Shape-shifting: Words, World Views, and Worlds

Living through history

Photo by Babette Landmesser on Unsplash

Another shape-shifting word: liberal

Last week I wondered my way into understanding what ‘neoliberal’ has come to mean. Now that I know, I’ll continue to avoid using it. Mostly. But I’m glad to understand it better.

This week I turn to what I already knew: That ‘liberal,’ in American English, is a word with too many meanings. I’m wary of it. But the word is used a lot. It’s useful to look at it more closely, and especially at its contrasts. What is liberal not?

Liberal v. illiberal. Liberal democracies protect basic rights: freedom of speech, press, religion, etc. Illiberal governments are authoritarian.

Liberal v. conservative. Liberals support the bundle of positions endorsed by Democrats; conservatives support the set held by Republicans. Those bundles change over time.

Liberal v. progressive. Liberals want justice within the system we’ve got: E.g., everyone, whatever their race, creed, or gender, should have equal access to jobs and equal pay for doing them. Progressives want deeper changes, often to Scandinavian social democracy or Bernie Sanders’ democratic socialism. ‘Progressive’ is another shape-shifter, and contested: Who has the right to be called progressive?

My life in history

When I grew up, in the 1950s, unions were strong, taxes were high, and government regulation accepted. These things were endorsed across the political spectrum, in what came to be called the liberal consensus. Life was good. In retrospect it looks even better, partly because of nostalgic haze, but also in comparison with where we are now. Examined more closely, though, a more complicated picture emerges. For one thing, each family had its own story. My own struggled. One day we had tomato soup for breakfast – announced as a radical treat! I learned later that my parents had completely run out of money. In the end, though, they found their way, and we did well.

In the 1950s life was good. The bipartisan liberal consensus supported strong unions, high taxes, and government regulation.

It’s also clear, now, that the 1950s were not so great for black and brown people, nor for gays and lesbians. Nor for women, whose options were so few. As a child I expected to become a schoolteacher, a nurse, or a social worker; possibly a secretary or lab technician. That was it; there were no other options. (The only worry was whether I could attract a husband, since a single woman’s life was tragic.)

Part of the story, too, is that postwar Europe was in in shambles. Without competition, it was easier for the US to grow as strong as we did.

By the 1970s American prosperity had weakened. Inflation was high, and so was unemployment. The economy was stagnant. I lived in Detroit; everyone I knew seemed to have lost their job or in danger of losing it. I worked two or three different jobs, trying to make ends meet. Twice Middle Eastern oil producing countries cut off our supply. We waited in long lines at gas stations; once I left my car in line, parked, overnight.

By the 1970s the economy slumped, and a neoliberal consensus emerged: The “magic of the market.”

As the economy slumped, the liberal consensus dissolved, and neoliberalism grew attractive. Milton Friedman’s prime time TV series “Free to Choose” equated freedom with an unregulated right to buy and sell. I watched, unconvinced.

Others were, but it wasn’t ideas alone that brought about the sea change. Certainly the long miseries of the 1970s encouraged new perspectives. But the shift was heavily promoted by business, and the “free market” it produced was solidly subsidized by the government.

Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 settled the issue. I was new in town (Norfolk, VA) and watched the returns alone, feeling like the last liberal in America. Over the next eight years, I heard endless references to the “magic of the market,” “the discipline of the market.” The economy did gradually improve. But monopolies grew larger, wages stagnated, and inequality increased sharply. American live expectancy, once longer than for Europeans, became 2 or 3 years shorter. We even stopped growing taller. Once three inches taller than Europeans, we’re now about 3 inches shorter.

Louis Menand, a critic and essayist who shares my long memory, describes these decades in detail.

As decades passed, these losses were slowly forgotten. Social scientists and journalists focused on what had changed during their own lifetimes, in the 1990s or 2000s. The fault line of the late 1970s faded from public memory.

Today the distance between rich and poor has become painfully large. No one’s job is secure. All this is dangerous for democracy, and one of the reasons authoritarianism has grown attractive.

Joan DeMartin, a disillusioned lawyer turned blogger, writes “The Poverty Trap: Why the Poor Stay Poor in America.”

In the light of all this, history is being rediscovered and neoliberalism questioned. Unions are resurgent. Congress has approved massive spending in the wake of Covid and the disaster of climate change. What lies ahead I do not pretend to know. Nor, I think, should anyone.

Instead, I endorse again the idea that hope is a verb. I do what I can to make the future better.

I will post only once more this month, around December 20.