Liberalism Starts Over

The 20th century liberal movement was an amalgam of impulses from populists and progressives. It combined elements of the pro-inflation talk of William J. Bryan with the reformist impulses of Upton Sinclair. It was bawdy street politics taken into the parlor, given a suit, and set on a balcony to change the world through the creative use of government.

Liberalism, in other words, was populism + progressivism.

Now, with the Nixon Thesis collapsing, and with the concept of liberalism discredited among the mass of people (because that was at the heart of the Nixon Thesis), big thinkers like Max Sawicky and Stirling Newberry are back in the salons (virtual ones this time) debating where we go next.

And they are starting with the past.

Sawicky argues that "populism is about the bottom line -- ours and not theirs."  The original populists were farmers who sought inflation to keep the value of what they produced high. They wanted a bigger piece of the economic pie, enough to live on. And they wanted money defined by production of goods, not just gold.

Newberry rejects the thesis, saying a populist devolves into a reactionary. His example is Thomas E. Watson,  who began as an economic populist, then became a U.S. Senator on the wings of racism.  (Here he is in front of our state capitol building, about a mile from the tomb of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.)

Liberalism rejected populism, in the form of George Wallace, when it rejected racism. The movement of Wallace supporters from Democratic to Republican (mirroring what blacks had done a generation before, moving from Republican to Democratic) was the key to the Southern Strategy, the key to making the present Nixon Thesis dominant.

What have they gotten for it? Plenty. Money is now what they want it to be -- ephemeral, virtual, practically imaginary.  The  Federal Reserve does  a "bill pass" and there it is, new money. The Congress passes a budget with trillions in debt and there it is, new money. Every government around the world can play the game. It's a populist's dream.

It's also a classic pyramid scheme.  It's a macro-economic chain letter.  Only three  possibilities are possible, Newberry notes -- a collapse  in share prices (all fall down), an export of the game to other countries (Wal-Mart in China), or new technology that makes everyone's debts good (a magic pony).

While kids are taught, then, that populism is dead, or that populism was bigoted, in fact it was co-opted, made part of the Nixon Thesis, and harnessed to the interests of the wealthy, at the expense of the middle class who created it.

Liberals today are stuck playing the other cards. Liberals like Howard Dean talk about balancing budgets, about paying our debts. They are, from the perspective of a century ago, rock-ribbed Republican (as Dean's own family was then. ) The Deans didn't change. The world changed around them.

Liberals now rising into power, in other words, must reject economic populism, an economic experiment which has been tried, and find another way. 

This starts with progressivism, which looks at the reality of things, and seeks to change that reality, on the margin, in order to provide the hope needed for the system to continue. As practiced by both Roosevelts it was a hope, a promise, a dream. That dream came true after World War II because the rest of the world collapsed, ushering the American middle class into the world's upper class.

It didn't really come true, in other words. And it must, in some form, for the world to survive this century. Because today the world's poor are systematically destroying this planet -- cutting its forests for firewood -- just in order to survive into tomorrow.  Only a real stake in a real future will change their behavior. 

Personally, I think the whole progressive-populist argument is bunk. We have to find a way to get beyond it. We have to find a consensus that leads to fundamental change in our attitudes. The crisis which will force such a change in attitudes is coming. The change must be managed in the direction of creation, not destruction, or our grandchildren will have no world -- rich, poor or middle class -- to inherit.

That's where the Open Source Thesis is heading.