#political philosophy

Imagine two Americans.

One wants to build a company worth a billion dollars.

The other wants to paint landscapes, repair old radios, play in a band, raise children, study insects, or write novels that may never sell particularly well.

There is no obvious reason that a healthy society should require either person to adopt the other's definition of a successful life. Nor is there an obvious reason that the first person becoming extraordinarily wealthy requires the second person to face homelessness if things go badly.

That suggests a political bargain that does not fit especially neatly into the usual American argument between capitalism and the welfare state:

Guarantee the floor. Leave the ceiling open.

Under such a system, every citizen would have some basic assurance of healthcare, housing, food, and enough income to remain an active participant in society. Losing a job would still hurt. A failed business could still wipe out savings. Choosing an economically unproductive life would still mean having less money than someone who spent twenty years building a successful company.

But illness, unemployment, or failure would no longer carry the threat of material catastrophe.

At the other end of the distribution, there would be no predetermined maximum fortune. If somebody builds something that millions of people willingly pay for and becomes fantastically wealthy, good for them.

We could even admire them.

Why Left vs. Right Doesn’t Cover Me Anymore

I keep getting told I have to “pick a side,” but the two sides on offer are obsessed with priorities I don’t share. So instead of pretending to be a team player for a team I don’t actually like, I’ll just say it: neither the contemporary left nor the contemporary right describes what I believe. Not because I’m a bland centrist, but because both have drifted away from a civic, plural, freedom-first idea of America.

You can actually find versions of this concern in writers as different as Alexis de Tocqueville (worried about overgrown central power), Francis Fukuyama (worried that recognition politics can crowd out shared identity), and Mark Lilla (worried that the left fragmented itself). I’m basically in that family of complaints.

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Where the Left Loses Me

Let me start with the left, because there are parts of the left I agree with. I’m for equal protection. I’m for not discriminating by race. I’m for people living how they want without the state or their neighbors harassing them. That’s basic liberalism.

But a lot of modern U.S. progressivism ties those good goals to two things I don’t buy:

1. An ever-expanding welfare/administrative state. It treats “more government” as the automatic answer, even though government and large corporate actors are already deeply entangled. If the state and big business are already in the same bed, I don’t see why I should fatten the state further. Tocqueville warned about this “soft despotism” a long time ago — power that’s not brutal, but is everywhere.