In Which I Find Myself Not So Much Pro-Nancy MacLean as Anti-Anti-Obvious and True Things Nancy MacLean Wrote..
Losing friends on Twitter: What can I do here? What should I have done differently?
It is a matter of basic empirical historical fact that to a typical upper class white Virginian in the 1950s, "individual liberty" included, as principal and basic parts, the liberties:
- not to be bullied by unions into paying your workers higher wages.
- not to be forced by the federal government into integrating either state or state-funded services, or especially public accommodations.
- not to be forced to join and then taxed to pay for a Social Security program.
Empirical fact. Historical fact. A seamless web of "individual liberty". These were among its principal components.
To deny that these were (a large) part of what "individual liberty" meant to a typical upper class white Virginian in the 1950s—to claim that you need "textual evidence" proving that this was how any particular one thought, for the "belief" that this was the case is a "slender reed"—that is a truly remarkable hill to choose to die on:
@henryfarrell: @delong-perhaps you might say where exactly it is that we read Buchanan through an enormously generous hermeneutic? When someone is accused of looking to protect the Southern way of life against the civil rights movement, masterminding Pinochet's constitution, & being the sinister intellectual Svengali behind the rise of the anti-democratic right, one would like to see supporting evidence.
delong: Like I said: a hermeneutic of enormous charity directed in favor Buchanan; a hermeneutic of enormous suspicion directed against McLean.
@Enopoletus retweeted: @henryfarrell: Shorter version: We aren’t part of the MacLean vs. Buchanan cagematch. We are intervening in the MacLean vs. basic academic standards of historical inquiry cage match.
@de1ong: @Enopoletus To pretend that in Virginia in the 1950s the freedom to discriminate against Black people was not one of the core federalist liberties from the central government, and also one of the core individual liberties, is to falsify history big time.
@henryfarrell: Brad-are you saying that Steve and I are “pretending” and “falsifying”? If you’re not, clarify. If so kthxbai.
@de1ong: It's not "her belief" that "public choice was [in part] motivated in his white Southern resentment of Yankee intervention". It's an empirical fact. Seamless web. It's not a "slender reed". You should not say her belief is a "slender reed". That is beneath you:
Farrell and Teles: MacLean does not back up her contention that the foundation of Buchanan’s entire school of public choice was motivated in his white Southern resentment of Yankee intervention with textual evidence. Instead, the reader has to rely on her belief that “individual liberty” had a coded meaning for Buchanan and the president whom he was writing to. This is a decidedly slender reed to support such a massive claim...
@henryfarrell: Nope. She explicitly claims that Buchanan decided to found the school of public choice because he resented the civil rights movement. She provides zero textual evidence to support this argument. We've already been through this, again, and again, and again. I like you very much when you are not in the grips of an idee fixe and I don't want to have to block you, but you deserve fair warning that you are becoming a Twitter pest.
@de1ong: All this seems 100% right to me:
MacLean: CHAPTER 3 THE REAL PURPOSE OF THE PROGRAM: It was the chance of a lifetime. The university founded by Thomas Jefferson himself was giving the new chair of the economics department “full rein” to create a kind of program that existed nowhere else. At a time when the discipline of economics, in James Buchanan’s words, “threatened to become extremely boring,” his new employer entrusted him and Warren Nutter to chart a new course.
The private mission statement for the Thomas Jefferson Center for Political Economy and Social Philosophy that Buchanan submitted to university president Colgate Darden in December 1956 made a lot of promises. It promised to be guided by two traditions: that of the “old-fashioned libertarians” whose ideas encouraged laissez-faire economic policies in nineteenth-century England and America, and that of “the Western conservatives,” who feared the “revolt of the masses,” as the title of one text put it, and sought new ways to ensure “social order.”
The document also made clear who would “not be allowed to participate”: anyone who, even inadvertently, would value “security”—the New Deal’s mantra—above liberty, and who would “replace the role of the individual and of voluntary association by the coercive powers of the collective order.” The latter would include supporters of industrial unions and government intervention in the economy. Buchanan, by contrast, pledged to train “social philosophers,” men (for the university admitted only men then) ready to put into effect a society based on liberty.
With a hint of defensiveness, knowing that such exclusiveness was, indeed, unusual in an academic enterprise, he assured: “To start in a small way to produce such a line of new thinkers is an eminently legitimate endeavor for a great university.” The center’s members, Buchanan vowed, would take up such matters of concern to Virginia’s governing elite as the growing power of labor unions; the correct relationship between the federal government and the states (made all the more urgent by Supreme Court decisions such as Brown); what he depicted as the “problems of equalitarianism” (among them “income redistribution,” “the welfare state,” and “the tax structure,” his archaic way of speaking of egalitarianism an indicator of how his program would approach them); and “the social security system and [its threat to] individual initiative.”
More specifically, the center aimed to combat what its founders referred to as “social engineering” by changing the way people thought. They hoped to break “the powerful grip that collectivist ideology already had on the minds of intellectuals,” as Buchanan later put it. Almost all professional economists then accepted the pump-priming doctrines of Keynes to ensure demand to keep the economy growing. Nearly everyone, even as they differed on the particulars, believed that in the age of the giant corporation, America needed what the liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith had recently termed “countervailing power”: organized workers and consumers. The federal government must also put its weight on the other side of the scale to ensure fair play and economic stability.
Put simply, most Americans then trusted their government.
In such an era, Buchanan said, “our purpose was indeed subversive”...
@de1ong: And all this seems 100% right to me as well:
MacLean: What animated Buchanan, what became the laser focus of his deeply analytic mind, was the seemingly unfettered ability of an increasingly more powerful federal government to force individuals with wealth to pay for an increasing number of public goods and social programs they had had no personal say in approving. Better schools, newer textbooks, and more courses for black students might help the children, for example, but whose responsibility was it to pay for these improvements? The parents of these students? Others who wished voluntarily to help out? Or people like himself, compelled through increasing taxation to contribute to projects they did not wish to support?
To Buchanan, what others described as taxation to advance social justice or the common good was nothing more than a modern version of mob attempts to take by force what the takers had no moral right to: the fruits of another person’s efforts. In his mind, to protect wealth was to protect the individual against a form of legally sanctioned gangsterism.
Where did this gangsterism begin? Not in the way we might have expected him to explain it to Darden: with do-good politicians, aspiring attorneys seeking to make a name for themselves in constitutional law, or even activist judges. It began before that: with individuals, powerless on their own, who had figured out that if they joined together to form social movements, they could use their strength in numbers to move government officials to hear their concerns and act upon them.
The most powerful social movement back then was what Buchanan’s proposal referred to as “the labor monopoly movement,” or what most of us would today call organized labor. But other movements, also injurious in his mind, were on the horizon, including the increasingly influential civil rights movement and a resumed push by elderly citizens to organize as they had not since the Great Depression. From his vantage point, it did not matter whether the movement in question consisted of union members, civil rights activists, or aging women and men fearful of ending their lives in poverty.
Nor did the justness of the cause they advocated, the pain of their present condition, or the duration of the injustice they were attempting to reverse move him in any way. The only fact that registered in his mind was the “collective” source of their power—and that, once formed, such movements tended to stick around, keeping tabs on government officials and sometimes using their numbers to vote out those who stopped responding to their needs. How was this fair to other individuals? How was this American?...
@henryfarrell: Brad-again-what we say is (a) that she does not provide textual support for her claim that the key motivation (and it is clear that she means the key motivation) for founding public choice was anger at the civil rights movement; and (b) that we have no particular interest in defending Buchanan or public choice, and that if more specific evidence emerged, we would not be particularly surprised. Our claim is both carefully articulated and specific-your response is... not.
@de1ong: The hill you have chosen to die on—incomprehensibly—is that she needs "textual evidence" explicitly saying it, or you will conclude that "individual liberty" for a 1950s upper-class white Virginian did not include, as a large part, liberty to discriminate. That's beneath you:
Farrell and Teles: MacLean does not back up her contention that the foundation of Buchanan’s entire school of public choice was motivated in his white Southern resentment of Yankee intervention with textual evidence. Instead, the reader has to rely on her belief that “individual liberty” had a coded meaning for Buchanan and the president whom he was writing to. This is a decidedly slender reed to support such a massive claim...
@henryfarrell: Yet again-she is making a specific claim. She is not simply saying that an upper class white Virginian had dodgy views about civil rights. She is specifically putting invented words into his mouth to claim that his burning motivation for founding public choice was defense of white privilege. Frankly, this is now verging on harassment and is beneath you. The novelty, I suppose, is that instead of accusing me of being a crypto-Communist, you are now accusing me (and Steve) of being dishonest apologists for the right and racism.
de1ong: As I have said before: this from MacLean seems right to me: "it did not matter whether the movement... [was] union members, civil rights activists, or aging women and men fearful of... poverty... The only fact that registered... was the “collective” source of their power..."
@henryfarrell: I am genuinely sorry about this, because when you are not locked into this bizarre and aggressive idee fixe mode, you can be fantastic. But the cost of engagement is too high to be worth it. Consider this goodbye.
@de1ong: Look: MacLean says Buchanan motivated by opposition to seamless web of unions, civil rights activists, and AARP. You say we don't know if a white Virginian on the 50s understood "individual liberty" to include "freedom to discriminate" as a principal part. She wins this round:
Farrell and Teles: The reader has to rely on her belief that “individual liberty” had a coded [racist] meaning for Buchanan and the [university] president whom he was writing to. This is a decidedly slender reed to support such a massive claim...
MacLean: Where did this gangsterism begin?... With individuals... joined together to form social movements.... From his vantage point, it did not matter whether the movement in question consisted of union members, civil rights activists, or aging women and men fearful of ending their lives in poverty.... The only fact that registered in his mind was the “collective” source of their power—and that, once formed, such movements tended to stick around, keeping tabs on government officials and sometimes using their numbers to vote out those who stopped responding to their needs. How was this fair to other individuals? How was this American?...
As I have said before: Isee at least six James Buchanans:
The brilliant academic thinker behind the genius insights of CALCULUS OF CONSENT http://amzn.to/2hF4H5k. It is worth noting that the framework underlying CoC with its emphasis on unanimity at the constitutional stage for any regime that can be just or justified, has a profoundly egalitarian and even Rawlsian bent—a bent that becomes stronger the thinner you make the veil of ignorance and the more averse to risk you make the people behind it. Thus the fact that Buchanan deduces a profoundly anti-egalitarian politics and built from it an intellectual movement that, as Mancur Olson used to say, “has a very strong right but a very weak left wing, and will never be healthy until both are equally strong”, is deserving of much careful and thoughtful inquiry.
The academic operator seeking to get money from ex-Governor and U.Va. President Darden for the great public choice research project by overpromising how useful his Thomas Jefferson Center for Political Economy would be in providing intellectual weapons to strengthen the political causes of Darden and his friends.
The academic operator going beyond what I, at least, regard as the permissible academic pale by imposing a political-ideological litmus test on who he invited into the public choice circle—i.e., not Mancur Olson, or any Olson students or potential Olson students (like me, in my younger days). That only “‘Manchester’ liberals who emphasize individual freedom as the central feature of the good society” and "Western conservatives who emphasize the importance of Western traditions in preserving the good social order” are invited in is, IMHO at least, in shocking contrast to say, Marty Feldstein's NBER, where the bet is that an honest intellectual process will show that I am right—and if it shows otherwise, I badly need to know that.
The grandson of Kentucky Governor John Buchanan, offended that Yankees would dare tell southern gentlemen how to deal with their “peculiar institutions”. (And just what are these “Western traditions”? And how near to the core of these “Western traditions” is white supremacy anyway? That the language here is Aesopian is not to Buchanan's credit.)
The friend of plutocrats or would-be plutocrats buying into the Hayekian idea that political democracy was, fundamentally, a mistake because the plebs would vote themselves bread-and-circuses and so ultimately destroy civilization.
The right-wing activist seeking, in a von Misian or Rothbardian way, to harness and in fact mobilize racial evil to the service of what he regarded as the good of stomping the New Deal and Keynesian economics into oblivion.
I tend to see Buchanan(1) as at least half the picture. (I was, after all, one of the two people at the fall 1986 MIT Economics Department Wednesday faculty lunch after the Nobel Prize announcement willing to say that awarding the prize to James Buchanan was not an obvious and stupid mistake—the other one, IIRC, being Jim Poterba). Our elders had very strong opinions...
References:
Nancy MacLean: Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America
Henry Farrell and Steven Teles: When Politics Drives Scholarship
