The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (9 page)

The Moral Equivalent of Liberalism

One of James’s greatest contributions to progressivism was the idea of the “moral equivalent of war.” This has had real cash value for liberals over the last one hundred years. “Martial virtues,” James wrote, “must be the enduring cement” of American society: “intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command must still remain the rock upon which states are built.” What James wanted was a way to figure out how to have war without war, to mobilize and galvanize people to drop their petty concerns and interests as if they were threatened by an outside foe. In other words, pragmatists care about what works, and war works. It works at getting people to shut up and listen, to follow orders, to make sacrifices and work together. More importantly, war legitimizes vast expansions of the state. Now if only we good and decent people can figure out a way to scare, enrage, or otherwise work up the people the way war does, we could really make something out of this country!

Like most people who’ve read James, I have a soft spot for the guy. He really was trying to work his way through the bloom’n’ buzzin’ confusion of the universe. And he was a decent enough fellow. The problem is that James was working in an environment where others were all too eager to redeem the cash value of his ideas for less sunny purposes. In Europe James’s will to believe joined forces with Nietzsche’s will to power and produced the ideas that led to Italian fascism.

Before that, a whole generation—the first generation—of American progressive intellectuals went to Europe, particularly Germany, to study. Thanks in large part to the growing fascination with Bismarck’s “top-down socialism”—“a catalytic of American progressive thought,” in historian Eric Goldman’s words—they returned with an attitude that was far more philosophically serious than James’s loosy-goosey, laugh-clown-laugh approach. A young Woodrow Wilson wrote that Bismarck’s Prussia was the most “admirable system,… the most studied and most nearly perfected” in the world. Indeed, some nine thousand Americans had studied in Germany by the end of the nineteenth century. When the American Economic Association was formed, five of the first six officers had studied in Germany. At least twenty of its first twenty-six presidents had as well. In 1906 a professor at Yale polled the top 116 economists and social scientists in America; more than half had studied in Germany for at least a year.
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These progressives took the idea of a moral equivalent of war very, very seriously. Even before James came up with the conceit, progressives had been struggling for a way to convince Americans to lay aside the antiquated dogmas and outdated ideologies of individualism in favor of a new collective ethos. “[W]e must demand that the individual shall be willing to lose the sense of personal achievement,” insisted Jane Addams in 1902, “and shall be content to realize his activity only in connection to the activity of the many.”
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Walter Rauschenbusch, the leading proselytizer of the progressive social gospel movement, declared, “New forms of association must be created.… Our disorganized competitive life must pass into an organic cooperative life.” Elsewhere, Rauschenbusch put it more simply: “Individualism means tyranny.”

And creating a moral equivalent of war was just the perfect way to get this organic cooperative life off the page and into American hearts
and minds. Although the idea began as just the moral equivalent, when the opportunity for a real war loomed on the horizon, the progressives leaped at it with both feet. John Dewey, James’s heir as the foremost practitioner of philosophical pragmatism, championed going to nonmetaphorical war, on the grounds that it would help do all of the things that James wanted from a moral equivalent of war. In less than a decade the optimistic and individualistic possibilities of pragmatism had now evolved into “social possibilities,” specifically what Dewey called the “social possibilities of war.” He complained that opponents of entering World War I failed to recognize the “immense impetus to reorganization afforded by this war” and implored them not to let the crisis go to waste.

After the war (covered extensively in my book
Liberal Fascism
), progressives returned to the Jamesian argument about the moral equivalent of war, now claiming that World War I proved that planning and social control had worked under Woodrow Wilson’s war socialism. Therefore, the same techniques—command and control economics (i.e., “war socialism”), censorship, propaganda, etc.—should be applied in peacetime. “We planned in war” became the mantra of the intellectuals, furious with the Republican-led “return to normalcy” of the 1920s. And liberalism has never recovered. The search for a moral equivalent of war continues to define American liberalism to this day.

It is not a controversial observation, even to liberal historians of the New Deal, that FDR campaigned in 1932 promising to use the techniques of World War I to fight the Great Depression. Once elected he recruited a slew of Wilson administration veterans to re-create or revive the infrastructure of Wilson’s “war socialism.” The Securities and Exchange Commission was an extension of the Capital Issues Committee. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation was an updated version of the War Finance Corporation. The Civilian Conservation Corps was sold and run as a paramilitary organization inspired by William James.

The National Recovery Administration, an explicit revamping of Wilson’s War Industries Board, was the crown jewel of the early New Deal. It was created by the National Industrial Recovery Act. “As in the great crisis of the World War,” Roosevelt explained in 1933 while unveiling the law, “it puts a whole people to the simple but vital test: Must we go on in many groping, disorganized, separate units to defeat or shall
we move as one great team to victory?” The NRA was run by General Hugh “Iron Pants” Johnson (an ironic nickname when you consider what “Hugh Johnson” sounds like when you say it fast), the man who oversaw the draft under Wilson. Johnson militarized it from the beginning. He issued the Blue Eagle—the symbol of the NRA—and FDR explained that it was like a military insignia that distinguished friend from foe. Johnson was a huge fan of Benito Mussolini, who was already running his own openly moral equivalent of war programs in Italy. Johnson used many of Il Duce’s techniques, including staging huge military-style parades, complete with mandatory uniforms for workers.

Despite the fact that the New Deal was a failure, it remains the gold standard in liberal policy making. In fairness, such leading lights as Paul Krugman and Lawrence Summers concede that the New Deal didn’t work. But their beaux ideal of a great economic recovery program was
World War II
—which is not exactly a sharp break from the moral equivalent of war argument.

Regardless, World War II or the New Deal or some combination of the two have remained the prism through which liberalism sees its calling. John F. Kennedy explicitly framed the New Frontier as an extension of the war generation’s mission. His successor, LBJ, fashioned the Great Society as a revamped New Deal, complete with a moral equivalent of war campaign: the War on Poverty. “Our decision about energy will test the character of the American people and the ability of the president and the Congress to govern,” Jimmy Carter told the nation, while wearing a fetching sweater. “This difficult effort will be the ‘moral equivalent of war’—except that we will be uniting our efforts to build and not to destroy.” Since then, environmentalists and various affiliated crusaders for green energy have invoked moral equivalent of war arguments with abandon. Thomas Friedman, who routinely waxes poetic on the advantages of China’s “one-party authoritarianism,” insists that we must fight global warming like it was World War II, because “green is the new red, white and blue.” And let’s not even pause on the whole “we need to be like the greatest generation” cliché.

Paul Krugman, America’s foremost exponent of Keynesian economics, is constantly invoking war or the threat of war as an economic boon. “If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack, and
we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat, and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in eighteen months,” he said on CNN. “And then if we discovered, oops, we made a mistake, there aren’t any aliens, we’d be better—”

At this point Harvard economist Ken Rogoff interrupted. “We need Orson Welles, is what you’re saying.”

To which Krugman responded, “There was a ‘Twilight Zone’ episode like this in which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace. Well, this time, we don’t need it, we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.”
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Krugman takes a similar position about World War II, which he claims pulled America out of the Great Depression (an argument largely dismantled by Arthur Herman, Robert Higgs, and Robert Barro), and a World War II–level intervention in the economy is required to fix our current woes. Similarly, after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks Krugman wrote that the economy would be boosted by everyone rushing “out to buy bottled water and canned goods.”
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Meanwhile, President Obama came into office motivated by the mantra “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” He routinely invokes moral equivalent of war arguments directly and indirectly, as do his supporters. During the Gulf oil spill he insisted the crisis “echoes 9/11.” At a military base he proclaimed to military personnel, “This is an assault on our shores, and we’re gonna fight back with everything that we’ve got!” That night he gave an Oval Office address offering his “battle plan” to fight the spill and suggested that we somehow owe it to our troops to rally around his energy agenda.

All of this is the natural product of American pragmatism, which vows that it is opposed to ideology. The desire to create a moral equivalent of war isn’t an ideological agenda, they insist; it’s simply what any pragmatic person would do.

The Devilish Dewey

The moral equivalent of war isn’t the only manifestation of pragmatism’s lasting impact on liberalism. (Pragmatism’s impact on Obama is not a controversial claim, by the way. Harvard’s James Kloppenberg’s 2010
book,
Reading Obama,
celebrates the president as the incarnation of the pragmatic spirit: “Barack Obama embodies a surprising number of the central themes in the American political tradition, particularly as it has come to be known in the last half century.… Americans who prefer their principles stated with dogmatic certainty rather than with the humility and tentativeness appropriate for democratic deliberation might find Obama’s conception of politics unpalatable.)”
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From the beginning American pragmatism set out to, in effect, rule by cliché. James’s optimistic, relatively
practical,
philosophy was exactly what a generation of ideologues needed to clear the field of rival ideologies. In this it was a “philosophy and a psychology perfectly tailored to progressive needs,” Eric Goldman writes in his classic
Rendezvous with Destiny
. William James’s call for a new orientation of “looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories,’ supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts,” allowed liberals to attack all competing ideas as outdated dogmas no longer relevant. James’s protégé, Horace Kallen, explained that Pragmatism “dissolves dogmas into beliefs, eternities and necessities into change and chance, conclusions and finalities into processes. But men have invented philosophy precisely because they find change, chance and process too much for them, and desire infallible security and certainty.”

Taken on its own terms, pragmatism’s folly is that it separates intelligence from wisdom. Its greatest sins are arrogance and deceit, including self-deceit. It is arrogant because it assumes the individual—particularly the expert—can know everything he needs to know without reference to received wisdom, historical precedent, tradition, dogma, etc. The pragmatists particularly loathed history, because it was a storehouse of old thinking with no relevance for the new age of science, slide rules, and data. Tricked by what they saw out their windows, they assumed that human nature had an expiration date—and that date was yesterday. “I speak in dispraise of dusty learning, and in disparagement of the historical technique,” boasted Stuart Chase, the brain truster who reportedly gave the New Deal its name and yearned for an “economic dictatorship” in the United States, “Are our plans wrong? Who knows? Can we tell from reading history? Hardly.”

Pragmatism’s deceit comes in the form of actually believing this nonsense.
There is a book screaming to be written on how the twentieth—and now twenty-first—century can be understood as a world-historical struggle not between Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes, as is so often claimed, but between Hayek and John Dewey. Hayek, more than anyone else, illuminated the knowledge problem. Simply put: No one person can ever know enough. Planners who think they can process all of the data from disparate sources across vast expanses of geography and culture are, quite simply, educated fools. The planners of the New Deal had convinced themselves that they were smart enough to grind out any problem so long as they had enough data. Worse, in their contempt for the “disorganized” character of capitalism, they were deeply hostile to markets and the informational power of prices. When prices went in the wrong direction the New Dealers took it upon themselves to out think the market. Hence the great pig slaughter of September 1933, when the government ordered the killing of six million pigs in a time of deprivation.

Hayek explained, and not just in the realm of economics, that knowledge is communal and collective. It is bound up in, and communicated by, traditions, customs, laws, prices, even language. There’s a lot of philosophical and epistemological overlap between Hayek’s philosophy and the pragmatists’—in terms of how we know and learn things as individuals. But on this core point the two could not be more different. Hayek understood that markets are collective, cooperative endeavors precisely because individuals are empowered to make their own decisions. Dewey believed the only way we could have a collective, cooperative system was if we took away the individual’s ability to make his own choices. Citizens needed to be forced to become the kind of citizens Dewey believed would be productive. “Social arrangements, laws, institutions… are means of creating individuals.… Individuality in a social and moral sense is something to be wrought out,” Dewey wrote.
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