Now that does make me blush, and does make me think that it is time to sing the Nunc dimittis: in the words of Clark Kent: “My work here is done…”
“Why, with such godlike powers to command nature and organize ourselves, have we done so little to build a truly human world, to approach within sight of any of our utopias?” DeLong asks in his final chapter, only to dodge an answer: “A new story, which needs a new grand narrative that we do not yet know, has begun.” Modesty is a virtue in a historian of long centuries, but after the persistent enlightenment of the book’s first 450 pages, this limping denouement is a disappointment…
Well, I could have ended the book with some version of "the arc of the universe tends towards justice”. But it does no such thing.
The arc of the universe does not clearly tend toward anything, except possibly heat death followed by the periodic emergence of Boltzmann Brains. Books that are successful in any sense need to conform to and work with the ways humans think; and humans think in narratives; and narratives, have to have a beginning, middle, and an end. As of now, the narrative of the long 20th century ends with our substantial success at baking, a sufficiently large, economic pie, and our failure to properly slice and taste it—we continue to be flummoxed by the problems of equitably distributing our wealth and then utilizing it properly to create a truly human world. Plus, as Keynes wrote back in 1924: “We lack more than usual a coherent scheme of progress, a tangible ideal. All the political parties alike have their origins in past ideas and not in new ideas…. No one has a gospel. The next move is with the head…”
It is what it is. Sorry.
DeLong’s story begins in 1870 because you cannot have the diversity of travel, consumption, art, and entertainment that defined the twentieth century without the inventions of the Gilded Age. But none of these fancy gadgets would have developed into a transformative mass culture without DeLong’s later plot points—particularly the coming of John Maynard Keynes. He enters Slouching Towards Utopia like Orson Welles in The Third Man, the brilliant man of mystery whose ideas have colored the entire work at last given room to explain the world and its problems. (Keynes was not a sinister villain like Welles’s character, though he would eventually be chased from the scene.) Keynes’s great genius, DeLong argues, was his recognition that economic troubles had ceased to be matters of resource scarcity alone; they had become problems of systems management…
Yes. Exactly. Before 1870 governance and politics had to be, at base, an élite—thugs with spears, and their team accountants, bureaucrats, and propagandists—elbowing other potential elites out of the way, and running a force-and-fraud domination-and-exploitation game on the rest of humanity so that the members of the élite could, themselves, have enoughand live an approximation to the good life.
This was, I think, true even of the era of the Democratic Revolution. Otto von Bismarck and Benjamin d’Israeli were not completely wrong in their responses to the technologies of education and communication that produced the age of mass politics. Their response was “Tory Democracy”. Their point was that the business-class liberals of the day sought the von Hayekian dystopia in which the only rights that mattered were property rights. Thus the aristocracy and the working class had a common interest in the preservation of and strengthening of “society” in which other sources of social power could be deployed and exercised.
After 1870, successful societies switch governments from an élite-domination to a technology-and-prosperity-system-management mode. This entails a severe reduction in inequality in both power and wealth. But smart élite members recognize the benefits to themselves of a smaller share of a much larger pie and the benefits to their descendents, many of whom will be non-élite, of the bigger pie equitably sliced.
Unfortunately, most élite members have not been smart. And one way this shows itself is in the extraordinary outsized hatred of Keynes. But that is a topic for another time.
Keynesian ideas opened the door to an extraordinary array of compromises and collaborations… “Thirty Glorious Years of Social Democracy”…. And then the neoliberals took over. The great puzzle of neoliberalism, DeLong astutely maintains, is how it preserved and even consolidated its intellectual grip even as it straightforwardly failed to achieve the social outcomes it promised. Milton Friedman, DeLong notes, insisted that repealing the elaborate economic management apparatus of the New Deal would produce price stability, something close to full employment, and a socially tolerable distribution of income. But none of that actually happened…. True believers… insist that their program wasn’t sufficiently libertarian…. But… higher unemployment and deeper inequality… should have been enough to discredit the program. Instead, DeLong notes, Bill Clinton declared the era of big government to be over, and Barack Obama called for deficit reduction with unemployment over 9 percent…
Here I think Zack puts his finger on the big flaw in my book. The speed of the fall of the New Deal Order, and the extraordinary persistence of the Neoliberal Order, are things that I do not understand, and cannot really believe happened. Neither can others: Noah Smith, for example, sees a single continuous story of social democracy and inclusion slowly, fitfully, and haltingly advancing.
DeLong is not a triumphalist about the experience of what he calls “hyperglobalization” in the 1990s. He acknowledges that the overwhelming majority of the gains from this project came in China, where the glory of new material prosperity must be balanced against the abuses of authoritarian surveillance and ethnic persecution…. China’s economic managers tried everything they could to give Chinese exports a leg up on international competitors…. The United States, like Britain in the nineteenth century, played along, believing that a broader, wealthier Chinese middle class would be good for human rights and global stability. The question for China, and the world, is whether this protectionist first step will lead to “Thirty Glorious Years” levels of shared prosperity without the social democracy that fostered it in the United States…. The last quarter century clearly demonstrates that this program does not work….
Here—alongside—the puzzle of the rapid fall of the New Deal and the stubborn persistence of the Neoliberal Order—is the second major flaw in what Mentor of Arisia would call my Visualization of the Cosmic All. my education fettered my brain, with the chains of the Barrington Moore problematic, and I have been unable to escape. Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy is perhaps the ultimate Harvard Social Studies book. Its argument, in a nutshell is:
Landlord-bureaucrat-aristocrats blocking economic modernization produces revolution from below and Leninism
Landlord-bureaucrat-aristocrats utilizating the state to force economic modernization produces revolution-from-above and fascism.
Landlord-bureaucrat-aristocrats overwhelmed by commercial-industrial interests produces democracy.
The reading of China that was dominant in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s—certainly within the Clinton administration—was the Deng Xiaoping and his successors were attempting to move China out of (1), and our task was to strengthen commercial-industrial interests as much as we could by making China grow as fast as possible so China would wind up in (3) rather than (2). It still seems to me to have been the best bet to make with the hand that history had dealt us. Plus all of our descendants here in America will be safer and happier if children in China in 2100 are taught that the United States helped China grow rich rather than tried to keep it poor and barefoot as long as possible.
Did not work. Once again: “We lack more than usual a coherent scheme of progress, a tangible ideal. All the political parties alike have their origins in past ideas and not in new ideas…. No one has a gospel. The next move is with the head…”
We are running out of time. The acceleration of climate change will stress the global economy’s capacity to support human life. DeLong is right to fear that humanity is not slouching into the next phase of its history, which looks very little like a utopia.
Yes. Exactly.
And another comment, on:
Zach Carter: A Dose of Rational Optimism: ‘And though he does at times take excessive detours into dorky cul-de-sacs—the book does not need quite so many pages on the development of alternating current or the transistor—these indulgences can be skimmed easily enough…’
Huh. Looking at how the book is being read, I now think that I did not include enough of these sections that I had to rescue from the “Landes-Schumpeter" version of the book that I wrote in some alternative timeline. Adding to AC electricity and the transistor, the book would be stronger with equivalent sections on skyscrapers, the assembly line, and oil.
John Halpin: The Healthy Parks Theory of Governance”: ‘Politicians often forget that what really matters to most people is a proper sense of place. For citizens across the world, this mainly means the economic stability of their own families and home life. But it also includes, importantly, the social and physical conditions of the local community where they live. Call it the healthy parks theory of governance. If you live in a nice and safe town with plenty of welcoming public spaces, you probably are happier about the state of things and proud of where you live. If you live in a dirty or crime ridden place with lots of sketchy public spaces, you probably are unhappy about the state of things and have less pride in your hometown—especially if you’re not doing well economically. In general, political leaders who provide high quality, safe parks and other public spaces will be rewarded by voters come election time and supported while in office…
Noah Smith: We still haven't solved the Nuclear Age: ‘Maybe Feynman was right after all. Maybe now that humans have nukes, we’ll inevitably use them (again). We’ve used every other weapon we’ve ever created, multiple times. Maybe war obeys the principle that everything possible is mandatory. I hope this is not true, obviously. But if we’re going to make sure it isn’t true, we need to be more purposeful about finding a solution to the Nuclear Age…
Kos: Ukraine Update: Russians in disarray, as Ukraine presses their advantage: ‘Russia is desperate for trucks and other military gear. You’ve seen the WWII era buggies on their way to the front? This is almost guaranteed a wartime requisition, with the side benefit of panicking observers into thinking Russia might go nuclear…
Matt Yglesias: To save downtowns, we need to embrace windowless bedrooms: ‘I’m not telling city officials anything they don’t already know about the merits of office-to-residential conversions as a means to help urban cores address economic pressures…. But for a major downtown redevelopment project, I don’t think that kind of wink-wink strategy would work…
Chris Anstey: A Decisive Turn: ‘It’s not just corporate anecdotes… suggesting a decisive turn in the world’s manufacturing cycle. Macroeconomic data are starting to align that way as well…
Lincoln Michel: Understanding the Reader Without Pandering to the Reader: ‘As writers we should try as much as we can to experience the text as another reader would. As just a text. Only the words on the page in the order they appear on the page…
Dissent must be less Marxist than it was when I subscribed forty plus years ago. Although it was always a good read. How could it not be with Irving Howe as an editor.
Dissent must be less Marxist than it was when I subscribed forty plus years ago. Although it was always a good read. How could it not be with Irving Howe as an editor.
That's one of the best articles about Slouching; thanks for sharing.