So what's a neoliberal these days?
Columnist, author, radio personality and "neoliberal extraordinaire" Matt Miller has been making waves around the blogosphere recently, subbing for Maureen Dowd in the New York Times and urging Dems to look at the "big picture" on social security reform. At the American Prospect they hate him; at the New Republic they love him. All is as it should be, no?
Well, no. In fact it sort of ties in to the larger debate going on -- led by TAP's Matt Yglesias -- over what exactly the center and the left are fighting about these days. It's not the minimum wage or, arguably, tax reform. Of course there was the War in Iraq; but the invasion of Baghdad has already happened and can't be undone; few liberal pundits are seriously advocating that the U.S. just cut and run and recriminations, while valid, can only go so far in defining a debate. Future military campaigns will likely lead to renewed stress between Democratic hawks and doves but there is a fairly broad consensus on the mainstream left, at least that UN-sanctioned humanitarian intervention, like those in the Balkans under Clinton, were and are an overall positive thing. Of course there is the matter of trade -- the real 900 pound gorilla in centre-left feud and the most jarring Clintonian legacy -- but, while the DLC doesn't seem to have a position on CAFTA yet, the House New Democrat Coalition has rejected it for providing insufficient labour protections -- a position that liberals share. Liberals and centrists probably have sharply divergent views on the importance of new social spending vs. deficit reduction in the federal budget, but so long as the Dems are out of power, such arguments are intangible; for now at least, both MoveOn and NDN seem equally appalled by out-of-control government borrowing. Not a single Democrat in the House or Senate voted for the prolifagate 2005 budget.
So what, in this current climate, makes a neoliberal different from a liberal? Specifically, what makes Matt Miller a neoliberal? Miller apparently thinks that Kerry was insufficiently liberal as a candidate. He endorses lefty Bruce Ackerman's "Patriot Dollars" campaign-finance reform scheme (an intriguing but extremely radical idea). These are not the arguments of a triangulator (and no neoliberal would cop to supporting triangulation for its own sake). In fact Miller constantly urges Democrats to think big, just like, say, Arianna Huffington did during the 2004 campaign.
I think the difference currently comes down to two factors.
First, the issue is not so much to what Miller (for instance) supports but who he supports. Most good neoliberals, for instance, think Kerry was a lousy candidate. So does Miller. Most good neoliberals think Dean would have been worse: Miller, check (although Steve Clemons is an interesting exception here). And of course, all good neoliberals are heavy into the Clinton hagiography. Miller is no exception. He also has a special place in his heart, and his column, for Oklahoma's young conservative-intellectual, Brad Carson. By contrast, liberals are (somewhat) more likely to defend Kerry's candidacy, and Dean's before him. Barbara Boxer, more than Brad Carson, gets their juices flowing.
Policy differences come in to play here of course, but only in a passive, implicit way -- in that the candidates preferred by neoliberals and liberals respectively are likely to implement different types of policies, to play different sorts of politics. Everybody knows that Amercian progressivism would look very different in a country run by Russ Feingold than in one run by Joe Lieberman. The arguments are most clearly manifested in the debate over the Clinton legacy: the liberal ambivolence that contrasts so markedly with the view of the New Democrats who still regard Clinton as their natural leader and justification for being. Again, however, as with the war, these differences of opinion are played out in assessing the past. That doesn't make them unimportant, but it limits their relevance in defining a current debate over the party's future.
The second, bigger, neoliberal identifier is tone. These days, neoliberals like Miller -- but also Easterbrook and Noah and Lind and Halstead and even the granddaddy of the movement, Charles Peters -- remain vocal supporters of bipartisanship, or perhaps, more accurately, of a big-thinking centrist nonpartisanship. To some extent that means imposing a sort of political moral equivalence on the two parties because, while Dems may be more virtuous, a better vehicle to work with, party politics in general with its coalitions of narrowly partisan interest groups, is something to be transcended, replaced with a broadly attractive "radical centrism" that is both egalitarian and sensitive to the needs of cultural conservatives. This is certainly not a new goal for the neoliberals -- it's essentially the same realist/idealist philosophy underlying Peters' "Neoliberal's Manifesto". What has changed since 1983, however, is the plausibility of the implicit argument that a majority contingent of Americans, whether they nominally align with either the conservatives or the liberals, are open to, even aching for, such a fusion, and that the all we need is the perfect centrist politician to deliver it.
And that seems to me the crux of the current liberal-neoliberal debate and why, though I'm a neoliberal at heart, I see why centrists feel pushed back on their heels and why we deserve it. In short, the neoliberals need to update their arguments to recapture the pragmatism that made the movement valuable. The strongest neoliberal arguments were never so much about their desired outcomes (which, with the possible exceptions of globalization and cultural control issues, were broadly similar to liberal outcomes) but about how exactly Democrats should go about reaching those outcomes, framing their arguments, reaching a majority of voters and breaking through the shibelleths of the right and left that constrained politics and political choices along narrow lines: strong military, permissive society, freedom of choice. They were political arguments, so naturally the neoliberals talked about politics, and politicians, as much or more than they talked about policy. In the wake of the 1988 election, at the moment when the neoliberals were waxing in importance, the Washington Monthly's conclusion was that we should have nominated Babbitt. The New Republic's conclusion was that we should have nominated Gore. The DLC's famous 1989 manifesto, The Politics of Evasion, while it lacked the acerbic contempt of the org's more recent output (see, for instance, the spittle-flecked "Why Gore Lost" issue of Blueprint), was a pretty sharp, empirical criticism of the limitations of Dukakis' "liberalism". But the argument wasn't really that Dukakis was too far left, but rather that he seemed too far left. The point was to rethink, reframe, win by reaching beyond the base in a way that conformed to progressive principles. And it was a powerful point, the embrace of the art of the possible along with a social vision that could accomodate it.
These days, things are rather different. In fact, there's been something close to role-reversal between center and left, in the degree of its connectedness, credibility. For neoliberals, the social vision remains, but the political pragmatism, the seeming straightforwardness in dealing with hard truths, that buttressed that social vision is lacking. The DLC attests to its success by pointing to Clinton's two elections, but by doing so it tends to whitewash much of what actually transpired, and didn't transpire, during the Clinton 90s, ignoring the uncomfortable facts that, whatever Clinton's considerable merits, the world that existed at the end of his decade in power don't look much like the world Miller envisions in "The Two Percent Solution", or, for that matter, what Peters advocated in "A Neoliberal's Manifesto". Looking forward, the neoliberals urge the Democrats to embrace big thinking, but the politicians they support haven't, and won't, think big. That's largely because the political centrism they advocate is, in large part, about consensus. And in a conservative country, that consensus is likely to be messy, frustrating, piecemeal -- warding off tax cuts, fighting deregulation, winning a Senate seat in Oklahoma. That's fine, of course, completely defencible and important. But it needs to be acknowledged. Divorced from the discipline of electoral and political reality that it once imposed on interest group liberalism, current neoliberal arguments look utopian, sanctimonious, even hypocritical.
So it's not surprising that today's liberals react to Miller and Easterbrook and Friedman and Kaus with exasperation. Liberals argue, convincingly, that the modern Right is simply beyond reason: that the Delays, and Norquists and Cheneys of the world, are fundamentally uninterested in the things that liberals and neoliberals want: equality, meritocracy, tolerance, community. In our current political climate, skewed increasingly to the right, there is no more room for "radical centrism" than there is for "radical liberalism"; looking at the "big picture" must come in second to defending past gains, and the way to do that is through partisanship. Robert Kuttner made this argument really well in his review of Miller's "The Two Percent Solution"; others have made similar criticism of Lind & Halstead's "The Radical Center". And in their rejection of the notion of good faith on the Right, of a "radical centrist" world we're unlikely to see any time soon, it's the liberals, the Kuttners and Reichs and Sam Rosenfelds, who are really carrying the current mantle of hard-nosed, reality-based, of-this-moment politics.
And that's something for the Matt Millers of the world to consider.
Well, no. In fact it sort of ties in to the larger debate going on -- led by TAP's Matt Yglesias -- over what exactly the center and the left are fighting about these days. It's not the minimum wage or, arguably, tax reform. Of course there was the War in Iraq; but the invasion of Baghdad has already happened and can't be undone; few liberal pundits are seriously advocating that the U.S. just cut and run and recriminations, while valid, can only go so far in defining a debate. Future military campaigns will likely lead to renewed stress between Democratic hawks and doves but there is a fairly broad consensus on the mainstream left, at least that UN-sanctioned humanitarian intervention, like those in the Balkans under Clinton, were and are an overall positive thing. Of course there is the matter of trade -- the real 900 pound gorilla in centre-left feud and the most jarring Clintonian legacy -- but, while the DLC doesn't seem to have a position on CAFTA yet, the House New Democrat Coalition has rejected it for providing insufficient labour protections -- a position that liberals share. Liberals and centrists probably have sharply divergent views on the importance of new social spending vs. deficit reduction in the federal budget, but so long as the Dems are out of power, such arguments are intangible; for now at least, both MoveOn and NDN seem equally appalled by out-of-control government borrowing. Not a single Democrat in the House or Senate voted for the prolifagate 2005 budget.
So what, in this current climate, makes a neoliberal different from a liberal? Specifically, what makes Matt Miller a neoliberal? Miller apparently thinks that Kerry was insufficiently liberal as a candidate. He endorses lefty Bruce Ackerman's "Patriot Dollars" campaign-finance reform scheme (an intriguing but extremely radical idea). These are not the arguments of a triangulator (and no neoliberal would cop to supporting triangulation for its own sake). In fact Miller constantly urges Democrats to think big, just like, say, Arianna Huffington did during the 2004 campaign.
I think the difference currently comes down to two factors.
First, the issue is not so much to what Miller (for instance) supports but who he supports. Most good neoliberals, for instance, think Kerry was a lousy candidate. So does Miller. Most good neoliberals think Dean would have been worse: Miller, check (although Steve Clemons is an interesting exception here). And of course, all good neoliberals are heavy into the Clinton hagiography. Miller is no exception. He also has a special place in his heart, and his column, for Oklahoma's young conservative-intellectual, Brad Carson. By contrast, liberals are (somewhat) more likely to defend Kerry's candidacy, and Dean's before him. Barbara Boxer, more than Brad Carson, gets their juices flowing.
Policy differences come in to play here of course, but only in a passive, implicit way -- in that the candidates preferred by neoliberals and liberals respectively are likely to implement different types of policies, to play different sorts of politics. Everybody knows that Amercian progressivism would look very different in a country run by Russ Feingold than in one run by Joe Lieberman. The arguments are most clearly manifested in the debate over the Clinton legacy: the liberal ambivolence that contrasts so markedly with the view of the New Democrats who still regard Clinton as their natural leader and justification for being. Again, however, as with the war, these differences of opinion are played out in assessing the past. That doesn't make them unimportant, but it limits their relevance in defining a current debate over the party's future.
The second, bigger, neoliberal identifier is tone. These days, neoliberals like Miller -- but also Easterbrook and Noah and Lind and Halstead and even the granddaddy of the movement, Charles Peters -- remain vocal supporters of bipartisanship, or perhaps, more accurately, of a big-thinking centrist nonpartisanship. To some extent that means imposing a sort of political moral equivalence on the two parties because, while Dems may be more virtuous, a better vehicle to work with, party politics in general with its coalitions of narrowly partisan interest groups, is something to be transcended, replaced with a broadly attractive "radical centrism" that is both egalitarian and sensitive to the needs of cultural conservatives. This is certainly not a new goal for the neoliberals -- it's essentially the same realist/idealist philosophy underlying Peters' "Neoliberal's Manifesto". What has changed since 1983, however, is the plausibility of the implicit argument that a majority contingent of Americans, whether they nominally align with either the conservatives or the liberals, are open to, even aching for, such a fusion, and that the all we need is the perfect centrist politician to deliver it.
And that seems to me the crux of the current liberal-neoliberal debate and why, though I'm a neoliberal at heart, I see why centrists feel pushed back on their heels and why we deserve it. In short, the neoliberals need to update their arguments to recapture the pragmatism that made the movement valuable. The strongest neoliberal arguments were never so much about their desired outcomes (which, with the possible exceptions of globalization and cultural control issues, were broadly similar to liberal outcomes) but about how exactly Democrats should go about reaching those outcomes, framing their arguments, reaching a majority of voters and breaking through the shibelleths of the right and left that constrained politics and political choices along narrow lines: strong military, permissive society, freedom of choice. They were political arguments, so naturally the neoliberals talked about politics, and politicians, as much or more than they talked about policy. In the wake of the 1988 election, at the moment when the neoliberals were waxing in importance, the Washington Monthly's conclusion was that we should have nominated Babbitt. The New Republic's conclusion was that we should have nominated Gore. The DLC's famous 1989 manifesto, The Politics of Evasion, while it lacked the acerbic contempt of the org's more recent output (see, for instance, the spittle-flecked "Why Gore Lost" issue of Blueprint), was a pretty sharp, empirical criticism of the limitations of Dukakis' "liberalism". But the argument wasn't really that Dukakis was too far left, but rather that he seemed too far left. The point was to rethink, reframe, win by reaching beyond the base in a way that conformed to progressive principles. And it was a powerful point, the embrace of the art of the possible along with a social vision that could accomodate it.
These days, things are rather different. In fact, there's been something close to role-reversal between center and left, in the degree of its connectedness, credibility. For neoliberals, the social vision remains, but the political pragmatism, the seeming straightforwardness in dealing with hard truths, that buttressed that social vision is lacking. The DLC attests to its success by pointing to Clinton's two elections, but by doing so it tends to whitewash much of what actually transpired, and didn't transpire, during the Clinton 90s, ignoring the uncomfortable facts that, whatever Clinton's considerable merits, the world that existed at the end of his decade in power don't look much like the world Miller envisions in "The Two Percent Solution", or, for that matter, what Peters advocated in "A Neoliberal's Manifesto". Looking forward, the neoliberals urge the Democrats to embrace big thinking, but the politicians they support haven't, and won't, think big. That's largely because the political centrism they advocate is, in large part, about consensus. And in a conservative country, that consensus is likely to be messy, frustrating, piecemeal -- warding off tax cuts, fighting deregulation, winning a Senate seat in Oklahoma. That's fine, of course, completely defencible and important. But it needs to be acknowledged. Divorced from the discipline of electoral and political reality that it once imposed on interest group liberalism, current neoliberal arguments look utopian, sanctimonious, even hypocritical.
So it's not surprising that today's liberals react to Miller and Easterbrook and Friedman and Kaus with exasperation. Liberals argue, convincingly, that the modern Right is simply beyond reason: that the Delays, and Norquists and Cheneys of the world, are fundamentally uninterested in the things that liberals and neoliberals want: equality, meritocracy, tolerance, community. In our current political climate, skewed increasingly to the right, there is no more room for "radical centrism" than there is for "radical liberalism"; looking at the "big picture" must come in second to defending past gains, and the way to do that is through partisanship. Robert Kuttner made this argument really well in his review of Miller's "The Two Percent Solution"; others have made similar criticism of Lind & Halstead's "The Radical Center". And in their rejection of the notion of good faith on the Right, of a "radical centrist" world we're unlikely to see any time soon, it's the liberals, the Kuttners and Reichs and Sam Rosenfelds, who are really carrying the current mantle of hard-nosed, reality-based, of-this-moment politics.
And that's something for the Matt Millers of the world to consider.
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