Brink Lindsey on Liberal Fusionism

by Virginia Postrel  •  Dec 5, 2006 at 12:45 am

http://www.dynamist.com/1829/brink-lindsey-on-liberal-fusionism

Writing in TNR, Brink Lindsey calls for "a politics that joins together under one banner the causes of both cultural and economic progress," a fusion of people the headline writer unfortunately calls "Liberaltarians." The historically inclined might simply call them liberals (and I have my own neologism, hence this site's name). It's a provocative piece and well worth reading (the Cato link is subscription-free), especially by Clintonite liberals. But the alliance Brink proposes requires three difficult shifts:

1) A commitment on both sides to a safety net for the poor but not to pursuing economic equality for its own sake. This is the easiest part and has largely happened already, despite protests from both hard-core levellers and anti-transfer libertarians. But many of the loudest Democrats and libertarians (small-l, the relevant ones) won't go along.
2) An abandonment of Herbert Croly-style technocracy as the governing philosophy of the Democratic Party, not only in economics but in social policy, where "centrists" like Hillary Clinton tend to confuse governing with raising children. Technocracy long ago lost its ideological oomph, but Democrats have a knee-jerk commitment to regulation. Today's good government liberals generally pay homage to tolerance, pluralism, and market processes. The trick is to draw connections between those values and specific policies.
3) A deliberate resolve to form a dynamist alliance at a time when "progressives" are increasingly redefining themselves as stasist populists--trade protection has become an ideological position, for instance, rather than a favor for special interests--and many self-styled "small government" supporters argue vociferously for vast expansions of police and planning powers to limit immigration. In this regard, I am more encouraged by the defenses of trade coming out of places like TNR and Slate than I am by the fawning on Jim Webb coming out of Reason. (The guy even wants to bring back the draft, which used to be a deal breaker for libertarians.).

If it's going to happen, such an alliance can only start among honest intellectuals who are not interested in scoring partisan points. How many of those are left, I'm not sure.

UPDATE: Maybe because I did something similar in TFAIE (developed further here), it seems much clearer to me than to other commenters that Brink is proposing an intellectual and policy alliance/debate, along the lines of the fusionism on the postwar right, not a short-term partisan political coalition to win the 2008 election. The stuff about 13 percent of the vote is mostly news-peg boilerplate. That's how you get TNR and the WaPost to pay attention. It's as irrelevant today as it was in the 1950s just how many libertarian-identified voters there are. The point is to talk seriously about policy ends and means and the role of market processes in serving liberal (in all senses of the word) values.

Demonstrate your support for "big books." Pre-order Brink's forthcoming book, The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Culture. And, of course, there's always The Future and Its Enemies.