David Warsh: America’s fracturing ‘politics of purity’ since the ‘70s

Ralph Nader in 1975, in his heyday

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

Like a lot of people, I am interested in what has been happening in the world, the U.S. in particular, since the end of World War II.  I am especially intrigued by goings on in university economics, but I take a broad view of the subject.  I grew up in the Fifties, and the single most persuasive account I’ve found of the underlying nature of changing times since 1945 has been a series of five books by historian Daniel Rodgers, of Princeton University. In Age of Fracture (Belknap, Harvard, 2011), Rodgers described very well my experience of the increasingly thinner life of things.

Across the multiple fronts of ideational battle, from the speeches of presidents to books of social and cultural theory, conceptions of human nature that in the post-World War II era had been thick with context, social circumstance, institutions, and history gave way to conceptions of human nature that stressed choice, agency, performance and desire. Strong metaphors of society were supplanted by weaker ones. Imagined collectivities shrank; notions of structure and power thinned out. Viewed by its acts of mind, the last quarter of the century was an era of disaggregation, a great age of fracture.

But I’m always interested in a new narrative.  One such is Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism (Norton, 2021), by historian Paul Sabin, of Yale University.  Sabin employs the career of Ralph Nader, the arc of which extends from Harvard Law School and auto-safety crusader in Sixties to his Green Party candidacy in the U.S. presidential election of 2000, as a metaphor for a variety of other liberal activists who mounted assaults of their own on centers of government power in the second half of the 20th  Century.

The harmonious post-war partnership of business, labor and government proclaimed in the Fifties by economist John Kenneth Galbraith and New Dealer James Landis, symbolized by the success of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s government-sponsored electrification of the rural South, was not built to last.  But how did government go from being the solution to America’s problems to being the cause of them? It was more complicated than Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan, Sabin shows.

Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961), Rachel Carson (Silent Spring, 1962) and Nader (Unsafe at Any Speed. 1965), were exemplars of a new breed of critics of capture industrial manipulation and capture of government function, Sabin writes.  Jacobs attacked large-scale city planning and urban renewal. Carson exposed widespread abuses by the commercial pesticide industry. Nader criticized automotive design. These were only the first and most visible cracks in the old alliance of industries, labor unions and federal administrative agencies.  Public-interest law firms began springing up, loosely modeled on civil-rights organizations. The National Resources Defense Council; the Conservation Law Foundation; the Center for Law and Social Policy and many other start-ups soon found their way into federal courts. Nader tackled the leadership of the United Mineworkers Union, leading then-UMW President Tony Boyle to order the murder of reform candidate Tony Yablonski, his wife, and daughter, on New Year’s Eve, 1969.

In Age of Fracture, Rodgers wrote that “The first break in the formula that joined freedom and obligation all but inseparably together began with Jimmy Carter.” Carter’s outside-Washington experience as a peanut farmer and Georgia governor, as well as his immersion in low-church Protestant evangelical culture led him to shun presidential authority. “Government cannot solve our problems, it can’t set our goals, it cannot define our vision,” he said in 1978.

Sabin takes a similar view but offers a different reason for the rupture. Caught in between the idealistic aspirations of outside critics inspired by Nader and the practical demands of governing by consensus, Carter struggled to maintain the traditional balance but failed to placate his critics. “Disillusionment came easily and quickly to Ralph Nader,” Sabin writes.  “I expect to be consulted, and I was told that I would be,” Nader complained almost immediately. Reform-minded critics attacked Carter from nearly every direction. A fierce primary challenge by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D.-Mass.) failed in 1980. The stage was set for Ronald Reagan.

Sabin recalls the battles of the 1970s with grim determination to show the folly of politics of purity.  Nader made his first run for the presidency as leader of the Green Party in 1996, challenging Bill Clinton and Bob Dole. He was in his sixties; his efforts were half-hearted.  In his second campaign, in 2000, he campaigned vigorously enough to tip the election to George W. Bush. Even then it wasn’t Nader’s last hurrah. He ran again, in 2004, as candidate of the Reform Party; and a fourth time, as an independent, in 2008. At 87, he is today conspicuously absent from the scene.

The public-interest movement initiated by urbanist Jane Jacobs, scientist Rachel Carson and Ralph Nader was effective in its early stages, Sabin concludes. The nation’s air and water are cleaner; its highways and workplaces safer; its cities more open to possibility. But Sabin is surely right that all too often, go-for-broke activism served mainly to undermine confidence in the efficacy of administrative government action among significant segments to the public.

The critique of federal regulation was clearly not the whole story, any more than was The Great Persuasion, undertaken in 1948 by the Mont Pelerin Society, pitched unsuccessfully in 1964 by presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, and translated into slogans in 1980 by Milton and Rose Friedman. Nor is the thoroughly disappointing 20-year aftermath to 9/11, another day when the world seemed to many to “break apart,” as historian Dan Rodgers put it in an epilogue to Age of Fracture.

What might put it back together? Accelerating climate change, perhaps.  But that’s another story.

David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this column first appeared.

David Warsh: Trying to make sense of America's age of disaggregation

 

Seeking distance from the dispiriting political news, I spent the best hours of last week reading various chapters of four books by Princeton historian Daniel T. Rodgers.  I am as eager as the next guy to make sense of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, but I do not expect to work my way through to useful opinions by following the primary and caucus returns. So I turned to the work of a scholar who has spent his career writing about the evolution of the political culture of modern capitalism in the U.S. over the last 150 years.

I first read Rodgers a few years ago after an old friend recommended Age of Fracture, which had won a Bancroft Prize in 2012. I was struck by how attentive the historian had been to various developments in economics in the 1960s and ’70s  I knew something about: the influence of deregulators such as Ronald Coase and Alfred Kahn, macroeconomists Milton Friedman and Robert Lucas, lowbrow supply-siders, highbrow game theorists, legal educator Henry Manne.

I know much less about the other realms Rodgers reconnoitered in the book in order to elaborate his central metaphor – international relations, class, race, gender, community, narrative.  But I know that his fundamental diagnosis rings true.  Life today is more specialized, more highly differentiated, and, yes, somehow thinner than in the past.

"Conceptions of human nature that in the post-World War II era had been thick with context, social circumstance, institutions and history gave way to conceptions of human nature that stressed choice, agency, performance and desire. Strong metaphors of society were supplanted by weaker ones… Imagined collectivities shrank; notions of structure and power thinned out. Viewed by its acts of mind the last quarter of the century, was an era of disaggregation, a great age of fracture.''

Over the next year I skimmed Rodgers’s three previous books. They turned out to offer a fairly seamless narrative of, not so much economic history, but arguments about economic history, over the course of a century and half. Rodgers was born in 1942, graduated from Brown University in 1965 and got his Ph.D. from Yale in 1973, taught at the University of Wisconsin until 1980, when he moved to Princeton University, where today he is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History, emeritus

That first book, The Work Ethic in Industrial America: 1850-1920, traced American attitudes towards work, leisure and success, from relatively small-scale workshops before the Civil War to highly mechanized factories at the beginning of the industrial age. The second, Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics since Independence, identified a handful of ostensibly technical terms – “utility,” “natural rights,” “the people,” “government,” “the state,” and “interests” – and examined their use in arguments, especially as the confident tradition he describes as “liberal” gave way to a rediscovery, both academic and popular, of “republicanism” in the Reagan years.

The third work, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age, is a highly original reconstruction of various ways “progressivism” was understood in the first half of the twentieth century, in Europe and the United States: corporate rationalization, city planning, public housing, worker safety, social insurance, municipal utilities, cooperative farming, wartime solidarity, and emergency improvisation in the Great Depression. (A research assistant was Joshua Micah Marshall, who went on to found the influential online news site Talking Points Memo.)

Age of Fracture is the fourth.

It’s a rich vein.  I plan to mine all four over the next few months, making a Sunday item, when and if I can. One needs something to discipline mood swings during the rest of the campaign, and I’ve decided that, for me, this is it.

Today I’ll offer a small but concrete example of what Rodgers calls “ideas in motion across an age,” or, in this case, many ages. American exceptionalism is a persistent theme with him: the free-floating idea that, as “the first new nation” and “the last best hope of democracy,” the United States has a mission to transform the world and little to learn from the rest of it. Is that the note that Trump so single-mindedly and simple-mindedly strikes when he promises to “make American great again”? It helps me to think so.

As for Rodgers, he is spending the year in California, writing a fifth book, a “biography” of a 1630 text that would come in time to be seen as central to the nation’s self-conception — the John Winthrop sermon that contains the famous phrase, “[W]e shall be as a city on a hill.”

David Warsh, a veteran economic historian and financial journalist, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this originated.