The Broken Society

(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/opinion/19brooks.html?src=me&ref=homepage)
(afbeelding res publica, Blond: the rise of the red tories)
The United States is becoming a broken society. The public has contempt for the political class. Public debt is piling up at an astonishing and unrelenting pace. Middle-class wages have lagged. Unemployment will remain high. It will take years to fully recover from the financial crisis.

This confluence of crises has produced a surge in vehement libertarianism. People are disgusted with Washington. The Tea Party movement rallies against big government, big business and the ruling class in general. Even beyond their ranks, there is a corrosive cynicism about public action.

But there is another way to respond to these problems that is more communitarian and less libertarian. This alternative has been explored most fully by the British writer Phillip Blond.

He grew up in working-class Liverpool. “I lived in the city when it was being eviscerated,” he told The New Statesman. “It was a beautiful city, one of the few in Britain to have a genuinely indigenous culture. And that whole way of life was destroyed.” Industry died. Political power was centralized in London.

Blond argues that over the past generation we have witnessed two revolutions, both of which liberated the individual and decimated local associations. First, there was a revolution from the left: a cultural revolution that displaced traditional manners and mores; a legal revolution that emphasized individual rights instead of responsibilities; a welfare revolution in which social workers displaced mutual aid societies and self-organized associations.

Then there was the market revolution from the right. In the age of deregulation, giant chains like Wal-Mart decimated local shop owners. Global financial markets took over small banks, so that the local knowledge of a town banker was replaced by a manic herd of traders thousands of miles away. Unions withered.

The two revolutions talked the language of individual freedom, but they perversely ended up creating greater centralization. They created an atomized, segmented society and then the state had to come in and attempt to repair the damage.

The free-market revolution didn’t create the pluralistic decentralized economy. It created a centralized financial monoculture, which requires a gigantic government to audit its activities. The effort to liberate individuals from repressive social constraints didn’t produce a flowering of freedom; it weakened families, increased out-of-wedlock births and turned neighbors into strangers. In Britain, you get a country with rising crime, and, as a result, four million security cameras.

In a much-discussed essay in Prospect magazine in February 2009, Blond wrote, “Look at the society we have become: We are a bi-polar nation, a bureaucratic, centralised state that presides dysfunctionally over an increasingly fragmented, disempowered and isolated citizenry.” In a separate essay, he added, “The welfare state and the market state are now two defunct and mutually supporting failures.”


[It is now clear that we are at one of those epoch-changing moments in British political history. Just as the 'Winter of Discontent' in 78/79 marked a paradigm shift, an utter and complete reversal of the pre-existing order and the arrival of something new, something revolutionary and something transformative - so the present unprecedented debt crisis of 2008/2009 is doing the same.

1979 brought an end to the welfare state, 2009 will see an end to the market state and the next election will, with the election of a conservative government, usher in the birth of the civic state.

We know what was wrong and what was right with the welfare state, it is right to provide a floor through which people cannot fall, it is right to have a safety net which catches and supports people who for reasons of health, wealth or market fluctuation cannot sustain themselves in the interim. Finally it is right to secure the general well being of all through a universal account of the common good and the necessity of full participation in it.

However we also know that welfare is a far more effective ceiling than it is an adequate floor - it traps as many as it helps and condemns therefore a whole class to permanent poverty and dependence. Furthermore welfare dis-empowers its recipients - the philosophy of entitlement destroys consciousness of mutuality and it fragments working class culture and permanently disables the associative drive that alone can make communities and foster the development of wealth and independence. Finally welfarism was the Faustian bargain that the left struck with monopoly capitalism, it ensures a kind of permanent ascendancy of the middle over the working class and creates an antagonistic feudal structure - where any genuine extension of power and ownership to the poor is resisted by the liberal middle classes who fear mostly for their own status and their sole assumed inherited right to social mobility. (Just look at British schooling)

Similarly we know what is right and what is wrong with the market state. Clearly the market is a more effective and efficient mechanism for the distribution of many resources than the state. Evidently if one can enter the market place and if one has something to trade - the market creates wealth, prosperity and independence. Finally there is the manifest good of liberty and unless this has an economic reality - one would exist under the permanent subjugation of the state, or the private cartel. Yet we also know what is wrong with the market state – too often it replaces a public monopoly with a private cartel. In the name of breaking up the state too little attempt was applied to breaking up the market. Under the dispensation of the market state, private replaced public monopoly and market entry was effectively and progressively denied to newcomers. The majority of Britons having being denied entry to the market lost any access to investment capital. Thus the ability to transform one's life or situation steadily declined as wealth flowed upwards rather than downwards and a new oligarchical class, asset rich and leverage keen, assumed market freedom was synonymous with their complete ascendancy. Market fundamentalism abandoned the fundamentals of markets. Prudent Chancellors promised no more boom and bust, the state sanctioned monopoly capitalism and sat happy on the tax receipts of unrestrained global gambling. As Labour stoked the engine of inequality - it abandoned the rest of the economy for the receipts of city speculation and the re-distributive power of welfarism . Thus the market and the welfare state merged into one as they both colluded in a system whose bankruptcy is now ongoing and self-evident.

The welfare state and the market state are now two defunct and mutually supporting failures
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The task today, he argued in a recent speech, is to revive the sector that the two revolutions have mutually decimated: “The project of radical transformative conservatism is nothing less than the restoration and creation of human association, and the elevation of society and the people who form it to their proper central and sovereign station.”

Economically, Blond lays out three big areas of reform: remoralize the market, relocalize the economy and recapitalize the poor. This would mean passing zoning legislation to give small shopkeepers a shot against the retail giants, reducing barriers to entry for new businesses, revitalizing local banks, encouraging employee share ownership, setting up local capital funds so community associations could invest in local enterprises, rewarding savings, cutting regulations that socialize risk and privatize profit, and reducing the subsidies that flow from big government and big business.

To create a civil state, Blond would reduce the power of senior government officials and widen the discretion of front-line civil servants, the people actually working in neighborhoods. He would decentralize power, giving more budget authority to the smallest units of government. He would funnel more services through charities. He would increase investments in infrastructure, so that more places could be vibrant economic hubs. He would rebuild the “village college” so that universities would be more intertwined with the towns around them.

Essentially, Blond would take a political culture that has been oriented around individual choice and replace it with one oriented around relationships and associations. His ideas have made a big splash in Britain over the past year. His think tank, ResPublica, is influential with the Conservative Party. His book, “Red Tory,” is coming out soon. He’s on a small U.S. speaking tour, appearing at Georgetown’s Tocqueville Forum Friday and at Villanova on Monday.

Britain is always going to be more hospitable to communitarian politics than the more libertarian U.S. But people are social creatures here, too. American society has been atomized by the twin revolutions here, too. This country, too, needs a fresh political wind. America, too, is suffering a devastating crisis of authority. The only way to restore trust is from the local community on up.