Politics & Schools

You've provided a nice description of the time when Republicans were under the sway of fusionism, Cold War-inspired flirtations between conservatives and libertarians. But I am not sure that this "anti-public" attitude defines American conservatism today. I would say it's the exact opposite. There is a huge split between these groups now. The Wall Street Journal reports that "It’s no secret that U.S. conservatives and big business are falling out. Skepticism on the right toward corporations is at an all-time high. Many within the GOP regard woke capital as the greatest threat to American liberties. In fact, conservatives are rethinking the social role of markets in general. If free enterprise has lost the power to inspire the U.S. right, what’s the alternative?" Guys, please read outside your liberal bubble. Do you really think that the populist right is against trade unions, and buys into all the free market notions? That's simply not the case.

 

The GOP and the populist right, even if we acknowledge a distinction, are both on an aggregate basis - unequivocally against trade unions. There may be a few rare exceptions in high public office, but I’m not aware of one. Long before I switched to education I was in the trades and a chief steward and committeeman for a large union in the energy industry. Served on a labor-management PAC for a Fortune 100 company and dealt with this for years on a professional level.

 

You probably have better insights on this issue due to your particular work experience and the fact that I am located outside of the United States (Poland). I don't doubt that this conservative anti-union sentiment is still a force to be reckoned with in your country, but I don't believe that it will be left unchallenged. There is a huge ideological shift on the conservative side toward what might be referred to as "common good" communitarian principles. I am seeing it all over the place, as I read opinion pieces, watch conservatives debate one another, and just observe the working class base of the conservative movement from afar. That doesn't mean that the libertarian-conservative economic approach will disappear any time soon, but it will definitely have a significant rival on the right side of the political spectrum. Here is just a part of an interview with Oren Cass, who is the executive director of American Compass, an emerging conservative think tank;

"Interviewer: The American conservative movement was born in opposition to the New Deal. Its bedrock think tanks, foundations, and periodicals were bankrolled by industrialists and business owners who had a deeply hostile attitude toward the concept of organized labor. And that viewpoint has been the Republican Party’s dominant one on labor issues for decades. So why do you believe that conservatism and organized labor are not only compatible but complementary? And if that is the case, why have so few American conservatives recognized labor’s virtues?

I don’t think the history that you’ve described is wrong. But I think a major part of that history is that what we call organized labor in this country was itself aligned with the political left. Today, in the private sector, actual organization is so low, a huge share of what big labor actually does is fund left-of-center political campaigns. And so, to the extent that that is what organized labor has meant, I think it’s understandable that the right of center’s view would be that organized labor is undesirable. But I think that it’s really important to separate unions as they are behaving in America today from the concept of organized labor; the concept of workers organizing together and bargaining collectively.

I don’t think that idea necessarily has a partisan bent. And I think, for conservatives in particular, as we look out across a modern landscape at the problems in society, at what we have lost, at what we’re trying to address, I think unions perform many of the exact functions that we believe are missing from this society. And there are conservative strains of thought that have always recognized this. Catholic social teaching has long emphasized worker solidarity in general and the importance of organized labor in particular.

When Senator Rubio spoke about the idea of having a “common good” capitalism, he spoke about an encyclical from the late 1800s. And, of course, even in modern times, in the Cold War context, trade unions in Europe — particularly, behind the Iron Curtain — were a vital form of resistance to communism and a big part of what brought it down.

It’s always funny for me thinking back to the Romney campaign in 2011 and 2012. I mean — for someone in politics going around the country — it was obvious that something was wrong in the industrial economy. But at that point, if you went to economists and said, “Hey what’s going on with China?,” certainly within the right of center, there was just a blanket assertion that free trade is good and so this is working out fine.

Then all of the research on the China shock comes out in 2013, 2014, 2015. And likewise with the deaths of despair and the opioid crisis. On the campaign trail, it was clear this was an issue on the ground. And I think you started to see a lot of conservatives saying to themselves, and to each other, you know, “Wait a minute, this economic paradigm really isn’t working for an awful lot of people, and it is contributing ultimately to exactly the sort of social dysfunction that conservatives want to remedy.” And so I think that has produced this real split between libertarians and conservatives. Both libertarians and conservatives like free markets. I love free markets. But I’m interested in them because of the outcomes they accomplish. And I think they are incredibly contingent institutions that depend on their interaction with all the other institutions in society. So there’s no guarantee that they are going to generate great outcomes by themselves. Whereas libertarians, to a large extent, either just see the free market as an end unto itself, regardless of what it delivers, or else have a kind of absolute faith that the market will deliver good outcomes. But I think both substantively and also in terms of sheer political numbers, the right of center is going to be conservative, not libertarian, at the end of the day. Conservatives just have to develop the vocabulary and the alternative agenda. After outsourcing economic policy to the libertarians for a few decades, I think there was some real atrophy of the muscles there. Part of our project is trying to figure out how to build that back up."

Source: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/09/conservative-case-for-organized-labor.html

 

I have my thoughts on Poland and its "populist conservatives", not relevant here. What IS relevant is how your source quotes Rubio.
It is interesting how Rubio writes a think piece on Rerum Novarum, but here's the thing: Liddle Marco is a sitting US Senator. He could have proposed a pro-union legislation; or, here's a crazy idea: co-sponsor the PRO Act. Given Biden's platform, there could be at least a show of bi-partisan cooperation. But he did no such thing.
Let me be clear: I dislike both corporate greed Conservatives and nativist "populist" Conservatives. Pox on both their houses. But Republican Party is a coalition of both, or how someone phrased it, "con men and cavemen". So far, the con men are running the show, while lying to cavemen by pretending they are "of the same tribe", and by putting down other groups so "their" base feels special. Trump is a special case, both a conman and a caveman; this is the big part of his appeal. This, and the ability to lie without even nominal remorse.

 

Stanislav,

I am not sure whether you’re already familiar with the work of David Goodhart, a British author of left-wing bent. I’ve once witnessed his talk here in Poland and I became fascinated by his analysis of various populist movements. I then found out that the former conservative Prime Minister of Canada (Stephen Harper) was recommending his work. Maybe I’ll just quote a brief sample of his stuff. It attempts to explain the rise of populist sentiment across the West. While Poland definitely has its own internal and history-shaped dynamics, the work uncovers a fair bit about the appeal of these movements in general. But what is particularly important is that it does not caricature the whole phenomenon of conservative populism. I would invite you to check out his last two books. It’s very good stuff, whether you’re conservative, liberal, socialist, or none of these.

Interviewer: You have to define in your words ‘Anywheres’ and ‘Somewheres’ for Samtiden’s readers. To what extent are Somewheres equivalent to those who have recently been sucked up by the populist movements and those who were in favour of Brexit? To what extent are Anywheres synonymous with supporters of cosmopolitanism, globalism, multiculturalism?

Yes, of course; I have already used the terms a few times, but let me define them more clearly. The main value divide in our society is between the 20 to 25 per cent of the population I call the Anywheres (the people who see the world from Anywhere), who are well educated and mobile and tend to favour openness, autonomy, fluidity – and a larger group of people (about 50 per cent of the population) I call the Somewheres (the people who see the world from Somewhere), who are less well educated, more rooted and value security/familiarity, and place a much greater emphasis on group attachments (local, ethnic, national) than the Anywheres.

Anywheres are generally comfortable with social change because they have so-called ‘achieved identities’ a sense of yourself derived from your educational and career achievements which allows you to fit in pretty much anywhere. Whereas Somewheres have ’ascribed identities’ based more on place or group which means that your identity can be more easily discomforted by rapid social change.

This sounds like a very binary distinction but there is a big in-betweener group of about 25 per cent of the population and there is a great variety of both Anywheres and Somewheres. It is important to remember that Anywheres are not just the metropolitan or cosmopolitan elites; they are around one quarter of the population and many of them have quite mainstream lives and beliefs. Though there is a sub-set of more extreme Anywheres I call the Global Villagers (about 5 per cent of the population) and there is also a group of more extreme Somewheres I call Hard Authoritarians (about 5 to 7 per cent of the population).

It is important to note that I have invented the labels but I have not invented the value groups. The divides play out somewhat differently in different countries, and they are fuzzy at the edges and change over time but in the UK they are plainly there to see in the opinion and value surveys such as the British Social Attitudes Survey. The differences overlap to some extent with social class but are distinct.

Why has the divide emerged so strongly in recent times? First, the greater importance of socio-cultural politics. Socio-economic politics and the old left/right division remain important but are increasingly eclipsed by the ‘security and identity’ issues. Second, the rapid growth in the number of Anywheres, driven by the expansion of higher education, has unbalanced the system. Anywheres have become too dominant as I argued above. All the main political parties (apart from the populists) are dominated by Anywhere priorities and assumptions and most of the policy agenda too, at least in Britain.

Populism is the reaction to liberal Anywhere overreach. Most but not all of those who voted for Brexit are probably best described as Somewheres. The task of politics in the next generation is to find a new settlement between these two legitimate worldviews, the two halves of humanity’s political soul.

Source: https://www.eurozine.com/questioning-diversity/

His next book “the Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st century” goes further…

In this timely and original analysis, David Goodhart divides human aptitudes into three: Head (cognitive), Hand (manual and craft) and Heart (caring, emotional). It's common sense that a good society needs to recognise the value of all three, but in recent decades they have got badly out of kilter. Cognitive ability has become the gold standard of human esteem. The cognitive class now shapes society largely in its own interests, by prioritizing the knowledge economy, ever-expanding higher education and shaping the very idea of a successful life. To put it bluntly: smart people have become too powerful.

 

I am not a Harper fan. Not a huge Trudeau fan, either, but Harper is still a notch or three below.

Sure. Based on what this "populism" usually turns out to be in practice, I must ask this: how much of this stuff is a long-winded excuse for "blame the migrant" politics? And "blame intels"? In other words, just good old-fashioned authoritarianism?

And, again, most of this stuff in US is just smokescreen for greed.

 

Stephen Harper struck me as a pretty cold, miserable human being. I read once that he didn't want to be involved in a posthumous award ceremony, with the father of a young man in military service, who had been killed on duty in Afghanistan. Reason: "You know this guy (the father) is an Iggy (Liberal - M. Ignatieff) supporter!" I believe his staff finally convinced him to meet and stand with the bereaved father. Shameful, that he had to be persuaded.

I'll never forget how "From the Harper Government" appeared on my pension and tax refund cheques - a sort of "Blessings from the Great While Father in Ottawa" condescension. Saner people in Federal Government put a stop to it - a question of legality.

How did I, personally, manage to stand the man for nine years? Apathy can be quite useful. It will get you through a LOT.

 

Yeah, I was surprised at that. Since when did that guy ever slap his name on someone else's work and claim credit?