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Landry Ayres: Welcome back to Zooming In at The UnPopulist. I’m Landry Ayres.
For decades, many observers held onto an optimism that, despite occasional setbacks, the arc of history inevitably bent towards a richer, freer, and better-governed world. However, the political turbulence witnessed across established democracies in the past decade has shattered this optimism and exposed deeper problems.
Today, The UnPopulist’s Editor-in-Chief Shikha Dalmia is joined by
, senior vice president at the Niskanen Center and writer behind the Substack The Permanent Problem.Shikha and Brink explore Brink’s central concept: the permanent problem, or how mass affluence has radically transformed human expectations, leading people to seek not just basic needs, but also fulfillment, meaning, and belonging, and how, paradoxically, this success has led to a crisis of legitimacy for liberal democracy, as the institutions that delivered such prosperity are now struggling to meet these new, elevated expectations.
We hope you enjoy.
A transcript of today’s podcast appears below. It has been edited for flow and clarity.
Shikha Dalmia: Welcome to Zooming In, Brink. We’ve known each other for a long time, but I think this is the first time we are podcasting together.
Brink Lindsey: It is indeed. It’s a great pleasure. Good to see you, Shikha.
Dalmia: And you are joining us from Thailand, and I’m here in sweltering D.C., but these are the wonders of technology.
Lindsey: Sweltering here too, but I think more unseasonably hot right now. It’s baking right now in D.C.
Dalmia: I’ve been following your Substack, which is called The Permanent Problem, since its inception. I’ve frankly been quite blown away by its depth, breadth, and ambition. It seems to me that you are working on what—and I’m only partly joking about this when I say—a unified theory of what is ailing modern societies. You have just written a whole book exploring every major issue that we are confronting from the analytical lens of what you call “the permanent problem.” There’s no way we are going to do justice to the complexity of all the ideas that you are expressing, so I want to just focus very specifically on those aspects that pertain to the core issues of concern to The UnPopulist: the fate of liberalism in this rising tide of authoritarianism of many different varieties.
Lindsey: And, indeed, it was Trump’s nomination and then election in 2016 that led me to think that problems in America and politics were much more profound than I had ever previously come to grips with. America wasn’t unique. The same kind of thing was happening all over the place. So it seemed to me that fundamental social and cultural forces must be driving what’s going on. And it was trying to pull on that string and try to figure out what has gone wrong and what we might do about it at a deeper level than at the policy wonkery that I do on a day-to-day basis that led me to start the Substack and then now to write the book.
Dalmia: You and me both, because that was exactly my awakening, so to speak. I bought some notion of American exceptionalism, after 250 years of Enlightenment liberal democracy. I saw a certain script of populist authoritarianism, a cultish appeal of a leader play out over in India back in 2014 when Modi got elected. I thought, that’s never going to happen here in the great old United States. And lo and behold, two years later, it was the same script again. It was sobering and chastening. And I just realized I didn’t know anything about anything, frankly. So I’m very glad you’re doing the big thinking, because I feel all I’m doing here in the United States trying to douse the fires that keep burning around us with a little sprinkling of water.
Lindsey: So I would say that my life has gone through its third phase of overall worldview. I was born in 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was a Cold War baby. I grew up in that great twilight struggle with communism that I thought would last my whole life. In my teenage years in the ‘70s, I wasn’t terribly optimistic about how it was going and discovered libertarianism and a unified problem between the problems of my own country and then the radical version of collectivism that was threatening world peace and civilization. There are good guys who have figured out what the right thing is. And there’s a fight going on where I can get on the good guy side. I thought it’s going to be tough and maybe we’re going to lose, but there’s something going on and I can join it. Then the Berlin Wall fell when I was 27. Didn’t see that coming at all. Communism just disappeared … poof … with barely any bloodshed at all. Never would have anticipated that.
So, from then until Trump went down the escalator, I was fully into the whole “end of history.” It was two steps forward, one step back, but the path of least resistance was towards a richer, freer, better governed world. Things have gone wrong and people know they have gone wrong but they haven’t really put their finger on why and there is a lot floundering.
Dalmia: That was one of the things I was chastened about myself: the whole idea of an arc of history that goes kind of in one direction. I’m actually beginning to come around much more to the Hindu view of things—and I’m not a practicing Hindu, but the cyclical nature of things …
Lindsey: … yeah, I had figured that cyclical history belongs to the Malthusian past, and we’d broken out of it, but I’m afraid not.
Dalmia: Well, that’s what we are going to get into right now. So tell me what is this permanent problem and how does it intersect with liberalism?
Liberalism is a system that is committed to toleration, pluralism, and defending the equal dignity of all. That means that when political leaders in a liberal democracy become overbearing and withhold the equal protection of the law from everyone, there are institutions of checks and balance that force them to mend their ways. In the economic realm it means allowing free enterprise to harness our animal spirits and make everyone materially better off, a prerequisite for the pursuit of happiness. Why is all this running into the permanent problem?
Lindsey: So that term, that turn of phrase, “the permanent problem,” comes from John Maynard Keynes, the British economist who 95 years ago, in 1930 …
Dalmia: Not a libertarian hero, let me say.
Lindsey: Not at all, but a liberal at a time that liberalism was menaced by totalitarianism. He wrote an essay in 1930 in the depths of the Great Depression called “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” It’s a very optimistic essay. He says, we’re right now in the middle of this economic cataclysm, but it’s not going to last, and barring just unimaginable catastrophe by the time our grandchildren are our age, a hundred years or so from now, or roughly now, where we are today, the world will be four to eight times richer. Material scarcity, the lack of availability of basic material conditions of life, isn’t going to be a problem anymore; we will be rich enough that material deprivation will be a marginal problem, the normal lot of in life. In his terminology, he says:
We will have solved the economic problem of deprivation from material scarcity. Mankind’s permanent problem will come into view which is how to live wisely and agreeably and well with the blessings, science and markets and compound interest have bestowed upon us.
So, first, he got something spectacularly wrong. He thought that by now we’d only be working 15 hours a week as we will have converted to non-economic priorities. He also said that this transition is not going to be easy, changing the habits of untold generations. He said to look forward to something like a general social nervous breakdown. That struck me as a pretty good description of where we are right now in the middle of a kind of general social nervous breakdown.
He supplies the basic reason why—that we’re stuck between having solved the economic problem and having mastered or even risen credibly to the challenge of the permanent problem. We have achieved material plenty and as a result people’s expectations of life have been radically transformed. They now expect a fulfilling life. They expect challenge and belonging and meaning, not just three meals a day and a roof over your head.
Right now, those expectations are not being met for most people, and in fact, not only has mass affluence raised expectations that thus far it is not succeeding in meeting for a lot of people, but also economic change since mass affluence, the development of the service information economy, and also cultural responses to mass affluence, have made the transition to mass flourishing much more difficult. That is, they have introduced problems and dysfunctions that make it harder for the good life to be available to more people.
Dalmia: All that liberal democracy promised it would deliver [at first], it has in fact delivered. If we are facing this next problem of, let’s call it the crisis of meaning, what you call the permanent problem, you would think that you would need these institutions which have delivered very spectacularly on the first rung of the human issues, and you would turn to them now to help you sort these other issues that you are confronting. And yet liberal democracy is facing a crisis of legitimacy at this point. This is not just in the United States—it’s pretty much all over the world. So why are the institutions that have succeeded facing a crisis in their very success?
Lindsey: So I think we can distinguish between institutions as social technologies and the broader culture. The institutions of markets are the greatest social technology of liberation ever devised, and the social technologies of liberal governance, of democracy, are the best form of collective problem solving that humanity has devised. But if those institutions are situated in a broader culture that is hostile to human flourishing and indeed is hostile to the health of those institutions, then you have problems.
Liberalism has never thought of itself as a complete, holistic worldview. It is not self-executing. It is a partial view of how to arrange life amongst people who disagree about a lot of things and particularly disagree about the good life. How do we set up institutions so that people can pursue different versions of the good life in peace and cooperatively? For that set of institutions to work, it has to be in situated in a supportive culture. Liberalism did not arise until the modern era, because the cultural affordances that made liberalism possible didn’t exist yet. Liberal capitalism has produced mass affluence. Mass affluence has produced circumstances and cultural responses that are sapping the foundations from those institutions.
“We’re victims of our own success that our mass affluence has produced a culture of consumerism that values stimulation and distraction over the real stuff that makes a fulfilling, rewarding life. In particular, our relationships are coming unglued. Our connections to other people are coming unglued as we spend more and more time in solitary, zoning out in front of screens. We spend less and less time with other people.” — Brink Lindsey
Dalmia: So this sounds like a variation on Joseph Schumpeter’s idea that institutions [or modernity], by their very success, will not be able to sustain themselves, because they can’t generate the ideas that sustain them. There’s nothing in liberal democracy that supplies them. And, as he famously said, capitalists will sell you the noose to hang them, right? So, because capitalists are not able to generate the ideas that they need in order to flourish …
Lindsey: He was quite deterministic about it. He said that capitalism’s doomed—that it’s going to destroy itself. Postliberals say that liberalism is self-destructive—that it’s doomed to parasitize the culture out of which it came and then produce a culture that destroys it. I would say that liberalism is always vulnerable—that liberalism is the way to make modernity work for most people, but it is vulnerable to going wrong. That is, there are illiberal forces always within the culture that can assert themselves and that can gain strength, and they can get the upper hand.
Postliberalism now has this very strange argument that liberalism made us all rich, increased the population tenfold, produced unimaginable technologies that make our lives transformationally better, and yet now, after all these spectacular successes, it’s petering out in anomie and alienation and suffocating bureaucracy.
Liberalism self-destructed in less than three years from the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789 to the terror. So liberalism is always vulnerable there. It blew up very quickly. Then, in the 19th century, out of liberal societies emerged the radical socialist challenge, particularly the totalitarian communist variant. So there, out of the womb of liberalism arose its antithesis, and that produced a much better argument in the 1930s that liberalism is self-destructive than today. You had these massive totalitarian powers that seemed to be the wave of the future, and yet once again, liberalism, because it’s a social technology that works and actually allows people to cooperate together and make themselves better off and live together for mutual advantage, it keeps emerging as a solution. So totalitarianism blew up horrendously, at least the Nazi version did, and we survived that challenge.
Now I would say, we’re victims of our own success that our mass affluence has produced a culture of consumerism that values stimulation and distraction over the real stuff that makes a fulfilling, rewarding life. In particular, our relationships are coming unglued. Our connections to other people are coming unglued as we spend more and more time in solitary, zoning out in front of screens. We spend less and less time with other people. Consumerism is addicting us to ways of spending our time that are not in our best interest.
Meanwhile, this kind of broader cultural development of what neoconservatives in the ‘60s called the adversary culture, of a belief in the West in advanced liberal democracies that these are the most evil, despicable societies that have ever been created, that they’re just steeped in racism and sexism and homophobia and the history of the rise of the West is the rise of white supremacy and misogyny … that radical culture has seeped out more broadly—especially over the past decade with the rise of the woke phenomenon.
There is a general disaffection. It started on the left, a disaffection from the institutions of our own society, and now in a horseshoe phenomenon, it is spread to the right. The populist right say they’re patriotic, but they hate most of the people who live in the country and hate most of what they’re doing. The was always disaffected from Hollywood and liberal professors, but now it’s disaffected from the NFL, the NBA, Disney—the army is woke.
So, the combination of being too distracted to bond with other people and this kind of cultural formation that alienates us from the society in which we live … both of these have helped to create the politics that we’re now in.
Dalmia: Samuel Huntington had predicted, actually two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that all previous waves of democratization had been followed by a backlash. So, in the 1820s, the U.S. extended suffrage to a lot of men, and that actually created a wave of democratization in Europe. And that was followed of course by the Civil War and then we had [a reversal] with Jim Crow and the complete collapse of Reconstruction. And Europe became just full of strife.
The same thing happened after the second wave of democratization after the Second World War. It carried on until ‘62 and then you saw a reversal. So he kind of predicted that the democratization after the fall of the Berlin Wall with the Color Revolutions will be followed by a backlash. As if on cue 20 years later, you saw a backlash.
He actually gave a very intuitive explanation for it that the memory of authoritarianism fades and democracy, liberal democracy, is the governing system. And it’s the human condition that you’re never satisfied with what you have. Your discontent against what exists is going to grow. And since you have no reference point to compare it to, you are going to get a longing for something different.
Why is that not a complete explanation for what we are experiencing?
Lindsey: I think it’s part of what’s going on. There’s always a two steps forward, one steps backward dynamic to progress. And so that’s certainly part of what’s happening. But that kind of ebb and flow, generally among political scientists, was thought to be happening at the periphery. The core democracies were thought to have consolidated, and there was an idea of democratic lock-in that you get rich enough, and your democratic institutions are locked in, and there just wasn’t any sense within the political science community that Western Europe and the United States were vulnerable to so-called democratic deconsolidation. And yeah, that’s exactly what’s happened. So that, I think, is surprising.
Dalmia: I never quite appreciated, until recently, the extent to which America was a two-system country before the passage of the Civil Rights Act. The Jim Crow South was extremely authoritarian. There was essentially one-party rule over there, for almost a hundred years. So America always had experience, not at the national level, but at least at the state level, with populists and authoritarians who used to cry freedom and yet advocated oppression of an extreme kind.
Much before Trump came along, George Wallace used his racial demagoguery to make a bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972 that came to an end mainly due to an assassination attempt that left him paralyzed. So, in that sense, it is not like what we are seeing now is totally unfamiliar to us.
But Huntington predicted, in his brilliant and prescient essay, the possibility of America becoming a sclerotic and aging power that lost interest in sticking up for democracy abroad for all kinds of reasons: financial and political. He even imagined India’s democracy collapsing. And one of the things he said was that if these consolidated democracies, as you put it, collapse, they have demonstration effects for other polities. So India has demonstration effects for countries that are within its orbit. And of course, the United States is the most successful polity that has had demonstration effects for the whole world. And when they lose interest in defending democracy or collapse into authoritarianism, the democratic backsliding epidemic would catch on.
Lindsey: And it’s not obvious that there is some negative feedback mechanism and that the pendulum is going to start swinging back the other way. There are deep social problems in the rich democracies, and there are reasons why people have lost faith in governing elites and established institutions. Until those reasons are addressed, I think it’s unlikely to see that faith return. All the liberal democracies are in a kind of legitimacy crisis. A critical mass of the electorate in all of these countries has lost faith in established institutions and governing elites.
Now, why has this happened? I think there are three broad possibilities. One is elite failure. And there’s been a lot of spectacular failures in the 21st century. More broadly, once upon a time in the post-war era, most people felt that their lives were getting better and were looking forward to their children’s lives being even better off. We’re not in that world right now.
Meanwhile, we have a media environment that puts elite failure in a much harsher light than it ever was before and exposes it more than ever before. People had no idea that FDR was paralyzed from the waist down. They knew he had polio and he had problems walking, but they didn’t know. The press colluded in keeping disconcerting news away from the public. That doesn’t happen anymore.
Finally, the public just may be less capable of trust. This adversary culture has taken hold and there is a cultural hostility to authority of any kind that’s just an acid that eats through any institution. We live in an increasingly post-literate world where people just don’t read books anymore. College kids, even at elite schools, can’t get through the assignments that previous generations did. We have this culture of ever more fractured attention spans. It’s now showing up in a so-called reverse Flynn effect. The Flynn effect refers to the rise in raw IQ scores over the course of the 20th century. Now it’s going in the other direction. Our raw IQ scores are going lower.
I think there is a fundamentally different political culture, and a political culture based on the printed word, when people would go and stand for hours and watch the Lincoln-Douglas debates. There was one debate that went on for seven hours. They adjourned for dinner so people could go home and then come back. And they’re not just riffing, right? They were delivering prepared orations that [had] incredibly complex syntax and people just listened to them. Go back and watch the first TV debate, the Kennedy/Nixon debate—they speak in paragraphs. It’s a completely different style of talk than we have now. And that has been replaced first by the 30-second spot and now by the meme, which makes the 30-second spot look like really in depth.
So, in this culture, it just may be a higher percentage of people just don’t get abstractions like separation of powers and rule of law. The public’s incapacity for virtuous democratic citizenship is becoming a real problem. I think all of these things are going on. Huntington was pointing out frustrated expectations. So, one version of elite failure. But I think that’s one part of a broader toxic soup.
“There’s been a big fall in the status of ordinary workers. If we just focus on economics and on the dollars, this story of rising dissatisfaction because of inequality doesn’t make any sense because we still have progress, everybody’s still getting better off. The rate of increase has slowed down for people in the bottom half or people outside the elite, but they’re still getting better off. Ordinary workers make more money now and work in much cleaner, safer conditions than they did. But their work is just dramatically less socially important than it was in the past.” — Brink Lindsey
Dalmia: You have given what I consider to be one of the richest and most complex explanations for this populist backlash. There are two theories of why we are having this. One of them is: economic progress has stagnated in the West, and the lion’s share of productivity gains are really going to the top 25%, and the others are not gaining as much as they used to. To put my cards on the table, that explanation has never really made all that much sense to me because the U.S. has actually been a very high economic performer. Median incomes over here since the Great Recession are at $80,000 per capita. It’s half of that in Europe. Yet U.S. is the one that is facing the most intense populist backlash in a sense. So that explanation has always left me puzzled a little bit.
The other explanation is that it’s not so much loss of jobs or loss of wages or stagnation, not material reasons, it’s status reasons. That, as you were saying, the rise of progressivism and the ever louder demands for minorities and recognition for the oppression that they have faced is deeply unsettling for dominant classes who are often the ones who are being pointed to as the villains of history.
So there is this relative shifting of status, and that theory has made a little bit more sense to me, but you offer a really very nice synthesis of the two. So tell us about that.
Lindsey: People who focus on the loss of status tend to just focus on loss of white male status relative to women and ethnic minorities. But I think there’s a broader loss of status of just what would have been called working class people. That kind of industrial working class doesn’t exist anymore, so I just call them ordinary people, people not in the highly educated elite. There’s been a big fall in the status of ordinary workers. If we just focus on economics and on the dollars, this story of rising dissatisfaction because of inequality doesn’t make any sense because we still have progress, everybody’s still getting better off. The rate of increase has slowed down for people in the bottom half or people outside the elite, but they’re still getting better off. Ordinary workers make more money now and work in much cleaner, safer conditions than they did. But their work is just dramatically less socially important than it was in the past. Industrialization was a mass mobilization enterprise. Technological progress depended upon mass inputs of brute physical labor to man those machines. That was a huge vulnerability for capitalism. It required putting a bunch of people in very hard conditions. Being dominated by tough bosses working in loud, dangerous, hot conditions, basically trading your bodily health for money, either over the course of a lifetime your body’s going to get broken or it may get broken in a second. That’s a hard bargain and people didn’t swallow it easily. So we got socialism, we got class warfare out of that, and expressed most critically in the Cold War division between communist and free worlds, and a nuclear showdown and the possibility of civilizational annihilation. So that’s real instability, right?
The upside was a dependence on ordinary people to make those machines work, to make society go—and not just to make us richer. When you had a steel strike, it not only threatened the American economy, it threatened the American military machine and therefore the whole world’s freedom. So there was geopolitical significance in a steel strike in a way that nothing like that exists anymore. So once upon a time workers had it tough, but they knew that they were a crucial contributor to the progressive elements of society. They were deployed on the technological frontier.
Now, technological progress has basically weaned itself of dependence on brute physical labor. It still outsources some to poor countries, but mostly, technological progress now depends more and more on just highly trained, technically skilled people. And so ordinary workers without those skills are shunted off into the periphery of the economy, into personal services and retail and work. That’s fine, but it just doesn’t have the existential importance, and therefore isn’t valued in the culture like it once was.
So, all cultures, capitalist and communist, celebrated the worker. An American composer wrote the Fanfare for the Common Man in the 1930s. You see all the wonderful art deco murals in from WTA projects in the 1930s of these burly, muscled steel and construction workers. There’s no glorification of call center workers or Walmart greeters, right? So, the status of ordinary work has declined greatly. Meanwhile, though, for women and minorities, economic opportunities now have been increasing since the 1960s, at the same time that generally the working classes status has been in decline. There has been some amelioration of this phenomenon for women and minorities, but white men have just completely taken it on the chin. In terms of status losses, it is the most severe there. So the search for scapegoating that emerges under those circumstances is not terribly surprising but the status loss is real, and it’s broader than just a racial or sexual thing.
Dalmia: Right. But you also make this point that along with the loss of status in the workplace, there is a loss of prestige socially. And at the same time that the knowledge workers are not only more highly valued, they’re also wealthier and they are able to then muster the political system in their favor, and the spiral downwards keeps increasing. And you’ve talked about how intellectual property rules have changed because it’s a knowledge workers economy and the whole system is responding to their needs. They have the prestige, they have the power, and the ordinary people are becoming less and less empowered. So you have like this combination of factors. There’s a loss of a meaning. There is a lot loss of prestige. There is a loss of power. And it’s feeding on itself.
Lindsey: So, ordinary people, not just marginalized in economic life, but marginalized in political life as well … private sector unions were a huge vehicle through which ordinary people were politically active and exerted a lot of influence. But beyond that, there are all kinds of mass membership organizations, both rural oriented and chamber of commerce kind of groups, that had local chapters. People would join them, participate in them. The national leadership would emerge out of those local chapters. Those groups had a lot of sway in American political life over the course of the 1960s, not only de-unionization, but all of those mass membership organizations got supplanted by professionally staffed single-issue groups. The whole nature of political life got professionalized.
Meanwhile, politics professionalized. There’s a whole industry of campaign consultants and pollsters now in a way that there wasn’t. So, all the political life is now managed by highly educated white-collar workers, and the active participation in political life that ordinary people had through unions and through mass membership organizations has been sidelined. Four-year degree holders are the overwhelming bulk of people in political power. At the same time, you’ve had real cultural change, and this adversary culture took hold much more in the college educated set than it did anywhere else.
So, at the same time, you had this divergence of relative economic fortunes, huge divergence in status, and you also had a cultural separation so that the people who are now lording it over you have values that are very different from yours. They think your values are despicable. They think you’re a Neanderthal and you find their self-righteousness contemptible and despicable. So you get this real deep cleavage in society growing out of developments that in many cases were positive, but the side effects have been very negative.
“My sense is that the problems of dynamism are much worse in Europe and Japan than they are in the United States. And the problems of inclusion are considerably worse in the United States than they are in Europe and Japan.” — Brink Lindsey
Dalmia: You have identified three things for human flourishing …
Lindsey: … projects, relationships, and experience.
Dalmia: At all those three levels, the knowledge classes can find meaning in their work and they have much more integrated social lives. The ordinary people, as you’ve pointed out, are finding less meaning in their lives. And at the same time, their relationships are in trouble—they’re facing social disintegration.
Lindsey: Social disintegration is a problem top to bottom in society. You have plenty of upper-middle-class kids now in a world of hurt emotionally and mental health problems. Smartphone addiction is at least part of the problem, and—in general, this delay in marriage, delay in childbearing, fewer marriages, more and more people never getting married, more and more people never having kids, more and more people saying they have no close friends, the number of close friends going down over time—this general phenomenon of disintegration of their relationships, which hold us together and hold lives together and make them coherent and meaningful and hold societies together, that’s going on all over the place.
But it’s much worse outside the elite. The working classes once upon a time had a very tight knit social structure based on extended families and based on, in America, the church, especially the Catholic church, for a lot of immigrant communities. But the breakdown in marriage and family life has hit the working class much harder than it has the college educated elite, and the breakdown in organized religion has happened across the board. The elite has all kinds of other social capital. They have all of their professional ties and their school ties. But the working class, which depended upon neighborhood ties and communal ties, all of those had been kind of blown up, and so they are much less integrated into communities than they were in the past and less than are people farther up the socioeconomic scale. So the problems of social anomie and alienation are worse outside the elite.
Dalmia: Do you think these problems are more acute in the United States? I mean, you live in Thailand. How do you compare the two? India is a liberal democracy. It’s also facing the exact same political issues of polarization and demagoguery and religious nationalism as the United States is. And yet I would say it doesn’t stem from any kind of social disintegration. It is just old tribal urges reasserting themselves, right?
But it sounds like you are suggesting that that’s not the case in the United States. There’s something more than just demagoguery preying on people’s base instincts and their tribal grievances at work over here.
Lindsey: Yeah. In less developed countries, there’s still optimism about the future because capitalism is still producing more and more material goods. And that’s the biggest salient lack in people’s lives. In general, optimism is about rates, not levels. So in rich, stagnant countries, people are miserable. In poor, fast growing countries, people are really optimistic. The slowdown in capitalism and dynamism generally, we just can’t build stuff. So that problem is afflicting us in away that it doesn’t afflict less developed countries like India.
'Abundance’ Offers a Sounder Way Forward for the Left than Degrowth or Redistributive Progressivism
Because of our globalized media world, cultural trends get accelerated so that things are happening faster in less developed countries. The biggest existential problem with the sustainability of liberalism right now is that liberal societies are not reproducing themselves. No rich country has a total fertility rate of 2.1 or higher. That is, people are not making enough babies to maintain, much less grow, the population. The only rich country that is above replacement fertility is Israel. The U.S. was right at replacement as recently as 15, 20 years ago, but now we’ve fallen off to about 1.6. But we still attract a lot of immigrants. So the United States is not looking at population decline anytime soon. But here in Asia, the fertility crisis is much more advanced. In Thailand, we’re at 1.3. China’s at 1.1 or 1.0, and South Korea has gone completely off the deep end at 0.7. So, every hundred South Koreans born today can expect to have 10 grandchildren. So 90% of family lines will only last one more generation. That is a spectacular cliff that all of our societies are approaching.
Once upon a time children were, first, an act of God—we couldn’t control them—and, second, they were a profoundly public social act. This was a religious duty to have children. It was a social duty to be an adult. And being an adult meant having kids and raising a family. We have moved into marrying and having children is one more consumer option amongst the whole panoply of ever proliferating consumer options. And those other ones are a lot easier, right? So we’re frequently choosing the easy wrong over the hard right. And we’re choosing short-term distraction and stimulation over long-term fulfillment. We’re turning away from those relationships, which give our lives meaning and purpose in favor of cheap thrills. And we’re paying the price for that. That’s happening everywhere right now.
Dalmia: Let me throw out this theory to you. I do find that the problem of atomization and loneliness and social disintegration is more acute in the United States than maybe even in Europe and definitely more than in India [and other traditional societies]. And my theory for that is that it’s got something to do with industrialization and modernity. Americans are just much more mobile and in that sense, de-racinated. But I think the root cause of that is its Protestant DNA; that there is a certain individualism that is just at the very root of American culture and society. America puts a very great premium to individual independence, and independence and self-actualization are considered to be almost the same thing. Your kids turn 18 and they just have to go off to college, or at least not live with their parents. And that’s not common in the other parts of the world. It’s not common even in Catholic countries, which have a much more communitarian social network.
Lindsey: Although Catholic European countries aren’t so Catholic anymore and all of that is disintegrating.
Dalmia: Fair enough. But still, I think they have an expectation of thick-knit communities that never quite existed in the United States. I’ve been here for four decades and I’ve always felt this. Do you think that the U.S. just had fewer inner resources to withstand the disintegration that a modern, knowledge economy has produced?
Lindsey: It could be that our culture of don’t tread on me individualism is more vulnerable to the pitfalls of hyper distraction than other places. I think this is a global phenomenon, this permanent problem. It’s certainly a phenomenon common to all the rich democracies. They’re all experiencing this political turbulence, which I think is growing out of deeper social problems and forces.
And the way I describe it, instead of talking about liberalism—which I tend to use in that context, just talking about political arrangements—I talk about capitalism, the social system, which is now truly globalized. Liberalism isn’t, but capitalism’s everywhere. Right now, I say capitalism is undergoing a triple crisis. On the one hand, this crisis of inclusion, this social disintegration—at the macro level, a reemergence of a class divide; at the micro personal level, the attenuation of vital personal relationships. And then a crisis of dynamism. Now capital societies are not as good at doing their core function, which is advancing the technological frontier as they once were. I think that is [because], in part, growth gets harder over time. So I think that’s a real thing. But beyond that, as we get rich, we get complacent and loss averse and we get much more focused on hanging onto the stuff we have now than on pursuing the possibility of gain. And I think scaling that up to the social level, we see a lot of the torpor and sclerosis throughout rich countries where you can’t build anything because everybody’s got a veto because everybody’s got something that they’re protecting, and so that prevents anything new from happening. That dynamic is happening. And then finally, these problems of dynamism and conclusion need political solutions, but our political system is subject to the same cultural and social forces that our social system is, and therefore we’re seeing the same problems crop up in politics.
I wrote this book trying to tell a global story, but writing it as an American with an American perspective. And my sense is that the problems of dynamism are much worse in Europe and Japan than they are in the United States. And the problems of inclusion are considerably worse in the United States than they are in Europe and Japan.
Dalmia: That’s a really good way to think about it.
Liberal democracy never set itself out to solve the spiritual problems of humanity. It set its sights low. Hobbes, Locke, all they wanted to do was give you the conditions for “mere life.” They brought down the sights of politics. Let’s just provide the basic goods and necessities and you make whatever you want of your life, of your pursuit of happiness. The ancients were the opposite; they thought that society should be organized around a certain conception of the good life and that turned them into social engineers. And maybe that was possible in small city-states (although I don’t think many of them worked out that well), but in large complex societies, do you think you’re asking liberalism for too much given that there are so many conceptions of good life?
Lindsey: Yeah, I’m afraid that’s the pickle we’re in. The old liberal offer was an offer for poor countries. That is, let’s focus on getting rich together and if we can put aside our differences, we can make each other richer, and we can overcome this appalling material deprivation to which almost all of us are subject. That was an appealing bargain, and it worked. Mission accomplished. Material deprivation is shoved to the corner.
But you can’t make people happy trying to say, “You shouldn’t be so upset. Look at how great the world is compared to how your grandparents lived.” And it just doesn’t cut any ice at all, right? People have expectations, and their expectations have been set by the context of past progress. And when you’re living in a rich society, you’re taking that for granted and now you’re expecting to have fulfillment.
Yes, there are many different versions of the good life, but they’re all variations on a very few set of themes. They’re relating to loving and befriending and taking care of and being taken care of by other people. And there’s doing stuff in the world that’s useful to other people and being a useful contributor to society and making your mark in the world by doing constructive things. We have solved the problem of rival conceptions of the good life to a considerable degree. We’re not being torn up in the United States by sectarian violence— by thick creeds of cohesive communities that hate each other. Our tribalism is born out of social disintegration. These are not cohesive communities that are tight knit and have a view of the good life that they’re defending. They have lost all conception of the good life and they’re floating around like flotsam and jetsam and they’re rebelling against whatever can be rebelled against, the people in authority. This is the permanent problem. We have succeeded to the point of having a real challenge on our hands that we just can’t go back. Everything can fall apart, and we can get poor again, and the whole cyclical view of history can start at the bottom all over again. I don’t want to do that. I want to figure out how to keep going. I don’t think there is any new social system besides capitalism that’s going to come to the rescue. Capitalism needs to be refocused on expanding the technological frontier. And I think we’re seeing promising hints of that in all this talk about abundance going on these days.
“The idea that the strong gods of tight-knit community and faith are returning through MAGA is just preposterous. This is just every bit as cringe inducing as the lefty political pilgrims who would wander around starry-eyed on guided tours of Mao’s China thinking they’d seen something wonderful, when in fact they were in a horrible dystopia. So the idea that Trump and Trumpism is a agent of cultural renewal is just preposterous. It’s a symptom of cultural collapse.” — Brink Lindsey
Dalmia: Let me ask you this last question. So, you wrote this wonderful piece for us, adapted from a longer piece you did for your own Substack, responding to NS Lyons’ postliberal critique of liberal democracy. It is very closely tied to that of the open society. His basic idea is that liberalism’s constant questioning of authority has meant that liberalism has torn down the existing gods of closed societies. There is no authority figure left to give anybody any moral direction. There’s no God. None of that has survived the onslaught of open critical inquiry. At the same time, open societies haven’t replaced the gods that they tore down with new gods. That’s the crisis we are in. Now that has echoes with your own thinking, but you also depart from him and postliberals in very significant ways.
Lindsey: Yeah. So, Lyons in particular and postliberals more generally, when they’re just criticizing things that are going on in the culture right now, I can nod my head in agreement a lot—in particular, the suffocating rise of managerialism and bureaucracy. They have a real point. When they’re talking about things that were going wrong, the postliberals I think are on pretty solid ground. They’re absolutely wrong seeing right-wing populism as a constructive response—that is profoundly misguided. His cultural critique and mine sound quite similar but he wants to blame this on the rise of liberalism 300 years ago and principles of free inquiry and open debate when that went on for a long time and suffered all kinds of other challenges—French revolution, communism, all kinds of other things—but produced enormous benefits for mankind. Neither I nor NS Lyons would be here in a world without liberalism and without the capitalist wealth revolution it helped to usher in. All of his complaints are complaints about liberal societies since mass affluence. So I think it’s about how liberal societies have dealt with mass affluence, not about something deep in the in the basis of individualism or individual liberty. And then the idea that the strong gods of tight-knit community and faith are returning through MAGA is just preposterous. This is just every bit as cringe inducing as the lefty political pilgrims who would wander around starry-eyed on guided tours of Mao’s China thinking they’d seen something wonderful, when in fact they were in a horrible dystopia. So the idea that Trump and Trumpism is a agent of cultural renewal is just preposterous. It’s a symptom of cultural collapse.
Dalmia: Yeah, a godless man reviving gods.
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