Links and some thoughts about early critics

A present from one of my sons: a Keynes Permanent Problem action figure, complete with money quote from “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.”

I got back to Thailand at the end of last week after a three-week trip to the U.S., with two of those weeks spent in Washington, D.C. doing book promotion. While in D.C I gave a half-dozen book talks, included this one recorded at the American Enterprise Institute.

In addition, I recorded one podcast interview before my trip and another five during my visit to D.C. Four of these are now out:

• Keen on America, “Societies on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown”

• The Liberal Patriot, “Why Rich Societies Are Breaking Down”

• The Realignment, “Brink Lindsey: How the 21st Century Mugged a Libertarian”

• Faster, Please! “Beyond Abundance: My chat with Brink Lindsey about his new book, ‘The Permanent Problem’” (transcript available here)

I’ll let you know when the others are out in the wild.

In general I don’t think much is gained by responding to critical reviews, but I got a couple in which the nature of the criticism was so surprising to me that I think it’s worth puzzling a bit about what’s going on.

I fully anticipated skepticism about the book’s argument, but I imagined that objections would focus on my prescriptions for greater “econonomic independence” and the revitalization of face-to-face communities. What I didn’t really see coming was that reviewers might baldly mischaracterize my diagnoses of capitalism’s current ills. And yet that’s precisely what a pair of normally sensible and astute scholars — one affiliated with the center-left Brookings Institution, the other with the center-right American Enterprise Institute — ended up doing.

As Mike Tyson put it, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” As for me, the particular left-right combination that threw me for a loop was getting lumped in with the so-called post-liberals — the gaggle of right-wing intellectuals who regard the whole of post-Enlightenment liberal modernity as a tragic mistake only now finally coming to grief.

Here are the key passages from the two reviews:

“If there is any criticism of liberal modernity that is not in Lindsey’s book, I couldn’t find it. Had I stopped reading after Chapter 7, I would take the book for a postliberal screed that outdoes anything by Patrick Deneen.”

“Lindsey’s assessment is consistent with post-liberal commentators’ arguments that democratic capitalism is exhausted, a failed experiment and an obstacle to human flourishing.”

To be clear, both reviewers make clear that I do not call myself a post-liberal. But by associating my critique of contemporary capitalism with the post-liberal label, both seek to discredit that critique through guilt by association. The post-liberals, in their estimation (and mine!), go off the deep end by catastrophizing contemporary problems; comparing me to the post-liberals is thus meant to convey that my analysis of what I call capitalism’s 21st century “triple crisis” is equivalently over the top and unsound.

I’ll grant this similarity between the post-liberals and me: we focus on some of the same symptoms of present-day dysfunction, namely the excesses of expressive-individualism-turned-nihilism, on the one hand, and a suffocating and hyper-controlling managerialsm on the other. But our diagnoses of these symptoms are starkly different: the post-liberals see current problems as evidence that the whole project of liberal modernity was misbegotten from the outset, whereas I see them as unintended consequences of one signal triumph of liberal modernity (the conquest of mass poverty and the coming of mass plenty) and obstacles on the path to the next great triumph (the achievement of mass flourishing).

I explicitly stated my rejection of the post-liberal diagnosis in an earlier essay on the post-liberal right:

I reject this post-liberal position completely and unreservedly. It is of course true that there are totalitarian tendencies in modernity — we saw them come to full flower in the great tyrannies of the 20th century. But the dominant tendencies have surely been liberating and humanitarian: a colossal increase in the number of human beings coinciding with a dramatic uplift in material living standards; an explosion in scientific knowledge and technological capabilities coinciding with mass literacy and schooling; the emergence of governments subject to popular control and the rule of law coinciding with the stigmatization of war and widespread embrace of an ideal of universal human dignity. I find it genuinely hard to understand how thinkers who accuse their opponents (with some justification) of antihumanism can fail to recognize the profoundly anti-human implications of their ideas. How does one profess love for God’s creation and then hold the view that the vast majority of people alive today are here only because of some dreadful mistake?

Although I never mentioned post-liberals by name in the book, there are any number of passages that make clear how fundamentally I disagree with them. Here are just a few:

"The United States and the other advanced liberal democracies are the richest, healthiest, best educated, most humanely and effectively governed societies that have ever existed." (p. 1)

“How are we to judge the state of human flourishing in today’s advanced democracies? Grading on a historical curve, things have never been better. The threat of material deprivation and physical suffering has receded to an unprecedented extent, and in both absolute numbers and as a share of total population, more people are enjoying rewarding, fulfilling lives than ever before. But for a society organized around ongoing progress, the past offers an insufficiently demanding standard for evaluation.” (p. 9)

“Specifically, we need to recognize that to get to a world of widespread opportunities for living ‘wisely and agreeably and well,’ we’re going to continue to need robust economic growth and innovation. We are far richer than any humans that ever lived before us, but we are not yet rich enough to enable and sustain widespread human flourishing. To raise all of humanity to lives of material security, comfort, and convenience while continuing to push outward along the technological frontier, capitalism’s prodigious wealth-creating energies remain indispensable.” (p. 135)

“I am an unabashed partisan of modernity over our agrarian past and of what Adam Smith called the ‘great society’ and F. A. Hayek termed the ‘extended order’—the vast and intricate division of labor governed by impersonal rules and mediated by competitive markets. Looking at its record over the past two and a half centuries, I regard capitalism as the greatest engine of human progress ever devised.” (p.161)

So what leads normally careful and level-headed writers to swing so wildly in criticizing my book? I believe that their reaction is a reflection of a newish intellectual fault line running through today’s embattled liberal center — by which I mean those people on the center-left and center-right who share more common ground with each other than they do with either the populist right or the “woke” left. That fault line consists of disagreement over the severity of the problems confronting contemporary liberal societies and the connection between those problems and the undeniable political crisis that alarms both sides.

Call it the division between the “brokenists” and the “anti-brokenists,” after the Alana Newhouse essay from a few years back, “Everything Is Broken,” that helped to bring the fault line into view. Brokenists, like myself, regard the political upheavals of the past decade as an understandable but misguided reaction to serious underlying maladies. The furious energy on the political extremes is due to legitimate frustration with a deeply flawed status quo; the problem is that the remedies proposed by those on the extremes are considerably worse than the disease. Anti-brokenists, meanwhile, concede that there are plenty of problems these days, but they insist that there are always plenty of problems; what has changed is the emergence of conflicting “derangement syndromes” that render people unable to handle living in a fallen, messy world and itching as a result to burn everything down and start over.

Each branch of liberal centrists sees the other as deeply mistaken in its response to the rise of extremism. Anti-brokenists — and I’m putting the authors of the two book reviews in question in that camp — worry that people like me are lending aid and comfort to the enemy by substantiating their exaggerated complaints about the status quo. Brokenists, meanwhile, believe that extremists have risen to power by filling a vaccum created by centrist complacency and neglect. In this view, which I share, dismissing widespread disaffection from established institutions and governing elites as so much hysteria and entitled whining is doomed to failure. It will only add fuel to the extremist fire.

Now is not the time to litigate this dispute any further. Here I just want to highlight both its existence and its importance in explaining internal tensions among those who all see themselves as defenders of liberal democratic capitalism. And it’s worth pointing out that my membership in the brokenist camp long predates writing The Permanent Problem; I’ve been on the brokenist side from the outset of the populist era. After all, when Steve Teles and I co-authored The Captured Economy back in 2017, we titled the first chapter “Rigged” to note our agreement with populist complaints from the left and right that the economic system is rigged in favor of elites. Because this problem had been allowed to fester, we argued, “the resulting vacuum leaves the public vulnerable to demagogues with superficially attractive and emotionally resonant alternatives.”

I’ll stick to my guns, thank you. But it is dispiriting that, after a decade of populist distempers, so many of my fellow liberals still don’t understand the nature of the challenge that confronts them.