Sandel - America's Search for a New Public Philosophy

Sandel, Michael. "America's Search for a New Public Philosophy," Atlantic Monthly, March 1996.

http://mavdisk.mnsu.edu/parsnk/Linked%20Readings/Citizens%20and%20Power/sandel.pdf

Writing in 1996, Michael Sandel explains an important change in America's public philosophy - the way we think about the role of government in our nation. Sandel argues we have drifted away from one of the key aspects of government envisioned by Jefferson - republicanism. A good government is one that is designed to foster virtuous citizens, which in turn can participate as educated members of civic society, to the benefit of all. Sandel sees republicanism climaxing during the Progressive Era, when reformers from the left (like Louis Brandeis) and the right (like Teddy Roosevelt) both sought to increase the size of the government in order to match up with, an balance public society against the dangers of big business.

Public philosophy changed during the Depression, as republicanism gave way to a belief, on both sides of the political spectrum, that government's primary role should be to protect citizens' liberty - liberalism. The welfare state (along with other federal programs throughout the century) was proposed by Liberals arguing that the societal inequalities hampered the freedom of individuals to pursue their own values and ends. Conservatives framed their opposition also in liberal, not republican, terms: big government itself threatened individual liberty.

Sandel's solutions are interesting and occasionally surprising, grand if a bit vague. Foremost, he would like to see a return to republicanism in public philosophy. The turn to liberalism has led to the sense, especially on the Left, that, out of respect for individual liberties, it is improper for government to take a moral stance. But a good government should be moral, so Sandel thinks politicians on both sides should bring morality back into the political arena, wrenching it away from the monopoly on moralism claimed by religious fundamentalists.

Just as Progressive Era republicanism sensed the need to increase government in the face of rapidly expanding businesses, today's good government should acknowledge that, in terms of economics, culture, etc, national boundaries no longer contain the limits of the public community. The government has to be active internationally, and thus (here's where Sandel gets pretty bold) must spread out its sovereignty. But Sandel wants to disperse sovereignty both up (to the international level) AND down (to the state and local level). Power should be more spread out, not consolidated at any one level. Put simply, government needs to feel NEAR to foster civic virtue. Though global boundaries continue to disintegrate, an ideal republican citizen will be most virtuous and civic-minded if he feels connected to his government's structure at a meaningful, local level.

Matusow - The Unraveling of America

Matusow, Allen J. The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s. New York: Harper & Row, 1984.

Argument
JFK and LBJ brought liberalism and the welfare state into broad new areas, where FDR didn't go because WWII intervened and where Ike was indifferent to approach. They succeeded in educational desegregation - despite "white flight" education improved for black children. The North managed to resist desegregation. But the War on Poverty ground to an end without reaching a solution to the problems of equal opportunity, amidst liberal divisions over affirmative action. The economy stumbled because of the unbalanced budgets and inflation caused by LBJ's attempts to have both guns and butter - to fund the war and the social programs. Vietnam revealed the generation gap. The counterculture led to the unraveling of America, peaking at the 68 DNC, and collapsing under the Weathermen and the Black Panthers. The backdrop of the period is one of continued economic prosperity, part of the period from 1950-70, ending in the failure of liberalism.

Review
Kirkendall - AHR
"...to blame the war is to embrace a liberal explanation for liberalism's failure to transform American life, and that is niot tlis author's point of view. For Matusow, the chief obstacle in the way of lar-ge-scale change was liberalism itself. Here the crucial defect was not a tendency to promise too much but weaknesses in perception that rendered the liberals unable to deliver on promises, such as the assurances that liberal measures would create an orderly society. The liberals, according to the author's interpretation, were too soft. They as- sumed that significant changes come easily. They did not understand the problerns they faced, includ- ing poverty, or the solutions to them, including the redistribution of income. Also, they did not think hard enough about the distribution of power and the need to change it. They were too willing to compromise with the corporations, the political bosses, and other power groups."

JAH - Heath
"The book's basic thesis is well summarized on page 127: "By his heroic poses, his urgent rhetoric, his appeal to idealism and the nation's great traditions, Kennedy inadvertently helped to arouse among millions a dormant desire to perfect America.... Only later, during Lyndon Johnson's term as president, would the limits of liberal good will become apparent and the flaws of liberal reform be exposed. "

Brinkley - Liberalism and Its Discontents

Brinkley, Alan. Liberalism and Its Discontents. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Argument
Brinkley explains liberalism in a series of collected essays, suggesting the changing nature of liberalism throughout the 20th century and the resulting difficulty in pinning it down with a specific definition. Nonetheless, I'll try to synthesize a definition: liberalism is the belief that the government can improve inefficiencies in the free market to the benefit of business, while simultaneously alleviating the effects of market downturns as well as supporting the poorest members of the nation. In foreign policy, the liberal state seeks to spread both the nation's ideals and interests through a combination of diplomacy and military power.

Discontents
Chapter 1 - FDR had some serious mother issues - his mother was controlling, and he tried to resist her throughout his life. His relationship with Eleanor was professional and never intimate after she discovered his affair at the end of the 1910s. He admired TR and strove to follow in his footsteps. Polio was huge. His efforts to overcome its affects through effort and denial revealed his character. Overall, his personality was overly friendly and thus extremely evasive. It was hard to know the real FDR, and Brinkley suggests that perhaps no one ever did.
Chapter 2 - The New Deal had no core ideology. It was a series of experiments designed by the experts FDR brought in to the White House.
Chapter 3 - In 1937 many thought that the Depression was ending and it was time to roll back. The ensuing recession ended those ideas. World War II and the Cold War solidified the massive new state
Chapter 4 - The New Deal coalition made the Democratic party once again a national party. It no longer had to play the politics of race to win in the south, thus setting up JFK and LBJ to take on Civil Rights.
Chapter 7 - A helpful essay on historiography of the Interwar years.
Chapter 10 - Henry Stimson and John J. McCloy represent members of the liberal establishment: non-politicians who played a large role in the government, particularly in foreign policy.
Chapter 12 - A brief synthesis of Isserman combined with an explanation of the New Left.
Chapter 14 - After 1968, the parties sought to gain control of their political conventions, turning them from exciting, unpredictable sites of politicking to scripted, ordered declarations of the pre-ordained candidates.
Chapter 15 - Oral Roberts represents how one religious figure emphasized that American Christians could be good Christians and still pursue prosperity in America.
Chapter 16 - A helpful synthesis of American conservatism, particularly the new Reagan right.

Helpful Quote
"...[the National Resources Planning Board of World War II showed] how the "planing" ideal was shifting away from the vision of a rationally ordered economy (prominent in the early 1930s), away too from the idea ofthe activist regulatroy state (a central feature of late 1930s reform) and toward the concept of compensatory action. Planning would enable govenrment to stiumlate economic growth through fiscal policies." (p.56)

Review
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2568415
"Brinkley writes with some "skepticism about the progressive assumptions of much twentieth-century political history," an atti- tude evident in his first book, Voices of Protest (1982). There Brinkley argued that a "popu- list" resistance to centralized wealth and power, speaking on behalf of family, community, and local self-determination, survived long beyond the nineteenth century, into the 1930s, as a counterweight to the nationalizing and bu- reaucratizing trends widely assumed by liberal historians to have made the Rooseveltian wel- fare state inevitable. "The Late New Deal" similarly casts doubt on the self-assurance of liberal historians by disclosing great uncer- tainty and indeterminacy in the substance and development of liberal ideals. Amid economic and political setbacks, Brinkley finds, New Deal reformers tacked and swayed, moving away from their initial aspiration to build a new, harmonious political economy toward successively more limited visions. If thorough reconstruction was unachievable, they opted instead for a strong regulatory state fighting monopoly-before turning to a roughly Key- nesian program of government-sustained eco- nomic growth. Finally, they adopted an even more modest program trusting in the dyna- mism of capitalism itself to fund public relief and social insurance programs as mere acces- sories to the marketplace. Besides establishing a limited welfare state, Brinkley concludes, "the New Deal is also important for the op- tions it foreclosed, for the way it tried to take certain paths and failed in trying, for how it delegitimized certain concepts of the state even as it was legitimizing others."