Redefining Individualism

One of the reasons that I've hammered the folks at Ordinary Gentlemen so much is not just because of their fundamental cowardice and dishonesty, but because they're extremely easy targets as well. It makes for interesting blogging, in any case, and the much-needed clarification of ideas.

E.D. Kain provides us with another opportunity this afternoon, in "Redefining Prosperity." E.D. is of course defending the dramatic Democratic expansion of government under Obama's fiscal policy, but he's also trying to justify this power grab by offering a new model of public purpose, an all-American revisionist philosophy of statism that's offered as if it's so self-evident that we should look upon those clinging to "archaic" conceptions of individualism and liberty as literally less biologically-evolved.

Check this out:

Individualism ties in well with the Republican Party’s superficial promise of small government through lower taxation. Democrats, on the other hand, believe that to some degree the State needs to intervene, to provide social safety nets in a society that obviously merits them. They have more faith in the power and beneficence of the government. Republicans are equally bound to the State, but believe in a broader partnership between it and private institutions. Both place an enormous amount of faith and emphasis on the individual. The irony, of course, is that individualism and the size of the State are bound inextricably, the one to the other. The more Americans become boxed into their “liberating” roles as individuals, the more detached we become from our communities and families. These antiquated institutions become accidentally irrelevant. Once upon a time, our family was our social safety net, and the community an even broader one. Yet, as we’ve been increasingly driven into our roles as individuals - through political and economic policies as well as through rapid technological development - and as our faith in community and family has dwindled, we have become ever more reliant on the State to provide for our needs.

Read the whole thing, here.

But let's note right away that E.D. might have set his essay up with some kind of definition of "individualism." Most scholars working in political culture don't use the necessarily popularized version of "rugged individualism," for the manifest reason that it's a term that easily abused, "John Wayned" into some kind of caricature of a phenomenon that should really be thought of as a more complex ideational identity of self-reliance and freedom from interference by the state (lower case for "state," as it's not a proper noun).

When we refer to "individualism" we're not latching onto some snazzy catch-word that's hip with the inside-the-Beltway conservative class - although certainly Rush Limbaugh and others take advantage of the powerful imagery associated with the historically-undeniable notion that people are better off to grow and prosper when LEFT ALONE. Indeed, the development of the democracy in many respects has been driven by individualism. The sense here is of a classically liberal orientation between the citizen and the state, WITHIN a constitutionally-limited polity based on respect for freedom of conscience and property rights.

Note something here as well: We think of individualism as a central component of our American ETHNIC identity, and especially as a psychology of values encompassing our mythic ideals as an immigration society. Over the centuries the immigrants to our shores who helped build and grow this nation have been glued together by a shared dream of acceptance, egalitarianism, and opportunity. And by egalitarianism I mean specifically equality of opportunity, the chance for average people prosper in the absence of hierarchical categories of aristicratic or ecclesiastic privilege. To read works like Gordon Wood's, Radicalism of the American Revolution, and Louis Hartz's, The Liberal Tradition in America, is to be regaled in the powerful moving force of an anti-feudal culture that has been unmatched as a developmental model in the history of the world.

Notice what Robert Bellah says about the power of this classic American political culture in today's day and age:

I believe I can safely borrow terminology from Habits of the Heart and say that a dominant element of the common culture is what we called utilitarian individualism. In terms of historical roots this orientation can be traced to a powerful Anglo-American utilitarian tradition going back at least as far as Hobbes and Locke, although it operates today quite autonomously, without any necessary reference to intellectual history. Utilitarian individualism has always been moderated by what we called expressive individualism, which has its roots in Anglo-American Romanticism, but which has picked up many influences along the way from European ethnic, African-American, Hispanic and Asian influences.

What's interesting in Bellah's piece is how he agrees with E.D. Kain's basic point on the power of the state, but the RESULT of the power is not to create greater DEPENDENCY on government, as E.D. avers (and desires). No, the state works to reinforce, with a world-historical enmority, the power of markets. And markets in turn unleash the productive capacity of individuals to create and produce and innovate, which advances society through wealth creation and the consolidation of entrepreneurial social capital.

Note that Bellah's writing twenty years ago. He's lamenting at that time the shift toward radical muliticultualism, which we know now is even more pronounced today. Bellah sees individualism and robust civic identity as the bulwarks against the more fissiparous tendencies of multiculturalism; the individualistic and civic levels form the social glue of communities that E.D. Kain has written off as "irrelevant."

This is to say that people are not "boxed in" by our historically individualistic culture. Our overwhelming norms and practices as a people are DRIVEN and SHAPED by it. Individualism is what creates a natural aversion to the power of the state. And this is not new. It's not as if the state itself is coterminous with large welfare-policy provision, as E.D. implies. The ORIGINAL state was the medieval actor that arose following the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Modern democratic societies emerges as a specific reaction to the absolutism of the national monarchies in Europe. Does it really make any sense in the American context that people today are abandoning "communities" and families" in favor of hegemonic state structures that are alleged to be atomizing them out of their natural social elements?

Indeed, the argument's absurd. One of the most talked about phenomena in the last couple of decades has been an extreme form of suburbanization found in "gate-guarded" master-planned communities. California's well known for this form of hyper-individualism. People who are successul in their businesses or professional careers need very little from the state other than a system of legal order of rights and contracts, and the public goods of community safety (police). Following the race-riots and social welfare liberalism of the 1960s and 1970s, increasing numbers of middle class Americans withdrew from the macrosociety to affluent enclaves away from the danger and decay of the inner cities. These communities of choice allowed for the preservation of a radical individualism that finds not a greater reliance of the state but an increasing flight from it.

Perhaps this is the version of contemporary self-sufficiency that E.D. should be excoriating. While it may be true, as E.D. says, that this type of individualism works at cross-purposes to community, it's of the larger macrosocial community, not that of the family and family-neighborhood enclaves. In turn, it's fundamentally illogical that growing the state will work to solve whatever "crisis of individualism" E.D.'s trying to elucidate. Big goverment kills liberty. If people feel threatened by creeping socialism and unescapable high taxes to pay for the entitlements of the ever-increasing left-wing hordes, they'll flee to where freedom's to be found. It's no wonder that many radical nihilists today are mocking and demonizing those like Glenn Beck or Glenn Reynolds for offering scenarios of American anarchy or of an emerging "John Galt" revolt of the productive classes.

E.D. Kain's groping for some ideological-philosophical justifcation for a left-libertarian consensus. But as Matt Welch noted the other day, this left-classical liberal alliance is dead on arrival. E.D. and his allies keep hammering the point because they want to be "progressive" without being hammered for their ideological capriciousness (if not outright cowardice). So far, these guys are striking out badly.