Author’s note: In three months—sometime in late March—I will be releasing in serial form for premium subscribers my new book, tentatively entitled Liberty in the Age of Bureaucracy, which builds upon my previous book, The New Bossism of the American Left. That latter book was written in 2012-2015, well before the arrival of Donald Trump on the national stage. I would certainly write some of it differently today—but not much—and I still think it lays out the foundation of the bureaucratic collectivist state that I feel provides important context to the new work. In short, the bureaucratic collectivist state is more dangerous and pervasive than I thought then, its threat to liberty far more existential and imminent. So, for premium subscribers, each Friday until the new book arrives, I am offering in serial form the forerunner and context for that book, The New Bossism of the American Left. I appreciate your support.
Installment 2:
Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual. Thomas Jefferson, 1819
Barack Obama, the bureaucratic collectivist
In its proud and powerful history, the United States of America once flourished as humanity’s greatest example of democratic capitalism.
At least it did flourish. I emphasize the past tense because these days that system is but an echo in the sociocultural chamber, though the Tea Party and other grassroots conservatives and libertarians are trying their best to resuscitate its spirit. But democratic capitalism as the world once knew it is long gone. It was an unlikely experiment, the founding of this republic. Armed with perhaps the most radical document the world had ever seen – Holy Smokes, the Declaration of Independence said it was obvious that all men were created equal! Heresy! – a loosely confederated force of revolutionaries challenged the greatest military power of the day, and won.
They did more. They brought together the disparate interests of 13 culturally different colonies, uniting them under the rubric of a very limited federal umbrella. That federal government would provide only what the colonies could not provide for themselves, such as national defense, leaving all other general police powers to the newly formed states. All this they codified in another radical document, the U.S. Constitution, and thus conceived of a way to preserve the sovereignty of the states while practically providing for their common interests.
It was not just a political revolution. It was a democratic capitalist revolution. As the political philosopher Michael Novak wrote in his book, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, from the founding of the nation sprang a system based on three intertwining tendencies. There was its emerging economy, based primarily on free markets; there was its classically liberal culture, in the moral sense, which was underpinned by an undying allegiance to individual liberty and pluralism; there were the democratic institutions that allowed the markets to work and individual liberty and pluralism to thrive.
“Democratic capitalism is not a free enterprise system merely,” Novak wrote. “Its political system has many legitimate roles to play in economic life, from protecting the soundness of the currency to regulating international trade and internal competition. Its moral-cultural system also has many legitimate and indispensable roles to play in economic life, from encouraging self-restraint, hard work, discipline, and sacrifice for the future to insisting upon generosity, compassion, integrity, and concern for the common good. The economic activist is simultaneously a citizen of the polity and a seeker after truth, beauty, virtue, and meaning. The differentiation of systems is intended to protect all against unitary power. It is not intended to protect anyone from a fully integrated personal life.”
Under democratic capitalism, the United States became the greatest power on Earth – economically, militarily, culturally, politically.
Alas, the 20th century was not kind to democratic capitalism. In Europe, a separate form of capitalism had long dominated, and, in the rubble of world wars and in the middle of a great depression, European-style state capitalism began to rear its ugly head in the United States. At first it was but a trickle, little puddles of statism drip, drip, dripping into the nation’s bloodstream. But then came Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the drip became a torrent. Roosevelt’s rise was representative of a fundamentally transformative moment in American history: State capitalism had fully arrived, and FDR was the symbol of its ascendency.