Some further thoughts inspired by comments on this post.
1. I don’t think that progressives would be comfortable with a narrative that says that things used to be better. That is much more of a conservative trope. Also, as an aside, Karl Marx himself said that capitalism saved people from the idiocy of rural life.
2. Instead, I think that progressives have two complaints about capitalism. First, it creates winners and losers. This leads to the winners becoming oppressors and the losers becoming oppressed.
3. The other narrative of capitalism is that it is unorganized and unplanned. It requires oversight in order to correct market failures. I think that this narrative does not fit in with the language of oppressor-oppressed.
4. I think that Randazzo have the libertarian narrative for capitalism correct. It is consistent with freedom and its success demonstrates the virtues of a free society.
5. I think that one of the commenters on the post suggests a reasonable conservative narrative. However, I think that conservatives feel some ambivalence toward capitalism. It is a civilizing force primarily because it rewards effort, individual responsibility, and self-discipline. However, it is an anti-civilizing force to the extent that it promotes greed and elevates materialism over values that ought to be higher.
For Progressive there are three kinds of people: the oppressed, the oppressor, and the friends of the oppressed, who might be called Guardians. The Guardians harm the oppressor and help the oppressed. They also manage the society/economy for the “good of all.” Harming the oppressor is just a subset of the work of the Guardians. Not much has changed since Plato.
Neo-conservatives offered “two cheers” for capitalism. It runs counter to the virtues needed for a good society though it does produce material abundance, hence, two cheers. The search for an alternative to religion to provide the needed virtues led ultimately to the Iraq crusade. War raises people above their petty concerns and selfishness; they live for something larger.
The alternatives to liberal and neoconservative Progessivism are traditional conservatism (living for the larger transcendence) and libertarianism (live for yourself plus bargaining to create society).
“Oppressed” is part of the issue. The other issue is lack of agency. In Progressive-land, there are three groups:
Good educated white people: They have morality and agency.
Whales/minorities/gays: They have morality, but no agency.
Evil educated white people: They have agency, but no morality.
It is the duty of the GEWP to seize power by any means necessary, because the gay minority whales don’t know what they really want, and the EEWP are evil.
This is correct. It describes precisely the idea behind the
“vanguard Party”, i.e., the organization that is to raise the consciousness of the masses. I’ve described the phenomenon as the ‘doctrine of secret socialism’: http://trotskyschildren.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-doctrine-of-secret-socialism.html
If winning means exploiting market failures then attempts to end them will meet with opposition, such as regulations on big banks, carbon taxes on coal and oil, freedom to loot and pollute, using power to favor their own interests, but these are as much negative as positive acts, prospering at the expense of others as well as to the benefit of the direct parties. Power can be oppressive, though not necessarily its main objective.
#3 might qualify OvsO in a roundabout way. One might believe that people are basically equal. So unequal outcomes is prima facie evidence of economic injustice. So the correction must come after the fact. Where exactly the total precision control impulse comes from I’m not sure- maybe it falls under “progress.” It also seems like “progress” should overlap with civ-vs-barb. Why doesn’t it? Maybe because civ-vs-barb does not make the equality assumption and tends towards a “separating sheep from goats” aspect. Maybe it us just hard to ascribe credit between institutions vs individuals.
As an aside, paging Tabarrok, I’m listening to NPR right now on tax and fine debtors prisoners.
I’ve been trying to think of a narrative to sell progressives on capitalism based on home economics:
“My fellow Americans (blah blah blah)… It’s time we stopped thinking about how our lives are affected by venture capitalists and start thinking about how our lives themselves are a capitalist venture. Each and every night, Americans struggling to do the right thing in raising their families come to realize that they are not only limited by the resources available to them in their account balances, but are very much limited in the time afforded to them to do the raising. At the end of each working day, parents eagerly return home and often find themselves in the situation of having more challenges of parenting than they have time to do them. Laundry. Homework. Dinner. After-School sports. It goes on. Conceivably, there are 6 hours of work to do, with three hours to do it. And how do Americans respond? Do we address each item on our to-do list with equal importance and devote equal time seeing them through only to 50% completion? Most certainly not. I, like many of you, decide that I will see my children through to the completion of their homework, and resign myself to getting a second day of use out of my socks.
Our country works in much the same way. There are many people in our economy who are “second-day socks”. Jobs/chores whose reward for completion simply don’t merit the attention paid.”
I’ve obviously still got a lot to iron out, but I think you see where it’s headed.
Good choice on the socks over undies 😉
Maybe social conservatives have reservations about greed having anti-civilzing effects but the conservatives I’m familiar with support the free market because it requires discipline and work ethic to succeed. Of course, they don’t advocate laissez faire like libertarians or Objectivists do. They are OK with some regulations and some welfare unlike libertarians and Objectivists. I think they follow a different (dare I use the word?) narrative than the later two groups. The bottom line might be that all three groups agree that capitalism liberates people per Haidt’s paper but they argue for capitalism coming from different angles. Libertarians and Objectivists take a more individualist approach while conservatives believe it benefits most of us as collectively.
I’ve been realizing lately the specter of chaos that haunts our lives. I wonder if conservatives have a greater sensitivity to chaos that makes them emphasize institutions and in-group fidelities.
For conservatives, an additional draw of capitalism is that it in fact works. Other systems of resource allotment have repeatedly become corrupt, inefficient, and very harmful to the people subjected to them.
Arnold,
I’ve been anxiously awaiting your post explaining the compulsory vaccination debates using the three-axis model. I think the blogosphere needs it.