Hello,
In “The Cure for What Ails Our Democracy,” conservative commentator David Brooks meditated on an important baseline condition, a thread, if you will, that holds together, for the long term, any political community that one would want to live in: the belief in value pluralism.
What is value pluralism?
Well…it’s basically another way of spelling out liberalism. Liberal societies are steeped in value pluralism; and when you are born during a time when it is thriving, it is easy to take for granted. Value pluralism is the idea that competing value systems can’t always be reconciled, at all times for all things; but a society that will survive long term, accomodates value systems that are in tension with one another. The only other alternative is constant war, basically.
And what flows from this is that if you believe those who disagree with you as “evil,” and that you believe that maybe there is one big idea that could fix things, such as fascism, Christian nationalism, Stalinism, Maoism, and so on, than you might be a monist thinker, and you might consider those who disagree with you as “evil.” Evil loosely thrown around in societies start to weather and weaken the implicit freedoms inherent in liberal, pluralistic societies. And the very idea of compromise becomes anathema.
As Brooks goes on to say: “We pluralists resist that kind of Manichaean moralism. We begin with the premise that most political factions in a democratic society are trying to pursue some good end. The right question is not who is good or evil. The right question is what balance do we need to strike in these circumstances?” He goes on to state that, right now, in our time of inequality and fragmentation, “Biden[’s] policies are the right response.”
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That is just, like, your opinion, man. But we are free to disagree, so do your thing. If we think, say, and live with this as your assumption for most disagreements and social activities, and not just in thoughts, but in what we do day-to-day, then you are on your path to understanding the crucial importance of living in a society based on value pluralism. You might be a value pluralist and didn’t know it. You go play basketball, do ju jitsu, or start or join a book club; I’ll go make noisecore music, volunteer at a pet shelter; attend a church on Sundays or refuse to step in one at all; or play video games. Let me do my thing. I’ll let you do your thing. And in the political and economic realm: we both should support policies that are not zero-sum, but that help sustain the conditions of freedom for all people.
But value pluralism is really strengthened when there are some shared communal goals. At the level of a nation-state, this type of nationalism is civic, and not ethnic, racial nationalism. Civic nationalism is based on the belief that people are equal and best left to pursue happiness as they deem fit as long as this pursuit doesn’t wrecklessly impede their fellow traveler’s own pursuits. Also “equal” here does not mean that people are equal in their abilities, personalities, and so on but equal in terms of fundamentals; and, as Erich Fromm puts it, “that they all have the same inalienable claim on freedom and happiness” (1941; 1965, 290).
But one major challenge or tension in open, liberal societies is the problem of intolerance. If a country believes in human rights, civil rights, separation of church and state, etc., than how much tolerance can there be for intolerance, especially if the intolerance becomes codified through legislation? Individuals need basic so-called “negative freedoms” but they also need true “positive freedoms,” or “positive liberty,” brilliantly summarized by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as “the possibility of acting — or the fact of acting — in such a way as to take control of one’s life and realize one’s fundamental, subjectivley chosen, purposes.” Writing in 1941, Fromm warns against suffocating conformity and totalitarianism. People will feel compressed, coerced, and will either become automatons, become self-destructive or look for a monist movement:
“Looked at superficially, people appear to function well enough in economic and social life; yet it would be dangerous to overlook the deep-seated unhappiness behind that comforting veneer. If life loses its meaning because it is not lived, man becomes desperate. People do not die quietly from physical starvation; they do not die quietly from psychic starvation either. If we look only at the economic needs as far as the “normal” person is concerned, if we do not see the unconscious suffering of the average automatized person, then we fail to see the danger that threatens our culture from its human basis: the readiness to accept any ideology and any leader, if only he promises excitement and offers a political structure and symbols which allegedly give meaning and order to an individual’s life. The despair of the human automaton is fertile soil for the political purposes of Fascism.”
This, too, is why the economic part of liberalism must be embedded in a social contract that ensures that the rich, the powerful, don’t hoard all of the resources, money, and power. Real democracy—not simply the right to vote—mitigates against the appeal of fascism. Take Fromm again “Democracy is a system that creates the economic, political, and cultural conditions for the full development of the individual” (1941; 1965, 301).
So, yes, Brooks is correct to point out that a commitment to value pluralism would go a long way to help our “ailing” democracy. He also admits that there are times when struggles really are about good vs evil. His examples were World War II, the civil rights movement, and the Civil War.
Personal commitment to value pluralism will be bolstered if our governments actually support policies that help the majority of people in this country thrive. And, right now, one political party is commited to doing the opposite; they are a minoritarian insurgency, supported by narcissistic billionaries, and led by the greatest liar and conman in American political life: Donald Trump.
This movement/party are explicitly targeting the Reconstruction amendments that helped give birth to the civil rights movement. For that matter, they are also openly contemptuous of the New Deal order which protected the country from going fascist in the first place. They are openly expressing bigoted, racist, anti-immigrant and anti-semitic remarks everywhere you can find them talking and discussing politics. They are attempting to, with varying degrees of success, fighting to rollback civil rights victories right now. They are stoking the very flames that set fire to Europe in the mid 1930s and 1940s. And their economic policies prioritize the 0.1% (and arguably the rest of the top 20%, but certainly not the vast majority of Americans) to the detriment of a majority of people, guaranteeing that any right to pursue happiness, or have true freedom, will be extremely perilous. The tax code didn’t write itself; the anti-tax movement was astroturfed by the Republican Party and economic elites beginning in the mid-1970s, according to a new book called The Power to Destroy: How the Antitax Movement Hijacked America (2024), successfully lied about what helped build a middle class and an industrial powerhouse in the first place.
To garner support and strength for a country based on value pluralism, we need an economic bill of rights, something similar to what was first proposed by F.D.R which in 1944 originally included “the right of every family to a decent home;” a right to vote (and not just a privilege which is the status-quo); the right to live without fear of dying in mass shootings, or by their family members, and intimate partners, and so on.
So, sometimes, it’s fair to call a spade a spade, or to call the Republican party out for what they are: oligarchic-supporting, political enemies of open societies that truly would produce more spontaneous, holistically free people, at least for all people, and not a select few.
“No god, no kings: I said love is the thing,”
Patrick M. Foran