This Week's Clue: The Greatest Liberal Value

Following is the essay you can designate as Volume 10, Number 39  of This Week's Clue, based on the e-mail newsletter I have produced since March, 1997. It would be the issue of October 1.

Enjoy.

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Competition.

There is no more important liberal value than competition. Competition among businesses. Competition among ideas. Competition among institutions. Competition among nations.

The biggest lie told by conservatives over the last generation was that liberals did not believe in competition. You can hear this lie in all their rhetoric. They call liberals Communists or Socialists who seek to monopolize the economy on behalf of the state. Or they call liberals elitists who seek to monopolize ideas.

This lie has its roots in McCarthyism. It wasn't just told by Joe McCarthy, but by Pat McCarran, by Walter Judd, most especially by the John Birch Society, which sought to make Mencken's claim  "when fascism comes to America it will be called Americanism" a literal truth.

Most of what is called libertarianism is in fact an attempt by the far right to create a vacuum which will enable their own monopoly on power. (I've studied Ron Paul for almost 40 years, and know whereof I speak.)

Competition has always worked, throughout history. Greece birthed European civilization because of competition. Italy birthed the Renaissance because of competition. Adam Smith was, in the context of his time, a liberal, a "free-thinker," who wrote "The Wealth of Nations" as an endorsement of Unitarians such as the entrepreneur Josiah Wedgewood, a fierce competitor whose grandson (born after his death) turned out to be Charles Darwin.

The scientific method is based on competition. It is liberal in origin, and still considered liberal in today's politics. The idea of anti-trust law, the breaking of monopolies in order to maintain competition, is also a liberal concept, brought forth by Republicans in the 19th century, when the Republicans were the liberal party.

Competition is the magic word which, if used thematically, can blow conservatism off the U.S. political map. Because everything in the conservative record of this decade shows a deep hatred for competition. And competition is also the central American idea.

The whole idea of monopolistic economic policies is to centralize power and reduce competition. The whole idea of a unitary executive is to centralize government power in one hand. The whole idea of secret laws is to prevent contrary ideas from being heard.

The result is we are fighting ideas with armies, which can only spread one idea at a time. When we should be fighting ideas with questions, and demanding answers.

Until this decade that had been the American way. The Founders were a highly diverse group of men -- and women by the way. Some, like Abigail Adams, were highly religious. Others, like Benjamin Franklin, eschewed organized religion entirely. Abraham Lincoln, whose words about God are among the most quoted in our lexicon, never had a home congregation.

It's not that these people, and so many others, were irreligious. They were simply unwilling to surrender themselves to outside authority. They weren't atheists. They were Americans.

Every element remaining in today's Republican party is authoritarian. You've got your military authoritarians, your economic authoritarians, you've got your religious authoritarians, and you've got people who lie to themselves with impunity.  That's about it, really. Everyone else in the party is suspect, by these same groups, and rightly so.

It's a tragedy, but one which has its roots deep in our history. Many American colonies were founded under a banner of religious tyranny. Many Americans actually feared that the Nazis, or the Communists, might win because of their greater unity. Many Americans actually felt that monopoly, the control of the economy in a few "sound hands," was the only way to run things.

The fact is none of it works. Nations that endorse a specific religion fail over time. Nations that preach a single ideology fail over time. Nations that allow monopoly fail over time. They are inflexible, they can't adapt. Things change and they're lost.

Only competition, free and open competition, can solve the succession problem. Someone reaches the top of the mountain, whether an academic mountain, a business mountain, a religious mountain, an entertainment mountain, or a political mountain, and everything they say looks right, sounds right, it seems to work. But only for a moment. Without competition, the moment passes and their whole structure starts to fail from the inside. With competition it is battered, forced to change, and may actually survive. So we celebrate the moment because you know that's all there can ever be, in a world of continuous competition.

That's really what sport is all about. Every athlete grows old. Every dynasty ends. Change is constant. That's the lesson. It's an important lesson, a vital lesson, the only lesson it really teaches. And it's one liberals should be talking about, rather than letting athletes sell the continuing delusion that obedience to conservative authority, to any authority, will keep them forever young. Team sports are based on obedience to authority, but no team is always successful.

For the last 40 years liberals have suffered a tactical problem. They have allowed the Big Lie to be sold. They have allowed their own disunity to be seen as a flaw, rather than celebrated as the free competition it represents. And they have let Republican unity be seen as a strength, rather than the authoritarian weakness it in fact is.

Now that you have spent these last few minutes listening to me praise competition, and identify it with liberalism, let me tell you the biggest problem with it.

It's hard. People don't like it. As individuals, we take one shot at life, only one, and there's no room in that life for wishy-washy contention. Winners go for it.

People seldom change their minds. Generally what you believe at 20 is what you'll believe at 60. It's not true that young people are liberal and old people are conservative. It takes an enormous effort of will to change your beliefs.

That's why the generational view of American politics, which I've been writing about here for two years, works. The cycle here is the life cycle. Whether or not you lived through the 1960s, your worldview has been filtered through that prism. It was an enormously wrenching crisis, which caused literally tens of millions of people to change their entire worldview. They held that view, they taught it to their children, and they practiced it for the rest of their lives.

Now we are in the midst of another crisis. This decade is a crisis decade, bookended by the 9-11 attacks and the Iraq War. The first caused many people to throw themselves across the political chessboard, from left to right. Dennis Miller, for instance, didn't go from being a moderate liberal to a moderate conservative. He went directly into foam-at-the-mouth authoritarian lunacy. At the same time, John Dean didn't go from being a moderate conservative to a moderate liberal. He is now, by all accounts, an activist liberal Democrat, where before this decade he was an aggressive Republican stalwart.

What happened to them has also happened to us. A decade of crisis is a period of wrenching political change. All changes in worldview are wrenching. They are not moderate or modest. People went from faith in FDR to stolid support for Nixonism 40 years ago. They are moving today from the Nixon Thesis to something completely new.

There are liberals who don't like this. There are liberals who see their own worldview threatened by all these newbies. There are liberals who see their own sinecures, their own beliefs, their own nests, as inviolable. These are the successors to the Rockefeller Republicans of the last generation, people who lean against the Nixon Thesis and take its abuse because it's the only life they know. Call them the whipped dog caucus.

In a time of crisis, we must contend with both. We must contend with those who cling to the old ways like barnacles do to a ship's hull. We have to physically scrape them from the hull of our economic, political, and media systems. We do this by creating new structures, new types of media, new political organizations, and new intellectual infrastructure, as the great liberal Thomas Jefferson wrote:

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

The pessimist in Jefferson saw the Constitution as temporary. He believed that new revolutions would be needed, periodically, in order for society to grow. What he didn't understand is that the roots of such revolutions were contained in the document. We can have a national revolution every two years, or every four, or every eight. We can have it in our cities, in our states, or in our nation. That power is always within our hands. We just don't use it often.

Competition is hard. Competition creates losers, and an obligation to deal with the result of loss. But competition was, is, and will remain the key liberal value, and it is the magic word that can lead liberals to power, in 2008 and beyond.