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This essay is a continuation of my previous post  giving neoliberal (usually mistakenly called conservative) answers to some progressive counterarguments against neoliberalism.

Summary of My Last Post’s Conclusions

These progressive points of opposition were offered by a progressive commentator, whom I will call “Chease.” His correspondence began with the following paragraph:

A few problems with the foundations of your argument. Let me elucidate two of them in detail. First, there is the idea that the impetus for economic progressivism is obsolete because a sufficiently liberalized market is incapable of producing inequality enough to be a danger to society. Second, there is the idea that racism is a thing of the past and that anti-racism is now more violent and dangerous than racism.

I answered Chease’s first point in my preceding post, where I pointed out that data for most countries from the World Bank, the Heritage Foundation, and the Wall Street Journal contradicted his implicit premise, that free-market policies would inevitably cause increasing economic inequality. Instead, what the data shows is that for a particular country, if all other factors remain equal (which they never are), increasing economic freedom by decreasing the economic power of the state actually decreases economic inequality. Right now, that conclusion must be taken as an empirically determined fact. As far as I know, no explanation has definitively been determined, although one possible plausible explanation comes from the nature of crony capitalism, which arises naturally in a progressive government. One other possible explanation might arise from the increase of economic opportunity in a vigorously growing free-market for people in the lower income percentiles.

The Mission of Progressivism

Before I continue, I should re-emphasize a point I made in my last post concerning the meaning of the phrase “economic progressivism.” Progressivism as practiced currently is an authoritarian kind of ideology. Its practitioners act almost in loco parentis for the vast bulk of common people, whom they treat almost like children who do not know what is good for them. These “children” are most of the inhabitants of the flyover country between the left and right coasts. These are the people whom Pres. Obama called the “bitter clingers”, those who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” 

As I wrote earlier in Why Would Anyone Be A Progressive?, progressives think about most of the population as an uneducated, unthinking herd with neither the power nor the understanding to keep corporate predators from feeding on them. The progressive university-educated elite must save them from those predators by seizing the reins of government and defending the common people. They will do this by centralizing power in the government (particularly economic power), and by changing laws and regulations to give themselves additional power. Authoritarian government by technocrats is their ideal. Given these kinds of biases about most ordinary people, it should be no wonder that progressives have become increasingly authoritarian over the decades.

Clearly then, any economy that can be called “progressive” must be one where it is the government, not free-markets, that controls much of the economy. Another basic progressive assumption is that Capitalism and free-markets are inimical to the material well-being of the people. Any disastrous economic event is necessarily a “free-market failure” rather than a government failure. Without the intervention of progressive government power, greedy businessmen and investors are free to loot ordinary workers of the wealth they created. The main mission that the progressives see for themselves is to prevent markets from subjugating the common people.

I would be remiss if I did not point out the fundamental flaw in this progressive view of political and economic reality. Their fundamental mistake in this view of reality is they ignore that social systems in general tend to be chaotic systems, in which global perturbations by government affect different parts of the system differently, and not necessarily in predictable ways. This is particularly true for that chaotic social system we call the economy. Possessing a humongous number of degrees of freedom and with the basic interactions between system components (generally pairs of people and groups of people) being local between the interacting components, chaotic systems tend to be rather sensitive to perturbations.

Whenever governments have tried to intrude deeper into the inner mechanisms of the economy with increased taxes or regulations, they have generally unbalanced innumerable supply-demand relationships. Whenever such an imbalance is created, either surpluses or shortages of goods result. Either outcome will cause economic activity to decrease, and the nation’s economic output to be less than it otherwise would be. This is the most fundamental explanation for why the Great Depression of the 1930s lasted so long, and for why the recovery from the Great Recession of 2007-2009 has been so tepid for such a long time.

The Issue of Racism

Having given my answer about the relation between market economies and economic inequality, we can continue to Chease’s second point about racism. He writes

Second, there is the idea that racism is a thing of the past and that anti-racism is now more violent and dangerous than racism. … As for the racism question, the notion that white guilt is irrational, that racism’s stain on American’s history is purely historical… that is easily disproven.

My first, visceral reaction is to shout out that progressives have no monopoly on anti-racism, that a very large number of neoliberals also are concerned with the evil, caustic effects of racism. Also, my remarks in Why Would Anyone Be A Progressive?  did not claim “that racism’s stain on American’s history is purely historical,” merely that it is a rapidly receding problem that progressives were milking for

all they could get. This was also the point of Dr. Shelby Steele, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, in his essay The Exhaustion of American Liberalism, which I extensively quoted. Dr. Steele declared the spate of riots, marches and demonstrations of progressive hatred directed toward Donald Trump and the Republicans revealed what modern progressivism has become: “a politics shrouded in pathos.” He believes progressivism has almost completely exhausted its store of emotional and intellectual resources, and to the extent it can still propel itself, the fuel that animates it is almost purely emotion.

Steele’s major point was the fact that for the Democratic Party to continue to profit from anti-racism, it would have to continually stoke the fires of white guilt for their ancient sins. Concerning this, Steele remarked,

America, since the ’60s, has lived through what might be called an age of white guilt. We may still be in this age, but the Trump election suggests an exhaustion with the idea of white guilt, and with the drama of culpability, innocence and correctness in which it mires us.

White guilt is not actual guilt. Surely most whites are not assailed in the night by feelings of responsibility for America’s historical mistreatment of minorities. Moreover, all the actual guilt in the world would never be enough to support the hegemonic power that the mere pretense of guilt has exercised in American life for the last half-century.

So how should we view the guilt of currently living whites for racism? Chease states, “the notion that white guilt is irrational, that racism’s stain on American’s history is purely historical… that is easily disproven.”  Yet can that notion be so easily disproven for the vast majority of people? I remember when I was in elementary school in the 1950s when racial discrimination was completely obvious and in your face. In 1954 the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education to begin the long process of desegregating schools. In 1955 Rosa Parks took her famous bus ride when she refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger, starting the the Montgomery Bus Boycott. From then on, the civil rights mileposts accumulated rapidly. I remember seeing coverage on TV news of the burgeoning civil rights movement, and reading about it in the newspaper. Those were the days when a great many whites completely deserved whatever guilt they felt for their actual discrimination and bigotry. As an elementary school kid, did I feel guilty? Hell, no! I was angry with the injustices being perpetrated. After the 1960s and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, outright discrimination began to decay away under the weight of law. Do I feel guilty now? Again, hell no. I committed no such acts, and I never expressed anything but disapproval for racial discrimination. I own only the acts I commit and the thoughts I think, and only the sins they might represent. Our own acts and beliefs, not those of our ancestors or our fellow citizens, are all to which we can lay claim. That does not mean I cannot be angry with those who commit such sins, and speak against it.

More than half a century has elapsed since the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Most American citizens have been born since then, and have probably seldom witnessed a true civil rights violation or much actual bigotry. At the companies where I worked as a physicist, no one would dare to demonstrate racial bigotry. I suspect that that is much the case in almost every American business today. Increasingly, we see Afro-Americans entering the mainstream of American life. There are black entrepreneurs such as ex-basketball greats Earvin Magic Johnson and Kobe Bryant, ex-prize fighter George Foreman, Oprah Winfrey, John H. Johnson, and Reginald F. Lewis. There are black senior officers in the armed services, such as  Gen. Dennis L. Via, Maj. Gen. Marcia M. Anderson, and Adm. Cecil D. Haney. There are a great many black congressmen in the U.S. Congress belonging to both political parties. There is even a famous black neurosurgeon who is now the United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Trump administration.

This is not to say that racial bigotry does not continue to exist, only that it is a decreasing phenomenon. As bigotry decays, fewer whites will feel the scourge of personal guilt for racism and have their attention directed to other issues. When racism was actually omnipresent in the 1960s, Steele notes that America was stigmatized “as racist, sexist and militaristic”. This stigmatization produced in Americans an overwhelming desire to regain their moral innocence and authority, of which progressives made themselves the keepers and guarantors.  Concerning this, Steele writes

This was the circumstance in which innocence of America’s bigotries and dissociation from the American past became a currency of hardcore political power. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, good liberals both, pursued power by offering their candidacies as opportunities for Americans to document their innocence of the nation’s past. “I had to vote for Obama,” a rock-ribbed Republican said to me. “I couldn’t tell my grandson that I didn’t vote for the first black president.”

For this man liberalism was a moral vaccine that immunized him against stigmatization. For Mr. Obama it was raw political power in the real world, enough to lift him—unknown and untested—into the presidency. But for Mrs. Clinton, liberalism was not enough. The white guilt that lifted Mr. Obama did not carry her into office—even though her opponent was soundly stigmatized as an iconic racist and sexist.

Now that racism is beginning to decay away, the progressives will have to find something other than white guilt to attract voters. The desperate attempts by progressives to label Trump and other Republicans as bigots show how little else progressives have to engage the public’s imagination. In summing up his thesis, Shelby Steele gives this final judgment of present day progressivism.

Today’s liberalism is an anachronism. It has no understanding, really, of what poverty is and how it has to be overcome. It has no grip whatever on what American exceptionalism is and what it means at home and especially abroad. Instead it remains defined by an America of 1965—an America newly opening itself to its sins, an America of genuine goodwill, yet lacking in self-knowledge. 

This liberalism came into being not as an ideology but as an identity. It offered Americans moral esteem against the specter of American shame. This made for a liberalism devoted to the idea of American shamefulness. Without an ugly America to loathe, there is no automatic esteem to receive. Thus liberalism’s unrelenting current of anti-Americanism.

I will continue my answers to Chease’s critiques in my next post.

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