Pluralism and Protests

Politics is not a philosophy seminar. My recent discussion of respectful pluralist engagement with disagreement can make it seem as if all politics takes place between a few relatively equal, well-off people sitting in a room and chatting about an issue before coming to an agreement or at least respectfully agreeing to disagree.

In many ways this is the ideal of political dialogue sketched by proponents of deliberative democracy. It is a powerful ideal and there are many, many settings when we should strive for this. In addition, respect for fellow humans is always important. But politics will not always resemble a calm discussion between equals. And sometimes disagreements are irresolvable. As Madison recognized in the Federalist Papers, disagreement and freedom of speech go together. Furthermore, the desire for total agreement and the elimination of dissent is a totalitarian drive that has no place in a democratic polity. This is why it is necessary to briefly consider the power and value of protest.

In the face of persistent injustice protest is justified, even necessary. Peaceful protests serve many different purposes and accomplish a diverse range of goals. Protests can motivate citizens to get involved and stay involved in politics. They can put pressure on elected officials and on those considering a run in the future, as well as targeting the behavior of corporations and other powerful private actors. They are a demonstration of popular strength and power. They can also change the discourse surrounding an issue—see the potential impacts the Tea Party movement (in 2010-2011) and then the Occupy Wall Street Movement (in 2011-2012) had on the discourse surrounding jobs, debt, and inequality. We have seen similar impacts with the more recent movement against police brutality.

Peaceful, democratic protests also have an intrinsic value. Protests empower the citizens who participate, increasing their sense of efficacy, as social scientists say. At their best they are an act of direct democracy that is deeply rewarding in its own right—ordinary citizens coming together collectively with one another to state their positions and make demands. Anyone who has been at a protest feels the collective democratic power of the people. Protesters are also frequently innovative, often engaging in symbolic forms of protest (like die-ins to protest a war). Protests at their most powerful, such as during the civil rights movement, dramatize an issue, making it more poignant and salient, which gets back to the first part, protests at their best help to mobilize and persuade people to think and act differently. 

Of course there are questions of both principle and strategy to consider when protesting. At their worst protests could make a cause less popular. And however intrinsically fulfilling they may be, we generally don’t protest with the goal of making our cause less likely to win. So protesters, particularly those organizing and leading them, must take these considerations into account. There are many different goals to balance when organizing.

But, as the Berrigan brothers discussed in the context of Vietnam War protests, we can neither fully predict nor control the future. So there is a case to be made that in the face of an unjust cause (say, the invasion of Iraq) citizens have an obligation to protest without any certainty that their protest will make a difference. 

Protests and other forms of direct action are also necessary because much of the world is defined by closed doors and unequal power relations. Many economic and political institutions don’t provide citizens with direct access to decision-making procedures. When decision-making is not democratic, like at a corporate board meeting, the only options we have are various outsider actions. When we don’t have a seat at the deliberative table, so to speak, we can turn to protests to draw attention to an issue and pressure decision-makers from the outside. As I discuss in Democratic Knowledge: Why There Are No Political Experts, protests have a legitimate and significant role to play in all polities, including deeply democratic ones.

A Note on Pluralism

Dating back to the 1950s there have been debates within the social sciences regarding the nature and distribution of power within American society. Political scientist Robert Dahl, for instance, published influential research arguing that American politics did not have a cohesive ruling class but was instead guided by a changing, amorphous plurality of interest groups that formed around various issues before disbanding. In other words, there was no ruling class but rather a relatively equal set of distinct groups competing for temporary success on various issues. Sociologist C. Wright Mills, on the other hand, famously argued that there was an enduring, cohesive ruling elite dominated by the interconnections between the corporate sector, the military-industrial complex, and the executive branch. In a similar vein G. William Domhoff argued that the ruling class in America is formed around the interconnections in the upper echelons of the corporate world, particularly through interlocking boards of directors.

The competing sides in this debate were sometimes referred to as pluralists and elite theorists. The pluralists, like Dahl, were describing and defending a reality that they took to be a reasonable approximation of democratic ideals. The elite theorists, like Mills and Domhoff, were describing and criticizing a reality that they saw failing to live up to democratic ideals. In an important sense both sides agreed that America could and should live up to its best democratic ideals; they disagreed on whether it did. These pluralists and elite theorists are thus distinct from the elitists I so often criticize, who oppose efforts to make America more democratic.

These debates were and are important. Recent research by Benjamin Gilens and Martin Page provides some evidence that, at least in contemporary America, the elite theorists’ diagnosis may be correct. Specifically, they found that when the preferences of poor, middle-class, and wealthy Americans differ, whichever policy is preferred by the wealthy gets enacted. More broadly, wealthy individuals and the big business lobby have a hugely disproportionate influence on public policy.

In what follows, however, I will not be using the term pluralism in this sense. Drawing on the work of political theorist William Connolly, I want to draw out some of his insights into pluralism as a way of being in a democratic polity. For Connolly this is less about political structures than it is about the ethos necessary for citizens in a healthy democratic society and how to engage with disagreement.

Living in a democracy means we have to recognize what John Rawls calls the “fact of pluralism.” How to live in a society defined by sometimes irresolvable disagreement is what Connolly is concerned with, particularly how to respectfully engage those with whom one disagrees.

This essay is motivated by my reflection on writers from all political perspectives who best embody these values, including non-professionals on facebook, message boards, and blogs, as well as commentators who very much don’t embody the values I will defend here (again, they are a mixture of professional and ordinary citizens). The following thoughts are adapted from my dissertation.

At its most basic, Connolly’s project focuses on the need for democratic citizens to cultivate a deep respect for difference, which he terms a “multidimensional thick pluralism.”  Connolly’s pluralism recognizes the inherent contingency and (therefore) contestability of all perspectives.  In a world of pluralism, no single perspective can persuade all rational citizens or prove its ultimate truth.  The radical democrat, the atheist existentialist, and the conservative evangelical Christian all hold world-views that are respectively built on various foundational values, gut intuitions, and analytic assessments about how the world works.  

The significance of this for Connolly is the need to cultivate a critical responsiveness to the views and needs of others, built around careful listening and generosity towards those seeking to gain recognition---one might say that he is reminding us of the need to listen to what Jacques Rancière calls the part of no part, i.e. the dispossessed and oppressed, when they do speak.  It is important to remember as well that political dialogue is more complex and rich than a philosophy seminar, “for thinking and judgment are affected by inspiration, attraction, and example as well as by the logic of argument.  Better, the former ingredients mix into the latter recipes.”

Living up to the ideals of radical democracy, for Connolly, entails a deep pluralism constructed through respect for a world peopled with multiple minorities, an appreciation of uncertainty, and recognition of doubt and weakness in one’s own worldview.  This requires that “you admit that the philosophy you adopt...is profoundly and legitimately contestable to others...when you acknowledge that your philosophical stance is grounded in a complex mixture of contestable faith and porous argument you take a step toward affirmation of political pluralism,” regardless of the particular politics and philosophy you embrace.

This entails a critical self-awareness of the limitations of one’s own perspective, knowledge, and insights, as well as the inevitable limitations of those with whom one disagrees. It is why conservatives attempting to “own the libs” are not productive interlocuters but neither are liberal articles and blogs documenting all the dumb things Ted Cruz said last week.

It means condescension is not helpful, nor is mockery, and acting as if one has definitively ended a debate is just silly. It is also means that no single argument, fact, study, book, or other piece of evidence will definitively put an end to political disagreement. Nor should we expect it to.

In a democratic society, to meet with and engage with disagreement, we need to treat others not as caricatures but as complex human beings. It does not mean we embrace relativism or give up on politics. We must argue forcefully for our perspective with the goal of changing minds and enacting more just policies. But by holding on to this respectful pluralism we will be less likely to go down a path of misanthropy, elitist condescension, or resentment towards those with whom we disagree. This pluralism is a necessary ingredient for acting politically in a world where victory is never total, defeat never permanent.

Time to Retire the Electoral College

Why do we still have the electoral college? A majority of Americans support replacing the electoral college with a national popular vote. Indeed, this has been true for decades. Since the electoral college currently advantages Republicans, it is understandable, if opportunistic, for them to defend it. But there are also less partisan advocates of the electoral college. And it is worth considering some of their arguments to see if there are any strong, non-partisan grounds for maintaining the electoral college.

Tara Ross, a lawyer and political commentator, offers one such example, having written several books on the topic. I will focus on one particular essay in which she makes the case for the electoral college in clear and concise terms.

First off, Ross notes that the founders did not intend to create a direct democracy. This is generally true, though some founders, like Thomas Jefferson, did at times flirt with visions of local, direct democracy. It is also not relevant. Calls to replace the electoral college with a national popular vote are calls for instituting genuine representative democracy in national Presidential elections. They are not calls for national direct democracy, if that means citizens voting directly on legislation.

Ross draws on a number of passages from the Federalist Papers to demonstrate that many of the Founders were deeply concerned with the potential tyranny of the majority. True again. Indeed, many of the Constitution’s anti-majoritarian features were designed precisely with this concern in mind, i.e. how to prevent a democratic majority from forming and acting effectively in national politics. Although Ross quotes Madison expressing concern for the tyranny of the majority, she does not note that he was in later years a strong critic of the electoral college.

Likewise, Madison’s famous quote that democracies "have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths" is not very compelling. Ancient Athens lasted for almost two hundred years and other greek city states also experimented with democracy for long periods of time. It is not at all clear that they were, or current democracies are, any more turbulent than other systems of government. Similarly, Swiss cantons had already had centuries of experiments with local forms of democracy by the time of Madison’s writing. Similar quotes from other founders are equally non-empirical and misguided. It is important to remember as well that the past two centuries of quality scholarship has given us far more information and insight regarding ancient democracy than the founders had at their disposal. Their quick dismissals of Greek democracy, for instance, have not aged well.

I do agree with Ross that many of the founders were critical of direct democracy and yet wanted a government influenced by “the sense of the people.” It is difficult to talk of the Founders’ as if they all had one intention but examination of the Federalist Papers, words spoken at the constitutional convention, and correspondence among the Founders generally supports Ross’ characterization. They described both direct democracy and republican (or electoral) democracy as “popular” forms of government, hoping to carry the democratic legitimacy of ancient direct democracy over to modern representative government.

Ross thus calls the electoral college an “ingenious solution to many 18th century problems.” But it wasn’t. The problem with the electoral college is not that it is outdated; rather, it didn’t make sense to begin with. Historian Alexander Keyssar documents the almost instant efforts to reform or abolish the electoral college that occupied American politics from 1800 into the 1820s. Many founders, including Madison, came to explicitly oppose the electoral college; some advocated a direct popular vote for President in its place.

And as Keyssar has noted, the electoral college never functioned as a system in which wise electors carefully discussed the merits of the presidential candidates and then chose one. Rather, they simply became a proxy for the vote of the people, casting their votes for whichever candidate won their state.

This is perhaps why Federalist 68 is so uninteresting. The Federalist Papers, written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, are a brilliant set of writings (85 essays in total) explaining the structure of the constitution and defending the principles that animate it. Federalist 68, on the electoral college, is not one of the great Federalist essays. Written by Hamilton, it briefly explains how the electoral college works and then offers a limited, fairly uninteresting defense, not least of which because the electoral college doesn’t work as Hamilton and other founders had hoped it would.

It’s not clear we can even speak of a unitary Founders’ “intention” here. The electoral college was relegated to the end of the constitutional convention, the committee on postponed parts, because no one could agree on how to select the President. The electoral college was a temporary least-bad solution that the constitution’s signatories could all accept in the short term, mainly because they could not yet agree on a better option. It was a rushed, ungainly compromise. As mentioned above, key figures like James Madison quickly came to criticize it, it never functioned as intended, and early American politics was defined in large part over battles to reform or abolish it.

The other set of arguments in defense of the electoral college tends to focus on the purported impact it has on Presidential campaigns. For instance, Ross claims that because of the electoral college “presidential candidates therefore tour the nation, campaigning in all states and seeking to build a national coalition that will enable them to win a majority of states’ electoral votes.”

This is exactly what the the electoral college does not do. Candidates spend most time and money in a tiny number of swing states, maybe around ten, to the neglect of other states, large and small, as documented in Jesse Wegman’s Let the People Pick the President. Hence the brilliance of the 2016 Trump campaign—it focused on winning Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, and thus the electoral college. Contrary to persuading a national majority, the Trump campaign effectively focused on turning out and flipping tens of thousands of voters in a small region of the country. And it worked. Similarly, the 2020 Biden campaign focused heavily on trying to flip those three states back, which it did, thus winning the Presidency. One study of the 2000 election found that 25 of the largest media markets in America “did not see a single campaign ad,” presumably because they were located in safe states.

In keeping with this line of argument, Ross claims that if we eliminate the electoral college “small states would likely never receive as much attention as their larger neighbors.” But as Wegman and others have established, this already happens. No one campaigns in Vermont or Wyoming. There is another concern here, either implicit or explicit, found in the works of electoral college defenders like Ross and George Will. This concern is that if we get rid of the electoral college large states and large population centers will get more attention from Presidential candidates.

In so far as this is true why is this a problem? In a democracy, representative or direct, every one is supposed to get one vote. So areas with more voters will have more impact. This concern is thus incoherent from a democratic perspective. It is as if I complain that New York City has more impact on presidential elections than I do. Yes, that is how democracy works: a city with 8 million residents will have more impact than me. To be bothered by this is to be bothered by democracy and the counting of equal votes.

Furthermore, this concern appears to be empirically misguided. In campaigns for Governor, which cover an entire state, campaign resources and attention are usually spent roughly in proportion to the population of each area within the state. In other words, if a major metro area contains half of a state’s voters it will tend to get half of the campaign ads and events. From a democratic perspective this is both what we should predict and desire. Presumably something similar would happen nationally, giving all voters an equal weight in the power of their vote and thus their ability to draw media attention and campaign resources.

One does not have to believe in the value of direct forms of democracy, as I do, to see that the arguments in favor of maintaining the electoral college are not strong. The basic democratic principle is that whichever candidate or policy gets the most votes is the winner. This is the whole point of voting, to let the people decide. In the 21st century the electoral college functions more as a coin-toss than a popular election. It is time to retire the electoral college.

Prisons and Cruelty

Why are there so many Americans in prison? More specifically, why was there a massive increase in the American prison population from the 1970s through the 2000s? Sociologists, criminologists, and political scientists have been considering this question for quite some time now. 

(Political scientists were late to the game, for some reason slow to realize that the study of government should include the study of prisons, which are important government institutions. Thankfully there has been some really good political science scholarship on this topic in recent years).

There are at least two factors to consider: First, what domestic political developments led to this massive increase in American incarceration? Second, why have similar countries not increased their prison populations? These are important questions but I here take a different tack. I will consider the American case before turning to a discussion of the political theory underlying the system of mass incarceration.

But first, let’s take a look at the numbers. There are around 2.3 million Americans behind bars. Put simply, America has the most prisoners in the world, in both absolute and per capita terms. As critics of mass incarceration often point out, America has roughly 5% of the world’s population but 25% of its prisoners. 

Moreover, the rates are mind-boggling. Nearly 1 out of 100 American adults are imprisoned, with millions more under regular surveillance via probation and parole. Furthermore, looking into the prison population is like holding a magnifying glass up to the profound race and class stratifications that underly American society. One positive? After increasing for decades, the number of Americans behind bars has stagnated and even slightly declined in the past decade.

The incarcerated population is also worse off in terms of income and education and is more likely to suffer chronic physical and mental illness than the general population. They are also disproportionately black and latino. According to the NAACP, 56% of the prison population is black or latino compared to just 32% of the general population. It is no exaggeration to say that America’s prisons are filled with a collection of poor black, latino, and white castaways. 

Furthermore, recidivism rates indicate that prisons do not rehabilitate. Ex-convicts re-enter a society without training, resources, connections, or opportunities, and navigate a legal web in which they are always in danger of violating parole and frequently unable to procure gainful employment. Michel Foucault, discussing prisons in the 1970s, called them “the terrible solution”—they don’t work but mainstream perspectives struggle to come up with something better. To be blunt, America’s system of mass incarceration is a totalitarian monstrosity sitting right at the heart of a liberal democratic society.

How could this happen? How could something so glaringly awful not just happen but endure for decades? These are complicated questions. It is here that political theory can shed some light on the situation. What follows is a brief summary of my article “Putting Cruelty First: Liberal Penal Reform and the Rise of the Carceral State.”

As political theorist Judith Shklar famously argued, liberalism is defined by “putting cruelty first.” What Shklar meant was that the western philosophy of liberalism, from John Locke to Thomas Jefferson and mainstream American thinking today, is concerned not simply with individual rights and protections against government tyranny. It is also fundamentally concerned with reducing cruelty. For the liberal tradition, cruelty is defined in purely physical terms. According to Shklar, cruelty is “the willful inflicting of physical pain on a weaker being.”

Focusing exclusively on physical cruelty, classic liberal thinkers were blind to psychological forms of cruelty. In my article I discuss Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham, two 18th century European reformers concerned with making punishment more humane and less cruel. Beccaria and Bentham were admirably focused on eliminating torture and other forms of corporal punishment while also making laws public and fairly applied to all. However, as I note in my article, “their sensitivity to physical pain and torture does not translate into an equivalent sensitivity toward incarceration and the psychological harm it produces.” This is because, as Shklar recognizes, liberalism as a philosophy is focused on physical cruelty while being ambivalent towards, or even unconcerned with, psychological cruelty.

This is a problematic oversight, for as anyone who has read accounts of torture knows, psychological torture is a key and sometimes deeply painful part of the torture regime. We see this in Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s discussion of Soviet sleep deprivation and other psychological torments as well as the often psychological torture inflicted on detainees in Guantanamo Bay by the American military.

The most extreme demonstration of this blindness to psychological cruelty can be found in Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon. The Panopticon was Bentham’s design for an institution of total surveillance that could be applied to schools, barracks, mental hospitals, and prisons. Specifically, he thought that if prisons were organized into the Panopticon they would no longer need to resort to corporal punishment.

Why? In the panoptic prison, there is a central guard tower that can see into every prison cell at all times. Prisoners are thus under total, 24/7 surveillance. Because of this, they can never misbehave without being caught. Therefore, over time, the prisoners will learn to self-police and cease misbehaving all together. By placing them under total surveillance, the prisoners will effectively be restrained and thus will not need to be punished physically, for they will no longer misbehave. For Bentham, this would admirably lead to the elimination of all physical forms of punishment. As should be obvious to us, it also forces a totalitarian mode of surveillance onto the prisoner. Freed from physical punishment, they are nevertheless now encaged, surveilled, and destined to suffer severe psychological cruelty. Physical punishment almost sounds less cruel than a multi-decade sentence in the Panopticon, with your every move monitored.

Now, Bentham’s Panopticon was hypothetical, though some prisons approximate its principles. But this in itself doesn’t explain why the US has so many more prisoners than Europe. Liberal penal reform has impacted both. My account does, however, help to explain how reformers could admirably oppose torture, corporal punishment, and other forms of physical cruelty while being blind to the cruelty of putting a human in a cage for an extended period of time. This is because being imprisoned, i.e. kept in a cage, is a terrible form of psychological cruelty even if you are never physically tortured. It thus helps to explain why Europe and North America in the 1700s and 1800s increasingly turned towards imprisonment and away from other forms of punishment. And this blind eye towards psychological cruelty goes a long way towards explaining how, at its worst, we have embraced punishments that are as, or more, cruel than earlier forms of corporal punishment.

As professor and former cop Peter Moskos provocatively asks, would you rather receive ten lashes or five years in prison? The answer seems glaringly obvious: ten lashes is far less cruel that five years in prison, a fairly standard prison sentence in America.

This is not to defend corporal punishment but to suggest the following: if whipping is more desirable than imprisonment, perhaps our system of punishment is not as enlightened as we like to believe. I prefer to believe, or at least to hope, with MLK that “the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice.” But it should also be clear that moral progress is never guaranteed.

This bears some reflection. Figures as diverse as Jesus and Friedrich Nietzsche have suggested that punishment, judgment, and vengeance are central questions of both individual morality and political justice. 

As Nietzsche said: Beware those in whom the impulse to punish is strong. The hangman and the bloodhound look out of their eyes.

As Jesus said: Do not judge or you too will be judged.

How we handle these issues says much about who we are as a society. Are we scared, vindictive, and cruel? Or are we generous, magnanimous, and forgiving?

The New Coerciveness of Precarity

The past few decades have seen a new condition arise in the lives of many Americans: precarity. What makes life so precarious today for the average American? Just what does this precarity look like?

The Government Accountability Office estimated in 2015 that more than a third of all workers in the USA are contingent workers, i.e. those whose work is not secure and does not come with the benefits and stability that defined many 20th century jobs. In response to these developments a number of scholars and activists have argued that we are now entering a new stage of capitalism defined by the increasingly precarious nature of labor.

Political scientist Jacob Hacker, in his compelling work The Great Risk Shift, laments “the rise of a reserve army of part-time and temporary workers.” The problem is not flexible work per se but rather that this flexibility is imposed on workers by and in the interests of their employers.

Hacker summarizes this transformation in the following terms: “Over the last generation we have witnessed a massive transfer of economic risk from broad structures of insurance, including those sponsored by the corporate sector as well as by government, onto the fragile balance sheets of American families.”

What are the consequences of this increase in economic risk? From the 1970s to the 2000s bankruptcies and foreclosures increased dramatically. And this was before the 2008 recession and its aftermath, which only drove these numbers up further. In addition, not only has inequality grown but income instability has grown rapidly. Individual people’s incomes now vary much more year to year than they used to. Conventional economic statistics (including GDP growth, productivity, and even unemployment) fail to capture “what most Americans feel: a sense of ever-increasing financial risk.” In addition, almost 60% of Americans will experience at least one year of poverty between the ages of 20 and 75, due to this income instability.

Precarity does not just produce anxiety and insecurity. It is coercive. In her book Capitalism on Edge, Albena Azmanova discusses the specifically coercive nature of our current form of precarity capitalism, as she calls it. “When we lack basic certainty regarding our source of livelihood, we lose control of our existence. Economic insecurity is politically debilitating…” This coercive form of precarious insecurity is growing in the United States and elsewhere, a point well-documented in the recent works of Guy Standing. 

This precarity in the private sector is also reflected in a growing precarity in the public sector. Political theorist Sheldon Wolin in his 1980s work The Presence of the Past argued that Reagan-era efforts to shrink social programs were actually best understood as an expansion of coercion and social control rather than a reduction in state power. Why? Because shrinking social programs made them more uncertain, unreliable, means-tested, and stigmatized. Our lives are thus much less certain, and less under our control, than they used to be. Let’s explore this further.

Contrary to contingent, means-tested programs, universal programs are liberating, empowering, and claimed as a matter of right. They are not stigmatizing and exert no coercion over us. But limited, means-tested programs, in addition to carrying an ugly stigma, also are far more coercive: they require much more effort on the part of citizens to attain them and much more state supervision. As a benefits claimant, one must continually fill out forms, comply with requirements, remain up to date on eligibility criteria, submit to humiliating supervision and the invasive disciplinary eye of the state, all to acquire and keep these benefits. Hardly a reduction in state power. Indeed, such coercive interventions have more in common with Foucault’s nightmare vision of the all-seeing panopticon than with some libertarian dream of a minimalist state.

As an example, consider Hacker’s depiction of Medicaid: “applying for Medicaid is often hopelessly complex…but even when enrolled in Medicaid, families often find themselves without coverage soon after they enroll because they briefly lose eligibility or…fail to follow cumbersome and frequent reapplication processes.” More precarious work, combined with precarious benefits, creates a coercive world in which we lack the freedom to control the conditions of our lives.

These developments, in other words, add new dimensions to the coercive nature of contemporary neoliberal capitalism. In addition to the coercive necessity of acquiring a job and working in an authoritarian institution, one must grapple with the damaging effects of precarious work, in which the very work one must rely on to pay for necessities is itself insecure, unreliable, and liable to automation, outsourcing, and downsizing. Similarly, to claim the limited benefits offered by the American welfare system one must submit to regular intrusions and endless bureaucracy. 

(Contrast this with the near-universal stimulus checks enacted in 2020 and 2021. Eligible recipients did not need to apply for such checks; rather, they were automatically mailed or deposited electronically to everyone who qualified. Unsurprisingly, these checks were very popular. This is a small sign that the neoliberal consensus may be replaced with something better.)

Philip Mirowski, in his incisive Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, notes that  neoliberalism was a “set of programs to infuse, take over, and transform the strong state.” Furthermore it expanded the “discipline of citizens through the further injection of neoliberal themes into everyday life.” This characterization is powerful because it correctly recognizes that although the US government may be less competent now in important respects (witness the coronavirus response at the federal and state level) it is also more coercive and stronger than ever in other dimensions. The neoliberal insinuation into every institution and interaction can percolate into individual life itself, as we are increasingly pressured to be “creators”, “self-starters,” “entrepreneurs,” “innovators,” and miniature firms. All this in the context of an economy in which the average hourly wage for US workers is lower than it was in 1973.

We should therefore challenge those on the right when they characterize capitalism as the pinnacle of voluntarism and freedom. As Thomas Frank reminds us, regarding the campaign of the wealthy in 1936 to defeat FDR, “tycoons and bankers and newspaper publishers—the people who ran the country into the great depression—were using “liberty” as a fig leaf for their privilege.” It is striking how frequently the wealthy use the word “liberty” to characterize their worldview. They are rarely genuine libertarians. What they mean by “liberty” is the freedom to accumulate wealth and private power. We see this today when Silicon Valley tycoon Peter Thiel describes himself and is dutifully described by the media as a “libertarian” yet his most notable political interventions have been to support would-be authoritarians on the right. 

To conclude, it is as important as ever for those on the left to stress that our political-economic vision calls for a massive expansion of the freedom enjoyed by ordinary citizens, both politically and economically.