The Politics of Power

The liberal order is breaking down, and that's a very bad thing.

The liberal order and values that have defined the United States, and the rest of the Western World since the end of the Second World War is unstable. Increasingly the nature of our political conversations has moved away from the healthy conversations about the politics of distribution — how we, as a society organize and regulate the use of our resources and wealth towards a greatest good for us all — towards the politics of power — how we, as a society decide who has power over others, and the limits of that power.

In the healthy politics of distribution, within a liberal polity, we argue over things like what public goods the government should provision. We argue whether government should provide healthcare or not. We argue over education policy. We debate how much money should be provisioned for law enforcement, security, and the military. These are all healthy political arguments that can and should be had within the liberal order. The politics of distribution is what healthy liberal politics looks like, and from 1945 to 2016, this is mostly what we got in our federal politics.

Increasingly however, the nature of our disagreements as a society are within the politics of power. We are disagreeing over the scope of government power. Such as, how much unchecked power does the presidency have, whether the permanent government bureaucracy should be under direct political control or not, how much political power should economic elites be allowed to wield, or what ideological worldviews should steer our institutions.

This is most pronounced from the right, who increasingly see this to be a conversation about an us and a them — of two distinct groups in America, who are in an existential struggle for ultimate control of the country. People of this view on the right, range from MAGA cult stalwarts, to people who dislike Trump, but see him as an unsavory but necessary bulwark against a “woke ideology” that binds Nancy Pelosi and a Jill Stein-voting campus protester with a “Genocide Joe” placard into a single, coherent group, working to bring about an end to freedom and capitalism in America. This is, in fact, how many of your fellow Americans view this situation.

People I know from within the tech sphere, have earnestly tried to convince me that Kamala Harris’ tack to the center is a complex deception, to hide her true Marxist agenda. Something akin to a Leninist maximum programme. They are convinced of this for two reasons apparently. One, that Kamala Harris’ mother was allegedly a Marxist. And two, to Kamala Harris’ stated political positions in the 2019 Democratic Primaries. I went back and reviewed Harris’ various stances on things — which surely were to the left of where she is now representing herself — but hardly anything that could be characterized as Marxist or inherently even anti-capitalist. If you think supporting higher corporate taxes, environmental regulations, or various other kinds of regulations is inherently Marxist, then I might suggest that you have no idea what Marxism is, or any sense of history here. The first railroad and banking regulations were passed by Congress within three years of adoption of the Constitution in 1787. The Taxing Clause and Commerce Clause of that constitution enumerates explicitly, the federal government’s power to create taxes and to regulate businesses. These are not powers that were weaseled into the Constitution by creative readings by progressivist courts. These were powers that were written in by Founders who actually had serious concerns about the risks of unchecked economic power. Thomas Jefferson himself worried explicitly about feudalistic economic actors overpowering the government’s monopoly of the enforcement of rule of law.

It was actually a no-brainer for the Founders at the time to think that the state should have the power to regulate commercial interests. At the time, the example of powerful global enterprises like the British East India Company and the Dutch East India Company pointed to the dangers of economic interests becoming too powerful. The Boston Tea Party itself, exemplified the issue, with the British East India Company’s legal monopoly on tea imports, forming the backdrop for the boiling tensions.

The contemporary notion that industry is a virtuous good that the state ought leave alone largely found its footing within our political culture in the shadow of the Cold War. Ayn Rand, whose political philosophy and the narratives she used to communicate it, such as and most notably her novel Atlas Shrugged, tells a seductive tale of the dangers of government regulation begetting more regulation, that ultimately creates a slippery slope towards a centrally-planned command economy, such as that seen in the Soviet Union. Rand, like many of her modern reactionary contemporaries, are intellectually unable to tell the difference between socialism and liberalism. The axis upon which they see the right and left, is a simplistic sliding scale of economic freedom. If you are for restricting economic freedom, for whatever reason, you are somewhere on the Marxism scale. Nobody seriously believes that classical liberals in the 18th century were Marxists. Yet these classical liberals saw fit to give its first great political project in the founding of the United States, an explicit power for the state to restrict economic freedom. Which it took no delay in getting about restricting. By imposing standardized weights and measures on industry. By regulating the railroads and imposing a standard railroad gauge. By imposing banking regulations. By imposing an overseas import monopoly for US-owned shipping companies. These restrictions on economic freedom were among the first laws ever passed within mere single-digit years of the adoption of the US Constitution.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, brought about in the Great Depression, and which, alongside the industrial policies for the wartime economy, represented massive interventions against economic freedoms, were the very examples that Rand felt were taking us on a slippery slope towards gulags in America.

This never happened of course. There was no slippery-slope into communism in America. Although, during the late 1960s and into the early 1970s, moral panics by cultural conservatives at the time, had convinced themselves the anti-war movement and the hippy movements were canaries in the coal mine for a youth that were growing up communist.

What actually happened is the hippies ended up moving to Silicon Valley, and starting chip and software companies. They also turned into bohemian neoliberal shills as they grew up in the 80s and came of age in the 90s.

The neoliberal era ushered in by the likes of Ronald Reagan in the United States, and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, represented a completely organic and healthy set of policy reforms to reorient a bunch of inefficient government regulations towards saner, more market-based outcomes. The politics of distribution was having healthy conversations about how resources could be distributed more efficiently. And once again, with some overwrought New Deal-era policies, the neoliberals made errors in judgement too. While they were correct about the powers of comparative advantage in free trade, they erred in their understanding of how economic freedom and political freedom related to each other. Their theory was that capitalism in China would beget democracy and liberalization there. They did not anticipate the advent of authoritarian capitalism. The neoliberals also misunderstood the danger of deregulating money in politics, and how that could leave us vulnerable to authoritarian capitalism at home.

Now, a weakened and struggling liberal center, is trying to turn its sights on this assault on upon the rule of law from unmitigated economic interests playing the political power game, while also contending with the fact that the politics of power which dominates the politics of America’s adversaries, China and Russia, are helping to add more pressure through the backdoor of economic power, which seeks to subjugate and disable the liberal order. The healthy politics of distribution, which we really ought to be talking about if we took our interests truly to heart are necessarily having to play second fiddle to a the fact that the politics of power has taken over our politics.

Too many people are in denial about the dangers here. We really could be on the verge of a catastrophe, with this assault on our liberal institutions. And Kamala Harris winning in November, may only offer us a brief reprieve, before these forces return again even stronger in four years.

More people need to wake up and soon.