Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press: 2014); originally published 1909.
I think we can all agree Herbert Croly hasn't aged super well, and he is not the intellectual forbear of modern American liberalism we would choose if we could invent one from scratch. This has made it easy to tar all of liberalism with Croly's brush. Back before the MAGA takeover of the Republican Party made it clear that American conservatism is the unambiguous heartland of neo-fascism in the modern era, and before the Neoconservatives mostly bolted from the Republican fold and became Democrats or Never Trump independents for that very reason, it was briefly fashionable among Neoconservatives to cite Herbert Croly as exhibit A for the incendiary claim that the intellectual tradition in America claiming to be "liberal" is actually quasi-fascist.
One doesn't come away from reading Croly's political classic, The Promise of American Life, any more convinced of this argument than before—but it has to be conceded that Croly provides some quotable fodder for this narrative. There are his casual racist asides (though Croly explicitly rejects, for what it's worth, the possibility that his notion of "Nationality" would have any basis in race, acknowledging that any claims to historical racial homogeneity are a fiction even in European nation-states, let alone in the United States). There is his insistence that Abolitionists overstated their case and that Southern enslavers were "for the most part, estimable if somewhat quick-tempered and irascible gentlemen [...] who were on the whole liked rather than disliked by their bondmen."[!] There is his overly sanguine attitude to U.S. imperialism and eugenics. ("I have not ventured more than to touch upon a possible institutional reformation, which, in so far as it was successful in its purpose, would improve human nature by the most effectual of all means—that is, by improving the methods whereby men and women are bred"!) And these are not even the book's worst lines.
The Neoconservatives aren't wrong therefore that Croly is an embarrassing source text for modern liberalism and progressivism. Where their smear against liberalism goes astray is in assuming that everything bad in Croly must have somehow contaminated, by a mysterious original sin or guilt-by-association, everything good in Croly, or everything good that was subsequently derived from Croly in the Progressive movement and modern liberalism. We must beware, after all, as Robert O. Paxton wrote in his history of fascist ideology, of reading a "teleology" into the intellectual history of extreme right movements. The fact that Croly said some things that would later prove congenial to some fascists does not mean that other, wholly unrelated things he said about, say, regulating railroads or enforcing collective bargaining agreements, must also derive from the same tainted seed.
It might be as simple as this: the same person can be wrong about eugenics, but right about rate schedules for railroads. To prove that the latter view is wrong requires some independent argument against it on its own merits, and can't be defeated on ad hominem grounds by quoting some unrelated racist comment from elsewhere in the text.
As for what is good in Croly, it is there in abundance for those willing to see it. To be sure, he is known to commit a purple passage or two, and more than one of his later chapters seems frankly interminable. He is guilty of self-importance, and in this regard, he is emblematic of that school of High Church liberals (it makes all too much sense that he founded The New Republic) who would continue throughout the rest of the century to take themselves far more seriously than anyone else did, and who attributed to themselves far more intellectual significance than anyone outside the pages of TNR would ever do. (Croly's big conclusion to his book, expounded at exhausting length, is that the true savior of the American Promise is likely to be a "critic" and public commentator—in short, someone much like Croly himself.)
But even conceding all of those frustrating qualities, Croly provides insight into American political history in a way that was at the time—and deserved to be—seen as groundbreaking. In particular, he sheds salutary light on the old vexing question of why no socialist movement ever emerged as a major party in the United States, and why the ideological configurations of our partisans have often failed to map onto European models of left and right. The strange fact is due to the unique origins of American political ideologies in the two poles of Hamilton and Jefferson. While the Jeffersonian democratic tradition would seem to be the logical source to find the origins of an authentically American socialist or social-democratic movement, economic conditions in Jefferson's time made it plausible to identify the "popular" cause with that of limited government and laissez-faire. Whereas Hamilton, though he was the proponent of interventionism and a strong Federal power, could be looked to even less as a source for American socialism because of his aristocratic and anti-democratic views.
The result is that, in American unlike in European social democratic political thought, there was no tradition (at least not one dating back to the founding) that logically combined support for the rights of working people with the establishment of a strong central government willing to advance and protect these rights. In Croly's telling, this left the parties of his day distinctly incapable of tackling the problems of modern industrial civilization. He acknowledges, to be sure, that he was living in the age of "Reform"—every politician from the Democratic Bryan to the Republican Roosevelt had a Reform agenda of some kind or another. But because they were hampered by the conventions of American ideology, they could only plead for reformist change as a sort of "higher conservatism"—I come not to abolish the Jeffersonians and the Hamiltonians, that is to say, but to fulfill them!
This meant that even populist democrats in the Jeffersonian tradition—like Bryan—were forced to simultaneously inveigh against big business and the "money power," while also denouncing Federal power as creeping "centralism," even though the Federal government promised the only effective means of curbing and regulating the industrial behemoths. The way the reformers sought to square this circle was to attribute the power of big business not to laissez faire economics (which they still as Jeffersonians needed to officially endorse), but to "special privileges" that some industrial hegemons were using to cheat and violate the principles of fair competition (this is still, of course, the argument used by some "bleeding heart libertarians" today, who want to claim the mantle of concern for the poor and the working class while simultaneously seeking to cut food stamps).
The problem that the Jeffersonian—who argued in this vein—soon encountered, Croly observes, is that there were simply not enough "special privileges" to go around. To be sure, some abuses could be found; the reformers could find some unfair and anti-competitive advantages that the big conglomerates received from the government. But they were woefully insufficient to account for the entire decades-long pattern of corporate consolidation that was displacing small producers, and which the Bryanite populists were railing against. (One is reminded today of how much of the anti-corporate activism on the Left is confined to documenting and denouncing human rights violations in the Global South committed by multinational corporations—of which many can be found, some of them quite egregious; but a similar issue arises—is the accumulation of these stand-alone abuses enough to account for all the problems in the global race-to-the-bottom in modern capitalism; and if all the "violations" were halted tomorrow, would that address the root problem?)
If perpetual crusaders manage to slaughter all the infidels—the "special privileges" and "unfair competition" are all swept away—and yet they find when they are done that the people are still suffering, workers are still getting stiffed on their wages, and the rich are still grinding the faces of the poor, then perhaps the crusaders were going after the wrong target from the start. Perhaps the problem lies much closer to home, Croly seems to be suggesting—in the unquestioned adherence to the laissez faire and non-interference policies of the Jeffersonian tradition, on the one hand, and the anti-popular and pro-big business priors of the other main stream of American thought—the only one that had ever actively defended the prerogatives of a strong central government—the Hamiltonian tradition.
Croly's complaint against his contemporaries, therefore, is not that they failed to see the flaws in contemporary arrangements. They certainly knew that "ill fares the land" and something had gone foully wrong in American social life. But they were so blinkered in their adherence to traditional American ideology that they were unwilling to attack these evils with any weapons except the most outmoded, and they had no solution to propose other than to do what they were doing already, except more so, and harder.
In this regard, Croly draws a salient comparison to the period leading up to the Civil War. He observes that both sides to the conflict claimed the mantle of the Constitution and the American political tradition—the one citing the equalitarian doctrines of the Declaration of Independence and the principle of unionism, the other citing the fact that the U.S. Constitution, in its original form, explicitly countenanced the evil of slavery. What neither side was willing to consider, Croly argues, is that the Constitution in its original form and the whole American political tradition may in fact have been inherently self-contradictory, and that to save some of it, other parts of it might need to be destroyed.
He argues that similar radical therapies were needed at the dawn of the 20th century. It was no longer possible, he writes, to claim that either the Jeffersonian democratic tradition or the Hamiltonian Federalist tradition were an internally coherent response to contemporary affairs. In order to make good on the ideals promised in either—or the Promise of American Life writ large—it was necessary to make explicit sacrifices. Laissez faire would have to go, if democrats wanted to retain their genuine populism and support for the claims of labor. They would have to embrace the Federalism they feared, if they were serious about achieving Jeffersonian ends under modern conditions.
It is this core insight—not all his regrettable asides about race, eugenics, imperialism, etc.—that makes Croly a forbear of modern liberalism and that still makes him worth reading for contemporary progressives. Liberalism, the argument goes—in order to achieve the classical aims of liberalism (liberty, equality of opportunity, human fellowship)—had to abandon some of the policy shibboleths of classical liberalism (free trade under all possible conditions, doctrinaire laissez faire, etc.) I still believe this to be true, as would most contemporary American liberals. And as an attempt to advance the traditional ideals of American ideology—the "Promise of American Life," in Croly's phrase, or what many of us today would call the "American Dream"—under conditions in which the consolidation of big business and the reign of unfettered capitalist competition has made the goal of an ever-increasing standard of living unrealistic for many people, Croly's combination of Hamiltonian intervention with Jeffersonian goals is probably the only one that would be at all workable as a positive political program for an American electorate.
Croly gives us an admirable way, in short, to remain true to the fundamental individualism and success-orientation of American ideology, while also calling for more collective government intervention and regulation of business competition. The way to square this circle that he found—and which is still employed routinely by Democratic politicians today—is to say that precisely the problem with big business is that it deprives ordinary people of their shot at success and limits the ability of individuals of merit to succeed. The goal, we can then say, is still Jeffersonian at heart—we want each person to be free to pursue their self-interest in the belief that this will ultimately yield the good of all—we just don't think unfettered market fundamentalism is the way to get there under contemporary conditions.
It is another question, though, whether the American ideology is actually the best one—whether individualism and the success-orientation are actually the only possible life goals. I have lived my whole life in this country, and had no choice but to imbibe this ideology, but I confess that I never quite adopted it in my inmost heart. I can subscribe, I suppose, as a matter of a party platform and official ideology, to the idea of equality of opportunity, and of everybody getting a "fair shake." I can endorse the notion that people are looking for "a hand up, not a hand out," as the speechwriters all say. I'm on board with the notion that each should have an equal opportunity to get ahead to the best of their abilities.
But... the melancholic egalitarian within me, which will never quite be silenced, always pipes up at this point, even if I'm the only one to hear it. "What about," the melancholic egalitarian asks, "the people who don't succeed even after they are given a fair shake? What about the people who fail even under conditions of 'equal opportunity'? Do we not care about them? Is the fundamental American creed still at last a Darwinian one in which the weak must perish, and the only check on the power of the strong that we would like to impose is to ensure merely that they can't trip the weak before the race has even started?"
As I say, Croly's brand of liberalism is probably the best we can get so long as we try to reconcile our politics to the fundamentals of the American ideology, and it is probably the only form of liberalism or social democracy that will succeed with an American electorate. Try running on a platform in this country of "free food for the losers of life's race," and see how far it gets you with the voters. This is why nearly every writer in American political history—even the ones who have come closest to a genuine social democratic tradition—has paid some sort of homage to the idea of the success of the fittest, and that everyone should be free to engage in self-interested competition, so long as they follow the rules of the game.
One of the few exceptions I've encountered in American letters is from an address to a graduating class of college students that Kurt Vonnegut gave in 1970, and which made a great impression on me as a teenager, when I read it in his book of essays, Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons: "I suggest that you work for a socialist form of government," he declared. "Free Enterprise is much too hard on the old and the sick and the shy and the poor and the stupid, and on people nobody likes. They just can't cut the mustard under Free Enterprise." (There is another, similar passage later on in the same collection, which may actually be the one I was recalling from my teenage reading, in which Vonnegut again bids us to remember the people who were "too stupid or too unattractive or too ignorant to rise.")
These passages I found distinctly shocking at the time I read them. I was prepared to hear claims made on behalf of people of great merit and intellect who were being artificially kept down—denied the equal opportunity that is their American birthright—by unfair social privileges. But I had never before heard someone plead frankly the cause of the people who are actually unintelligent, ignorant, lazy, and hard to like, and who fail for these reasons, not because their true inborn merit is being artificially stifled. Yet, does society owe nothing to them? Are they to be left to perish, just so long as their meritorious neighbors have a chance to succeed? Is the true decency and morality of a society not far better measured not—as so many of political speechwriters claim—by whether it allows merit to shine—but by how it treats the unmeritorious? Should we judge society by its treatment of the strong, who are generally able to look after themselves, or by how it treats the weak?
Such is the liberalism I would truly like to see in America, if I had my druthers—the Vonnegut sort of liberalism that has the courage to enter a plea for the stupid and the ill-favored. A liberalism of the losers. But, for the reasons stated above, and under the influence of our whole tradition of thought (America is, or believes itself to be, after all, a society of "winners"), then Croly-style "equality of opportunity" is probably the best we will ever get. And this makes his book worth reading.
I spotted the following typos as I read through:
p. 113 "which entered into the lines of these [...] men," should be "lives" in context
p. 119 "He is the kind of national hero the admiring imitation of whom can do nothing but good." I think Croly meant to say something like "no one any good." The sentence appears at the end of a passage otherwise denouncing the unsavory personal characteristics of Andrew Jackson.
p. 205 "behavior at least is not dictated by negative conception of reform." Missing an article before "negative."
p. 213 "I will take the risk asserting that[...]" Missing an "of"
p. 301 "A nation or an individual who wishes to accomplish great things must be ready, in Nietzsche's phrase, 'to lived angerously" (sic)
p. 306 "the anti-nationalism 'liberalism'[...]" Should be "anti-nationalist"
p. 319 "can only got a fair start politically" (sic)
p. 445 "would become the increasing[ly?] rigid victim[...]"
p. "because we resolutely refused to believe that human servitude was not entirely compatible with the loftiest type of democracy[...]" I don't think the "not" was intended here.
No comments:
Post a Comment