The American People and the Politics of American Identity

by Will Wilkinson on September 1, 2010

I commented on Jonah Goldberg’s most recent LA Times column at Democracy in America, but not on the part where he mentions me:

There’s been a lot of debate , largely in the context of the so-called ground zero mosque, about the evils of American identity. Will Wilkinson, an influential liberal-libertarian writer, sees opposition to the proposed mosque as a reprehensible expression of the “cult of American identity” and the “zaniness of right identity politics.” The upshot of his argument is that it is preposterous for Americans to see themselves as a people.

Well, Americans certainly aren’t “a people” in the sense that the Japanese, the Kurds, or the Jews are a people. There is no American ethnicity; the U.S. is a resolutely multicultural (and multilingual) country. The usual idea is that American identity is creedal, or organized around a distinctively American set of ideas and value.s Even the State Department says so! This piece on American identity on a government propaganda website summarizes its message like so:

Since the United States was founded in the 18thcentury, Americans have defined themselves not by their racial, religious, and ethnic identity but by their common values and belief in individual freedom.

The trouble is that even when there is widespread agreement on nominally common values, conceptions of those values vary wildly.

Take the belief in individual freedom. Some Americans have understood individual freedom as freedom from all non-defensive physical force and fraud. Some Americans have understood individual freedom as implying roughly equal voice in the democratic process, which straightforwardly requires the redistribution of resources and state regulation of spending on political speech. Some Americans have understood individual freedom as a condition of robust autonomy or self-governance that requires universal government-financed education and a minimum of material resources necessary to ensure that individuals are able actually to exercise their liberty and are not caged-in by necessity. And none of these are the conception of individual liberty that prevailed among the Founders. Anyway, there was heated disagreement among the Founders, too. Some them took the ideal of individual freedom to be consistent with chattel slavery while others correctly found human bondage obviously at odds with liberty. Some defended a robust conception of freedom of conscience while others wished to ban the practice of certain religions for freedom’s sake. And so on.

Not only do appeals to the values of the Founders fail to settle anything,  many such appeals are simply ignorant of what this or that Founder actually believed. Consider the State Department piece by Michael Jay Friedman. He writes:

Franklin instructed the would-be immigrant:

People do not inquire concerning a Stranger, What is he? but, What can he do? If he has any useful Art, he is welcome; and if he exercises it, and behaves well, he will be respected by all that know him.

Franklin’s remark was grounded in first-hand observation: As early as 1750, German immigrants outnumbered English stock in his home colony of Pennsylvania. The newcomers were perceived as industrious and law-abiding. Skillful farmers, they improved the land and stimulated economic growth.

So Franklin was, like, Welcome Germans! Except he totally wasn’t. Check this out:

Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.

Sound familiar? Change a few words and Ben sounds like he’s campaigning for sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona. So which is the relevant American value: tolerant openness to industrious foreigners or xenophobic hostility to swarthy, unassimilable, babbling invaders? (Yes, Franklin thought Germans were swarthy!)

If you ask me, both are time-honored American values. But that suggests its misguided to appeal to the American creed as the basis of the American identity of the American people. There are multiple conceptions of American creed equally consistent with American history. That’s why movements to glorify, elevate, and honor a particular conception of American identity based on a particular conception of the American creed necessarily  marginalize equally or more historically plausible conceptions and therefore tend to suggest that citizens who favor those conceptions are less or even un-American. It seems pretty clear to me that this is exactly how the conservative politics of American identity works.

So, turning back to Jonah’s passage, I guess I don’t think it’s entirely preposterous for Americans to see themselves as a people. But any conception of the American creed sufficiently general to encompass most widespread American conceptions of individual freedom, equality, tolerance and so on is going to be so general that it will do very little to distinguish American identity from, say, Canadian identity. And that’s clearly not what Glenn Beck or the staff of National Review have in mind when they talk about American values, promote a conception of American identity, or encourage Americans to see themselves as a people. (I’m not sure if they’d consider my nominalist view of the American people–that the American people is the set of Americans–better or worse than that.)

The conservative conception of American identity is so selective and so specific that it tends to suggest to its adherents that many (maybe even most!) Americans aren’t real Americans, or are Americans who betray real American ideals. Birther and Muslim Obama memes crudely reify the logical upshot of the right’s fixation on its favored version of American identity. Most conservatives don’t need to believe that Obama is literally an un-American non-Christian. They’re just content to nod along with Glenn Beck when he implies, or outright asserts, that a guy who adheres to a mundane version of liberal politics slightly to the right of the typical “This American Life” fan is hell-bent on destroying the special Americaness of America.

{ 16 comments }

Keep It Real, Tom Paine!

by Will Wilkinson on August 28, 2010

Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice

Synopsis:

Proposed system

Paine proposed a detailed plan to tax property owners to pay for the needs of the poor, which could be considered as the precursor of the modern idea of citizen’s income or basic income. The money would be raised by taxing all direct inheritances at 10%, and “indirect” inheritances – those not going to close relations – at a somewhat higher rate; this would, he estimated, raise around £5,700,000 per year in England.

Around two-thirds of the fund would be spent on pension payments of £10 per year to every person over the age of fifty, which Paine had taken as his average adult life expectancy, with most of the remainder allocated to making fixed payments of £15 to every man and woman on reaching the age of twenty-one, legal majority. The small remainder would then be able to be used for paying pensions to “the lame and blind”. For context, the average weekly wage of an agricultural labourer was around 9 shillings, which would mean an annual income of about £23 for an able-bodied man working throughout the year.

Philosophical background

The work is based on the contention that in the state of nature, “the earth, in its natural uncultivated state… was the common property of the human race”; the concept of private ownership arose as a necessary result of the development of agriculture, since it was impossible to distinguish the possession of improvements to the land from the possession of the land itself. Thus Paine views private property as necessary, but that the basic needs of all humanity must be provided for by those with property, who have originally taken it from the general public. This in some sense is their “payment” to non-property holders for the right to hold private property.

{ 20 comments }

Argumentum ad un-Americanum

by Will Wilkinson on August 28, 2010

This Forbes column by Yaron Brook and Don Watkins arguing that the government should stop subsidizing homeownership was skipping along predictably but just fine until…

When the government encourages homeownership, the story goes, it strengthens individuals and communities and thereby fosters the American Dream.

They’re wrong. A government crusade to promote homeownership is un-American.

America’s distinction is that it was the first nation founded on the principle that you have a right to pursue your own happiness without government interference. But the government’s homeownership crusade means it gets to decide how you should live, and stick-and-carrot you into living that way.

Say what? Government programs to promote homeownership are American as flag-flavored eagle pie. The first clue is that there are so many goddamn subsidies for homeownership in democratic America. The second clue is that these subsidies are so goddamn popular with Americans, probably because American culture really does relentlessly assault Americans with the American idea that owning an American house is an essential American part of the best and most authentic American way of American living.

Ah! But the American quiddity, which may be divined by peering through a magickal gem at a parchment reproduction of the Bill of Rights, is that you have the right to pursue happiness without government interference! This no doubt explains the government crusade, extending back to the Founding and beyond, to evict natives from their land and give it away to colonists. One could go on and on and on and on enumerating the ways in which government in America from the moment of its inception reserved the right to interfere with the individual’s pursuit of happiness, but that would be tedious. Let me  recommend to Messrs Brook and Watkins a trip to the Hucklesford County Historical Society to glance at the local Founding-era penalties for miscegenation, public cursing, and what have you. Suffice it to say that the state has been stick-and-carroting us since the dawn of the Republic, that the idea was never that there would be no stick-and-carroting, and that the idea of a stick-and-carrot free mode of government has yet to catch on, despite the strenuous efforts of our authors’ favorite lady novelist.

It would be correct to argue that refusing to promote homeownership is distinctly un-American, but  because an idea’s Americanness or lack thereof has no bearing whatsoever on its merit, we should not allow a tidbit about American folkways distract us from the fact that subsidizing homeownership has no persuasive justification and does more harm than good.

C’mon Objectivists!

{ 27 comments }

“The Stupid Response to X Caused Y” Does Not Mean “X Caused Y”

by Will Wilkinson on August 27, 2010

Rather than go another round on The Economist blogs about inequality and the financial crisis, let me respond to Ryan Avent’s latest here. We both like this piece by Raghuram Rajan, but we evidently think it has rather different implications.

Rajan says that mechanisms such as skill-biased technical change have left lower and middle income households feeling insecure, creating political demand that something be done about it. The sensible thing to have done would have been to  to improve the quality of education available to lower and middle-income Americans in order to enable them to gain more remunerative skills. However, Rajan notes that “it is hard to improve the quality of education, for improvement requires real and effective policy change in an area where too many vested interests favor the status quo.” He continues: “Moreover, any change will require years to take effect, and therefore will not address the electorate’s current anxiety. Thus, politicians have looked for other, quicker ways to mollify their constituents.” And then we get to credit expansion, especially easy credit for lower-income Americans to buy houses. And this led to disaster.

Ryan wants to interpret this as a tale about the danger of a high level of income inequality:

What Mr Rajan is really getting at is the fact that income inequality is politically destabilising and will often, through that channel, generate economic crisis. There is no world in which much of the population perceives itself to be falling behind and we all nonetheless go on our merry way. Inequality, as such, threatens the stability of the economy, and it should be activitely addressed in positive ways or it will be opportunistically addressed in negative ways.

I’d ask Ryan to read the Rajan piece again. He really isn’t getting at the fact that income inequality is politically destabilizing. He’s getting at the fact that poorly chosen political responses to the anxieties bred by the failure of our educational system to keep up with rising demand for increasingly high-skilled workers have been massively economically destabilizing. Rajan  notes that “too many vested interests in favor of the status quo” in part explain why we never got the necessary kind of educational reform. So, if we read a bit into this, he’s saying that an important part of the story is that the teacher’s unions and relatively well-to-do families already satisfied with the current educational dispensation made the best reforms impossible, and thus forced politicians to seek other responses to the economic anxieties of lower and middle-income households. How is this is a story about how the level of inequality as such (i.e., as an abstract property of the national pattern of income incapable of ever entering into anyone’s experience) threatens the stability of the economy? A significantly higher top marginal tax rate would have done a lot to reduce income inequality without having done anything at all to allay the anxiety and sense of stagnation produced by the failure of our educational system to keep pace with the demand for high-skilled workers.  If the revenue collected from higher top tax rates was spent in idiotic ways–subsidizing houses even more heavily for people with bad  credit, say–then the fact that inequality had been brought down would have done nothing to prevent the bonanza of bad loans that ended up, with the help of incompetent Wall Street risk analysts, bringing down the house. Skill-biased technical change is by no means a bad thing, but it does cause dissatisfaction and more inequality than necessary if the system fails to adjust for it in the right way. Attempting to adjust for it in stupid ways creates bad results. That’s the moral of the story.

{ 22 comments }

How Reason Imperils Our Fake Libertarian Heritage

by Will Wilkinson on August 25, 2010

The National Review‘s Daniel Foster has some odd ideas about my political philosophy:

American libertarianism is queer in that it can admit both rationalists and conservatives in the Oakeshottian senses. Reading Wilkinson it becomes clear that he is a classic rationalist. He derives his libertarianism a priori — a set of propositions on a chalkboard. Contrast with, for example, the average tea partier, who gets his as a uniquely American historical inheritance — a full-blooded tradition. Like most rationalists, Wilkinson thinks this is not just silly and sentimental but pernicious (one of his biggest bugaboos is patriotism).

And so, holding the same set of basic principles, but with different reasons, sends these two kinds of libertarians in two very different directions: the rationalists off toward liberaltarianism; the conservatives toward the classic Buckley-National Review fusionism.

First, I don’t believe in a priori anything. My view is very similar to my one-time grad advisor Michael Devitt in his aptly titled paper, “There Is No A Priori.” There is only one way of knowing: the empirical way!

Second, my moral psychology is resolutely sentimentalist. I am a devotee of Smith and Hume, and strongly influenced by contemporary sentimentalists like Jonathan Haidt. I subscribe to a broadly Hayekian account of cultural evolution (updated by the likes of Boyd and Richerson). Like Hayek, I believe it is exceedingly difficult, if at all possible, to articulate the full set of norms, conventions, and embodied rules upon which observed patterns of social interaction depend.

Where I definitely part ways with the conservative is that I think it is both possible and desirable to critically evaluate our “full-bodied tradition” — to identity inherited habits of feeling, such as patriotism, that have generally pernicious consequences, and to argue against them on those grounds. (Perhaps Foster should consider that I’m hard on patriotism not because I don’t appreciate the overriding power of moral emotion, but because I do.) This evaluation isn’t done “on a chalkboard,” but through a delicate, messy, and indeterminate process of seeking wide reflective equilibrium — the process of detecting and eliminating internal inconsistencies within our traditional moral judgments, and then detecting and eliminating inconsistencies between our refined judgments and the well-established findings of the psychological, social, and other relevant sciences.

Foster is mistaken in the claim that there are “two kinds of libertarian,” one deriving libertarian conclusions from evidence-free armchair cogitation, the others simply discovering a ready-made libertarianism in the trunk of their “uniquely American historical inheritance.” There is no form of libertarianism that simply falls out of our cultural endowment, as American moral culture has never been remotely libertarian. The average Tea Partier is, like the average voter, a collection of reflexes, prejudices, resentments, and demands that add up to no coherent philosophy at all. The heritage of the progressive managerial social insurance state is no less an authentically American one than is the heritage of Jim Crow apartheid, the heritage of utopian collectivist frontier communes, or the heritage of founding-era republican liberty for propertied males. It is the business of conservative elites to fabricate a narrative and ideology of authentic Americanism, and to convince the right-leaning public that this is what their particular concatenation of impulses really comes to, in order to give it some strategically useful partisan shape and motivation.

Reasoned public deliberation, passionate rhetorical jousting, and bullshit heritage mongering are all among the selection pressures that shape the course of cultural evolution. Foster’s worry about my sort of libertarianism isn’t really that it’s a “rationalist” ivory tower abstraction remote from the lived experience of the allegedly natively libertarianish American tradition. It’s that the application of any rational scrutiny (libertarian or not) to the efforts of conservative elites to construct bullshit American-heritage narratives tends to get in the way of elite conservative political aspirations.

{ 50 comments }

The Liberaltarian Diaspora

by Will Wilkinson on August 23, 2010

Of Matt Yglesias’s sensible approach to regulation, Conor Friederdorf writes:

Being someone who understands progressives, Mr. Yglesias makes the case for deregulation in terms likely to appeal to his colleagues on the left. What would be nice is if more people on the right could be similarly persuasive. Of course, capitalizing on common ground or winning converts on individual issues requires an accurate understanding of what motivates people with different ideologies, so it isn’t surprising that a Yglesias fan invoked Cato in that Tweet. It’s a place where several staffers are daily deepening our understanding of where liberals and libertarians can work together.

I’m glad Conor recognizes the value of the work some of us at Cato have been doing to make productive liberal-libertarian dialogue and collaboration possible. Alas, all good things must come to an end.

Via the Kauffman Foundation

Brink Lindsey Joins Kauffman Foundation as Senior Scholar

Economic researcher and author to contribute to Kauffman’s growing body of work on firm formation and economic growth

KANSAS CITY, Mo., Aug. 23, 2010 – The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation today announced that Brink Lindsey has joined the Foundation as a senior scholar in research and policy. Lindsey will use his expertise in international trade, immigration, globalization and economic development to identify the structural reforms needed to revive entrepreneurial innovation, firm formation and job creation in the wake of the Great Recession.

…

As for me, my official last day at Cato is September 15. Expect more blogging and sketches.

{ 64 comments }

Sack Up America

by Will Wilkinson on August 21, 2010

In my first post for The Economist‘s Democracy in America blog, I riff off this smart Andrew Potter op-ed and conclude:

[T]he hubbub over the Park51 project has revealed the anxiety of an American public increasingly convinced that theirs is a culture too fragile for unfettered religious freedom. One would think that the proud denizens of the home of the brave would behave rather more bravely, and would not need Canadian columnists to tell them to grow spines.

In this excellent post (via @tylercowen), Aziz Poonawalla lays out an argument very similar to Potter’s:

[I]t really does boil down to an issue not just of religious freedom but also a means of putting into practice the very American values which Al Qaeda seeks to deny. A mosque in NYC, near to the site of 9-11, is not a “monument to the attackers” (a pernicious claim, which puts collective responsibility for the terrorist attacks on all Muslim Americans) but actually a repudiation of the Al Qaeda ideology. What they want is to make Muslim Americans reject American identity and follow their call to jihad – explicitly, as Anwar al Awlaki has repeatedly stated, and even succeeded (ref the cases of Fort Hood and Times Square). An American mosque, built for American Muslims, is literally the antithesis of what the enemy most desires.

The bigotry unleashed by this whole affair plays perfectly into our enemies’ hands.

These colors don’t run mosques out of town!

[Update: The feed for Democracy in America is here. My byline, W.W. | Iowa City, should be obvious enough.]

{ 9 comments }

And it’s taking forever

by Will Wilkinson on August 17, 2010

Most days I probably wouldn’t find this performance so affecting, but most days recently haven’t been most days.

I love this album.

Via Balloon Juice.

{ 6 comments }

Mosque Shmosque

by Will Wilkinson on August 17, 2010

Gene Healy says:

All this posturing is getting tiresome. The “mosque” controversy isn’t about property rights or religious freedom. It’s a bogus issue seized by the GOP establishment to distract the rank-and-file from the party’s reluctance to shrink government.

And concludes:

The establishment Right wants to play the Tea Party movement for suckers. It remains to be seen whether they’ll play along.

I don’t find this believable. This idiotic foofaraw could be a distraction only if the GOP rank-and-file actually cared more about the size of government than the cultural politics of American identity. But they don’t. It’s not even close. American conservatism is a movement consumed by protecting and asserting a certain fabricated conception of the traditional American way of life against imaginary enemies. Support for small government is no more than a bullet point on the Right’s “What We Believe” cheat sheet, mouthed at opportune moments. I approve of what Gene’s trying to do here rhetorically, but the fact is that complaining about Muslims and keeping holy the memory of 9/11 and Ground Zero — the legitimizing altar of aggressive American imperialism —  is a direct manifestation of contemporary conservatism’s essence. If it’s not the twitchily bellicose identity politics of self-righteous middle-class white Americans, it’s a distraction. Gene graciously lets the rank-and-file off the hook by blaming all this tiresome dim-witted chest-thumping on “the GOP establishment.” But I’m afraid in this case the establishment is just nervously along for the ride. Nicely asking the Right to rejoin libertarians on the old fusionist common ground would have a point if there were more than talking points in common, but I’m afraid that these days a few shared tropes is all the fusionist overlap amounts to.

{ 27 comments }

Sloth

by Will Wilkinson on August 16, 2010

So, I am going to be doing a lot more sketching and drawing in the future. What I’d like to know is whether you’d like me to post drawings here or on a separate blog — maybe a Tumblr of Posterous sort of thing. Please vote!


[Update: At about 100 votes, it's breaking about 60/40 for "this blog." I think I'll start a Tumblr sort of thing for sketches, which I'll automatically export here. However, I assume most of the 40% are voting to not see drawings more than voting to see a special drawing blog. I'll see if I can rig a feed that excludes the sketch category.]

{ 5 comments }

Quentin Skinner on the Concept of Liberty

August 16, 2010

I found this Quentin Skinner lecture on concepts of liberty delivered several years ago at the University of Sydney interesting and illuminating. Is Skinner’s Liberty before Liberalism worth reading?

Read the full article →

Brink Lindsey’s Five Books on Liberalism & Conservatism

August 16, 2010

This Jon Rauch interview of Brink Lindsey at Five Books covers Mill, Hayek, Rand, among others, and is full of liberaltarian goodness.

Read the full article →

Bradley Manning’s Moral Clarity

August 16, 2010

In case you haven’t seen it, here’s my latest column at The Week about Bradley Manning and Wikileaks. I’ve got to say that I’ve been pretty disappointed with the response to the Manning/Wikileaks affair from a pretty good number of libertarians. I think it’s obvious that Wikileaks screwed up pretty badly in not redacting names. [...]

Read the full article →

Alternatives to Birthright Citizenship

August 10, 2010

This issue really does have an interesting flavor of American exceptionalism to it. Other than our neighbors, Canada and Mexico, the U.S. is the only OECD country with a pure jus soli citizenship rule. It seems that a great deal of confusion is caused by the fact that even thinky Americans are by and large [...]

Read the full article →

Liberalism and Birthright Citizenship

August 9, 2010

My argument that ending birthright citizenship could, over the medium-to-long term, help facilitate the sensible integration of North American labor markets has not gone over well with my friends on the left. Part of it, I’m afraid, is just knee-jerk opposition to policies their political enemies favor. Of course, the fact that bad people with [...]

Read the full article →

Thanks Gipper!

August 4, 2010

Great post by David Boaz rebutting the idea that Judge Vaughn Walker, the guy who struck down California’s Proposition 8 today, is some kind of left-wing judicial activist enemy of the rule of law hell-bent on trashing “the foundational values of civilization itself.” In other words, this “liberal San Francisco judge” was recommended by Ed [...]

Read the full article →

Michael Bloomberg vs. the Cult of American Identity

August 3, 2010

Hero of the day: Michael Bloomberg! The simple fact is, this building is private property, and the owners have a right to use the building as a house of worship, and the government has no right whatsoever to deny that right. And if it were tried, the courts would almost certainly strike it down as [...]

Read the full article →

The Limits of Experimentation in Policy Analysis

August 3, 2010

Jim Manzi’s City Journal piece on “What Social Science Does–and Doesn’t–Know” is excellent. Jim’s bottom line: [W]hat do we know from the social-science experiments that we have already conducted? After reviewing experiments not just in criminology but also in welfare-program design, education, and other fields, I propose that three lessons emerge consistently from them. First, [...]

Read the full article →

Bart Wilson on Fairness

August 3, 2010

I lost $60 dollars in that lab because TV’s Wayne Rogers misunderstood the rules of the ultimatum game.

Read the full article →

Countercyclical Policy Doesn’t Matter as Long as It’s Not Crazy

July 30, 2010

The following email exchange between Bill Easterly and Carmen Reinhardt has me toying with the thought… Bill to Carmen: What do you think of the argument that your results suggest that financial crises are really not so enormously damaging in the long run, since you have confirmed they have happened repeatedly in both rich and [...]

Read the full article →

Vernon Smith on What to Do

July 19, 2010

Our best shot at increasing employment and output is to reduce business taxes and the cost of creating new start-up companies. Don’t subsidize them; just reduce their taxes even as they become larger; also reduce any unnecessary impediments to their formation. This is strongly indicated by the business dynamics program of the Bureau of Census and [...]

Read the full article →

A Nudge Is Just A Nudge

July 15, 2010

From Eric Voeten at the Monkey Cage: George Loewenstein and Peter Ubel have an interesting op-ed in this morning’s New York Times arguing that insights from behavioral economics have been abused by policy makers in order to avoid hard choices. [...] Loewenstein and Ubel’s op-ed is mostly aimed at warning people that behavioral solutions are no panacea. [...]

Read the full article →

Claude Fischer on The Spirit Level

July 13, 2010

Claude Fischer offers an exceedingly generous and therefore pretty damning review of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level in The Boston Review. Fischer appears to think that their analysis goes wrong at every step, yet he pulls his punches, apparently finding the upshot of their analysis too congenial to really put his weight [...]

Read the full article →

So Hayek Basically Had Ezra Klein’s Views on Health Care, Right?

July 11, 2010

Dylan Matthews, apparently a bit surprised that Hayek favored of a scheme of social insurance, offers Ezra Klein’s readers an excerpt, emphasis added, from The Road to Serfdom: There is no reason why, in a society which has reached the general level of wealth ours has, the first kind of security should not be guaranteed [...]

Read the full article →

Schumpeter Weighs In

July 8, 2010

The Economist‘s “Schumpeter” columnist, Adrian Wooldridge, endorses Brink Lindsey’s criticisms of Arthur Brooks’ The Battle, and adds one of his own: The metaphor of a culture war sticks in Mr Lindsay’s craw, for two good reasons. The first is that it overstates the tension between the market and the state. You can have a big state [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries