Contra Acemoglu on Reviving Liberalism
Pouring water on civic republicanism
Last week in the New York Times, Daron Acemoglu argued that liberalism is on the backfoot today, but can be rescued from the populist grip by returning to its roots. We should be skeptical of this proposed medicine, even if the diagnosis seems correct.
Our Dying Order - Establishment Liberalism
In the Acemoglu telling of post-WW2 history, a “bipartisan governing philosophy” took hold amongst the political elites in both major American parties. Over time, three features of this philosophy grew in emphasis:
(1) cultural liberalism, with emphasis on individualism, autonomy and progressive cultural attitudes; (2) the empowerment of educated elites, in the form of both technocracy and meritocracy, but going beyond just technical matters and extending to issues like moral values; and (3) an emphasis on establishing procedures for predictable application of laws and regulations.
His contention is that none of these features are essential to liberalism. Freedom of expression became corrupted at the top level as liberals kept winning and an unchallenged cultural consensus emerged. A lack of dissent within liberal circles led to a shift from neutrally respecting different conceptions of the good life to the active prescription of “acceptable” values.
It wasn’t that LBJ was applying his master manipulator skills to legislate this shift, but rather that a new educated class came to operate government institutions, fill the ranks of the private sector, and run the media. The seeds of a class conflict, tailor made to suit a bog-standard populist narrative, were thus sown.
On one side were beneficiaries of the new meritocracy of paper, the BA-wielders. In the 79th Congress (1945-1946), 56% of House members held at least a bachelor’s degree. By 1993, this had risen to over 90%. On the other side, those without the requisite credentials, those blindsided by rapid technological change, and increasingly those breaking from the intellectual consensus, felt shunned.
As the educated elite captured more and more of a share in governance, they failed to promote the public good as one would expect. Instead, paperwork and regulations descended upon every industry and field. NIMBYism, safetyism, and a marked decline in the quality of public services followed their rise—and discontent eventually caught up to them. This is the basic story of establishment liberalism.
The Way Out? - Renewed Liberalism
Early liberals challenged power, but, having eventually become the establishment they originally supplanted, they lost their edge and way. Today, they’ve embraced the celebration of the individual, but not the common good which emerges from recognition of each other’s autonomy. The sort of community which best promotes flourishing first needs its members to have those individual rights, but this purpose of theirs has fallen by the wayside.
To return to this vision of what liberalism was intended to be, Acemoglu sketches three principles of renewal:
Emphasize free expression and repudiate thought-policing - Institutions must cease excluding those who differ from the consensus and self-professed liberals should work to foster an intellectually-inclusionary media sphere. Something more like Substack, and less like the Musk-leviathan or offshoot lefty echo chambers. It’s a basic liberal insight that knowledge comes from open debate, not from authority.
Economically diversify the elite - Liberalism arose to fight unfair power - including the power of wealthy elites to make all the decisions. Then credentialism inadvertently made liberals into the wealthy elites who make all the decisions. Purposeful outreach to the working class, including in selecting for leadership positions, will help heal the social conflict in-progress.
Emphasize regulatory efficacy - “It is one thing to deal with risks from nuclear technology, new pharmaceuticals, artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies, and a completely different thing to build a bureaucracy for piling up permits for repairs or licensing hairdressers and massage therapists.”
Donald Trump has shattered the postwar consensus and left establishment liberals reeling. Though they no doubt maintain control of vast institutional power, a tremendous amount of elites have decided to rebel. This is not a credit to Trump’s vision of the future—which many of them are awkward bedfellows with—but a discredit to the establishment’s lack of such a vision.
Some stand for plutocracy, cronyism, bad economics, and malice, but many are just seeking good governance in a world that has offered little. The Democratic Party has a chance to reform itself, and by so doing win back all those who stand for optimistic liberal values.
Is Acemoglu on the Money?
Proclamations about why the so-called consensus is collapsing have been common fodder for writers and intellectuals stretching at least as far back as the 2016 election (and almost certainly farther than that). In these accounts, Biden 2020 was a sad last gasp, a repudiation of a dark, but vital, force with no vitality of its own. The narrative has great intuitive appeal. Importantly, it’s one shared by republicans and communitarians, but, I would argue, shouldn’t be accepted by liberals.
Acemoglu’s essay is not advocating a repaired liberalism, but civic republicanism in the vein of philosopher Philip Pettit. Republicanism defines liberty as non-domination, which encompasses “any relation of unequal power, whether enforced by threats or by other social means, such as customs”.1 It is often distilled to freedom from masters.
To republicans, this is a much more robust liberty than what is offered by liberalism. It promises public policy to counteract domination wherever it appears, be it an exploitative workplace, a patriarchal family, a retributive prison sentence, or a life lacking in its basic needs. Overtly technocratic institutions, unopen to public examination, cannot be sanctioned by the republican, who demands the ability to object to their decisions.
Understanding him as a civic republican, Acemoglu’s prescriptions line-up perfectly:
Spreading power more evenly across classes
Making institutions more open to public input
Reducing elite impositions in every industry
All are means of countering domination. The aim of the postwar narrative is to portray the credentialed as dominating the working class politically, economically, and culturally, priming the reader to sympathize with their plight. It’s very successful to that end. From Eisenhower to Obama, politicians have sure had a go at us!
But is it true? The working class, like neoliberalism, is a nebulous term. Everyone’s for it, but there’s little consensus what it is. Marxists use it to include everyone relying on wage labour, while opinion polls show its popular usage detached from income and education. Neither is how Acemoglu is using the term. Following him, let’s understand working class status to be determined by whether someone has gone to college or not.
On this credentialism account, the working class has been shrinking rapidly, as a larger and larger share of young people opt to pursue a bachelor’s degree, but is still the dominant share of the labour force. Since 2000, the median member of this group has experienced an 11.3% increase in income after adjusting for inflation, whereas the median BA-holder saw a 13.3% increase. A significant difference, on the order of $5k more in salary gains, but not nearly enough to suggest some systematic rigging by elites in their own favour.
Both groups can rightfully complain that their salaries were constrained by the twin forces of NIMBYism and safetyism, but the story about these being the result of elite, non-working class dominance is implausible. Suburbanite preferences are the muscle behind these pernicious influences, and their communities are not full of highly educated residents. Instead, a plurality of American suburbanites (40%) have a high school diploma or less.
So the story of economic neglect is shaky enough to cast doubt on Acemoglu’s narrative, but I think there is something to the cultural side of things. Institutions do have the capability to serve as sources and mediators of culture. To the extent higher education has a stranglehold on producing journalists, creative writers, filmmakers, and classical musicians, among others, whilst simultaneously becoming more intellectually homogenous, it makes sense that the mainstream would come to resemble something of a blob.
The problem here is that the state lacks mechanisms for interfering in culture the way it does in economics. Maybe there’s a line to trace from LBJ’s top-down policies to the present environment, but it’s a hard sell. It’s also not a liberal approach.
Though Acemoglu’s prescriptions here are largely good advice—we should all welcome more perspectives and strive to remove anti-abundance regulations—the political philosophy they spawn from would pull us farther from liberalism’s origins, not closer.
If universities drift toward certain ways of thinking, how is a new-look Democratic Party to respond to that? Affirmative action for conservative thinkers? Party primaries are very (probably excessively) democratic processes already, how is the party to sway its own voters into selecting more working class candidates? By imposing another elite preference? Municipal government, that bastion of public input, has helped to restrict freedom to build and has hurt everyone along the way—is it to be given even more of a role?
There is no one at the levers to make the proposed changes happen, and it is far from clear that they could pull social trust in institutions back from the brink. Unfortunately, Acemoglu doesn’t seem to deliver the goods here.
To Find and Not To Yield
Collapsed trust helped set the stage for the Nazi takeover of Germany, dividing society between monarchical conservatives, violent reactionaries, and revolutionary communists, among many others. Fifteen parties were voted into the parliament. Elites and non-elites alike lost their faith in the republic, and their voting habits paralyzed government with continuous gridlock until enhanced executive power seemed to be the only option remaining.2
Yet it still took the Great Depression hitting for the middle classes to hop on board with the Nazi’s movement. I do not mean to suggest that the stakes here are equivalent, nor that a similar spark event is on the horizon; with that said, the widespread loss of faith is a key ingredient in backsliding. There’s good evidence we’re experiencing it.
Even if the story of elite institutional exploitation of the working class is false, we shouldn’t stop looking for better explanations behind this erosion. There is an ongoing crisis of liberalism, and I believe it’s as mysterious as ever.
Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty, p. 6.
Ibid. Chapter 13.