Liberalism

"I think that today Keynesian economists primarily distinguish themselves from other economists through their belief that you cannot understand the behavior of our economy on the assumption that it is always at or near a full, or Walrasian, equilibrium, and that you cannot account for the movements that you see in output and employment on the assumption that everything you see is at the intersection of traditional supply and demand curves, and that the movements are only accounted for by shifts in those curves People who think of themselves as Keynesian economists can be divided as to what they would put in place of Walrasian equilibrium. Some of them think that what we observe in the world is a disequilibrium. If the economy is moving toward Walrasian equilibrium, it is doing so very slowly. Another group of Keynesian economists, who are in some ways closer to Keynes, believe that the economy is characterized by multiple equilibria; a modern capitalist economy is capable perhaps of producing a good Walrasian equilibrium, but also a bad equilibrium, that is, a situation with bad welfare properties and without forces that move the economy away from such a situation. I find myself halfway between those two schools of thought. I used to think that the correct analysis would emphasize disequilibrium. Now I have some doubts about that. Either of these approaches is a Keynesian alternative to the idea that the economy should be regarded as being in a Walrasian equilibrium."

"I started as a Keynesian, and I am still one—which is not to say that I have not learned. The crude, as we sometimes say, hydraulic Keynesianism of the early postwar period certainly needed improvement. And I’ll even say how and where. The foundation of what we think of as Keynesian economics— and you understand that I’m not at all concerned with what Keynes really meant, I am talking about American Keynesianism—was built on the observation that, over the business cycle, prices are slow variables and quantities are fast variables. If you pick up any elementary text, if the market is in disequilibrium, the reflex reaction is that when demand is in excess, prices will rise and that will eliminate the excess demand. And if there is excess supply, prices will fall and that will eliminate the excess supply as consumers buy more. Then you go on to ask what kinds of institutions—monopoly, regulation, cartelism, whatever—will prevent that adjustment from taking place. But the first thing you think of is prices."

"Keynesian economics offered not only an economic explanation of changes in aggregate output and employment, but also a rationale for government intervention to restore an economy mired in depression. Rather than wait for the market to adjust and restore full employment on its own, Keynes argued that government spending could produce the same result faster and with fewer painful side-effects. While Keynes and his followers recognized that government spending entailed the risk of inflation, especially when “full employment” became an official policy, it was a risk they found acceptable and manageable, given the alternative of unemployment on the scale seen during the Great Depression."

"When Professor Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago won a Nobel Prize in economics in 1976, it marked a growing recognition of non-Keynesian and anti-Keynesian economists, such as those of the Chicago School. By the last decade of the twentieth century, a disproportionate share of the Nobel Prizes in economics were going to economists of the Chicago School, whether located on the University of Chicago campus or at other institutions. The Keynesian contribution did not vanish, however, for many of the concepts and insights of John Maynard Keynes had now become part of the stock in trade of economists in all schools of thought. When John Maynard Keynes’ picture appeared on the cover of the December 31, 1965 issue of Time magazine, it was the first time that someone no longer living was honored this way."

"The same people who would never touch deficit spending are now tossing around billions. The switch from decades of supply-side politics all the way to a crass Keynesianism is breathtaking."

"Economics is a difficult subject, because we cannot conduct controlled experiments. There are not two or three Argentina's, one following the experiment that I described above, and another adopting the policies that I prefer. But we do have a wealth of experience from which to draw inferences. This wealth of experience all points in one direction: Keynes's teachings are still very much alive, and Argentina today would be in far better shape if his lessons had been taken to heart."

"The hostility between these alternative schools was so strong that when I studied and taught in Cambridge, in the mid and late 60s, Keynes’ disciples’ “secret seminar” was still an ongoing institution—a seminar from which Robertson and his followers were deliberately excluded."

"After all, in today’s context, the pursuit of Keynesian policies looks even more profitable than the pursuit of market fundamentalism!"

"Nearly all modern business-cycle analysts follow the same course, though few as consciously as Schumpeter. The ‘Keynesians’ for example, pay little attention to subjectivevalue problems except when they speak ex professo of ‘pure theory,’ which, since it is furthest removed from real problems, is naturally the last stronghold of obsolete ideas. Demand plays a very important role in their analysis, but what they have to say about it is dominated by the distribution of income, that is to say by the existing relations of production. It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that the importance of the Keynesian contribution stems largely from the fact that here for the first time since Ricardo orthodox economics accords to the real relations of capitalist production reasonable weight in the analysis of the capitalist process. It would be a further step forward if the Keynesians could be brought to realize that this is what they are doing."

"Monetarism—both of the older Friedman version stressing adherence to money stock targets and of the newer rational expectations variety—has been badly discredited. The stage has been set for recovery in the popularity of Keynesian diagnoses and remedies. I do not mean to imply, of course, that there is some Keynesian truth, vintage 1936 or 1961, to which economists and policymakers will or should now return, ignoring the lessons of economic events and of developments in economics itself over these last turbulent fifteen years. I do mean that in the new intellectual synthesis which I hope and expect will emerge to replace the divisive controversies and chaotic debates on macroeconomic policies, Keynesian ideas will have a prominent place."

"Keynesian economics at a minimum provides a licence for welfare state measures and other government efforts towards redistribution of wealth. The license is the faith that macroeconomic stabilization and prosperity are compatible with a wide range of social policies, that modern capitalism and democracy are robust enough to prosper and progress while being humane and equitable. That faith conflicts with the visions of extreme Right and Left, which agree that extremes of wealth and poverty, of security and insecurity, are indispensable to the functioning of capitalism. Keynesian policies helped to confound those dismal prophecies in the past; I think they will do so again."

"Keynesian economics was, in the context of those times, essentially conservative. The message was that capitalism was not doomed; its major failing, chronic large-scale unemployment, could be remedied fairly easily, by intelligent use of the fiscal and monetary instruments governments already had at their disposal. This message was not welcome news to Marxists committed to the view that the system was no longer structurally capable of prosperity and progress."

"If we are to grasp the dynamics of this unforecasted storm, we have to move beyond the familiar cognitive frame of macroeconomics that we inherited from the early twentieth century. Forged in the wake of World War I and World War II, the macroeconomic perspective on international economics is organized around nation-states, national productive systems and the trade imbalances they generate. It is a view of the economy that will forever be identified with John Maynard Keynes. Predictably, the onset of the crisis in 2008 evoked memories of the 1930s and triggered calls for a return to “the master.” And Keynesian economics is, indeed, indispensable for grasping the dynamics of collapsing consumption and investment, the surge in unemployment and the options for monetary and fiscal policy after 2009. But when it comes to analyzing the onset of financial crises in an age of deep globalization, the standard macroeconomic approach has its limits. In discussions of international trade it is now commonly accepted that it is no longer national economies that matter. What drives global trade are not the relationships between national economies but multinational corporations coordinating far-flung “value chains.” The same is true for the global business of money. To understand the tensions within the global financial system that exploded in 2008 we have to move beyond Keynesian macroeconomics and its familiar apparatus of national economic statistics. As Hyun Song Shin, chief economist at the Bank for International Settlements and one of the foremost thinkers of the new breed of “macrofinance,” has put it, we need to analyze the global economy not in terms of an “island model” of international economic interaction—national economy to national economy—but through the “interlocking matrix” of corporate balance sheets—bank to bank. As both the global financial crisis of 2007–2009 and the crisis in the eurozone after 2010 would demonstrate, government deficits and current account imbalances are poor predictors of the force and speed with which modern financial crises can strike. This can be grasped only if we focus on the shocking adjustments that can take place within this interlocking matrix of financial accounts. For all the pressure that classic “macroeconomic imbalances”—in budgets and trade—can exert, a modern global bank run moves far more money far more abruptly."

"When we Americans disagree over issues like abortion or gun control, typically we'll "battle it out" until one side "wins." But one side rarely "wins" for long. The losing side always seems to come back with reinforcements, ready for more. For most Americans, this constant balling is the very essence of politics. But more and more of us are beginning to suspect that the batting, itself, is part and parcel of what we need to overcome. ... The idea here is not so much to come up with a better political platform as it is to come up with a better political discourse ... one that forces all "sides" to listen to and learn from each other. Out of this new discourse, a better political platform may emerge."

"There is a distinct force in American society which is both volatile and pivotal in its activism ... - the Middle American Radical (MAR). Their perspective does not fit readily the traditional molds of liberal and conservative ideologies. ... On some issues, MARs are likely to take a "liberal" stand, on others a "conservative" one. For example, the MAR expresses a desire for more police power. He feels that granting the police a heavier hand will help control crime, i.e., [Alabama Governor George] Wallace's Law and Order program. However, MARs are also adamant about keeping many social reforms, often wrought by the left, such as medicare, aid to education, and social security. Often MARs feel their problems stem from the rich and the government working together to defraud the rest of the country. They blame the situation on defects in the system such as bad taxes. However, their causal analysis does not suggest what effective remedial actions they can pursue as individuals."

"I'd like to work on having every fourth year become a year in which no laws are made, but the old laws are reviewed, updated, or deleted as needed. That way we won't get endless, obsolete laws piling up on the books."

"I view the traditional two parties as in some ways very evil. They've become monsters that are out of control. … The only things that are important to them are their own agendas and their pork. Government's become just a battle of power between the two parties."

"I am not a career politician. I'm not a Democrat. I'm not a Republican. I'm a working man with commonsense ideas and goals. I describe myself politically as fiscally conservative and socially moderate-to-liberal."

"Halstead and Lind drew explicitly on “The Radical Center: Middle Americans and the Politics of Alienation,” a sociological study published in 1976. Its author, Donald I. Warren, had supervised nearly 2,000 interviews with a cross-section of citizens, almost all of them white, in an effort to isolate the attitudes of “middle American radicals,” whose anger at political and social institutions had erupted in the early and mid-1970s. … Put roughly, “radicals” were blue-collar Catholics, and “average middles” were white-collar Protestants. The novelty of Halstead and Lind’s book lay in its suggestion that subsequent changes in demographics and party affiliation had collapsed the two warring factions into one. Between 1970 and 2000, the percentage of college graduates in the population at large had more than doubled, from one in 10 to one in four. Evangelicals had joined Catholics among the ranks of social conservatives. The working-class “flight” from the Democratic Party was all but completed in the 1980s and ’90s even as moderate Republicans began to vote for Democrats. The question Halstead and Lind tried to answer, whether this fusion of the two “middles” might form a new consensus, is again the most pressing issue of the day, with conflicting answers supplied by left and right, and with the outcome fluctuating from moment to moment, possibly confirming the authors’ guess that “the future of American politics may well belong to the major party that is first to renounce its more extreme positions.” This is why “The Radical Center” remains valuable even as the political realities that seemed to discredit its argument a decade ago have themselves proved fleeting."

"When The Radical Center was published, mere weeks after the trauma of 9/11, its picture of a highly polarized nation seemed instantly outmoded. … Not quite a decade later, things look very different. “Big government” is once again viewed with deep hostility, and much of the public is not merely cynical, but fuming. Many on the left feel betrayed by the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats, while the Tea Party movement has been expressing the same “radical” frustrations Halstead and Lind described. Meanwhile, political observers are recycling, if not always wittingly, the authors’ terminology. In his Times Op-Ed column, Thomas L. Friedman recently called for “political innovation that takes America’s disempowered radical center and enables it to act in proportion to its true size, unconstrained by the two parties, interest groups and orthodoxies that have tied our politics in knots.” And David Ignatius, the Washington Post columnist, has said that officials at Barack Obama’s White House “speak of this president as being a man of the radical center” who seeks to occupy the ideological middle but at the same time aspires to “be the agent of change, to break this system that everybody knows is broken.”"

"At a time when politics has become an almost ­minute-by-minute spectacle, political thinkers who try to discern a sweeping interpretive pattern in current events or to predict where those events may be heading are likely to find their work evaluated in terms dismayingly like those applied to candidates and strategists. One wrong guess, or an abrupt change in the political weather, can make even an illuminating political book seem as irrelevant as a bungled campaign. A good example is Ted Halstead and Michael Lind’s book The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics. Published in 2001, it argued that the nation was ready for “political transformations and realignments” as broad in scope as those created by the Civil War and the Great Depression. … if Halstead and Lind’s proposals were questionable, their analysis of the paralyzed condition of American governance was incisive and prescient, particularly their depiction of a substantial base of disenchanted voters who had become profoundly alienated from the “increasingly dogmatic two-party system,” both parties “captured by their extremes,” with the result that a growing slice of the electorate could not “find even a faction within a major party with which they can identify.”"

"The radical centrists of the 21st century were better dressed and superficially better behaved than the Greens. But they had their own impediments to humanity and effectiveness. I got my first taste of this after my book Radical Middle was published in 2004 and I attended my first radical centrist … conference in Washington DC. I dearly wanted to meet some of the other writers whose books and articles were turning radical centrism into an emerging American political perspective. But when I introduced myself to the ones I most wanted to meet, the best known gave me stony stares and little face time. … I supposed it was just the old male competitiveness, rearing its silly head among the reconcilers, until I reread Ed Kilgore's weirdly ambivalent review of my book in the radical centrists' then-favorite magazine, the Washington Monthly. Kilgore characterized me as a person who'd "moved to Canada to avoid the draft" and "rubbed elbows there with the Weathermen," and later became a "New Age guru." There it was in a nutshell, I realized: my peers in the radical centrist community, ... many of them hoping for jobs in future political administrations, did not want a notorious New Age draft dodger exotic gumming up their ranks. I'd been in the Big World long enough to understand their concern. But it still hurt. And I knew this aversion to getting one's hands dirty would keep us from ever being able to take our movement beyond the world of think tanks and Big Ideas."

"At the radical middle, we're ... proposing concrete answers – practical solutions to the most pressing issues of our time. For example, with just a little bit of cleverness and imagination, and a willingness to borrow, humbly, from neoliberals, neopopulists, neoconservatives, and transformationalists alike, we can make ourselves energy independent within 10 years. We can create a universal health care system that's preventive, and affordable, and not government-run. We can provide affirmative action for all economically disadvantaged Americans. We can create corporations we'd actually enjoy working for. We can make globalization work for everyone. We can keep terrorists away from our shores – and at the same time come to passionate grip with the causes of terrorism. I've woven all these ideas and more into this book. ..."

"How can we be of use to the developing world?"

"How can we maximize our potential as human beings?"

"How can we give everyone a fair start in life?"

"How can we give ourselves more choices in life?"

"Many nonpartisan or post-partisan Americans are asking basic questions, now, that can move us toward a new and more relevant politics. Here are four I've put front and center in this book:"

"More than two centuries ago, Benjamin Franklin wanted us to invent a uniquely American politics that served ordinary people by creatively borrowing from all points of view. It's not too late for us to listen to him."

"Our politics today doesn't express either our practical, grounded side or our visionary, creative side. It is all about the short term, not the long term. It is all about blaming others for our problems, not about turning our problems into opportunities by addressing them in the forthright, imaginative ways you know we can."

"There is a hunger in this country for a new kind of politics. There is a hunger for a politics that can take us beyond the usual venomous blame games in Washington, D.C. There is a hunger for a politics that appreciates the genuine and often very reasonable concerns of the left and right, and builds on them toward something new. There is a hunger for a politics that's idealistic but without illusions, a politics that dares to suggest real solutions to our biggest problems but doesn't lose touch with the often harsh facts on the ground. There is a hunger for a politics that expresses us as we really are – practical and visionary, mature and imaginative, sensible and creative, all at once."

"A radical is a man with both feet firmly planted — in the air. A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward. A reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards. A liberal is a man who uses his legs and his hands at the behest — at the command — of his head."

"Yes, there will always be fights over details. But if we first ask, "What does equal opportunity and a decent life in America mean?" can't we agree that anyone who works full-time should be able to provide for his or her family? That every citizen should have basic health coverage? That special efforts should be made to make sure that poor children have good schools? And that average citizens should have some way to have their voices heard amid the din of big political money?"

"What American politics urgently needs ... is not a new left, but a new center. Domestic debate needs to be re-centered around a handful of fundamental goals on which all of us can agree, whether we call ourselves Republicans, Democrats, or Independents."

"Since 1994, when the Clinton health care plan imploded in a fiasco that cost Democrats control of the Congress, Democrats have been too scared to think big again. Republicans, emboldened by this Democratic timidity, have chosen to push harder for their traditional priorities of cutting taxes and regulations. What's been lost in the dysfunctional debate of the last decade is a commitment to two long-standing American ideals: equal opportunity and a minimally decent life for citizens of a wealthy nation."

"Do not be deceived by the way men of bad faith misuse words and names … It used to be only the English who excelled in the deception of words. Then the French went even beyond them, and now the whole world is adept at it. … Things are set up as contraries that are not even in the same category. Listen to me: the opposite of radical is superficial, the opposite of liberal is stingy; the opposite of conservative is destructive. Thus I will describe myself as a radical conservative liberal; but certain of the tainted red fish will swear that there can be no such fish as that. Beware of those who use words to mean their opposites. At the same time have pity on them, for usually this trick is their only stock in trade."

"Philosophically as well as politically, Capek was a man of the center, but not in the sense used by hostile critics. The center he was aiming for was not a lukewarm middle ground between extremes. It was a radical center, radical in the original sense of the word: at the root of things. Capek rejected collectivism of any type, but was just as opposed to selfish individualism. He was a passionate democrat and a pluralist. He was often called a relativist because he disliked single vision and preferred to look at everything from many sides … Yet Capek did not believe that truth is relative nor that everyone his or her own truth. Capek is also often described as a pragmatist. But in his belief in the reality of objective truth, he departed from both relativism and from pragmatist thought."

"Radicals have value, at least; they can move the center. On a scale of 1 to 5, 3 is moderate, 1 and 5 the hardliners. But if a good radical takes it up to 9, then 5 becomes the new center. I already saw it working in the American Muslim community. For years women were neglected in mosques, denied entrance to the main prayer halls and relegated to poorly maintained balconies and basements. It was only after a handful of Muslim feminists raised "lunatic fringe" demands like mixed-gender prayers with men and women standing together and even women imams giving sermons and leading men in prayer that major organizations such as ISNA and CAIR began to recognize the "moderate" concerns and deal with the issue of women in mosques. I've taken part in the woman-led prayer movement, both as a writer and as a man who prays behind women, happy to be the extremist who makes moderate reform seem less threatening. Insha'Allah, what's extreme today will not be extreme tomorrow."

"We could send down a combination of Pericles and Thomas Jefferson, and if that person's reporting to Harry Reid [Senate Majority Leader] or Mitch McConnell [Senate Minority Leader], he's going to be ineffective. … Every vote is a test vote. Every vote is party loyalty. We're sunk if it keeps up this way. … It wouldn't take but four or five centrists like me to completely change the dynamics."

"I don't have any illusions it will be easy, but I do think particularly if the two parties are closely divided, I will have an influence … I might have a chance of starting a movement toward change in this broken system. This country has serious problems, but you can't address them if the institution set up to address the problems is broken."

"If you like the system as it is, I’m not your guy… If you want a shot at changing it, join me."

"We proved that with civility, common sense, building bridges, working with coalitions and working with people one at a time, we could do something. … I can speak for the middle. … The real issue is the system itself."

"Virtually all ideologues, of any variety, are fearful and insecure, which is why they are drawn to ideologies that promise prefabricated answers for all circumstances."

"The phrase "the radical center" was used to describe disaffected white working-class Democrats by the sociologist Donald I Wallace in The Radical Center: Middle Americans and the Politics of Alienation ... . Replying to Joe Klein's Newsweek cover story "Stalking the Radical Middle," September 25, 1995, John Judis distinguished between the political views of the working-class "radical middle" or "radical center," and the affluent "sensible center" ... we are not using the term Radical Center in this narrow sense, which changes in partisanship and demography already may have rendered obsolete. Rather, we use the term to describe a public philosophy distinct from liberalism and conservatism in the forms in which they have been familiar for the past generation."

"To criticize the New Deal welfare model that is routinely defended by today's Democratic Party is not to side with today's Republican Party, which has established a troubling record of slashing funds to the neediest and youngest Americans. The Radical Centrist alternative is a true safety net model, under which public benefits would be provided to those who need them the most, while those who can afford to pay their own way would be required to do so."

"A second guiding principle of Radical Centrism is that the citizens of the twenty-first century can and should be held to a higher personal standard. In this new era of big citizenship, greater choice and freedom must go hand in hand with greater responsibility. Formerly, civic duty was identified primarily with military service, jury duty, and the act of voting. But the definition of civic duty now needs to be expanded, especially in a society in which most citizens receive transfer payments or subsidies from their fellow taxpayers. In such a society, self-reliance must become a civic duty as well as a private virtue."

"In redesigning our nation's public, private, and communal institutions once again for the early twenty-first century, we believe that one design criterion above all others should guide us: increasing the amount of choice available to individual citizens. So far, the information era has enabled most Americans to enjoy newfound choices only as consumers in the economic and entertainment spheres. Any new political program worthy of the Information Age must be capable of translating this so far narrow expansion of choices to many other spheres of society: voting choices, educational choices, medical choices, retirement choices, lifestyle choices, and career choices."

"The underlying purpose of the Radical Centrist program is to further expand America’s perennial goals of individual liberty, equality of opportunity, and national unity in the new circumstances of the Information Age."

"We use the word radical – in keeping with its Latin derivation from "radix," or "root" – to emphasize that we are interested not in tinkering at the margin of our inherited public, private, and communal institutions but rather in promoting, when necessary, a wholesale revamping of their component parts."

"We call our new political program the Radical Center. We chose this name to differentiate our principles and policies from those of the Democratic Left and the Republican Right. To us, it seems obvious that the familiar varieties of liberalism and conservatism ... are largely irrelevant in the fundamentally different environment of first half of the twenty-first century. "Centrism" itself has become something of a shallow mantra in recent American politics. It is usually involved in a tactical effort to bridge the differences between the existing Left and Right – yielding a "Squishy Center" that lies between Left and Right, rather than a "Radical Center.""