There is this guy, Matt Bruenig, who people seem to share as
though he is some articulate voice of anti-liberalism. He’s an idiot. Every
time I read something he writes I am gobsmacked by how wrong it is. Worse, I am
gobsmacked by how fallacious the arguments are. Do people not see this?
Two recent examples, both in reply to Chait’s article
‘Liberalism is working; Marxism failed’, a great
piece.
In the first, Bruenig says that liberalism is failing
because America, a liberal nation, had slaves. Yes, and Marxist countries had
Gulags and suppressed free speech and banned political parties other than the party. I suppose he might say that
‘that wasn’t Marxism’. Umm, irony? Liberalism didn’t come into being from one
day to the next and remains a project under construction. That’s why we can’t
just airdrop it into Baghdad. Slavery in early America was absolutely an
illiberal part of that society. Fortunately, various liberal values and
institutions present in the system allowed for a long debate about the merits
of slavery and people cared enough about it to go to war over it. Had slavery
been a policy in a less liberal society then there’s every reason to believe
that opponents of slavery would have been branded class enemies and shunted off
to the Gulags. It is a complete fallacy to say that it liberalism was what permitted slavery when it was precisely the advancement of liberalism that
led to the end of slavery.
In a similar fashion in another recent article, Bruenig says
that because Kant was racist and Hume was sexist liberalism is clearly just a
vehicle for straight white-male privilege. Leaving aside that Kant was
apolitical and wouldn’t make a list of the top 100 liberal thinkers in history
and Hume is far more a conservative icon than a liberal one, this claim is
straight up fallacious. It seems that Bruenig thinks that because nascent
liberalism did not immediately lead to the complete emancipation of all peoples
(and presumably complete equality of outcomes) it therefore is an unjust system
that favours the privileged (including all those straight white men toiling in
the factories of Victorian London, I presume). The history of the advancement
of liberalism is a history of the gradual widening of agency to larger and
larger circles. Progressive sentiment had a huge role to play in this (which
perhaps goes some way to explaining why Americans conflate liberalism and
progressivism sometimes), but unlike pure progressivism a la the French
Revolution, liberal institutionalism ensures that these changes happen at an
incremental pace. Bruenig does not seem to have any grasp of social evolution.
This fits with the standard hubris of the progressive Marxist: let’s just have a
fucking revolution and we can fix it in one go. How’s that worked out mate?
More importantly, there is an error of reasoning here that
you see in tonnes of supposedly progressive commentary, namely the conflation
of ideas and identities. Who someone is doesn’t have any bearing on the merits
of what they say. Consider the example of Jefferson. He made some very
important contributions to liberalism, notably in constitutionalism, and is
rightly considered an intellectual doyen of the movement. He also owned slaves
and is therefore at least a bit of a terrible person. However, Jefferson’s
slave ownership does not invalidate the logic
of his ideas about constitutions. You
can say that Jefferson lacked integrity in his convictions. You can say that he
had cognitive dissonance. You can say that he was a hypocrite. None of this has
any bearing on the veracity of his arguments in favour of constitutionalism, or
a bill of fucking rights for that matter!
An idea must be judged on its merits, not those of the
person who conceived it. That’s why we can listen to Germaine Greer on feminism
even though we might disagree with her about trans people. That’s why we can
consider Marx’s arguments about classes even though he lived a very bourgeois life and seems to have been a bit of a dickhead about it. Nobody is
perfect, so if we can’t separate the merits of an idea from the merits of a
person we will end up with nothing at all.
I don't think he's an idiot. However, I do agree that all examples you raise are bad arguments on his part. I think you are right that the bigger story is that liberalism ended slavery, not that the societies who developed liberal ideology ever had slavery. Slavery was nearly a universal in the history of civilizations. Also, I don't think that the fact early liberal theorists conceptualized a very limited moral circle is a strike against liberalism. As you said, each idea needs to be evaluated independently. If a good idea exists alongside a bad idea in someone's head, the bad idea doesn't invalidate the good idea. But unfortunately this seems to be Bruenigs reasoning.
ReplyDeleteBruenig strikes me as unusually economically literate for a leftist, more economically knowledgable than I am. So I like that about him. Despite the stupid things you've identified, I think he is interesting as a moral/political philosopher. I've tended to agree with some of his criticisms of libertarians re property. However, I think I have some disagreements with him about the ethics of parenting and welfare for families.