Come on!
We CAN — still — change this nation for the better, not worse.
The following is one alternative to MAGA. If you know of a better one, so be it. The point is that the time for endlessly mulling things over is past.
Now it is time to ACT. Advocate! Tell others about whatever alternative you favor — every chance you get. Encourage others to advocate. Write about your preferred alternative here in Medium — including the comments sections — or in any other media. Walk around with a sign. Do something! (To be clear, merely ‘clapping’ or even — 000h! — ‘following’ any author here in Medium does not count as actually doing something.)
What is happening here in the U.S.? I think it is obvious: anti-liberalism (the political ideology of the center-left) is morphing into anti-Liberalism (the meta-ideology based on the idea that liberty and equality are the necessary basis for the just governance of a nation).
That is why so many people are insisting that ‘MAGA’ is a form of ‘fascism’. At the least, it seriously questions “equality” — making democracy suspect, at best — and its idea of “liberty” is all people being ‘free’ to live — even be as people — as conservatives decide it is O.K. to do. For any people who are ‘different’, even if who they are and what they are doing does no harm to any other person(s), they must change who they are and what they are doing to conform to the dictates of MAGA.
To do better we need a better idea than the old Liberalism. It does in fact have conceptual and practical limitations as an approach to justly governing society. It turns out that truly reconciling equality and liberty fully and completely is simply not possible.
A New Liberalism* offers a better approach to justly governing the nation.
A nation governed by it would have an explicit set of absolute prohibitions governing the actions of individuals: no killing, harming, coercing, stealing, or manipulating (which includes lying, cheating, etc.) to get anything you want — accomplish anything — in this world. So much for rants against ‘moral relativism’. Those prohibitions would apply to any aspect of life, whether doing/accomplishing something for oneself or on behalf of any other person or entity (such as a business or government — or a cause): we are always, first and foremost, human beings having effects on other human beings through our actions (which can include ‘speech acts’). Justice requires that we take one another into account, i.e., consider the effects of any action on other people, as we live our separate lives together in this world.
Who among us thinks any of that contradicts what justice is?
Any nation governed by this New Liberalism would have the maximum liberty that coexisting people can share simultaneously. People would still be free to do anything that was not against the law — and didn’t violate those prohibitions. For sure, we humans being what we are, all people would not abide by all of those prohibitions all the time. To the extent that people did abide by them, however, that would itself contribute to liberty for all: to transgress any of those prohibitions is, whatever else it would be, an attack on the real (actual) liberty that another person can have.
That does stand in contrast to the nonsensical idea in old Liberalism that the liberty people experience within society is supposed to be as close as possible to the liberty that people living completely separate, independent — if not to say isolated — existences would experience. Thomas Hobbes famously described that kind of existence as being “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (in Leviathan). To be fair, John Locke, the originator of Liberalism (Two Treatises of Government), did have a much rosier view of such a life. The salient point is that we humans are by our nature social beings: we live together in groups — we always have and presumably always will (and any individuals who have chosen an isolated existence have lived their lives as a member of some group before they took that plunge). Basing the just governance of society on what life would be like if all people lived such radically separate and independent lives simply makes no sense. Yet, that was part of old Liberalism.**
Philosophically, this New Liberalism reconciles those two fundamental parts of our nature as humans: we are separate and independent beings with respect to one another — each of us is our own self — and we are social beings. The self-centered individualism of old Liberalism can undervalue our sociality. Socialism can undervalue our individuality. This New Liberalism has within it an other-centered individualism. That is not its starting point, but it does get there. Anyone who wants to can, however, take that other-centered individualism as a starting point and accept the further implications of this approach to justice based on that as a value.
‘Equality’ would be recognized in this New Liberalism as being what it is: an unnecessary complication. In it, all that matters for justice is that the beings involved are humans. That doesn’t mean that this approach to governing society is incompatible with a belief in equality. Anyone who believes in equality can still support this approach to justice. It does mean that believing in equality is not necessary to be in favor of this approach to the just governance of society.
Still, a nation governed by this New Liberalism would have a democratic political process. Only a democratic political process takes all citizens into account. The political process is the process of effecting choices for the community as a whole, and since all citizens are affected by those choices, all must be allowed to participate in it. So there must be freedom of political speech for all. Any restrictions on any other forms of participation in the political process (such as voting or running for office) must be universally applicable and universally applied (with age apparently being the only restriction that unquestionably meets that requirement).
That leaves the economy.
This New Liberalism would not require any changes to the structure of the economy. Yet, the functioning of the economy — its effects on people — would be transformed. There would be a ‘democratically distributed income’, meaning any (adult) citizen could become eligible for it. It would be a guaranteed minimum income that a person could actually live on (plus, for employees, benefits from employers). Yet, taxes and public debt could be reduced to zero — though no one can guarantee that they would remain at zero forever. Sustainability would be systemically increased, in two ways. One way is that total output would be governed, passively but effectively, by demographics. The other way that sustainability would be systemically increased is that the political imperative that now exists to maximize total output/total income in order to maximize employment and the collection of taxes would no longer exist: neither would be dependent in any way on output/income.
All of that would be accomplished with no need to redistribute anything, impose any cost on any employer, impose any limit on income/wealth, or require people to act any particular way (such as altruistically or selfishly, competitively or cooperatively, etc.). Many people might prefer that society would do some of those things, but many people don’t. The greatest strength of this New Liberalism is that it can unite our more progressive citizens and our more traditional citizens in a quest to make our nation, to quote the Preamble of our Constitution, a yet “more perfect Union.”
So . . .
Again, take the best alternative you know and start advocating for it. If you know of a better alternative to MAGA than this New Liberalism, then advocate for it — and be sure to apprise me of it. If not, advocate for this one. Having read just this essay, you already know enough about it.
In the end, every nation on the planet is a direct democracy. If enough people advocate for anything long enough and strenuously enough, that thing will come to pass — without having to kill or even wound anybody.
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*Linked article is here in Medium — but not, for the benefit of any ‘guest readers’, behind the paywall.
**It is summed up in ‘contract theory’ to explain why people ‘choose’ to live together in groups despite the obvious need for constraints on our behavior that living together in groups must necessarily entail.