By Wade Lee Hudson
In his review of several books written by Catholic “post-liberals,” Mark Lilla expresses sympathy for their “rejection of the intellectual foundations of modern liberal individualism” and its “idealization of autonomy,” which “has worked as an acid eating away at the deepest cultural foundations inherited from the Christian era” (such as “love your neighbor”).
Read MoreBy Wade Lee Hudson
In her magnificent magnum opus, Justice by Means of Democracy, Danielle Allen affirms egalitarianism and criticizes domination. She proposes a “power-sharing liberalism” rooted in “difference without domination” and applies her analysis to the entire society: politics, the economy, and society. Nevertheless, her analysis falls short.
Allen affirms the development of
citizens’ ability to adopt habits of non-domination in their ordinary interactions with one another.… This would permit us to establish a virtuous cycle linking political, social, and economic domains in support of the kind of human flourishing that rests on autonomy, both private and public.
This attention to interpersonal relationships by a political scientist is rare and vital.
She defines difference without domination as social patterns that don’t involve any group or individual controlling another. She rightly asserts that protecting private autonomy is as important as safeguarding political liberties.
Allen recognizes the necessity to submit to legitimate limits “that come from laws, shared cultural practices, social norms, and organizational protocols.” These hierarchies, however, must “avoid an arbitrary or rights-violating exercise of power.”
Read MoreBy Wade Lee Hudson
Barack Obama's presidential campaigns showed we can create a large national movement based on local teams focused on achievable goals. Instead of relying solely on top-down leadership, these campaigns enabled ordinary citizens to collaborate as equals. We can learn from these efforts to build a movement to transform the world with compassion and justice one demand at a time.
Read MoreBy Wade Lee Hudson
In her April 14, 2023 interview on the Ezra Klein Show, Danielle Allen (whose new book is Justice by Means of Democracy) addresses how society might use modern technology to develop and strengthen “deliberative democracy structures that we have not yet set up.” Klein calls voting “a pretty thin level of participation” and envisions methods to enable people to “really be part of steering the ship of state.”
Klein argues, “You could have things like citizens assemblies and meetings, and in other ways, you could have a thicker kind of participation and advisory role for the public than you currently do.” Modern deliberative digital tools can enhance democracy, which Allen defines as “equal empowerment across a body of free and equal citizens.” She believes, “One of the greatest values of democracy is that together we can be much smarter than we can be as individuals.”
Read MoreNever easy, the relationship between the vaunted political system and economic order appears to be in crisis. New books by historians and economists sound the alarm.
By Jennifer Szalai
The documentary series “Free to Choose,” which aired on public television in 1980 and was hosted by the libertarian economist Milton Friedman, makes for surreal watching nowadays. Even if Ronald Reagan would go on to win the presidential election later that year, it was still a time when capitalism’s most enthusiastic supporters evidently felt the need to win the public over to a vision of free markets and minimal government. Today’s billionaire donors may be able to funnel money to their favored candidates without even bothering to pay lip service to American democracy, but the corporate funders of “Free to Choose” set out to make their case.
They had an enormous audience: The 15 million viewers who watched the first episode saw an avuncular Friedman (diminutive and smiling), leaning casually against a chair in a Chinatown sweatshop (noisy and crowded), surrounded by women pushing fabric through clattering sewing machines. “They are like my mother,” Friedman said, gesturing at the Asian women in the room. She had worked in a factory too, after immigrating as a 14-year-old from Austria-Hungary in the late 19th century. Friedman explained that these low-wage garment workers weren’t being exploited; they were gaining a foothold in the American land of plenty. The camera then cut to a tray of juicy steaks.
Read MoreMason: The word “identity” keeps coming up, and this is a really crucial part of it. And remember that we have research about intergroup conflict, right? Don’t look at this as, like, a logical disagreement situation. We’re not disagreeing on what kind of tax structure we should have. We’re not just disagreeing about the role of the federal government in American society. What we’re disagreeing about is increasingly the basic status differences between groups of people that have existed in America for a very long time. One of the things that Nathan Kalmoe and I found in our forthcoming book is that if you look at Democrats and Republicans who really, really hate each other and call each other evil and say the other party is a threat to the United States, the best predictor of that is how they think about the traditional social hierarchy.
Read MoreBy Wade Lee Hudson
Thus far, the activist organization that comes closest to fulfilling Systemopedia’s vision is East Point Peace Academy. The progress they’ve made organizing a national network of like-minded small teams is particularly encouraging.
However, ambiguities in their website content raise two questions: 1) East Point, might you clarify your written commitments to more fully affirm everyone’s essential equality? 2) Might you invite your supporters to collaboratively plan and convene a workshop to explore how to advance your principles, with the understanding that the participants will be invited to plan and convene the next workshop?
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Systemic
An Interview
The February 5, 2020 episode of the Ezra Klein Show, “Jill Lepore on what I get wrong,” consists of Jill Lepore’s interview of Klein concerning his just-released book, Why We’re Polarized. Lepore is a Harvard historian and New Yorker contributor. The interview includes the following exchange:
JL: In some big structural way in the book there’s a quite notable absence of villains. I wonder if you could talk about that as the explanation you came to, as a narrative choice. Why no villains?EK: … I want to understand people and people in general as following incentives. And this is very deep in me. It is tempermental. It goes way beyond this book. I don’t trust people’s stories of why they do things almost at all.
I’m not a huge believer in individual agency. Not in a narrow sense. Obviously if Donald Trump had not run for President American history would have been different. If Barack Obama had not given a speech in 2004, American political history would have been different. But I don’t think that if Mitch McConnell was beaten in Kentucky a couple of years ago that the current Republican leadership would be dramatically different. I don’t think if Newt Gingrich hadn’t appeared…. I’m very skeptical about the Newt Gingrichification of polarization literature, which is like, this one guy came from Georgia and he came up with all these new…. Maybe it would have happened a couple of years after him, but people were playing out the incentives of the system in a reasonably clear way that I think was going to happen in one way or another.
So there are obviously people I think of as villains in the sense that even as they are following their incentives their values are values that I find toxic. They are racist or they are willing to abandon the poor to no health insurance and so on. So there are people whose values I find quite grotesque.
Even so what I wanted to try to do here, the kind of book I’m writing, and I say this at the beginning, is I’m trying to tell you how a machine works.
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