The tensions between Liberal principles are sometimes too much for politicians and so they take the easy way out. The easy way is to abandon principles and become dogmatically pragmatic. Dogmatic pragmatism is obviously a slippery slope, for pragmatism-although it is as American as apple pie-is not the panacea cure for philosophical or political loggerheads that it sometimes may seem.
The essence of pragmatism is that one should seek "practical" solutions that work rather than half-measures or total misses that conform to preconceived ideas. Trouble is, some preconceived ideas are worth more than others. Principles, for instance, are preconceived ideas that have been fashioned and honed over long years and finally enshrined as worthy and valuable guidance for human affairs.
The other problem with pragmatism is that "what works" for one guy may be quite the opposite for the next. Who is to say which point of view is more credible or important? That's why we have principles as handy measuring sticks against which to gauge our daily efforts in the heat of discussion. A heated discussion these days that affects the soul and substance of the Democratic Party and all Liberals and Progressives is the question of "free trade policy."
The Clintonistas embraced "free trade" as if it were gravity or some other inevitable force of nature. Their acceptance of free trade came on the crest of the declaration that the world's economies were merging under the revolutionary expansion of communications made possible by the computer revolution. At least the appearance looking backward at the semi-isolation of pre-computer, pre-internet, Cold War preoccupations was that a long process of market penetrations had reached a critical point, while "inevitability" and "globalization" were now the watchwords of the day.
The other background circumstance affecting the Clintonistas was the precarious hold they had established on an electoral majority. Reagan was a hugely popular if disgustingly low common denominator politician, whose reign of bombastic demagoguery touched all the chords of economically and socially (and racially) imperiled lower middle class and middle class white Americans. That and the fact that the Great Society welfare programs of the LBJ era were now mired in the predictable abuses and abuse rhetoric one might have expected from years of Republican administration of these programs, Clintonistas were already numb to the centerpiece principle of Liberalism and Progressivism-humane treatment of our citizens. The Clintonistas were ashamed of the failures of the Great Society programs and, yes, this shame easily transferred to the people for whom those programs were designed. So, when the Republicans gained the upper hand in Congress in 1994, not only was the stage set for free trade, but the script tended strongly to ignore the working men and women of the country.
One should ask at this point what is the alternative to "free trade?" The business interests and nascent neocons called the alternative "isolationism." This starkly dichotomous view played to decades of public school instruction and mass media propaganda meant to promote America's part as the "good guy" in a global war for the minds of men, the Cold War against "Godless Communism." To say "isolationism" was to call up almost half a century of plucky (and self-serving) internationalism with all the history of appeasements and depression that preceded it. But the alternative to "free trade" is obviously not isolationism, for it it were then what was the second half of the 20th century if not something quite different from both free trade and isolationism?!
Globalization of commerce is a partial truth. The facts are that many countries are now competing as industrial or mass market agricultural producers, where many fewer were fifty years ago. Globalization does not mean a level playing field, of course. Some countries, like the United States, have built up fabulous infrastructures to support a bewildering array of industrial, agricultural, and service sector industries while maintaining constantly improving medical, educational, cultural, and social systems. Such countries compete with neophyte industrial nations whose only claim to competitiveness is the willingness of workers to work for very low but nevertheless better-than-before wages. These countries do not have the infrastructures to maintain and certainly do not have the standards of living to protect. Corporations from advanced countries exploit this kind of imbalance for short-term profits, completely ignoring the social and physical infrastructure at home that brought these corporations and their headquarters personnel to this possibility.
Barack Obama's book, The Audacity of Hope, is full of this kind of pragmatic ignorance. He seems not to understand that "Liberal ideology" is a short way of stating a short and a long list of principles upon which humane and progressive governance should rely for guidance. In fact he dismisses ideology summarily in favor of his own pragmatic approach to issues. (p.59) Obama takes "globalization" at face (popular press and propaganda) value and "free trade" as an inevitability. One reads in his rambling discourse that "free trade" will be good for the workers of America, as if he were a medical doctor diagnosing a patient albeit on the basis of a hurried look and a few words in a high school gymnasium in between soliciting campaign funds. What arrogance this generation of Democrats possesses, what hubris and ignorance! The last thing we need is another Hamlet!
The real costs of "free trade" are not just the individual or the sum of huge personal dislocations of families, the loss of incomes, the loss of precious lifetime, but also the losses incurred to the towns, cities, neighborhoods, and the whole social infrastructure of these people and their places. Until these effects can be measured and a price established, the call for "free trade" that ignores these values is nothing but another corporate slogan, a deception for profit, an immoral abandonment of the very grist and grit of American life.
But what if we could establish the value of a town like, say, "Galesburg?" How would we measure it? Would we dare depreciate its assets as if they were mere emphemera? Would we amortize its decline and destruction, or would we establish present day value and appreciate that to a better future day value, hoping that progress can be maintained? Would we take into account the sum of all taxes invested in infrastructure? How would we put a value on the schools and colleges, the churches and synagogues, the art museum and the baseball park? Could we not agree that businesses have an obligation to take no more from a community than they provide above the cost of labor?
I am not promoting isolationism. The United States is much too important and vital a nation to retreat from the rest of the world behind unnecessary economic protections and political indifference. But, the United States should not be mugged by its own spawn, its transnational businesses and industries. These entities have no right to decide unilaterally that one American community will survive and another one not. These entities are creations not only of soulless capital, but of people who have a necessary and inherent responsibility for the whole, the community and the nation. These are public questions, not private business decisions. The fact that the United States has been organized on principles that have fostered a very high standard of living and opportunity for the many, rather than the few, should not be held against us in a world that is actually striving to achieve similar national results in their own terms. We should not be hostage to our own corporations or those of any other nation.
I am also not promoting a departure from an empirical approach to foreign (or domestic) affairs. Empiricism is not the collection of information to fit some narrow interpretations of reality, but rather a broad synthesis of data whether it supports preconceived ideas or not, a process which always involves a willingness to analyze one's own assumptions and biases.
The Libertarian notion that the world owes its life to entrepreneurship is false and, worse, misleading. Entrepreneurs do not spring full grown out of the ground or surf, they are nurtured in the embrace of a society and culture, and they owe their chance to establish enterprise to the efforts of the many who have gone before them and the many who will put off their own ideas to see the entrepreneur's through to realization. All enterprise is a artifact of society, not of unique individuals. No man is an island entire of itself....
The idea that a greater good is realized by the hidden hand of the marketplace is equally false and misleading. The more apt expression is that greed begets more greed and that a firmament founded in avarice cannot but understand avarice. But make no mistake from this: the accumulation of capital is neither good nor bad, it is simply a possibility when efficiencies can be realized. Efficiencies cannot be allowed, however, which summarily destroy the common wealth, the society, its infrastructure, its culture and life.
The mining of profit from the infrastructure of society to accumulate capital is basically an outrageous theft. The notion of "free trade," therefore, is nonsense, a deliberate obfuscation of the responsibility the government and the people have to preserve and protect the investments we all have made as taxpayers and productive members of society in our our places and lives.
http://americanliberalism.org
James R. Brett, Ph.D. taught Russian History in several universities before becoming an academic administrator in curriculum and faculty research administration. His academic interests have been in the history of science and the history of ideas, particularly Marxism and classical liberalism, but also psychology and consciousness studies. He is a frequent contributor to liberal and progressive blogs and is the founder and publisher of The American Liberalism Project.
...I say that free trade agreements have hurt our country more than they have helped it. Also, being a bit of an entrepreneur, I can also add that the effects of free trade agreements trickle down more surely and rapidly than does money from the rich to the poor.
How many million more people have to become permanently unemployed before we catch this clue? By outsourcing our jobs to the other side of the globe, we have brought the pernicious hand of poverty home to reap us like rotten stalks of wheat molding in a field soaked with the tears of the disaffected.
And in the midst of this, we hear that the economy is vibrant and vital. Sure it is if your job is profiteering off the misery of the Iraq war, or advertising the latest, greatest societal diversion. In a country were so many millions are "negatively food challenged"...err, I mean hungry, how can any of us who aren't DIRECTLY involved in it celebrate the billion dollar bonuses given to employees of Goldman Sachs? How can we get that lump in the throat feeling knowing some anonymous paper pusher sucking off the juices of the debacle of Halliburton's no bid contracts will be able to buy that Rolls Royce he's been eying when some people can't even afford to put gas in their Yugo?
My business is predicated on theaters and individuals needing vital electrical and electronic equipment repaired. Considering how much money there ISN'T for people to fix things, I am languishing.
The loss of jobs because of free trade has a ripple effect. All the jobs lost by supporters of the arts effects the theaters. Because of this, said theaters have less money in their accounts to get things fixed. This means they either wait longer to get stuff fixed, or do without. That gets down to me, and puts a big dent in my wallet.
At this point in time, I'd accept isolationism fully. Let the rest of the world tend to its own economies. Let them figure out how to make their countries work. Bring back our jobs before America turns into the latest, greatest, and largest third world country on the globe.
Blessed be!
Pappy
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Pappy (61 articles, 0 quicklinks, 9 diaries, 828 comments)
on Friday, December 22, 2006 at 2:35:52 PM
Free Trade OK with Environmental & Worker Protections
I believe in global free trade - but not without environmental and worker protections - like current free trade agreements.
Some complain about Mexicans and South Americans flooding into the U.S. The increased migration from Mexico is a direct result of passing NAFTA and CAFTA without any environmental and worker protections. Big corps moved to places like Mexico, opened up huge agribusinesses and other manufacturing plants that put all the small Mexican other other farmers and small business owners out of business - leaving them no choice but to move to the U.S.
Implementing world trade treaties without worker and environmental protections is a Lose-Lose proposition for everyone except a few corporate owners. These trade treaties which ignore worker and environmental protections have undone centuries of fighting for worker protections and decades of fighting for environmental protections.
No more trade treaties without worker and environmental protections!
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Kathy Dopp (30 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 50 comments)
on Friday, December 22, 2006 at 7:21:52 PM
Yes to the article and yes to all 3 responses thus far...
What a mistake free trade has been. It's once of those ideas that sounded really good but then turned out to be awful.
I will say though that it IS an inevitability, just like equality for race, color, creed, sex, origin and orientation is an inevitability, world peace is an inevitability, etc. I haven't read Audacity of Hope yet and so I cannot speak to what Obama may have meant, but it is inevitable that these things will come and will come the right way. It just isnt in the near future, unfortunately.
Right now, there needs to be tariffs that speak to worker conditions, the environment and other issues. Unfortunately, I and the majority of the rest of the Democratic Party were way too slow on the uptake on this one.
I'd like to take some sort of poll of both congressional Democrats and the public at large to see what people really think of this issue right now. My sense from hearing a few prominent and/or congressional Dems is that many of them realize NAFTA and other free trade efforts were a mistake.
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Steven Leser (178 articles, 29 quicklinks, 30 diaries, 1194 comments)
on Friday, December 22, 2006 at 10:44:28 PM
If "Free" Trade is so free, how come NAFTA is 950 pages of corporate protectionism?
NAFTA is simply an anachronistic response to America's strategy of pursuing Cold War policies in a post-Cold War world. Conservative foreign policy is mired in the muck of ancient laissez-faire thinking - thousands of years of history have not proven an able teacher to these fools. In their defense, there are precious few examples of empires that did not succumb to their own hubris. We need people who are willing to think progressively in positions of power and stand up to the economic forces of short-term profit and externalized costs. Until that happens, America will not only teeter on an economic precipice but will suffer the blowback of unintended consequences (The Saudis backing the Sunnis? Who woulda thunk it?).
To give credit to Chalmers Johnson, America doesnt need isolation to solve this riddle - it needs to support global economic diversity, it needs to extricate its military from the 70 countries it occupies, it needs to reemphasize the defense part of the Dept. of Defense, reduce the nuclear arsenal to deterrent capability, support the aspirations of China and N. Korea in a healthy direction, stop micromanaging East Asian economies including Japan, pay its UN fees, ratify anti-landmine treaties, and accept the International Criminal Court. In short, America needs to lead by example instead of by military force and imperialist pretension.
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BriMan (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 17 comments)
on Friday, December 22, 2006 at 10:54:54 PM
I wish this was a central issue in more political discussions.
We need to assert the same standards on our trading partners as we do the manufacturers in the United States. I'm for fair trade anything less amounts to exploitation of the workers. We need to apply tariffs to any trading partner that utilizes child labor, less then the minimum workers rights that we demand, inadaquate enviromental protection or less then satisfactory human rights policies.
We need not to protect principles founded in Greed and return to protecting ethical values that do not feed our military opponents such as China.
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Sleeper (1 articles, 1 quicklinks, 4 diaries, 257 comments)
on Saturday, December 23, 2006 at 1:28:43 PM
