The Socialist Who Saved Liberalism

“I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes it turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.”  – William Morris

Bernie Sanders says he’s a socialist, but he’s not.  It’s true that the misapplication of political labels is a venerable tradition in American politics – consider the Puritan Social Darwinists who call themselves conservatives, the multiculturalist particularists who call themselves liberals, the Old Rightist Neo-Confederates who call themselves libertarians.  But let’s not add to that confusion.  Sanders’ program advocates using activist government to rebuild infrastructure; raise the minimum wage; make college free; increase regulations on Wall Street; institute single payer healthcare; make taxes more progressive; empower unions and worker co-ops.  He rails against “the casino capitalist process by which so few have so much and so many have so little”, and hopes for “a society where all people do well, not just a handful of billionaires” and a “government that represents all of us, not just the wealthiest people in the country.”  That is, present-day capitalism has come off the leash; it isn’t working for most working people and the excess concentration of wealth corrupts democracy.  His analysis is spot-on and his program is full of good practical ideas, but is this socialism?

The essential doctrine of socialism is that capitalism is irredeemably exploitive in that it forces workers to sell their labor to produce goods whose value is stolen by the investors who control that production.  Individualist liberal theory – like that of John Locke and Adam Smith – is used to justify capitalism, but it’s just an alibi excusing the concentration of economic and political power (which is really just economic power) in capitalist hands.  This view reached its most sophisticated and influential theoretical exposition, of course, in the work of 19^th century political philosopher Karl Marx.

Classical Marxism holds that the essential contradiction of capitalism – that production is broadly socialized, but profit goes to a small ruling class – would inevitably lead to its downfall, once workers realized their objective condition and their true class interests.  Most early socialists organized workers in the hopes of increasing their economic power, either through explicitly pro-labor electoral politics, or trade unions, or both.  But the ultimate goal was a society where communal control of production – via unions or worker cooperatives or the state – spelled the end of capitalism and its system of forced, alienated and exploited labor.

But then, in early 20^th century Russia the young intellectual firebrand, Vladimir Lenin, created a new version of socialism.  According to Lenin and his followers, the working class would never achieve true class-consciousness on its own; only a small vanguard party of intellectuals in possession of true theory could work the magic needed to replace capitalist hell with socialist heaven.  The workers would be herded and directed and controlled, all in their own true interests.  Once in power, of course, Marxism-Leninism became horribly totalitarian: the leaders controlled the party, which controlled the state, which controlled everything and everyone else.  This is classic Communism, as espoused and practiced by Stalin, Trotsky, Mao, Ho, Che, Castro, Kim Il-Sung, etc.  Hardly workers paradise.

As the original Democratic Socialism was confronted on its left by Communism, a new ideology, Social Democracy, arose on its immediate right.  Social Democracy is still socialist in analysis – it considers capitalism fundamentally exploitive – but it has a much more moderate and pragmatic program.  Informed by both the failure of capitalism to self-destruct – despite war, depression and decades of socialist agitation – and the failure of socialism to become established other than in its nightmarish Leninist form, social democrats accepted capitalism as a social reality, but tried to bring about socialist ends within the capitalist system.  After coming to power in northern Europe, they heavily regulated capitalism, redistributed its bounty, and provided a safety net for its downtrodden.  That is, they established the welfare state.  But since this is socialism that has made its peace with capitalism (even if only programmatically) it’s no longer really socialism.  Real socialists – Communists and Democratic Socialists – consider capitalism organically incapable of justice, and so view Social Democracy as a sellout and a sham.  To Social Democrats, socialism is a nice idea that has proven historically impossible.

These are the three main groupings of socialist-inspired thought (there’s also Anarchism, which is socialist ends through thoroughly libertarian means).  Clearly Bernie Sanders is neither a Communist nor a Democratic Socialist, since there’s nothing in his rhetoric or his program indicating he yearns to end capitalism, merely regulate it and redistribute its riches a little more equitably.  So is he a social democrat?  Should we label anyone who supports a welfare state (as opposed to the actual socialist destruction of capitalism) as a social democrat?

Lyndon Johnson, also not a socialist.

No.  Consider American liberals and the welfare state they created.  Franklin Roosevelt and the New Dealers used the federal government to promote labor unions; regulate banking and finance and labor markets; provide economic relief to the poor, the elderly, farmers, and workers.  In his 1944 State of the Union address, FDR proposed his “Economic Bill of Rights”, which would have (if not blocked by a conservative Congress) guaranteed to every American a good job, a decent home, healthcare, old-age security, a good education, etc.  Harry Truman pushed for increased unemployment and Social Security benefits, full employment, increased worker safety protections, universal healthcare, public housing, public works, aid to veterans.  Lyndon Johnson ended racial segregation and provided medical care for seniors and the very poor.  And in the first real expansion of the welfare state since LBJ, Obama finally instituted (near) universal healthcare.  This all sounds a lot like social democracy.

But it’s not; it’s modern liberalism.  Both social democracy and modern liberalism support a robust welfare state, but for very different reasons.  Classical liberalism, as defined and expressed by thinkers like Locke, Smith and John Stuart Mill, held that individuals and their rights are logically and morally prior to society.  So no one has any natural claim of authority over anyone else and political power is legitimate only when individuals consent to it.  Classical liberal theory arose during the 17^th, 18^th and 19^th centuries, as the creaking feudal structure was replaced by the free market, nationalism, individual rights and representative democracy; all of these being instituted to allow individuals greater control over their own lives.  By the end of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries full-spectrum classical liberalism had become the established way of life in most advanced Western countries.

But once dominant its downsides became apparent.  Specifically, capitalism was generating enormous wealth, but that wealth was mostly going to the capitalists, not the workers, who were forced to work in terrible conditions for meager pay.  Also, capitalist economy went through dramatic boom-and-bust cycles, causing widespread hardship and social instability.  Socialism arose to explain these symptoms as manifestations of capitalism’s fundamental irrationality.  But liberalism’s critique of capitalism is based upon support for individual freedom and democracy and the desire for social stability.  That is, the completely free market leaves most workers with very little bargaining power, it constricts their options and their lives, it concentrates too much power in the hands of the rich, it corrupts the democratic process, and it opens the door to dangerous radical change.

Thus liberals tried to rescue workers from economic bondage, and save capitalism – their invention! – from its own excesses.  Hence, the liberal welfare state (which is generally a little milder than the social democratic version).  This new liberalism – using the state for the prudential amelioration of capitalism in order to increase individual freedom – was quite different from classical liberalism; it’s been called welfare state liberalism, welfarism, progressivism, social liberalism, modern liberalism.  That is, through a sort of convergent evolution, some socialists moved right and some liberals moved left and they met in the welfare state middle.  Their programs became very similar, but their respective ideological motivations remained unchanged, and therefore quite divergent.  Social democrats still considered capitalism exploitive at its heart; modern liberals still supported it in theory while wishing only to mitigate its most pernicious assaults on freedom and democracy.  But both gave up their utopian dreams – of pure socialist justice, and pure capitalist freedom, respectively – and accepted the good and bad in capitalism, once tamed by the welfare state.  To social democrats welfare-state capitalism is the least bad economic system that’s practically possible; to modern liberals it’s an improved version of an imperfect but essentially beneficial system.  A social democrat is a socialist who knows socialism is impossible; a modern liberal is liberal who knows that capitalism must be made better.

This is why it’s not fair to call Sanders a socialist; he’s clearly a fairly typical welfare state liberal, in the historically popular mold of the great 20^th century New Deal liberals.  So why does he call himself a socialist?  Because liberalism has changed so much since Lyndon Johnson.  The success of modern conservatism and its electoral dominance, particularly since the rise of Ronald Reagan, subdued liberals.  Many, such as Bill Clinton and Al Gore, became New Democrats, largely giving up the liberal critique of capitalism and promoting privatization and deregulation.  In technical terms they became neo-liberals, trying to achieve welfare-state ends through private means.  They partnered with conservatives to expand free trade, end the federal guarantee of social assistance to poor families, and deregulate banking and investment.  Old-fashioned welfare state liberalism lost its political leaders to conservative polices, its white working class constituency to racially charged right-wing populism, and its intellectual and cultural elite to libertine, cosmopolitan multiculturalism.

That is, post 60’s liberalism became much less focused on economic struggles and much more focused on issues of cultural emancipation: social equality for racial minorities, women, gays, etc.  This was partly the influence of countercultural movements like the hippies, feminists, black nationalists, etc., and also the influence of the New Left, that baby boomer, student movement against conformity, white supremacy and militarism.  New Leftists started the 60’s as reformist liberals hoping to cure then-dominant technocratic liberalism of its bureaucratic and paternalistic excesses, and create a racially healed, individually fulfilling and humane liberalism.  As liberalism was the conscience of capitalism, they aimed to be the conscience of liberalism.  But as that fateful decade proceeded and they felt the stinging disappointment of liberalism’s failure to end racial injustice and Cold War extremism, they came to see liberalism as the enemy of its putative humanitarian goals.  They became convinced that America was fundamentally compromised by racism, militarism and capitalism.  Most of them became social democrats; but many moved farther left, in fits and starts; some slid all the way to Communism; a small number even embraced Communism’s farther extremes, idealizing horrible tyrants like Mao, Kim and Hoxha.  Thus modern welfare-state liberalism lost its intellectual support to both its right and its left, though it still commanded a large, orphaned constituency among actual working people.

When he was a socialist, sort of.

Bernie Sanders is a child of the New Left.  Born in 1941, he’s a little bit older than the typical baby-boom New Leftist, but he was very much part of the counterculture, the sexual revolution, the anti-war movement, and the ideological opposition to capitalism.  That is, he once was an actual socialist, albeit something of a libertarian hippie one.  But as he became involved in electoral politics – mayor of the very liberal city of Burlington, Vermont, then independent Congressman from Vermont, and now Senator – his natural personal pragmatism moved him on both economic and cultural issues further to the right, that is, toward the old welfare-state liberal center.  As the rise of Reaganism moved welfare-state liberals over to neo-liberalism, it moved Bernie from vague socialism over to welfare-state liberalism. He was a New Leftist who came to understand the necessity of defending the welfare state against the conservative and neo-liberal onslaught of the last 40 years.  Now he’s a liberal who calls himself a socialist, but mostly because respectable establishment liberals as a whole abandoned real liberalism decades ago.  And that nicely explains why the primary defender of real liberalism is such an eccentric.

It has fallen to a New Leftist to rescue liberalism.  That someone came out of that starkly anti-liberal tradition to save liberalism is an irony too exquisite, but the justice is poetic, and the lesson is clear.  Just as socialism was an overreaction to the flaws of capitalism, New Leftist abandonment of the traditional welfare state was an overreaction to the compromises and half-broken promises of 20^th century liberalism.  Socialism was never a real possibility in America – thank God! – and it still isn’t – thank God!  Even if Sanders were elected and somehow managed to institute his entire program, and even if the entire world came to call it socialism, it would still really just be modern liberalism, the most popular, successful, broadly prosperous, and humanitarian ideology since feudalism went sloughing off to its happy demise.  Bernie, welcome home.

Hillary, the Lesser Evil

The champion of everyday people visits Wall Street

If Barack Obama had not been a candidate for president in 2008, Hillary would almost certainly have been the Democratic nominee, and liberals would have been quite happy about it.  Indeed, she enjoyed strong liberal support at first.  And if she had been elected president, liberals would have been jubilant.  But now that she almost certainly will be the nominee – and quite probably the president, too – they’ve become quite unsure about her.  What gives?  Why did she inspire such passion then and such hesitation now?  Who has changed, Hillary or liberals?

For instance, incontrovertibly liberal New York mayor Bill de Blasio created a minor controversy on NBC’s Meet the Press when he hesitated to endorse her candidacy.  He publicly worried that she’s not liberal enough, and he channeled widespread liberal Hillary-ambivalence when he both applauded her resume and challenged her to present a more starkly liberal economic program. 

And now that Hillary has officially declared herself a candidate and is acting the populist and the “champion” of the people, a crowd of critics has arisen to argue that it’s only an act, that Hillary is as populist as a credit default swap.   The indictment is convincing: she’s very cozy with Wall Street; she’s been part of official Washington since she moved into the White House with Bill in 1993; she’s quite comfortable within the modern American ruling regime of capital, connections, and corruption.  She seems more like part of the problem than the solution; that is, if you think a rapacious, semi-hereditary caste exploiting our economy and undermining our democracy is a problem.

But you don’t have to be to Hillary’s left to suspect her populism.  Conservatives – bless their helpful hearts – doubt her sincerity too, though generally for unconvincing and disingenuous reasons.  If she can’t be a genuine liberal because she has money then how do you explain Teddy Kennedy and FDR?  And conservatives are quite indignant at her call for a constitutional amendment to curtail the political power of corporations, all while she rakes in that dirty Wall Street cash.  Their point seems to be Hillary’s hypocrisy, and the way it reinforces the near-universal perception that she’s phony from top to bottom, that she doesn’t do or say anything that hasn’t been focus-grouped and poll-tested and approved by public relations gurus.  Well, duh.  It seems unlikely that conservatives are complaining that Hillary is not battling vigorously enough against the pernicious influence of big money, i.e. that she’s being insufficiently liberal.

And then there’s the case for the defense, made by Hillary-supporters who insist she is a real liberal.  But it’s just unconvincing; they either ignore her intimacy with big money, or they attempt a misdirect by pointing out her reliable cultural liberalism, or they highlight her recent populist rhetoric itself, as if political rhetoric should be taken at face value.  Interestingly there’s a cadre of conservatives on this side of the argument as well, convinced that Hillary is quite left, actually more left than you might imagine: she’s an Alinskyite Stalin-waiting-in-the-wings.  Oh, dear!

Bill Clinton working for George McGovern, 1972

In reality, Bill and Hillary started out as idealistic McGovern supporters, but somewhere between there and here they became a little too eager to work within the system, a little too comfortable playing nice with the powers-that-be.  Hillary has supported Obamacare, the extension of unemployment benefits, etc., so she clearly is some kind of liberal; that is, she’s willing to use government to help working people.  So why all of a sudden does she feel the need to sound like Huey Long?

And there it is.  That’s the way liberals have changed since 2008: they’ve become substantially more economically populist.  The wars over Obamacare, the federal budget, financial regulation, etc. have focused the liberal mind on the issue of economic injustice.  The Tea Party and libertarians have made free market anarchism the centerpiece of conservatism, and in doing so they’ve clarified liberal convictions.  The 2008 election was about unseating the party of George W. Bush and undoing the tremendous damage it had caused, and Hillary seemed a perfectly plausible leader for that charge.   But now liberals are hungry to fight the real fight, the fight to make our economy work for everyone, not just CEO’s and investors and hedge-fund managers.  And Hillary is simply implausible as the champion of that fight.

The Clintons came of political age in the 1980’s, when the country was turning toward Reaganism, toward free-market idolatry and Social Darwinism.  Like many liberals of their day, they made their accommodation with the new reality.   They abandoned the fight for economic justice, and fought a rearguard action against the laissez-faire assault on the welfare state.  This is the real way that Hillary is too old: she’s still part of that liberal timidity.  But liberals today are no longer afraid to be liberals, they want a leader that represents their new fighting spirit, and Hillary sold off that piece of her soul to the highest bidder long, long ago.  In a strange way, the McCarthyite freaks afraid of Hillary’s inner Stalin are half right.  She did submerge her true liberal self long ago; they’re just wrong to think it’s still alive and kicking.

In an era when Republicans have a lock on Congress (or at least on the House) even a thoroughly liberal president wouldn’t be able to advance much of a liberal agenda.  And a moderate president doing little to help or harm America would be enormously preferable to a conservative doing it much harm.  It’s true that a genuine liberal could substantially advance the interests of working people through appointments of cabinet secretaries, agency heads, federal judges, etc., but there are no genuine liberals running this cycle that actually have a chance of winning.  So all that’s left for liberals is to pressure Hillary to be as liberal as she can be pressured to be, and that includes doing pathetic little things like withholding endorsements.  And this is the likely scenario for the next 8 years: an uninspiring and cynical president half-heartedly containing raging conservative havoc.  It seems we just have to accept that that’s the best we can do.

Hollow Populisms

Union members and supporters protest Governor Scott Walker's assault on unions
Madison, Wisconsin, 2012

Conservative populism is inherently unstable; it must constantly struggle to keep cultural populism from bleeding over into economic issues.  That is, white working people are encouraged to resent snobbish, over-educated, cosmopolitan, elitist liberals who look down on them for their unsophisticated tastes, crude manners and backward views.  But they must never resent the rich simply for being rich; they must never consider the injustice of being forced to work for less pay in worse conditions while CEO’s and hedge-fund managers make millions.  Since in conservative mythology, capitalism always rewards the virtuous and punishes the lazy, conservative populism must be about attitudes and humiliation, never about wages and power.  It must remain purely affective, never material.  You’re only allowed to hate someone for their condescension, never for their money.  Thus is real populism neutered.

But that’s what makes the conservative split on immigration so interesting: it sneaks in some genuine economic populism through the back door.  Conservative elites – commentators, writers, the Republican establishment, the Chamber of Commerce, big money – are quite happy to let in lots of unskilled workers from other countries.  It provides cheap labor, and it indulges their stark libertarianism, the view that any interference in the market – even a national boundary – is the work of the devil.  And after Hispanics voted overwhelmingly in 2012 against Mitt Romney and his severely restrictive anti-immigration position, Republican leaders are eager to appear more accommodating toward Hispanics.  And did I mention that immigration provides lots of cheap labor?

The conservative base, of course, is strongly opposed to both allowing in more immigrants and allowing undocumented immigrants to stay.  Their reasons are partly cultural: they’re afraid that too many foreigners will resist assimilation and alter the national character.  And on the farther reaches the reasons become more nativist and racial: they’re convinced America is meant for white Christians.  But their objections also include perfectly defensible and plausible economic concerns: they don’t want to compete against cheap labor.  Of course, that’s the same cheap labor – I may have mentioned – that employers and investors are quite happy to have them compete against.  So the split on immigration between the conservative establishment and the conservative base is an economic split.  It’s a split defined by class.  Not class in the sense of who’s looking down his nose at who, but in the sense of who holds economic power and who is subject to it.

Into that breach has stepped Scott Walker, the conservative Republican governor of Wisconsin and credible presidential candidate.  During an interview with conservative Glenn Beck, Walker staked out what breitbart.com calls a “pro-American-worker” position:

In terms of legal immigration, how we need to approach that going forward is saying—the next president and the next congress need to make decisions about a legal immigration system that’s based on, first and foremost, on protecting American workers and American wages, because the more I’ve talked to folks, I’ve talked to [Alabama] Senator Sessions and others out there—but it is a fundamentally lost issue by many in elected positions today—is what is this doing for American workers looking for jobs, what is this doing to wages, and we need to have that be at the forefront of our discussion going forward.

Clearly, Walker is siding with the base against the establishment.  But to do so, he’s taken a populist position, an economically populist position: the rich and the powerful are making decisions that hurt everyday people, that hurt them in their pocketbooks.

Now Scott Walker, like most conservatives, is not exactly a friend of policies and institutions that promote the economic interests of working people.  Indeed, he’s loved by conservatives specifically because of the ferocious battles he fought against organized labor in Wisconsin.  And many conservative commentators consider Walker’s newfound suspicion of a completely free labor market to be a real betrayal of conservative principle (there are exceptions).  Consider Philip Klein's delightfully dogmatic reaction:

The idea that policymakers should protect current American workers from competition from immigrants who come here legally and are willing and eager to work hard is a perversion of American ideals and a recipe for decline.

But in addition to Walker’s newfound moderation regarding market purity, there is his newfound immoderation on the immigration issue itself; i.e. he’s gone quite a few steps further than most of his conservative presidential rivals by questioning not only illegal immigration, but legal immigration.  Together these deviations add up to a new, more comprehensive conservative populism.  That is, Walker is positioning himself, consciously or otherwise, to be the genuine voice of working America (white working America, at least) championing both its cultural instincts and its economic interests.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker

Or so it would appear.  But will Walker embrace a broader range of policies helping working people?  Will he support raising the minimum wage or progressive taxes or public works?  Will he come out fighting in favor of unions?  If he does none of those things his populism will have been detained at the border’s edge.  If it seems that the immigration controversy might be the herald of a more genuinely populist conservatism, it isn’t happening yet, and it probably won’t happen any time soon.  And that’s because conservatives – even populist ones – believe that American workers merit special consideration only for being American, not for being workers.  American workers should be protected from competition from foreigners but not from the depredations of American capitalism.  This is the full extent of conservative concern for American workers: they must remain American.

But if conservatives have no concern for American workers as workers, liberals have no concern for them as Americans.  Indeed, most liberals seem to have no more consideration for American workers than they do for workers from other countries.  It’s true that the Democratic economic agenda – minimum wage increases, Obamacare, etc. – is directed at helping working people, but when faced with the choice between American workers and immigrants, liberals choose the immigrants.  Have their national feelings attenuated that far? They’re terribly concerned about the injustice suffered by African-Americans, Hispanics, other racial minorities, women, gays, the handicapped, etc., and rightly so.  But do they have no particular consideration for their fellow Americans as Americans?

If not, if liberals have gone that far, then American liberalism is on a short one-way trip to history’s dust bin.  No one will vote for a party that doesn’t put a special priority upon the interests of its own citizens.  Indeed, no one should!  Especially if one supports the social welfare state and hopes for a more egalitarian and just society, since those are practically possible only within the confines of a well-defined polity.  It’s much easier to convince a rich New Yorker to pay taxes for doctors in Texas than for doctors in Bangladesh.  Liberalism without patriotism is liberalism standing upon thin air.

Liberals used to understand this.  Only a few years ago they were much more willing to express worry about the effect of immigration on American wages.  Now they only worry about doing even the tiniest damage to their demographically expanding non-white electoral coalition.  And by spending so much time and energy portraying any conservative resistance to immigration as based entirely upon racism, they’ve made it too politically costly to question immigration themselves.  Their populism is a victim of their own propaganda and their own hypertrophied broad-mindedness.  To love everyone is to be of no use to anyone.

And conservatives, whose national feelings could probably do with a little attenuation, are all too happy to demonstrate how this undermines liberal economic populism.  Here is the Weekly Standard’s Jeffrey H. Anderson explaining how immigration shows that liberals don’t care about workers (in a piece written before Walker staked out his anti-immigration position):

If there is anything that liberals and Big Business can seemingly agree upon, it’s that we don’t need an approach to immigration that benefits Main Street.  It remains to be seen whether anyone running for president will seize this opening and buck the liberal-corporate consensus.

But liberals seem blithely unaware how much they’re playing into that consensus.  Hillary has even come out in favor of more immigration!  And that’s in perfect keeping with her pro-business positions and the general cosmopolitan tilt of liberal elites.  And, of course, it helps Democrats cement their support among Hispanics.  But it drastically undermines liberal credibility among working Americans, the very people that liberalism used to be about.

We’re left with no real populism.  Liberal populism shrivels before our eyes.  And a hollow conservative version tries to steal its place.  But the only American populism worthy of the name is one that actively works for the material good of American workers.  Liberals may call that nativism and conservatives may call it socialism.  But in reality it’s neither, it’s justice made practical.

Freedom, Work, Drudgery and Danger

American coal miners

If you won the lottery, would you still work?  No, you’d have the freedom to indulge yourself in worldly pleasures: travelling, socializing, thrill-seeking, etc.  But eventually you would probably find a life of indolence and hedonism unsatisfying, and would long for activity that both engaged your talents and benefitted society.  Without your millions, of course, you would be compelled to work, and the extent that a job gratified your talents would become secondary to the extent that it gratified your need for food and housing.  That is, most people work to survive and only a lucky few find work that’s deeply satisfying.  Does a garbage man find as much satisfaction in his work as an architect?  How about a cafeteria worker or a data entry clerk or a coal miner?  No, most of the work that most people do is drudgery, and most people would happily give it up if not compelled to it by economic necessity.  It’s true that all honest work imparts dignity and there is some satisfaction in simply doing your job well.  And in a society of equal opportunity – something to which our society provides at best a rough approximation – anyone with sufficient talent and determination can become a successful architect or neurosurgeon or musician.  But the great majority of people work not for the satisfaction or the dignity.  They work because survival obligates them to a life of unsatisfying and unforgiving drudgery.  For most people, work is coercion.

But imagine if some of that coercion could be lifted.  Imagine a person working an unsatisfying job only for the health insurance provided by her employer (that’s how most Americans get health insurance).  Maybe she or someone in her family requires expensive medical treatment, or maybe independent medical insurance is prohibitively expensive.  But now imagine a change in the system allows her to get cheap but good health insurance somewhere else.  Now she can afford to quit her job and give up the modest pay.  Maybe she wants to quit so she can stay home with her young children or her aging parent.  Maybe she wants to go back to college or start her own business.  Maybe she wants to retire a few years early.  Or maybe she wants to keep her job and simply work fewer hours and spend more time with her family.  Maybe she’s just happy knowing that her expanded health care options give her more choices and more opportunities, more control over her own life.  Isn’t it a tiny bit like winning the lottery?  That is, aren’t we imagining she has more freedom?

Well, you don’t have to imagine.  According to a report by the non-partisan and broadly respected Congressional Budget Office (CBO) there are millions of people who will work less or not at all because they can now obtain cheap and dependable health insurance through Obamacare.  As Josh Barro explains, “Broadly, one key goal of health policy should be to let people make work decisions without worrying about how those decisions affect their health insurance.”  That wasn’t the central intent of the health care law, but it sure seems like a positive development.  Well, there are many conservatives who adamantly don’t think so.  Welcome to the latest battle in the Obamacare wars.

At first many conservatives, blinded by Obamacare-hatred into abandoning either understanding or scruples, proclaimed that the CBO is reporting that Obamacare will destroy millions of jobs.  Some Republican politicians eagerly misrepresented the issue for electoral gain.  Even the supposedly liberal mainstream press thoughtlessly parroted stories about “lost” jobs.  There are no lost jobs, of course, only defecting workers, as clarified in this exchange between conservative Republican vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan and CBO director Douglas Elmendorf as the latter appeared before the House Budget Committee:

"Just to understand, it is not that employers are laying people off," Ryan said.

"That is right," Elmendorf said.

There is a huge difference between being fired and quitting, as anyone who has actually held a job knows.  As Elmendorf testified:

The reason we don’t use the term “lost jobs” is there is a critical difference between people who like to work and can’t find a job — or have a job that’s lost for reasons beyond their control — and people who choose not to work. If someone comes up to you and says, “The boss says I’m being laid off because we don’t have enough business to pay,” [then] any other person feels bad about that and we sympathize for them having lost their job. If someone says, “I decided to retire or stay home and spend more time with my family and spend more time doing my hobby,” they don’t feel bad about it — they feel good about it. And we don’t sympathize. We say congratulations.

Exactly!  But some conservatives are so sure that no Obamacare news is good news they simply pretend that the “lost jobs” tale hasn’t been thoroughly debunked and persist in their misrepresentations.  Consider the semantically-challenged David Harsanyi:

“Obamacare is inducing labor demand to shrink!” doesn’t have the quite the same punch as “Obamacare is costing us jobs!” though both are accurate.

No, normal English usage compels us to call the first sentence accurate, the second one inaccurate, and Harsanyi’s point ridiculous.

Some conservatives deny that even though Obamacare will let some people quit their jobs, that won’t constitute an increase in their freedom.  Charles C. W. Cooke writes in the National Review Online that whatever else one can say about taxing one person to subsidize another:

one cannot claim that it makes either man “free” — at least not without twisting the word and the concept that it represents beyond all meaningful recognition.

That’s because the need to scramble for survival does not constitute coercion in any sense:

Does the Obama administration really plan to make the case that negative liberty is but a mirage and that, the state of nature’s “forcing” one to work being akin to actual compulsion, the state must step in everywhere to liberate the citizenry from reality’s harsh claims? One suspects not.

Let’s overlook Cooke’s rather slapdash treatment of the theoretical concepts of negative liberty and the state of nature, and rephrase his position in everyday terms: He seems to be saying that the brutish struggle for existence is an unavoidable reality of even a thoroughly free life; alleviating that brutishness does not increase one’s freedom, only one’s comfort.  Every person, every creature, in every situation, must struggle for sustenance and shelter.  This feels intuitively plausible: it seems a little odd to think of the demands of one’s own biology as coercions.  But this argument overlooks two important points.  First, there’s no reason an increase in comfort can’t yield an increase in freedom.  To the extent that it’s actually possible to moderate the struggle for survival such that one’s biological needs don’t consume one’s resources to the same degree, those needs can be coherently thought of as coercive.  If survival didn’t compel one to spend so much time hunting down wooly mammoths or waiting on tables then one would have more options, more control over one’s life, more freedom.  Second, in modern society both the freedoms and constrictions of economic life are not just natural, but social as well; they manifest the rules we’ve agreed to live by.  There is a difference between the hinter-gatherer chasing down prey on the savannah and the worker who through lack of independent means is forced to sell his labor on the open market.  In the modern world economic survival can be made less or more harsh by (among other things) actions of society or the state.  Marginally liberating individuals by subsidizing their health insurance is not like trying to counteract all of “reality’s harsh claims”; it’s not like trying to repeal old age or gravity; it’s more like a hunter-gatherer discovering a grove of abundantly productive fruit trees.  It’s more like winning a lesser lottery ticket.

But, though Cooke’s logic does not convince, it does illuminate.  Misapprehending capitalism, a social institution, as a purely natural phenomenon – like the struggle for survival – is a widespread conservative fallacy.  Perceiving all political and social issues as amenable to black-and-white moralistic solutions is another.  Put the two together and you have conservative economics.  To Cooke, when the state tries to revise the natural workings of the market it commits both arrogance and immorality.  His conservative colleague, writer Michael Goodwin, likewise considers it a sin, and the abetting of sin: Choosing to work less hours because the government subsidizes your health insurance is shameful, if not downright un-American!

In [the old, pre-liberal] America, work, any work, was honorable while being on the dole was cause for shame. Still is.

That is, liberals are blind to the moral nobility of self-sufficiency; that’s probably why they’re always plotting to ensnare people into government bondage:

This anti-job, pro-dependency tilt is the crux of the nation’s polarization. In essence, it pits those who believe in the sanctity of work against those who believe in penalizing wealth and redistributing its fruits.

Sanctity!  Goodwin beats even Cooke in the competition for most abstractly moralistic understanding of labor in the modern world.  Cooke may believe it’s natural but Goodwin actually believes it’s holy!  Goodwin attempts to describe the essence of our national polarization, but instead he embodies it.  Conservatives issue furious sermons about the naturalness and sanctity of the free market while ignoring its actual results.  Liberals actually perceive capitalism’s “harsh realities” – its coercion, its amorality, its inability to deliver universal healthcare – and hope to moderate them in limited and prudential ways that increase individual comfort and freedom.  Moralistic, dogmatic platitudes vs. pragmatic, prudential solutions.  That’s the real crux of our polarization.  Here it pits the absolutist, pre-ordained certainty that the state can’t possibly make anyone freer against the practical reality that sometimes it does just that.

And there’s all the usual handwringing about the evils of redistribution.  As Repair_Man_Jack of redstate.com puts it:

The freedom to sit on your butt and do nothing at another citizen’s expense is expressly parasitic and malignant.

Well, at least he concedes it’s freedom!  But all social insurance requires redistribution, from Social Security to unemployment insurance to student loans to Medicare and Medicaid.  Every government activity, even the provision of education and highways and the military, includes those who pay who will not benefit and those who benefit who have not paid.  You can’t have anything like universal healthcare without some redistribution; the young, healthy and affluent have to help pay for the old, sick and poor.  And once you subsidize the old, sick and poor they may find less need to hold a job or work so many hours.  To pay for Obamacare you do have to marginally increase someone’s taxes and that does marginally decrease that someone’s freedom.  That is, you’re redistributing not only money, but freedom.  You’re marginally increasing the coercion on the taxed worker so that the Obamacare recipient can work less.  But much of the revenue for Obamacare comes from taxes on the upper economic strata (and much of the rest from hospitals and insurance companies), that is, on those who already have the most freedom.  Even the extravagantly hated individual mandate to buy health insurance is really only a tax on not buying it, and a minor tax at that.  And everyone may someday need government-subsidized healthcare; indeed, every American who lives to 65 qualifies for Medicare, a program even Tea Partiers seem to love.  Why is Obamacare is any less defensible?  If you believe they’re all indefensible and the entire welfare state should be repealed, you’d better be prepared for the quite harsh economic and social conditions that prevailed before its creation.  Would that represent an increase in freedom? The person who worked 14 hours a day in deadly conditions his entire life without hope of retirement might have found some appreciation in the purely abstract freedom of his condition, but it’s doubtful that offset the all-too-real crushing coercions he actually lived under.

But from the perspective of the highly moralized conservative point of view, redistribution is robbing Peter to pay Paul, and it not only cheats Peter, it diminishes Paul.  As Jonathan Chait explains, Obamacare recipients have become the new welfare queens.  To John Podhoretz such recipients risk the loss of self-sufficiency:

This is the classic problem of a government handout: It can become more alluring to those who receive it than the prospect of a life lived without it.

Charles Krauthammer puts it rather less kindly:

In [Obama’s] new opportunity society, you are given the opportunity for idleness while living parasitically off everyone else.

Repair Man Jack gets downright visceral:

So behind all the benevolent language about being free to quit is a call to greater personal dependence instead of responsibility. Why isn’t this relief from responsibility good? It is antipodal to good because it takes a free-minded, productive and independent citizens and turns them into the human equivalent of intestinal parasites. These parasites then degrade and eat out the sustenance of others.

Jack’s fascination with intestine-eating aside, a person who works less or quits their job because of government subsidies is not a parasite.  What have we come to that American workers actually need to be defended against such vile slander?  These are people who have been working or looking for work, not looking for a handout.  Health insurance subsidies do not “turn them into” anything other than healthier, more secure, more autonomous Americans. Are people who retire on Social Security parasites?  What about capable and healthy retirees?  Should Social Security be repealed so they’re forced to get off their lazy butts and go hustle for jobs?  Or consider the G.I. Bill, which provided government-sponsored mortgages, business loans and college tuition for servicemen and women returning from World War II – did it turn them into parasites?  And just because Obamacare allows a person to quit her job doesn’t mean she has stopped working (especially if she is merely working fewer hours).  A person who stays home to take care of her children or her parents or her home is still working and still contributing to society.

But, though government assistance need not transform one into a parasite, you need not be a raving hysteric to appreciate that it might weaken one’s self-sufficiency, it might weaken one’s work ethic; indeed, it might weaken everyone’s.  Andrew Sullivan almost agrees with Goodwin about the crux of our polarization:

It’s struck me that there is an underlying anxiety to several of our current debates on economic and social issues. That anxiety is that the American work ethic – unparalleled in the developed world – is under threat. That’s the real critique of Obamacare

Though it’s not clear he’s on Goodwin’s side of that polarization:

The Protestant work ethic we have, for example, is the imperative for industrious striving, self-advancement and material gain. It is emphatically not about being happy. And at some point, if those two values are not easily compatible, something will give.

The Puritan work ethic has, to a great extent, served us well, though it does have the downsides that Sullivan touches upon.  But that work ethic doesn’t seem dead just yet.  There is an ongoing tension in American public life between the pragmatic need to ameliorate the excesses of capitalism and a political folk culture that worships self-sufficiency, and that tension is not about to ease any time soon.  And even if the liberal view of capitalism came to dominate it would not necessarily mean the death of the work ethic.  One of liberalism’s fondest dreams is that working people be fairly rewarded for their labor.  Second-guessing capitalist outcomes looks like an attack on the work ethic only if you believe the harshness of the market is a necessary corrective to the enervating human desire for sponsored comfort.  To conservatives, the unforgiving necessity for hard work is positively beneficial in that it polices a naturally weak and unambitious populace.  But American workers want just what liberals want for them: to work hard and to reap the benefits, one of which might be working fewer hours because of a health insurance subsidy.  Should we really fear that when the workers in question leave their jobs they will so casually fall into inactivity, despondency and sloth?  At base, the fierce conservative attack on the welfare state is about the Puritanical dread of corrupting, lazy irresponsibility.  They’re convinced the freed man won’t feel the need for work, the urge to create and produce and contribute we ascribed to the lottery winner; instead he’ll embrace indolence, hedonism and immorality.  So the workforce must be kept hungry; not because hungry workers will work for less (though the investor class does not object), but because hunger keeps them busy, it keeps them honest.

We see the political forces arrayed against freedom for the American worker:  There is an ideological worldview that sees exemption from wage labor as unnatural and morally debilitating, a culture that equates moral value with economic value and freedom with self-sufficiency.  There is the warped version of the work ethic that’s convinced that inside each worker is a welfare cheat just aching to jump out.  And there is the ferocity of a partisan movement in the grip of these mythologies, righteous in its insistence that moralistic absolutes override the bread-and-butter concerns of people’s actual lives.  And, most fundamentally there are the ideological blinders that prevent the clear apprehension of the coercion that plays such a large part in the lives of working people.  Cooke finds:

a great deal of truth in The Economist’s observation that “a job is an economic transaction between a seller and a buyer of labour, and can be ‘destroyed’ if either seller or buyer walks away.”

It may seem here that Cooke is toying with the pretense of some of his less scrupulous conservative colleagues that the CBO report proves Obamacare is destroying jobs.  But it’s not mendacity that tempts him to support the Economist’s laughable “observation”, it’s the constrictions of his own ideology.  In real life, no job is destroyed when a worker walks away; there is always a line of people eagerly waiting to take his place (especially during a weak recovery).  A job is a thing an employer dispenses; it cannot be destroyed by a seller of labor.  Labor is a buyer’s market; in the real lives of most people, the employer holds the power.  CBO Director Elmendorf reminds us how we pity the man who’s been fired, but congratulate the man who quits.  That’s because the quitting man has acquired the economic power to meet the boss as an equal, as one who is free of the boss’s power.  Such a man has shed one of life’s coercions.

But there is no room in conservative ideology to address that coercion; that’s why conservatives have been so exercised by a provocative tweet from the Huffington Post’s Congressional reporter, Michael McAuliff:

There's an irony in the GOP complaining that ACA lets people quit jobs. I mean, what's wrong with freedom?

Conservatives can’t imagine a subsidy recipient has been freed from a compulsion whose existence they can’t even perceive!  In their worldview it’s not only acceptable, but essential that families mold individuals, schools indoctrinate them, religion restrain them, mores chasten them, and the market allocate them.  But interference from the federal government is the darkest tyranny!  What’s actually wrong with freedom – actual individual freedom – in the conservative mind is that it dis-empowers families, schools, religion, mores and the market.  The freedom that conservatives genuinely value is the unconstrained power of those institutions to exert their traditional moral authority over their charges, to manage them.

To be fair, there is another side to such freedom that conservatives value at least as much: the individual self-sufficiency those institutions are charged with instilling and enforcing.  To a conservative, individual freedom without individual responsibility is no freedom at all.  Overlooking the semantic confusion, liberals value their version of freedom because it allows individuals to pursue their own goals and develop their individual talents and personalities.  Conservatives value their version of freedom because it produces righteous and responsible providers and protectors (yes, it still includes a profoundly male tone).  But it’s a strange sort of freedom that requires ongoing and overpowering direction and enforcement from social institutions like the church and the market.  Once again, it’s not clear how much conservatives trust truly free individuals to make their own choices.  To a liberal, if a subsidy allows an individual to develop herself more, then she simply is more free, regardless of the financial source for the subsidy.  To a conservative she has forgone her freedom, her autonomy, for a gilded cage.

Comprehensive freedom from work is, of course, both impossible and undesirable, while comprehensive freedom from drudgery is merely impossible.  The struggle for existence and the capitalist need for wage labor are, obviously, the most important and most inescapable enemies of freedom from drudgery.  But if we can allow workers to work marginally less and in such a way that it barely affects either the economy or the social fabric, then what is so wrong with that?  At bottom, conservatives reject the notion that such workers are more free because they’ve confused freedom with responsibility.  Freedom seems to be merely their word for the arrangement of interlocking, constraining institutions that punish irresponsibility and thereby enforce morality.  The conservative sensibility, with its overwrought Puritan anxieties, can’t seem to escape the fear that real freedom – freedom to say “No” to the boss or the patriarch or the minister – is dangerous.  That’s because real freedom means the redistribution of power – the power to quit without starving, power over your own time and energy – and that threatens traditional authority and the view of moral order it represents.  That’s what’s wrong with freedom, as far as conservatives are concerned.  But given the overwhelming necessity of work and the coercion it entails, respect for the labor of our fellow Americans should prevent us from begrudging them the small slivers of power and freedom we might provide.  Their respite from drudgery represents a small victory for everyone who labors.  Let’s trust them to enjoy it and cultivate it and profit from it as they will.