In 1997 George
Soros, writing in The Atlantic,
declared: “The main enemy of the open society, I believe, is no longer the
communist but the capitalist threat.”
The words marked
the beginning of a decade and a half of plutocratic progressivism. In July
2003, AFL-CIO political director Steven Rosenthal conferred with some of
America’s richest tycoons at El Mirador, Soros’s estate in Southampton, to
figure out how to defeat George W. Bush. In August 2004, the president of the
Service Employees International Union, Andy Stern—the “most important labor boss
in America”—traveled to Aspen to plot strategy in a moneyed conclave that
included savings and loan moguls Herbert and Marion Sandler, Progressive
Insurance founder Peter Lewis, and businessman John Sperling. Warren Buffett,
de facto chairman of the country’s billionaires’ club, endorsed the candidacy
of presidential aspirant Barack Obama, while the Democracy Alliance, which
Matthew Vadum and James Dellinger dub “Billionaires for Big Government,” bankrolled progressive
groups like ACORN and the Center for American Progress.
Is there something
novel in these alliances which, Demos scholar David Callahan observes, have brought some of the
nation’s most notable elites together during the last decade to make common
cause with some of the country’s most progressive leaders? Hardly: pacts
between munificent plutocrats and progressive reformers are one of the oldest
tricks in oligarchy’s playbook.
More than a
century and a half ago, Benjamin Disraeli, affecting to believe that
Britain’s Tory elite was “the really democratic party of England,” showed that
the well-to-do could more easily maintain their ascendancy if they became
paternalist champions of working people. By adopting socially progressive
policies, they could “dish the Whigs” and stave off free-market reformers like
Richard Cobden and John Bright. In a no less duplicitous spirit, Otto von
Bismarck invited Ferdinand Lassalle, founder of the General Union of German
Workers, to the Wilhelmstrasse, where the two explored an alliance between
Bismarck’s Junker ministry and the working classes. Bismarck did not “promote
social reform out of love for the German workers,” historian A. J. P. Taylor
wrote. Following, by turns, Marx and Metternich, Bismarck sought to make
workers “more subservient” to the Junker-dominated state.
Elites who seek
alliances with progressive tribunes are not always feudal aristocrats (like
Bismarck) or feudal retainers (like Disraeli). They may, like the Roosevelts,
be high bourgeois who have succumbed to the Medici Syndrome. Abandoning, as the
Medici did, the tradition of their forebears, who were proud of their market
squares, the high bourgeois find commerce vulgar and ape the manners of the
nobility.
As part of its
acquired feudal style, the haute bourgeoisie dabbles in social policy as a form
of noblesse oblige. Theodore Roosevelt made common cause with progressive
leaders in his ill-starred 1912 Bull Moose campaign. A number of plutocrats
rallied around the former president when he criticized market competition,
among them Morgan financier George Perkins, who believed that “competition in
the marketplace was a waste of energy.” Perkins persuaded Roosevelt to drop
antitrust law—an essential feature of competitive markets—from the Bull Moose
platform, and together the two men advocated a form of state capitalism, “an
entente,” Roosevelt biographer Edmund Morris writes, “between socially
responsible entrepreneurs and a powerful, yet non-prosecutorial government.” So
close were Franklin Roosevelt’s ties to CIO leader Sidney Hillman that the
mantra “Clear it with Sidney” became an issue in the 1944 presidential
campaign.
Principle plays a
part in motivating elites who hoist the flag of social reform: the free-market
ideal, they argue, is a source of misery when pursued too unrestrainedly. But
Henry James pointed to another, suppressed motive. Lionel Trilling remarked of
the character who gives her name to James’s 1886 novel The Princess
Casamassima—a princess who befriends working-class social reformers—that
she “is the very embodiment of the modern will which masks itself in virtue,
making itself appear harmless, the will that hates itself and finds its manifestations
guilty and is able to exist only if it operates in the name of virtue.”
James’s and
Trilling’s belief that social pity conceals an unacknowledged desire for power
finds corroboration in the behavior of today’s elites, who in promoting the ostensibly
virtuous cause of social reform are making a shrewd investment in their own
continued dominance. Much of today’s big money was made during the
extraordinary period of market liberalization that began around 1980 and came
to an end with the crash of 2008. In pushing for a revival of the social state,
tycoons who benefited from freer markets seek to limit market competition. If
they succeed, they will forestall the emergence of a new generation of
innovators, young Turks who would otherwise push the old Croesuses aside.
Disraeli and Bismarck favored the social state precisely because it is a means
of perpetuating indefinitely the authority of the elite instituting it: like
the state capitalism that so often accompanies it, a social regime promotes morbidity
and stasis, the petrification of the social organism.
Soros wrote in
1997 that he feared “the spread of market values into all areas of life.” The
fear is not unwarranted. But if compassion for the less fortunate—and not a
solicitude for their own power—were truly at the heart of the elites’ social
vision, they would almost certainly favor, not the extension of progressive
programs that have failed in the past and are now bankrupting the West, but
local and non-coercive forms of compassionate care which for centuries had
their source in the old market-square life of Europe. A number of contemporary
reformers, among them Prince Charles (a renegade elitist in this respect) and
the New Urbanist architect Léon Krier, are attempting to revive
this agora culture today.
Where the remedial
agencies of the social state have abridged freedom in the name of social
control, the old market sanctuaries relied on uncoerced efforts to relieve
suffering. Such voluntary associations as the confraternity and the sodality,
the almonry and the charité, tended the strayed “lambs” of the community—and did
so in ages much poorer in material wealth than our own.
We don’t know why
agora culture was able to nurture the compassionate impulse in ways that we,
with all our social-scientific tools, seem unable to do. Wordsworth, enamored
of the “old usages and local privilege” of the traditional marketplace, pointed
to the virtues of its civic artistry. He contrasted the savageness of
communities where men live “irregularly massed” with Bruges, where the interblent
poetries of music, art, and architecture regulated life rhythmically and
promoted a “harmonious decency” in manners.
Wordsworth’s
insight finds some support in modern science. Oxford’s Robin Dunbar, an
evolutionary psychologist, believes that rhythm filled the void that developed
when primitive human communities grew so large that they could no longer “be
bonded in the conventional primate manner.” The metrical patterns of sound
inherent in language, laughter, and singing, Dunbar maintains, made it possible
for humans to engage in “grooming at a distance,” and to build new and more
durable forms of community.
The same grooming
gift that (if Dunbar is right) bound together the earliest human communities
united also those that for millennia had their core and center in the
marketplace. The grooming instruments of the market enclaves—from painting and
sculpture to drama and dance—were rhythmically ordered. With uncanny intuition
the Greeks, who laid the foundation of the Western market square, divined the
grooming potential of the rhythmic arts when they are concentrated in a public
place. Because rhythm sinks “furthest into the
depths of the soul,” the Greeks made it the basis of education and used the
word mousikē to denote, not only music in our sense, but
culture generally, those arts over which the Muses preside and which make the
more civilized forms of congregation possible.
Whatever the
source of the agora’s power, the nineteenth-century writers who composed its
epitaph took it for granted that it promoted the kind of community in which
compassionate impulses could work most effectually. Alyosha in Dostoevsky’s The
Brothers Karamazov, the Bishop of Digne in Hugo’s Les Misérables,
the pastor in Wordsworth’s Excursion, and Josiah Crawley in
Trollope’s The Last Chronicle of Barset are agora shepherds
who dispense a genuine compassion—not the frigid pity Hannah Arendt thought
characteristic of the social state.
A revival of the
agora culture that once flourished throughout the West would preserve the
virtues of market freedom and at the same time prevent the intrusion of market
values into areas of life where they have no place. But don’t look to our
progressive plutocrats to join Krier and the Prince of Wales in their effort to
recover a humane civic life. There is
nothing in it for them.
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