It's Time for an America First Green New Deal

Reuters
April 26, 2020 Topic: Security Region: Americas Tags: PoliticsElectionVotersDemocratsRepublicans

It's Time for an America First Green New Deal

The challenge for U.S. and Western politicians in meeting the short-term crisis of the coronavirus and the long-term crisis of climate change is to create, by democratic means, the sort of national consensus that will make radical and consistent strategies possible.

In the immediate future, preventing the pandemic from plunging great parts of the U.S. population into unemployment and misery on the scale of the 1930s will require a state economic response couched in terms of national solidarity and collective mutual responsibility. In the longer term, a  Green New Deal also needs to be cast in a national form not only for the sake of national unity and resilience, but because to achieve changes on this scale will require a new dispensation in U.S. politics, akin to those created by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s: a new national consensus that ensures that, for several decades, both parties when in office are guided by the same basic philosophy and pursue the same basic policies. 

In the past, intelligent conservatives like Dwight Eisenhower understood that Social Security is essential to national strength and wellbeing; and the coronavirus is certainly teaching us this lesson again. By contrast, in recent decades, the idea has become firmly fixed in the minds and propaganda of both the political spectrum’s Right and Left that social security systems and state guidance of the economy were purely creations of the Left. This is useful to both sides: to the Right, it allows them to attack such systems as proto-Communist; to the Left, it allows them to take all credit for these systems. This unanimity does not mean, however, that this picture is true. In fact, conservative forces played a critical role in building social welfare. They had two goals in mind: to ward off the threat of socialist revolution, and to strengthen national solidarity and resilience in the face of possible (and as it turned out, actual) war.

The first systematic national insurance program was created by Otto von Bismarck (not exactly a socialist) in the German Empire of the 1880s. Bismarck’s social program had the full support of the German military high command; they were quite able to see that if you were going to conscript and arm millions of working-class men in order to prepare for European war, basic prudence dictated that you needed to look after their families. It should be noted, incidentally, that despite dire warnings by German capitalists, Imperial Germany’s social security system did nothing to impede economic growth.

A decade or so later, as Germany drew further and further ahead of Britain economically, the possibility of war became increasingly real, and social unrest and labor protests in Britain grew, sections of the British intellectual and political elites began to look to the German model.

The so-called “Social Imperialists” in Britain were a thoroughly eclectic bunch, drawn mainly from the imperialist wing of the Liberal Party, including Winston Churchill and the later architect of the British welfare state William Beveridge. But they also embraced Fabian socialists, including the Webbs (Sidney and Beatrice) and (intermittently) George Bernard Shaw; “one nation” Conservatives; former colonial officials (including John Buchan); and the more farsighted sections of the military elites like Field Marshal Lord Frederick Roberts (plus intellectuals and writers close to the military, like Halford Mackinder and Rudyard Kipling).

What brought them together in a loose alliance was belief in the defense of the British Empire, a conviction of the likelihood of a coming world war in which national unity would be tested to the limit and, therefore, needed to be greatly strengthened, and a deep fear of revolution, class warfare, and social disintegration. In the words of Lord Roberts (not exactly your conventional idea of a socialist): “To tens of thousands of Englishmen engaged in daily toil, the call to ‘sacrifice’ themselves for their country must seem an insult to their reason; for those conditions amid which they work make their lives already an unending sacrifice.”

At the core of Social Imperialism was also a belief in “national efficiency”: that the British state needed to be thoroughly reformed and given increased powers, including to shape and guide the economy. Or according to Winston Churchill (also not a socialist), “Germany is organised not only for war but for peace. We are organised for nothing except party politics.” National efficiency is what the United States and the West need (and have at the time of writing generally failed to show) in the response to the coronavirus pandemic.

All the Social Imperialists, of both the conservative and socialist varieties, would have agreed with popular political talk show host Tucker Carlson,

[M]arket capitalism is not a religion. Market capitalism is a tool, like a staple gun or a toaster. You’d have to be a fool to worship it. Our system was created by human beings for the benefit of human beings. We do not exist to serve markets. Just the opposite. Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.

The Social Imperialists’ vision therefore extended beyond social insurance to urban planning, public health, and educational reform. As Lord Milner wrote,

[To sustain the Empire] you must have soundness at the core – health, intelligence, industry; and these cannot be general without a fair average standard of material well-being … Patriotism, like all the ideal sides of life, can be choked, must be choked, in the squalor and degradation of life in the slums of our great cities.”

The Social Imperialists generally believed in the need for a new guided “national economy,” the need for higher progressive taxation to pay for both social reform and military preparation, and in limits on free trade to protect British industries and imperial economic unity (“imperial preference”). They were, therefore, in rebellion against the free market orthodoxy that had dominated both political parties since the repeal of the Corn Laws almost sixty years earlier. In an interesting parallel to the present, their thought developed in the context of the decline of British industry in the face of growing international competition, and the steep growth in relative importance of the City of London and the financial services industry.

In Britain, Social Imperialism—though under new names—was strengthened and eventually triumphed as a result of the wars, and especially the Second World War, in which the Conservatives and Labour worked together in government. In the course of that war, Labour became deeply patriotic and the Conservatives for a generation and more became “One Nation” conservatives, committed to the idea of social solidarity. The creation of social security in Britain was thus intrinsically linked to the creation of what we would call today “national resilience.” And it worked: British democracy is still around. Unlike so many other European countries, it did not succumb to the catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century, and played a key role in saving them from those catastrophes.

IN THE United States, the impulses which in Britain produced Social Imperialism fed into the Progressive movement and Theodore Roosevelt’s and Herbert Croly’s concept of “the New Nationalism”—though with relatively less focus on welfare and more on the regulation of capitalism and national efficiency. The situation in the United States that produced this tendency had certain analogies to the U.S. situation on the eve of the pandemic, as well as important differences. It followed a period of great economic growth, the fruits of which had been very unevenly distributed. By 1896, it was estimated that one percent of the population owned over half of the wealth in the United States, and that twelve percent owned 90 percent. 

As today, the resulting concentration of wealth and monopolization of industries threatened some of the American republic’s founding values: the idea of a basically middle-class (or in Jefferson’s older formulation, “yeoman farmer”) society with a rough equality of conditions (something which Tocqueville thought an essential basis of American democracy), and equality of opportunity for all citizens in a free economy. 

Corruption had always been part of U.S. public life; but the new huge concentration of wealth meant a huge concentration of political power in the hands of “robber barons” like John Pierpont Morgan and Andrew Carnegie—just as today, huge political power is concentrated in the hands of super-rich individuals and companies whom the Supreme Court has allowed virtually unlimited ability to fund politicians and campaigns.

This power helped the great corporations to form “trusts” aimed at creating monopolies in particular sectors, while the railroads used their domination to impose grossly unequal tariffs between different regions. Out of this came the image of the “Octopus” (the title of Frank Norris’ novel of 1901 about the struggle between Californian farmers and the Pacific and Southwestern Railway), a monster whose tentacles stretched into every part of politics and the economy.

Simultaneously there took place—as in recent decades—massive immigration to the United States from Europe by culturally very different people. This caused deep anxiety in the older population. The enormous growth of American cities led to worry over the increasing role in politics of urban political machines run by immigrants (Tammany Hall), which merged with anger at their corruption; outrage at the dreadful conditions in the urban slums; and  fear of urban revolt, of epidemic disease, and of disasters like the Chicago and Boston fires.