Moving right along

In a recent article from the Wall Street Journal, a new poll suggests that we’re starting to see a large-scale shift in socioeconomic thinking in the United States.

John Harwood writes:

By a nearly two-to-one margin, Republican voters believe free trade is bad for the U.S. economy, a shift in opinion that mirrors Democratic views and suggests trade deals could face high hurdles under a new president.

The sign of broadening resistance to globalization came in a new Wall Street Journal-NBC News Poll that showed a fraying of Republican Party orthodoxy on the economy. While 60% of respondents said they want the next president and Congress to continue cutting taxes, 32% said it’s time for some tax increases on the wealthiest Americans to reduce the budget deficit and pay for health care.

This actually makes me think of something I read in Blue Mars, about the shifts throughout history from one kind of global socioeconomic system to the next:

She described what she called a “residual/emergent complex of overlapping paradigms”, in which each great socioeconomic era was composed of roughly equal parts of the systems immediately adjacent to it in past and future. The periods immediately before and after were not the only ones involved, however; they formed the bulk of a system, and comprised its most contradictory components, but additional important features came from particularly persistent aspects of more archaic systems, and also faint hesitant intuitions of developments that would not flower until much later.

Feudalism, therefore, to take one example, was … made up of a clash of the residual system of absolute religious monarchy, and the emergent system of capitalism—with important echoes of more archaic tribal caste, and faint foreshadowings of later individualist humanisms. The clashing of these forces shifted over time, until the Renaissance of the sixteenth century ushered in the age of capitalism. Capitalism then was composed of clashing elements of the residual feudalism, and an emergent future order that was only now being defined in their own time, which [the author of the treatise] called democracy. And now … they were, on Mars at least, in the democratic age itself. Capitalism had therefore, like all other ages, been the combination of two systems in very sharp opposition to each other. This incompatibility of its constituent parts was underlined by the unfortunate experience of capitalism’s critical shadow, socialism, which had theorised true democracy, and called for it, but in the attempt to enact it had used the methods at hand in its time, the same feudal methods so prevalent in capitalism itself; so that both versions of the mix had ended up about as destructive and unjust as their common residual parent. The feudal hierarchies in capitalism had been mirrored in the lived socialist experiments; and so the whole era had remained a highly charged chaotic struggle, exhibiting several different versions of the dynamic struggle between feudalism and democracy.

To me, this really sheds light on the whole “battle” between the conservative and liberal ideologies. One seeks to maintain the “old”, while the other seeks to make way for the “new”. What constitutes the “old” and the “new” changes over time, but the basic tug-of-war between maintaining and breaking tradition is always there.

You can see evidence for this throughout history. How many people today think that slavery is acceptable, or that women’s suffrage isn’t? In this way, even conservatives progress over time, whether they’re aware of it or not. Conservatism once supported maintaining absolute monarchies, but today hardly any exist — Saudi Arabia and Vatican City are the only two which come to mind—and as a result you rarely find someone advocating absolute monarchy as a desirable form of government.

Adam Smith was considered quite the liberal when he argued against mercantilism in favour of free-market capitalism, and yet his ideas are now a mainstay of conservatism, with mercantilism practically nowhere in sight.

I think what’s happening now is that we’re beginning to see a gradual but permanent shift away from free-market capitalism in the USA, but towards what is hard to say. Laissez-faire capitalism showed considerable problems in the 19th century, and the New Zealand experiment has clearly failed. On the other hand, socialism also plainly had its fair share of problems. Personally, I think that the economic policies of social democracy — in the vein of Sweden — are the way things are ultimately headed, but it’s definitely going to take some time before it’s well and truly established in the country that stood strongest against anything even remotely related to socialism throughout the 20th century. But as Sweden shows, the rewards will be well worth it.