In the company of educated, politically active Americans from Upper Manhattan to Marin County, from the North Shore to Dupont Circle, in the blogosphere and the coffee house alike, you can find a surfeit of libertarians (left and right), old school conservatives, neo-cons, and liberal democrats. What is very, very hard to find are people who are strongly pro-life, economically progressive, and committed to a foreign policy opposed to preemptive war and other quasi-imperial initiatives. Given the parameters of contemporary political debate, some may be tempted to say “Of course not.”
But why not? It’s not as enough this particular set of positions commits its supporters to some unpardonable intellectual incoherence– in fact, pro-life convictions, progressive economics, and anti-imperial foreign policy ideas are in all sorts of ways more philosophically coherent than any number of liberal and conservative alternatives. Many liberals believe private businesses should be regulated on moral grounds, except when biotechnology companies are at issue, in which case “science” dictates that whatever can be done should be done, especially when it antagonizes religious people; they also believe the vulnerable should be protected from violence and harm, except the unborn (in some cases, even if they are born). Many conservatives wax lyrical about traditional communities, while deregulated hyper-capitalism displaces or destroys those communities around the world with their fervent support; they talk in sorrowful tones about the sober limits of government’s ability to act effectively in the world (in homage to them, feel free to insert a pompously intoned Samuel Johnson quote here), but are all too often unremitting enthusiasts for an increasingly pervasive surveillance state with gargantuan military budgets pursuing an expanding portfolio of open-ended global security commitments. If these agendas set the standard for political-philosophical coherence, pro-life progressives with sober foreign policy ideas have no need to shrink from argument about the coherence of their own convictions.
The exclusion, or simple disappearance, of this perspective in debate about American politics is all the more surprising because for most of the twentieth century, pro-life economic progressives– who would have been horrified to think of America as an empire– simply were the political mainstream in this country. We’re familiar with at least some of the reasons for the break-up of the electoral coalition that expressed this consensus in the Sixties and Seventies, and obviously all sorts of discrete political and cultural problems and questions and mores have changed since then, in a great number of ways– though clearly not in every way– for the better. But there is no reason why this electoral shift should account for the near-total disappearance of a compelling body of principles for thinking about politics. There is nothing the least bit archival or nostalgic about the following:
Life is not ours to take from conception until natural death. Abortion takes human lives, and no euphemism can change that fact, any more than terms like “enhanced interrogation” can change the fact of torture.
The poor and the vulnerable deserve substantial state support within a free-enterprise system. On broader questions of pay and working conditions, Gilded Age- style social and economic inequalities are undesirable for a host of reasons, and government should take an active role in limiting extreme inequality of income and opportunity (like the inequalities that existed before the New Deal– and exist again today).
An American Empire can only be sustained by a steady erosion of republican freedom and democratic vitality. The Bush Administration’s recourse to a torrent of signing statements, extraordinary rendition, CIA prisons, what appear to be largely rigged military tribunals, and warrantless eavesdropping are one side of this erosion; another was the decision to say “We’re going to be at war indefinitely; now all of you go out and shop until your credit is maxed out. Don’t worry your little brains about it.” America’s foreign policy should also not be out-sourced to well-connected private contractors, because those contractors are not accountable to the American people in anything like the way that government employees and elected officials are accountable. The demands of flourishing public life in a democracy are not compatible with preemptive war, torture, and rampant corporate profiteering, combined with more or less overt appeals to public apathy.
In education and in culture, every effort should be made to affirm both the courage and principle of those who have defended the vulnerable and the oppressed by “telling truth to power” and also those who use various kinds of power well and responsibly. Too often, within the world of education in particular, the cultural left is only interested in the former, driven by a kind of gnostic refusal to think about how to use power well in complex and difficult circumstances. For this reason, contemporary high-schoolers apparently hold in higher esteem and know more about those who have resisted injustice from without than those who in power who helped to rectify those injustices from within, often at great cost.
As in many other areas of culture and politics, the cultural left finds its own distortions inverted rather than rectified– and often subsequently exceeded– by the labors of neo-conservatives, who tend to systematically downplay the outsider champions of the marginal and the weak as alternately self-indulgent, ineffective and overexposed, despite the abundant evidence that is often the the marginal moralist that clears a path for righting wrongs in practical and direct terms (think E.D. Morel, among others).
These political principles have been ignored for too long, above all as an integrated program for thinking about American politics and culture. The question now is: what might give these combined principles greater attention and prominence?
