Towards a Clearer Trade-Offs Conservatism: Remarks in Partial Response to Michael Anton’s "The Stakes"

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The in-house analysts here at IMPASSE tend to think that much of the American right, including especially its dissident spectrum, often appears to mistake the trade-offs of liberal commercial politics for the work of sophistic hostiles or ideological saboteurs. Now I don’t doubt for a moment that most, if not all, of America’s essential institutions suffer considerably from the effects of one sort of activism or another. But to treat the noxious growths of the Rococo Left as if they are simply foreign weeds – invasive French or German varietals somehow alien to American soil – often results in very bad gardening; or to switch Platonic metaphors: superficial diagnoses and palliative cures. Conservatism, instead, should square off more directly with the underlying conditions and not only learn but digestively comprehend that the American state was, in its origins, always already vulnerable to certain vices and pathologies, including problems that directly anticipate our current malaise. By re-setting its stance in this way, the right would simply be informing itself more directly by the worries of the very minds they most admire, including the founding fathers and the critical stewards of the American political tradition.

Most of the influential moderns well understood that the path of commercial republicanism was fraught with risk, and that its successes would come at some price (yes – there are limits to the load-bearing tolerances of even our lower and sturdier supports). Many wrote extensively to help future statesmen and thinkers form a clearer judgment of this political reality, in part so that they might better craft the right sort of offsets or correctives. Our best modern thinkers did not believe that a knowledge of or an adherence to the principles of liberalism alone would be sufficient to maintain the health or longevity of the liberal state. Nor did they think that straightforward patriotism would carry the day either. There is of course nothing wrong with civic awareness or patriotism – both are to be encouraged – but neither can replace what can only be the work of a clear understanding of the problematic vulnerabilities of the commercial regime. And America is at the point now where it needs to be as clear as possible about what ails it. Our sincerest hope is that America has the time and resources to respond intelligently and creatively with offsets at multiple levels. 

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Michael Anton is one of the keenest minds on the American right. His recent book, The Stakes, is valuable reading for anyone interested in understanding the moral complexion, the functional organization, the ruling order, and the future problems and prospects of today’s America. 

For all of the book’s insight, however, Anton builds his causal account in ways that illustrate the problem I note above. While Anton laudably makes clear that the American state is beholden to a managerial oligarchy, and that many of our problems stem from its vices, especially the private-public fusion of government and corporate players, he also soft-pedals parts of his criticism to better accommodate a defense of the founding vision. That is, instead of drawing an even clearer and continuous set of lines between commerce and political dissolution, Anton identifies the intrusive influence of progressive intellectuals and others as his preferred explanatory frame for diagnosing the bad effects of managerialism and activism. 

Now, let me be clear: I don’t think that Anton is wrong about Progressive influence, particularly its stage-setting for the New Left and the moral tumult of the 1960’s. I want to argue instead that the problem is deeper and has its roots in economic behavior; it resists, therefore, being captured by analysis that rests at the level of “ideas.” I want to make this clear, in part, for reasons of diagnostic rigor: like Anytus and Meletus, one can easily find oneself blaming the intellectuals for problems that have a complex provenance, especially when they are woven into the very fabric of one’s regime – problems that might actually be the negative valence of otherwise helpful or even virtuous forms of behavior. When faced with such temptation, we should remind ourselves of Socrates’ claim that the city itself is the greatest sophist – and that intellectual “corruption” only gets traction because of antecedent behaviors and influences (read Jerry Rubin’s Do It! to see how it was mainly consumerism and Elvis Presley – not theory, and certainly not Marcuse – that “recruited” him to bark carnival for the New Left). Now don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that Anton would have killed Socrates (not even in a moment of peak Machiavellian ire). I’m only trying to point out how partial political diagnostics can sometimes, oftentimes, shade into a kind of scapegoating. And I see this pattern recur frequently regarding the place and meaning of Progressivism in West Coast Straussian analysis. 

Let me be more specific about the claims I want to take up.

Anton’s principal worry is that our current ruling elites are working hard to transform the United States into a deracinated semi-feudal free-trade zone. Their picture of “progress” is an asymmetrically globalized world where, as the lords of technology and finance, they enjoy the latest and greatest benefits of scientific and material prosperity, while the middling classes are increasingly absorbed into, or eclipsed by, the radically emancipatory leftism of the managerial orders – the corporations, bureaucrats, creditors, academics, media elites, and politicians.

For the most part, I think that Anton has his critical picture down right. I agree with much of what he argues, especially the analysis and forecasts based on the plight of California. But I think there are major lapses or elisions in his “forensics.” For instance, I’m not entirely clear on Anton’s explication of the relation between Progressivism and “neo-liberalism.” But before I jump the gun, let me first try to spell out what I think Anton is saying about the core roots of today’s problematic America. 

Firstly, I think that Anton (1) blames neoliberalism as the proximate cause of deracinated, free-trade, open borders America (cf. 181-2, 195, 305, 311); while he identifies (2) Progressivism as the historically deeper precipitating event (91, 95-6, 212-13, 215). We might say that for Anton, neoliberalism is the proximate cause and Progressivism is the “true cause” or the deeper historical catalyst of changes that ultimately allow for the bad effects of neoliberalism.  

Regarding the proximate cause (1): the main problem with neoliberalism, for Anton, is its unfettered economic “leftist” libertarianism which eschews much of the former structure of traditional America – including especially limits on immigration – in favor of a confused blend of moral ideology and commercial interests. It is the neoliberal conservatives, for example, that fail to preserve anything of the traditional order, preferring instead to protect commercial interests even at the price of accommodating the social and cultural reforms of the left. 

Regarding the “true cause” or the tectonic shift of Progressive influence (2): the key problem here is that Progressivism introduces a pernicious moral teaching that presents freedom as a matter of self-realization, in contrast to the limited or more negatively defined freedoms of natural rights. It also assumes that moral goods, aims, and purposes are historically and culturally relative. The confusions of Progressivism mean, therefore, that not only does it promote greater moral laxity, it saddles government with new “duties” to support programs of authentic self-fulfillment. This new moral vision is simultaneously expensive (in terms of wealth  transfer), idealistic, irretrievably confused, and, thus, corrosive to whatever theoretical and moral coherence remained from the Founding and from Lincoln’s statecraft. 

Now, I want to respond to (1) with a few comments on the problem of the modern corporation where I’ll illustrate that Anton’s worries about neoliberalism have a pronounced antecedent in the rise and especially the effects of the industrial corporate capitalism.

I’ll then respond to (2) by noting that the advent of modern advertising and consumerism, roughly coeval with Progressivism, probably did as much or more to alter the American relation to prescriptive morality in favor of the practical relativism of the more emancipatory framework that underlies our current situation.   

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1. The Problem of the Modern Corporation

As a federated commercial republican empire of states, America was constituted deliberately to foster commercial enterprise and technological innovation. These features are part of what makes the United States a unique political experiment. The USA, despite its organic roots in the legacy of Albion, is unquestionably the offspring of a liberal genealogy, which includes the main thinkers behind enlightened political economy.  More than any other state by far, America was stamped by the influence of Locke, Montesquieu, Smith and others. Now, these supporters of commerce all believed, of course, that the benefits of modern economy would outweigh its costs; but it is crucial to remember that none – even the most confident booster – thought there wouldn’t be risks or even a serious price to pay. A full accounting of their worries is beyond our present scope (see Lasch’s The True and Only Heaven for a good run up), but let it suffice to note that while most thought that greater economic activity – owning, making, buying, selling, even speculating – would lead to more proximately “rational” forms of behavior (and, hence, to greater political stability); they all understood that economic self-interest could easily tip over into viciousness; and that while a “softening” of moral seriousness can help reduce friction or conflict, the man of commerce would now be vulnerable not only to greed, but to the psychically diminishing effects of an unprecedented array of comforts, services, and luxuries.

In theory and especially in practice, the United States’ economy, pre-civil war, could best be described as small or “local” in its scale. Yes, there were international and national trade networks; but these were still pre-rail, and trade and markets were relatively slow. In addition, the value of this economy was tethered to agriculture and manufacturing; there were hardly any corporations to speak of, and the influence of Wall Street was limited. This might seem strange, but it would not be unreasonable to call this period, say 1760-1860, the golden century of American capitalism, not because it was the most productive or transformative (though it was both), but because it was balanced and limited and woven into a way of life.  During this hundred or so years, most economic activity came from private initiative. Makers, inventors, planners were also owners, shopkeepers, artisans, and workers. Importantly, these conditions were most favorable to the restraining effects of personal connection and the bonds of emotional attachment. The local scale of industry meant that owners and workers knew each other, lived in the same town or neighborhood, went to the same church, belonged to the same associations or clubs etc., etc. Here, sentiment and attachment could do the work of moderation, especially in communities that were more or less homogenous at multiple levels.   

Apart from the disruptions of the civil war, the one thing that most transformed this golden era of capitalism was the rise of the corporation. We can say that rail systems are the hard technology that most facilitate the growth of the national economy; but the corporate model is the social technology that most accelerates national and international expansion, in large part because, without the corporation, rail would have been very difficult to finance, as would most other sectors of industrialization.

The two key features of the corporate model that make it attractive as a vehicle for especially large scale enterprise are: 1) It spreads financial risk across a group of investors, who become the “owners” of the enterprise through its stock; this process of raising capital allows for the simultaneous increase of scale with a greater reduction of vulnerability. 2) The split between owners and managers sets up a structure or hierarchy that focuses more or less exclusively on efficiency and profit-maximization. On this model, owners no longer need to have a direct interest or personal attachment to their enterprise; they can treat ownership primarily from the standpoint of investment or as a means to wealth. For their part, managers answer to the board that represents the investors; they are paid to run the enterprise efficiently and must report on their activities according to the financial calendar. Modern managers train in methods pioneered by American schools of business to better organize labor or maximize efficiency by utilizing new techniques, machinery, incentives, messaging or “team-building,” legal frameworks, etc.

Enterprise at the corporate scale or under the corporate model is more profitable and efficient; but it purchases these goods at the expense of the kinds of relations that helped to shape and moderate capitalism under pre-corporate conditions.  In particular, by severing ownership from management and labor, the corporate model vastly diminishes the shared interests that helped to pull the previous economy into a more prosocial equilibrium.        

The framers of the American constitution had some understanding of corporations because British colonial companies were part of their history and experience.  They did not, however, anticipate the rise of commercial corporations, and especially the ways in which corporate power would be enhanced through industrial technologies.  As far as I can tell, there is very little, either in the thought of the early modern philosophers or in the thought of the founding generation that anticipates and helps to prepare for the effects of the modern corporation. For these reasons, I think it makes sense to see the rise of Progressivism as partly motivated by a deep concern that a nation weakened by civil war and with a constitution seemingly fitted to a by-gone economic era needed to somehow be “re-founded.” Now I’m not saying that the Progressives got it right. Not at all. But it is a mistake to read their movement solely in terms of theoretical initiative, as if they had hatched their vision of a new America strictly as a matter of scientific or philosophic progress (Anton offers some nuance on this score).

I take the Progressive willingness to hazard its program of innovation, in part, as an index of how deeply they believed America had been transformed by its new economic circumstances. Read Henry Adams or even Walter Lippmann. Or consider JP Morgan’s efforts to open up the United States to international finance or his instrumental role in staving off the financial panic of 1907.  The new titans of industrial capitalism and finance stood astride a completely different world than the quasi-mercantilist golden era. And it wasn’t entirely clear what government should do about it. Or to put the point differently: the various crises of the Gilded Age, even including the Ellis Island inundation, were brought on, either directly or indirectly, by rapid technological and economic expansion. And this expansion far outpaced the government’s ability to meet it head on. This series of perturbations climax in the crash of 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression, both of which give the Progressives the mandate they need to dramatically intervene.

But it is not clear to me that the United States has ever really caught up to the tempo, and especially the effects, of corporately enhanced innovation (consider Anton’s comments on Apple Inc.; 49-51). Instead, government seems to have made its peace with “public private cooperation” (283), which includes: tax-funded bailouts for banks and corporations “too big to fail;” a well-oiled revolving door for politicians turned managers and lobbyists; and a PR industry (including media and academia) that helps provide “science” and other made-to-order rationalizations for profitable initiatives, including green energy, pharma, social-therapeutic services, intelligence, surveillance, and foreign wars. In sum, the unforeseen consequence or “trade off” of commercial innovation has been the rise of corporations that have, in turn, helped catalyze the oligarchic fusion of industry and political administration that America is today. What Anton laments as the influence of “neoliberalism” has deep roots in the cumulative outgrowth of a much longer history.

2. The Problem of Modern Advertising

The powers of American capital were enhanced considerably by the tools of modern advertising. And by modern advertising, I mostly mean Bernaysian advertising, though aspects of Bernaysianism have prior antecedents (cf. J. Walter Thompson). If you don’t know who Edward Bernays is, look him up – I suggest starting with his book Propaganda – or take a short cut and watch Adam Curtis’ Century of the Self.

Modern advertising, like the corporation, gained momentum in the United States at the dawn of the Progressive era (Bernays, for instance, got a leg up working PR for Woodrow Wilson). And as with the corporation, advertising has had social and psychological effects that conservatives – including Anton – overly, and even wrongly, ascribe to Progressive influence. 

Anton’s main grievance with Progressivism is that:

“Worst of all, at the theoretical level, Progressivism entirely upended our elite’s understanding of justice, of good and bad. The hidden cause of that upending is the contradiction at the core of Progressivism, which at once denies a fixed human nature and hence a standard of goodness independent of human preference or will but also insists that progress is good. “Historicism” – the belief that values change from era to era – is Progressivism’s indispensable foundation. By this, the Progressives did not mean simply that people’s preferences and habits change over time. They intended something much more fundamental: the underlying structure of right and wrong, of morality itself, changes over time. But if morality is always changing, then no one morality can be simply true – much less good” (96).

Anton is surely right about these core contradictions, and I think he makes helpful points about how Progressivism prepared some of the main features of the contemporary left. But while Anton tries to restrict these theoretical problems to the Progressive elite or to elite influence, he nonetheless assumes that somehow this intellectual sphere was responsible for the more popular agitation of the 1960’s. Now, again, I don’t deny that Progressivism was influential; and I don’t want to attribute to Anton an overly simplistic set of causal assumptions. I actually think he’d agree with much that I’ve laid out above. But to truly understand the onset of the “lived” relativism of midcentury America, one needs to start by studying the habits of the people, especially their relation to pleasure and pain (NE 2.3). In the American context, this means primarily the people’s relationship to acquisition and consumption – what we can call their commercial habits.

One can divide roughly the history of American advertising into two categories: at first there was advertising based on the presentation of cost-benefit appeals, where the product is sold on the basis of its quality and especially its utility; and then came advertising based on psychological attraction, where the product is sold on the basis of an appeal to want or what Plato would call “the unnecessary desires” or what Freud or Jung would see as forms of compensatory desire. Because the psychology of want is more complex than the psychology of need, wants can be manipulated in subtle and strategic ways. This was known and practiced before Bernays, but what Bernays realized was that he could use his uncle’s theories – who was, happily, none other than Sigmund Freud – to refine his tactical messaging. 

Without delving into the psychology and the history of Bernays’ influence, the main effect of his approach was something like this: Bernays realized that people can be sold goods on explicit or more directly implied promises of self-fulfillment and even moral liberation. That is, because wants are not necessary, the pleasure they afford often requires justification or some sort of rationale (Remember, you deserve a Lexus this Christmas). To liberate desires that the person may be on the fence about satisfying, it is helpful, therefore, to make it seem or feel like the object will provide much more in terms of happiness or fulfilment or freedom or self-realization – some sort of short flight on the wings of eros – than it can actually supply. The pleasures of consuming surplus goods at the level of want, are, therefore, intimately connected to feelings of self-expression and especially emancipation – that one is allowing oneself to take and enjoy something more than ordinary restraint tends to permit; and that one is more fully oneself for doing so.

As Plato well understood before Freud, the principal moral effects of an economy of surplus goods are, not only the transition from a prescriptive moral framework into an emancipatory frame (this is the primary characteristic of what we can call “democratic drift”), but a practical relativism that settles over things precisely because such relativism best accommodates a less restrained pursuit of pleasure and the rationalizations it entails. It is crucial to understand that this kind of relativism is not the result of sophists in the street broadcasting their views. It is rather an organic consequence of oligarchic antinomianism; or put differently, it is more or less the default moral setting of what Socrates calls a ramped-up and “feverish” economy (to take a stab at the fuller picture, see “Plato >Capital” [forthcoming at IMPASSE] which was leaked by Venezuelan Intelligence to the Pandora Project and then compiled by the IMPASSE Worker’s Guild – Serfs Up!).

Modern advertising thus enhances and exacerbates patterns and tendencies latent in our relation to the unnecessary desires. The cumulative effect of this phenomenon was to transform America from a nation of citizens to a nation of consumers (or “spenders,” as Socrates says).  Much more than intellectual influence from on high, I would argue that it was this fundamental alteration of habit that most contributed to the seismic moral shift we see finally manifest in midcentury.

If my claim here strains credulity, think about it like this: Advertising is something we mostly take for granted, but we should keep in mind that there was nothing like it in the ancient or medieval cities – even in early modern states. As we experience it today, advertising is an additional stream of “music” in the cave, scientifically refined to achieve its effects. For whatever reasons, we are content to simply co-exist with this constant “propaganda of products” and yet we expect somehow that our other streams of influence – “culture” “education” “art” “religion” etc. – will go on just the same, as if individuals can “choose” to be influenced or not. We then act surprised when we detect a rise in brute forms of mercenary self-interest or in crass materialism – when worship leaders or influential artists preen themselves like real-estate barons.  My guess is that we routinely overlook or underestimate the pernicious effects of commercial culture. It is, after all, the water we swim in and we probably don’t even fully understand its total psychological impact – certainly not in the light of recent developments like smart phone technology and social media. My sense is that many on the right wouldn’t even register this as a problem worth looking into, let alone acknowledge as a major obstacle to stability or renewal.     

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At IMPASSE, we admire our West Coast friends for their respect for the American founding and the work they’ve done to bring out the impressive achievements of American statecraft. But in looking back to the tradition of American political wisdom, we need to more fully embody the worries of men like Adams and Madison, who were profoundly concerned about the malign influence that money could exert on republican government. They well understood that a regime dedicated to commerce would be fragile and especially prone to certain vices. Now more than ever, we need to restore their worries, especially because we live with forms of commerce, trade, banking, and industry that, in terms of scale and scope, far exceed the threats they had in mind. Yes, it is important to assess the troublesome character of our Progressive inheritance. But this should not take priority over being maximally clear about the vices of capitalism, lest we dig up one weed while seeding another, or poison ourselves by trying to cure the wrong disease. We can no longer afford to soft-pedal or defer a theory-driven critique of capital so as to shield the founding or latter-day “fusionism” from flak and shrapnel. Some subset of our political class needs to think clearly about trade-offs; and unless they understand how the worm rots the wood, they will not be able to supply the appropriate correctives.