
Americans used to understand the difference between private and public, between what government should regulate or even administer, and what is appropriately left in the private marketplace.
Ever since the Reagan Revolution, however — as I lay out in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America — even our very lives have become fodder for the buzzsaw of unrestrained raw capitalism controlled by the morbidly rich.
Last week, the nation learned that it’s become a routine practice in the assisted living industry to drain elderly people of their entire life’s savings and then, when Medicaid kicks in at a slightly lower payment level to cover their costs, evict them onto the street.
Old people are, from that industry’s point of view, apparently just another commodity, a thing that can be converted into cash when convenient and disposed of when no longer useful.
Housing prices are exploding across the nation, the result of hedge funds and foreign investors jumping into the single-family residence market to the tune of billions every year.
In 2018, for example, corporations bought 1 out of every 10 homes sold in America and converted them to high-priced rentals: the number has gone up significantly since then.
Housing, an essential for a decent life, is now just another commodity and the commodification of housing and its exploitation as a source of revenue for billionaires and other investors has led to an explosion of homelessness.
The price of food, also essential to human life, is sliding out of the reach of many Americans.
CNN reports that Cal-Maine Foods company, which controls about 20% of the entire United States egg market, has radically increased the price of a dozen eggs from $1.61 to $3.30 over the past year. The result? Revenues and profits have gone up by 109 percent. They claim it’s inflation, but it’s actually price gouging.
Large companies are able to pull this off because of their monopoly power in the marketplace, a situation resulting from Ronald Reagan’s 1983 order to the DOJ, FTC, and SEC to stop enforcing our nation’s antitrust laws.
The result is massive price gouging across dozens of industries because these huge companies no longer face competitive market pricing pressures, although it became a humanitarian crisis when price-gouging moved from consumer products and airfares to food and housing.
Good health has become a commodity that’s exploited by giant corporations and the morbidly rich. A half-million American families are wiped out every year so completely that they must lose everything and declare bankruptcy just because somebody got sick.
The number of health-expense-related bankruptcies in all the other developed countries in the world combined is zero. Yet the United States spends more on “healthcare” than any other country in the world: about 17% of GDP.
Switzerland, Germany, France, Sweden and Japan all average around 11%, and Canada, Denmark, Belgium, Austria, Norway, Netherlands, United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia all come in between 9.3% and 10.5%.
Health insurance premiums right now make up about 22% of all taxable payroll (and don’t even cover all working people), whereas Medicare For All would run an estimated 10% and would cover every man, woman, and child in America.
Electricity has become a necessity for a decent life in modern America, and many other countries see it as part of the commons. Around the world, roughly 71 percent of utilities are owned by “the people” rather than by private, investor-owned for-profit corporations.
In the US, though, the shift to neoliberal “free market” policies that accompanied Reagan’s abandonment of FDR’s Keynesian New Deal policies led, in the 1980s and 1990s, to a massive consolidation of electric generating capacity in the hands of for-profit companies.
Today over half of the electric utilities in America are run as for-profit corporations that put investor returns first before serving their communities (as Texans learned in 2021). Electricity is now just another commodity to make wealthy investors even richer.
Pharmaceuticals have become so effective over the past century that they’re now literally keeping millions of Americans healthy and alive.
But that very necessary nature of them has attracted the hyenas of Wall Street and the investor class, turning pharmaceuticals into just another commodity that can be manipulated to increase profits and the wealth of the investor class.
Drugs like Molnupiravir, the new anti-Covid drug, are developed as part of the commons with taxpayer dollars (a $10 million grant from the Department of Defense and $19 million from the National Institutes of Health) and then turned into a commodity with ever-increasing prices.
Manufacturing cost for Molnupiravir, according to a report from researchers with the Harvard School of Public Health, is around $17.74 for a 5-day course of treatment. Nonetheless, Merck just signed a contract with the federal government to sell 1.7 million treatment courses for the government to distribute to infected people for … wait for it … $712.00 each.
Water is essential to human life, but three years ago it became a commodity traded by CME, the world’s largest futures exchange.
Like with electricity, about half of all public water supplies in America are held by for-profit operations. Prices go up for consumers as profits rise for investors.
Without education it’s difficult to function in society, which is why virtually every other developed nation in the world has free public schools from kindergarten all the way up through PhD level university courses.
But in America, education has become a commodity with private academies and charter schools wiping out public education, and college education is out of the reach of more than half of America’s young people. While teachers and students struggle, student-loan bankers and investors in private schools and colleges are getting richer by the day.
Every one of these items are rightfully part of the commons, the stuff essential to life that’s either administered or heavily regulated by government to protect average citizens.
And while Democrats want to expand the commons, Republicans want to steal and monetize it. It’s really that simple.
It’s why Democrats want to expand infrastructure (part of the commons) and Republicans don’t — the GOP want the commons of things like schools, rail lines, the Post Office, and energy systems entirely billionaire- or corporate-owned.
Some, like libertarian Rand Paul, even think privatizing our fire departments and public roads — turning them all into fee-for-private-service and toll-roads — is the way to go, along with privatizing Medicare and Social Security.
“We the People” should, in their minds, control nothing but the Army and the cops; everything else should be owned by and run for the profit of the elite class that funds them and their political campaigns.
It’s almost entirely absent from our political dialogue, but the issue of who owns the commons and how they’re to be used (and by whom) is at the core of almost all the major debates between Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, and even those advocating democracy versus those trying to expand the American oligarchy.
The commons is the stuff we all use or is necessary to life: the air and water, the public roads and schools, the police and fire departments, the airways that our planes fly over and through which we send radio and TV signals, outer space, and our oceans.
The commons, in aggregate, are one of the major stores of the wealth of a nation.
One of the main reasons people throughout history have established governments is to protect and regulate the commons.
Which explains why wealthy people and corporations are in a constant battle with government, launching massive propaganda campaigns to say the government should be “smaller” and thus less able to protect the commons.
Whether it’s oil barons, giant utilities, private schools, drug companies, insurance predators, or greedy ranchers who want to use public lands to graze their cows without paying a public fee that would help maintain and restore those lands, the commons are under continuous low-level assault by greed and the neoliberalism that celebrates it.
Similarly, polluters from mining companies to frackers to industrial operations increase their profits by dumping their poison into our commons — our air, soil and water — rather than paying the cost of cleaning up their own waste.
History and contemporary studies show that when the commons are administered by the people who use them, particularly healthcare, water, and electric systems, they are better cared for and their benefits are provided to the people at a lower cost.
To stop this, however, the morbidly rich and America’s largest corporations have set out to interrupt that process of government protecting the commons for the people. They’ve done it by seizing government itself.
This is where we must push back, if American democracy is to survive and the American people are to have a quality of life even remotely comparable to other developed democratic nations.
Because one of the principal functions of government is to administer the commons, government itself — and, thus, our vote — is the single most important part of the commons.
Anybody who wants to exploit the commons for their own private profit has to go through government, or corrupt government, in order to make that happen.
This is one of the main reasons that we have laws against bribery of public officials: access to the commons for private exploitation is one of the most visible ways private interests corrupt government. Witness Donald Trump putting a coal lobbyist in charge of the EPA and an oil lobbyist in charge of our public lands running the Interior Department.
Privatizing public lands, public schools, prisons, and other obvious commons-related functions of government is a crime against Democracy.
A much bigger crime, however, is privatizing government itself, or “Shrinking it down to the size where you can drown it in the bathtub,” as K Street lobbyist Grover Norquist proposed some years ago on NPR.
In most developed countries, the healthcare system that is so essential to maintaining a robust and healthy populace is considered a core part of the commons. That notion is foundational to the proposal for Medicare For All here in America.
Depriving people access to the commons of the vote, the vehicle by which we choose government that administers all the rest of the commons, is another crime against both the commons and democracy.
There are currently over 400 pieces of Republican-sponsored legislation in various state legislatures that would make it more difficult for people to vote. An additional 300+ have passed in the past decade.
Almost exclusively, these bills would reduce the ability of young people, elderly people, city-dwellers, and racial minorities to vote, as the Republican Party sees these people as their political enemies.
Denying people access to the commons based on the color of their skin, in fact, is one of the oldest crimes against democracy that has been perpetrated throughout the history of America.
When we understand what the commons is, and have a collective consensus about what is and isn’t appropriately part of it, we can have an informed discussion about the proper role and size of government.
Until we frame our debates around the commons, they will continue to seem like most of our political debates are simply arguments about separate, discrete issues. In fact, most are about how the commons are controlled, protected, and used — and to whose benefit.
We used to teach Civics in America; that mandate pretty much ended when Ronald Reagan put the anti-public-school advocate, Bill Bennett, in charge of the Education Department.
If our republic is to be successful and Americans are to have decent lives, we must stop the commodification of America’s commons and turn power over life’s essentials to We The People.
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A Change in Values to Reverse a Nation in Perilous Decline
We need a value to replace greed as our highest goal. Compassion? Justice? Love of truth? We do not know how to name it precisely, but that does not mean we cannot strive for something that can guide us, other than concerns with money.
Apr 10, 2023
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2021 almost 60 percent of girls encountered depressive sadness, and one-third seriously considered attempting suicide.
Child labor — and particularly labor in dangerous conditions — is rising rapidly among immigrant children.
Child poverty, which had declined as a result of spending programs during the Covid crisis, is again increasing, in the richest nation on earth.
Sometimes we are so concentrated on specific large issues — Ukraine, global warming, racism — that we ignore the largest dimension of what is happening around us: What is happening to our children, who are the nation's future.
The United States of America is in a state of perilous decline. Our young people can no longer cope adequately with the lives they must live; they are increasingly ignored by our laws and corporations; more and more, they seem unworthy of our collective spending.
When large-scale phenomena, indicators of the health of a society, point toward a difficult future, people should pay attention. But we do not.
There has been substantial commentary on why the young are so depressed and hopeless. There are good reasons to believe that contemporary forces have propelled this rising incidence of depression and suicidal thinking: the rise in social media (and its capacity of bullying), the huge and seemingly uncontrollable forces shaping our society and planet (global warming, racism, sexism), the lack of social cohesion (the decreasing importance of schools-as-communities, the erosion of cultural mores about marriage and sexuality), the decline of community values in a time of concern about individual freedoms.
But lost in these discussions of causality is the simple fact of greed. "If it makes money, it is good." Superficial economic values — individual wealth — have subsumed all other values, be they the good of the community, long-term economic growth, or even long-held ethical concerns like honesty, justice, compassion, and generosity. Greed dominates every consideration. The driving force is always whether a policy will make money for someone.
Superficial economic values — individual wealth — have subsumed all other values, be they the good of the community, long-term economic growth, or even long-held ethical concerns like honesty, justice, compassion, and generosity.
And meanwhile, we drift from strength to weakness, from building a future to undermining it.
It is simple and yet difficult to figure out how to respond to the crisis of an America in decline. Simple, in that making decisions that take "health" rather than individual gain into account is, in fact, simple. Difficult, in that we all disagree about how to go about making such decisions.
Should we pass legislation to require that Facebook and TikTok and Twitter do not allow harassment, bullying, and sexism? Should we limit gun sales and aggressively pursue those who push drugs, including pharmaceutical behemoths? Should we really, aggressively, try to prevent global warming and the proliferation of racial and sectarian hatred? Should we rethink schools, and how they work and what values they inculcate in their students?
There is much to prevent us from moving forward. The anti-vax campaigns, with their successes, show that all too often individual autonomy is more important than communal well-being, that the needs of the individual trump the welfare of the community. The move to limit educational initiatives against racism and sexism, now so highlighted in Florida, show that many are unwilling to limit their boundless autonomy in order to provide dignity and justice to their neighbors.
But everywhere, there is greed. "Cui bono?" Who benefits? That, not "justice for all," not "honesty and truth," not "compassion," seems to determine how our society is shaped, and for whom.
I myself am a well-educated intellectual, a former professor and former chief of staff to Sen. Bernie Sanders. And yet I have no answers, no answers. I see an America in savage decline, and have no idea of how we should go forward. Limit corporations and corporate power, yes. Control our carbon emissions, ditto. Help the young recognize and love one another: for sure.
But what we need, most desperately, is a change in values. We need a value to replace greed as our highest goal. Compassion? Justice? Love of truth? We do not know how to name it precisely, but that does not mean we cannot strive for something that can guide us, other than concerns with money.
The young know this, which is why they so frequently are depressed and even suicidal. We care about the wrong things, and there are consequences. There are consequences.
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