A search for social solidarity in a ‘radcon’ world

When America Was Great

The Fighting Faith of Postwar Liberalism

Kevin Mattson

Routledge: 240 pp., $26

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Politics and Passion

Toward a More Egalitarian Liberalism

Michael Walzer

Yale University Press: 208 pp., $25

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Reason

Why Liberals Will Win the Battle for America

Robert B. Reich

Alfred A. Knopf: 272 pp., $24

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Nine years ago, in “Democracy’s Discontent,” the political philosopher Michael J. Sandel threw down a challenge to welfare-state liberalism -- the big, bureaucratic kind that, since the 1930s, has distributed rights and subsidies to make a corporate, consumer society work more fairly. Big-government liberalism lifted the elderly from grinding poverty and broke racist barriers, Sandel acknowledged. But as it threw out the bathwater of authoritarian, racist provincialism, it also dumped the baby of civic obligation, emphasizing rights over responsibilities and material security over the moral rewards of work.

By treating Americans as clients or consumers, liberals stopped arousing them as citizens to build a civic and moral life. And as hunger for civic belonging grows, Sandel warned, “Fundamentalists rush in where liberals fear to tread.”

Have they ever: In November, conservative moralists helped defeat big-government liberalism in favor of the Bush administration’s moral and religious agenda. But new books by Kevin Mattson, Michael Walzer and Robert B. Reich insist that wise social-welfare policies can strengthen a republic against the civic costs of rampant corporate “free” marketeering that conservative patriotic moralism barely disguises. All three agree that no belated display of religiosity or embrace of the war on terrorism can vindicate the liberal faith that fought its way up in labor and civil-rights movements against enduring injustices.

Yet there are lessons to be learned from conservatives, some of them propounded by liberal civic-republicans like Sandel, the late social historian Christopher Lasch and Lasch’s student David Chappel. Mattson, Walzer and Reich differ but do make some concessions to conservative wisdom.

Historian Mattson’s “When America Was Great” insists that liberal thinker-activists of the 1950s did understand Americans’ need for civic faith and even a national greatness based on civic as well as military strengths. He profiles historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., whose 1949 book “The Vital Center” proclaimed that liberal freedom “must become, in [Oliver Wendell] Holmes’ phrase, ‘a fighting faith’ ”; John Kenneth Galbraith, the economist and President Kennedy’s ambassador to India; Reinhold Niebuhr, a theologian and public activist; and James Wechsler, who edited the crusading liberal New York Post before Rupert Murdoch turned that tabloid into a daily reminder that Australia was founded as a penal colony. Sketches on Harper’s columnist and conservationist Bernard DeVoto and Southern historian C. Vann Woodward complete Mattson’s cast of liberal tribunes who fought both communism and McCarthyism when many thought the center wouldn’t hold.

At times hagiographical and polemical, the book means to rescue liberalism from taunts of the New Left and from conservative charges of “un-American” activity. Mattson insists that his subjects “showed how a passionate commitment to virtues and ideals could be balanced against complexity ... and irony.” As he tells it, Galbraith’s condemnations of “private opulence and public squalor” and Schlesinger’s calls (as an advisor to Kennedy) to supplement Keynesian materialist redistribution with a more “qualitative” liberalism anticipated warnings such as Sandel’s that civic trust must not be reduced to an empty tangle of contracts and rights.

Mattson admits that his heroes sometimes mistook their own convictions for reality, as when Schlesinger announced “cycles of history” and Galbraith touted “countervailing powers” against capitalist overreach. More privileged than populist, they sometimes forgot Niebuhr’s Calvinist caution that liberals can’t rely on presidential charisma and legal strategies alone. They need to stay grounded in the pluralism and compromises with provincial bosses that sustained President Franklin D. Roosevelt. “I don’t see liberalism as a story of ... selling out” to such parochialism, Mattson insists, but as “a public philosophy that demands citizens think of themselves as members of a national community committed to greatness.” But if liberalism didn’t sell out, why didn’t it “sell” politically?

One answer is that liberalism lost its provincial footholds. In “Politics and Passion,” Walzer -- like Sandel a political theorist -- incorporates a “communitarian correction” to the big-government liberalism he sometimes champions as co-editor of the democratic-socialist quarterly Dissent. He examines liberalism’s accommodations to a multiculturalism in which the liberal state tolerates and even supports racialist and fundamentalist communities, even some that are authoritarian and irrational by liberal standards. Walzer ends up straddling the horns of this dilemma: A healthy liberalism can transmute the dark strengths of parochial rural backwaters and urban ethnic enclaves into the civic visions of leaders such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. or Mario Cuomo.

Walzer reminds us that before such liberal champions can rise, parochial wellsprings do have to nourish them. He wants the liberal state to help these communities against what he dubs, “in Chinese fashion, the Four Mobilities” of market capitalism that uproot them: the geographical, social, familial and political disruptions that tend to make us all think, “Everyone for himself!”

I’d call Walzer’s four mobilities the four horsemen of a market-driven apocalypse that’s dissolving all solidarities, parochial and otherwise. And I wonder whether his state-supported multiculturalism, which would fund even some groups that oppress women and freethinkers, would be any better than national-service programs such as those that the New Deal made liberating. Walzer argues, against universalist theorists such as John Rawls, that a democracy’s contentious daily life can’t be as fair-minded and deliberative as a jury or a Civilian Conservation Corps camp; we have to bargain with the communities we find. Walzer sometimes achieves a dry-eyed, Madisonian clarity about this tension between civic nationalism and cultural pluralism, but he also calls it “a dilemma I can’t cut my way through.”

Less parsing and more passionate, Robert B. Reich touts a civic nationalism that he hopes can stem social dissolution. A veteran public tribune who was President Clinton’s first secretary of Labor, he calls this preelection book “Reason,” but, like Mattson and Walzer, warns: “It’s not enough to have reason on our side. To win, liberals also need fire in our bellies.”

Reich’s moral outrage at economic exploitation (and his wishful past-tense references to the Bush administration) place this manifesto among many recent left-liberal efforts to “tell the people” they’re being had. He assails “radcons” (radical conservatives) who’d “rather police bedrooms than boardrooms.” His hopefulness stirs memories of the poet Shelley’s appeal to workers to “Shake off your chains like dew / You are many, they are few.”

Why didn’t this left-facing liberalism do better in November? That may have something to do with how Reich and others adapt the word “liberal.” While Walzer frankly calls himself a social democrat seeking “a more egalitarian liberalism,” Reich’s folksy, populist pitch is elliptical about his own leftist origins and dreams. Yet he knows that fellow “liberals” such as Tony Coelho, California’s former Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman, caved in to boardroom largess long ago.

Reich is evasive in a different way in saying he wants “liberals” to win. He rebukes raging “radcons” with a warning from 18th century conservative philosopher Edmund Burke that “when the subject of demolition and construction is not brick and timber, but sentient beings, multitudes may be rendered miserable.... Rage and frenzy will pull down more in an hour than ... foresight can build up in a hundred years.” But doesn’t this also condemn liberal urban renewal and busing schemes and the New Left’s “politics of turmoil” and “Days of Rage”? Reich might answer that liberal sins don’t rival conservative ones, but this doesn’t offset liberals’ “Coelho cave-in” to corporate capitalism that most of them want to ameliorate, not restructure.

In fairness, Reich has held and run for public office as a liberal Democrat -- unlike William Greider, Robert Kuttner and Thomas Frank, who’ve also written strong “tell the people” books. But they too haven’t persuaded “the people” to shake off market liberalism’s dewy chains. They all condemn radcons’ use of “bedroom” moralism, which deflects attention away from the dark, republican resentments stirring beneath our consumer paradise. But the question none of these books answers is how a society atomized by Walzer’s four mobilities can regenerate civic trust so that, for example, there is mutual sacrifice to sustain Social Security. No war or economic debacle will renew such social solidarity unless liberalism as a fighting faith can reach deeper into wellsprings of belonging and belief than these writers and most of us scribblers and pundits have done. *