Uncouth Reflections

Fenster writes:

I wrote previously of my respect for the way Michael Lind parses our current situation.  As I noted Lind sometimes appears to tilt right and other times left, suggesting an Andrew Sullivan-like tippy brilliance.  But whereas Sullivan really does switch sides, at least in matters political, Lind is pretty constant in his worldview.  The apparent tippiness in his opinions is a function of the tippiness of the world around him.

Divisions such as right/left, liberal/conservative and Democrat/Republican push us to view the world in binary terms that are not built on ideas and principles but things like power, coalitions and the need for coherent doctrine in our various Big Tents.  And we are expected to align ourselves with whatever binary choice is on offer.

In actual fact people are free to believe what they damn well please.  And when they do and do it well, as Lind does, their opinions are not bound by the binary strictures that are expected to define our identities.  Individuals may hold numerous contradictions but it is hardly the case that they must hold more contradictions than the allegedly coherent systems that we are to live by.  It is no wonder that his ideas appear to be veering back and forth.  Lind’s thinking is actually pretty constant but swirling artifacts of power create an optical illusion of movement.

Lind is at it again, publishing what is to my mind one of the more brilliant essays I have read in quite a long time. It is “Classless Utopias versus Class Compromise”, and it appears in the most recent issue of American Affairs.  American Affairs is more or less behind a paywall but I believe most visitors are permitted a certain amount a free reading each month, and I highly encourage you to track the article down and read it if you can.  Here is a link to the article that may work for you.

Lind starts by poking at the concept of class.  In his view the concept of class by its nature must consist of both “functional and nepotistic aspects.”   That is, a class will consist of individuals and families who are “disproportionately likely to work in certain vocations” but who are also “disproportionately likely to marry and have children with one another.”

(Note that Lind does not bring in the genetic component that is in the air at present.  Under that view one might not only have functional and nepotistic aspects to class but a genetic one as well, as with, say, potential genetic differences baked into the long history of intermarriage within the Indian caste system.  This is a missing aspect that might have been woven into the discussion but its absence does not undermine where Lind goes with his policy ideas, as we will see.)

Americans like to think of themselves in classless terms, hostile to anything as rigid as the Indian caste system and suspicious of British snootiness—at least as long as we are not watching Downton Abbey or a royal wedding.  But as Lind points out “(m)ost if not all stable societies have had some sort of enduring class divide between upper-class and lower-class families.”

Seeing things as they are is an important skill.  Lind criticized libertarianism some years back arguing “(i)f libertarianism was [sic] a good idea, wouldn’t at least one country have tried it? Wouldn’t there be at least one country, out of nearly two hundred, with minimal government, free trade, open borders, decriminalized drugs, no welfare state and no public education system?”

His treatment of class in the article takes a page from this pragmatic way of looking at the world.  Ideas about the world ought to pay serious attention to whether they work or not, something which may be fairly evident by looking at human history.  We may want to think of ourselves as classless, and an egalitarian impulse can be harnessed to do good things.  But when we clear out all the rationalizing clutter class appears to persist, and may have an adaptive quality.

It is wise to see things as they are.  One of the reasons for grounding social opinions in social facts is the damage opinions can have if they feel free to just take flight.  As Lind points out all of the major ideologies of the 20th century have shared the view that “hereditary elites are anachronistic.”  This is true of social democrats and social liberals but also true of Marxism-Leninism and National Socialism.  The latter two of these have been tried and found wanting but the appeal of classlessness is still with us in the mainstream.

 . . . both the mainstream Right and the mainstream Left in America are deeply invested in the claim that a classless society can be achieved in the near future, if only the government would get out of the way (the Right), or redistribute more income (money liberalism), or remove residual racial and gender barriers to individual achievement (identity-politics progressivism).

Despite all this intergenerational mobility remains low.  Further, t’was ever thus.  Gregory Clark and Neil Cummins have documented that English with Norman French surnames like Mandeville have been “at the top of the British social order for twenty generations since the Norman Conquest in 1066, while families with Anglo-Saxon surnames . . . still tend to be poorer and less well educated.”

Bonneville, not Mandeville, but Norman derived and no surprise.

Further, “large scale declines in social inequality have historically been associated with mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse and catastrophic plagues.”  And once leveling gets to an extreme state leading revolutionaries become the new aristocrats, a fact noted by both Plato and Pete Townshend.

So does it follow that we should just lie back and enjoy the show?  Let the rich get richer?  By no means.  Income and  social inequality are out of control and something needs to be done.  Lind suggests, quite reasonably to my mind, that while efforts to eliminate class will be utopian and dangerous managing class conflict is a workable and desirable goal.

What might it mean to manage or moderate class conflict?  Here, one should reflect on whether government should mainly concern itself with doing things directly or whether its main aim is to create ground rules for later action in the real world by other parties that may move things in desired directions, or at least avoid predictable traps in a prudential way.

Lind asks us to consider the Founders, especially Madison.  The division of government into three parts was hardly a concept built on an ideal fancy, and it was not intended to achieve any particular goal.  It set the stage for action,  and grappled with messy truths.

There will always be a yearning in government for something unitary.  Something there is that does not love a wall.  But if we note, with our eyes open, that too much unity leads to disastrous ends then let us break the coercive power of government up into separate components: one for deciding, one for acting and one for reflection and judging.  And just as the power of government must be broken down into pieces, with the pieces then balanced against one another in as careful a fashion as possible, so too with the outside actors that government must inevitably concern itself with.  Faction must be made to counteract faction.

Moreover, it is but a hop, skip and jump from Madison’s 18th century concept of faction to the emerging 19th century fixation on class.  Indeed, as Lind points out, in 1830 Madison predicted that in a century “a majority of Americans would be landless laborers ‘necessarily reduced by a competition for employment to wages which afford them the bare necessities of life.’”

A century later the New Deal arrived “right on schedule.”

So then let’s ratchet that New Deal period forward several decades.  What are we to make of the period from the New Deal through the 1970s, that famed era of American economic growth and stability?  Lind argues that success in that period was less about following a set of ideals and much more about a grand bargain between what Madison would call factions and what Marx would call classes.

“What really happened in the generation after World War II is that the balance of political and economic power among the pre-existing managerial . . . and working classes shifted, and so did the distribution of gains from growth.”

In today’s world we face another situation out of control and ripe for reform, with our new tech robber barons and with a political establishment not at all interested in change.  The Democrats—supposedly the tribunes of the workers—are in many ways the least interested in upsetting any apple carts.  What is needed is something relatively basic and simple: “policies that might shift the balance of raw bargaining power in favor of nationally rooted working classes at the expense of managerial classes. . . “

Further, “the challenge is not a lack of ideas but a lack of power.”  And if you don’t have power, how do you get it?

The sometimes inchoate populism that is looked down on by our betters is one answer but it is incomplete.  Trump comes at the thing from a pro-business point of view and while his policies may yet benefit middle America more than the consensus globalism will, isn’t there something missing?  An explicitly pro-labor, pro-little guy way of approaching the issue?  That would not be in total harmony with Trumpism but it would allow for the the struggle to be defined properly, creating the right playing field for combat–two different but somewhat related ways of addressing national problems from a national perspective.

The fight between Right and Left has morphed into a war over how the elites will divide the spoils in a globalized world built to the specifications of management.  And then we have sideshows over immigration, identity politics and the rest.  Isn’t the main event what it has always been: to balance the needs of factions/classes, and to enhance the power of the class that is out of power before things go totally off the rails?

Elites we will always have with us: Madison saw that too, as it is central to the notion of a republic.  But elites must act with prudence and wisdom, even if it takes something as crude as a blow to the head with a heavy stick to come to the necessary epiphany.

Lind then sketches out his vision of how Madisonian countervailing power might be harnessed to allow for a pragmatic rebalancing of class interests.  Since the federal government is in bed with managerial interests and will likely stay in bed with them for some time, Lind argues that we need to look elsewhere for the “little platoons” that will assert power.  This can involve local governments, which are closer to the people and probably less willing to tow the company line the way the feds do.  But it also involves a host of other civic actors.

Democracy, then, requires strategically strengthening institutions that working-class people can control or at least influence. That means, among other things, defending the institutional independence of diverse religious communities, while sometimes favoring pragmatic municipal socialism. Whatever form an authentic grassroots working-class movement might take in the twenty-first-century United States, it is likely to look like historic precedents, including old-fashioned Milwaukee-style “sewer socialism” (municipal ownership of public utilities) and the Salvation Army. It will not look like the campus-based social justice and climate-change NGOs of progressive upper-middle-class professionals or, for that matter, free-market agitprop groups funded by the libertarian rich.

This is a lovely vision, and probably the best one could hope for.  But is it possible?  Even Lind is skeptical. After laying out his vision of new “little platoons” he frankly acknowledges another possibility, one that is “perhaps more likely.”  That is the victory of managerial minorities, with the future North America looking like Brazil or Mexico, with “nepotistic oligarchies clustered in a few fashionable metropolitan areas but surrounded by a derelict, depopulated, and despised ‘hinterland.’”

Politics ain’t beanbag, as the saying goes.  But neither does it exist in an idealized realm.  It exists in the here and now, and what is to be done must always be cognizant of the way the world really works and be attentive to The Law of the Situation.  In this case past is prologue.  In Madison’s time and so with ours: power must be made to counteract power, and then let ‘er rip.

Fenster writes:

There is a new line of thinking developing from anti-Trumpers on immigration.  You hear if from people like David Frum and Damon Linker. It goes like this: Trump is a cruel xenophobe but Democrats need to be wary of playing into his small, clever hands by overdoing it on the open borders business.  Ixnay on the atch-and-release-kay!

Linker:

If you wanted to ensure the eventual triumph of immigration restrictionism in the United States, you couldn’t devise a surer path to that goal than getting the Democratic Party to explicitly embrace a policy of de facto open borders.

Unfortunately, this is precisely where the liberal reaction to President Trump’s viciously harsh immigration policies is headed.

Frum:

(O)utrage is the mood of the moment, perhaps more than at any time since the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election.

The Trump administration’s border policies and his dehumanizing rhetoric about immigrants have triggered this incandescent reaction.  . . .Trump and his brutish methods are radicalizing his opponents. But those opponents still retain the choice not to be radicalized.

Translation: we cannot let stand the lie that Trump is the true nationalist here.  We must reclaim that for the anti-Trumpers.

Linker:

The human longing for communal solidarity — and its corollary, the love of and privileging of one’s own above others — cannot simply be wished or legislated away. No matter how much moral discomfort it causes.

Frum:

The spreading view that immigration is a civil right and that immigration enforcement is totalitarian is an attack on democratic legality. It subordinates rules and norms to desires and passions. It is also a corrosion of the ideal of a constitutional state.

Linker’s answer:

(I)t’s crucially important for voters to know that, wherever we ultimately choose to set the annual rate of immigration and whatever admissions criteria we use, we will enforce it, by taking firm control of the border and continuing to uphold the politically crucial distinction between who is and who is not a citizen.

Sounds kind of Trumpian but of course it is not.  It sounds . . . nicer . . .  and of course it is being articulated by a Trump opponent.

For his part Frum concludes by trying to talk the Democrats off the ledge from which they are about to jump.  And he does so cannily, in the manner of that good cop by the window,  by flattering their refined sensibilities:

It’s not easy to decide what to do about the accelerating surge of illegal immigration from Central America—or about the surges that will soon follow from the rest of the planet if the present surge is not checked. But the decision will surely be better made by means of rational discussion than in response to emotive images. You want to be different from Donald Trump? Fine. Do what he does not do: Think.

Hilarious.  He frankly acknowledges the seriousness and scale of the problem but refuses to concede an inch on Trump’s efforts to do something about it.  Hey liberals, think!  If only you would do that all would be well.  But please please please don’t jump!

Francis Wilkinson in Bloomberg takes a similar tack.  Writing of Trump’s zero tolerance border policy Wilkinson argues that “the cruelty, accompanied by the lies deployed to excuse it, further inflamed political passions and sharpened the divide between Republicans, who support the president, and Democrats, who detest him.”  As a result not only are we already in a soft civil war but if the Democrats do not regain control of Congress:

(h)ere’s an easy prediction. Democrats will then experience rage — at Tea-Party levels or worse.

Of course Democrats have no agency here.  They will have been driven to war by the evil genius Trump.  Moreover, what is really tragic is that while the Democrats may erupt in fury it will only reflect a sad souring of their most noble impulses:

Democrats won’t give up on democracy. It’s too central to their identity, and their commitment to democratic norms and processes is also their point of greatest contrast with Trumpism.

So it is possible that while the Democrats will never give up their inflated self-esteem and virtuous self-image they may be willing to get somewhat more realistic about the challenges of unlimited and uncontrolled immigration.  They may need to do that only if they can simultaneously hold on to the belief that Trump is the villain of the piece. But, hey, as I have always said, hypocrisy is the handmaiden of all great things.

POSTSCRIPT:

Peter Beinart sketched all of this out with a lot more honesty last year in The Atlantic.  Beinart freely acknowledges that the shift by Democrats to open borders goes back before Trump and is essentially self-inflicted.

Beinart also comes closer to real solutions, though as he admits it ain’t an easy problem to solve.

He is an honest liberal on the issue and happens to believe that more unskilled immigration can be a good thing.  He first develops an economic argument: if immigration adds to overall economic growth but disadvantages some then why not devise ways of tapping into the increment of growth created to offset the losses where they occur?  But he notes this kind of distributive policy is hard to pull off politically.

More importantly he sees that it is not simply an economic argument.  He is open about questions of culture and cohesion that mere economic redistribution cannot readily resolve.  People resist “the other”–or at least too much of the other, applied with too heavy a hand and with no ability to influence or control the cultural consequences.  His answer: a return to the value of assimilation.

In theory this could work of course.  But can it work in practice?  It is easy to say we will return to assimilation but is such a thing even possible?  Whatever assimilation we promote in this day and age is likely to be a soft and gauzy thing, in keeping with liberal values.  But assimilation in practice had, and must have, a hard edge.  Are Democrats even close to taking on the cultural demons that would have to be tamed in order to create a serious approach to assimilation?

It’s political, of course.  The more people who live in the United States and are not interested in assimilating the harder it will be to adopt that approach as policy.

It may well be that our last anti-Trumper of the day, Andrew Sullivan, is right:  to end the border crisis give Trump his friggin’ wall. If we could only find a way to do it without giving that jerk the credit . . . .

Fenster writes:

It only takes a couple of generations for social things to come full circle, with that generation’s victims this generation’s bullies, and so on.

Here is a photo of Amsterdam’s “white bicycle” program, a free bicycle share idea pushed by the anarchist-influenced Provos in the mid-sixties.  Witte Fietsen for all!

And here is how the current generation of anarchists have chosen to respond to bicycle sharing in Portland, Oregon.

Stations trashed; bikes vandalized.  “Our city is not a corporate amusement park.”

It is tempting to say that the anarchist spirit has stayed the same and that what has changed is the Establishment, which finds ever new ways to commodify desire.  Some truth in that I am sure.  But there is also a big difference between the playfulness of the earlier anarchist vision and today’s sour, angry and bleak version.  No one escapes the merry-go-round.

Fenster writes:

The mainstream (i.e., anti-Trump) position on family separation is at least as disingenuous that of the Administration.  Much of the grandstanding in Congress relates to whether Trump can stop separation “with a phone call”.  Further, the mainstream press supports that view, arguing that the Flores consent agreement does not “require separation” and that Trump can stop the process on his own. That is true but misleading.

When someone is detained for federal criminal proceedings they are given over to US Marshalls.  It is never the case that children are permitted to accompany parents who are so accused. So the initial separation arises inevitably (in the case of illegal border crossings) from the decision to prosecute entry at the border rather than waving people through.

Most often the proceedings are quick and if the accused is found guilty of entering on an unauthorized basis they are sentenced to time served, generally days, are reunited quickly with family, and all are deported.  If all that can be done in under 20 days the Flores tripwire (no detention of children after 20 days) is not triggered.  But during that period of up to 20 days separation is unavoidable once the approach taken is the swift resolution of the legal matter.

But let’s say someone who is caught entering illegally not at a border crossing asks for asylum after being caught. Perhaps they ought to have presented themselves at the border (or to Mexican authorities, or to an American embassy–these are for the moment but trifling points).  But they are free to assert a claim for asylum even if they are brought in by traffickers not at a border crossing and subsequently apprehended. Such individuals may still have the charge of illegal entry to deal with but the asylum process beyond that can take a longer time.

Alas, under a 9th Circuit ruling dealing with Flores handed down a few years ago children cannot be detained for more than 20 days even if they are with their parents. So the government is prohibited from moving the asylum seeker to detention with their children awaiting an asylum hearing; even that situation is not permitted under Flores.

It is for this reason that the Administration favors a quick law change that would get rid of Flores restrictions on length of stay and permit families to be together. Who could oppose that?

Well, the Dems appear to be opposed, arguing that Trump doesn’t need the legislation.  Since Flores does not “require separation” the argument is that he can reunite families without a law change, with a phone call.

Sure but it appears that the only way to do that would be to just let the families go entirely. If it is objectionable to separate a child from a parent who crossed illegally, even for a matter of days, they can always be released, right?  Same with asylum seekers.

It sounds easy enough but I do not see any way the Administration’s approach to prosecution and asylum can be easily squared with keeping families together.

Now, there are of course different views on the wisdom of the Trump approach to the border. Migrants, their advocates and large chunks of the liberal electorate are fine with catch and release. They want the migrants in the country. If you like more immigration you will presumably like releasing families whether or not they have requested asylum.  Better to finesse the law than insist on its enforcement.

It is OK to have that opinion, but it is quite a different thing from saying Trump is free to end the separation policy with a phone call–not if he wishes to continue his current approach to entry and asylum.

That is the disingenuous part—what is not stated by the Dems is that in order for him to end separation without a change to Flores he would have to drop the current approach to the border, and revert to the prior practice of waving families through.

Why is this aspect not highlighted by Trump’s opponents?  The Dems know that the American public does not like family separation but they also know that the public does not favor the lax approach elites have taken to the border in the past, and just do not understand why someone who walks across the border should not simply be denied entry.

Is there a good case to be made by Dems for ignoring the law and letting people through given the complex nest of restrictions and laws in place at the time of entry? Something that will resonate with the public?  I doubt it.

Meanwhile Trump’s polling continues to improve.

Fenster writes:

Design is the new IP

Design is the new marketing

Design is the new currency

Design is the new engineering

Design is the new green

Design is the new black

Design, it seems, has some powerful mojo.

Yet with all things mojo how much is real?

Buckminster Fuller put the essence of design into two pithy sentences at the beginning of Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.

If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat makes a fortuitous life preserver.  But that is not to say the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top.

Not much arguing with that.  At base design expresses a few key concepts:

–Intentionality

–about solving a problem

–taking account of context and systems

–with a goal in mind.

So far so good and pretty straightforward.  Now, it is not clear that Fuller’s Dymaxion Car. . .

. . . springs from this idea fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus.  But this conception of design does partake of the positive tradition of American pragmatism.  Things can always be made better.

There is something off, though, about the way Fuller frames the issue.  Note that he puts design on the one side and, for want of a better word, serendipity on the other.  But is that a fair fight?

What Fuller elides past in this metaphor is another venerable tradition: tradition.  Many of the answers we accept as worthwhile do not just come floating by us in the open ocean after a shipwreck as flotsam and jetsam.  No, these answers are often themselves designed in a sense but not in the highly intentional manner that Fuller would favor.  Rather, they arise more via human choice, experimentation, and trial and error, and the Darwinian process of winnowing down that follows.

So in a sense Fuller unfairly sets his notion of intentionality against mere chance.  Design can beat mere chance on a one for one basis much of the time: a life preserver designed to save lives at sea will generally best a piano top.  But in the real world a designed concept is up against many shipwrecks over many years, and it is quite possible–indeed inevitable–that the collective “design” that results from seeming chance will best the best of intentional design.  Gee-whiz pragmatism is a wonderful thing and is to be celebrated but let’s make it a fair fight and let’s make sure Burkean conservatism is taken account of.

These ideas were much on my mind when I read a recent (paywalled) article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on whether design concepts need to play a larger role in higher education.  And not just in the pedagogy–there is plenty of that–but relative to the institutions themselves, and to how they are structured, managed and financed.

There has been a lot of breathless talk about redesigning higher education, disruption and dramatic change.  Clayton Christensen, the Guru of Disruption, speaks about altering higher education’s “DNA”–eugenics for the organization.

The author of the Chronicle article, Lee Vinsel, will have none of that.  To him design thinking in higher education amounts to a “boondoggle”.

(F)addists and cult-followers are pushing the DTs as a reform for all of higher education. In the last couple of years, The Chronicle has published articles with titles like “Can Design Thinking Redesign Higher Ed?” and “Is ‘Design Thinking’ the New Liberal Arts?” The only reasonable answer to these questions is “Oh hell no.” . . . 

You likely can’t get to the article because of the Chronicle’s paywall.  But you can probably guess the line of the argument.

–Design thinking is a fad, like the human potential movement that was in part responsible for its development and growth.

–People who preach the application of “design principles” in higher education are just using the same old consultant-speak, gussied up for a new era.

–There is no real track record of success in applying so-called design principles to higher education anyway.

I suspect there might be a lot of debate about the first two propositions above, with advocates taking issue with whether “design” is a valued added way of looking at things.  I suspect less disagreement with the third proposition.  Despite hand-wringing galore over the past decades higher education has not much changed.  Some institutions can’t turn on a dime.  Colleges can’t turn on a million dollars.

Some will defend that, pointing to the resilience of the odd structure, and that it has proven adaptive over time.  Others will say time is up.

Now, it is true that whatever cannot bend can only break, and if conditions will no longer permit higher education to continue past practices change will come one way or another.  But to what extent will such change truly represent design and to what extent is it likely to be a form of what Charles Lindblom famously called, in only a slightly different context, “the science of muddling through“?

Vinsel is no doubt correct in asserting design has not amounted to much relative to reforming higher education.  But that may say more about just how hidebound the institution is in its conservatism than it does about the inadequacies of design thinking.

So let’s give a cheer for design thinking. . .  and one cheer in this complicated situation, not three.

Of course design works–except when it doesn’t.  Context and history matter.  The highest form of pragmatism is skeptical of doctrine of any type and will look first at the Law of the Situation.  What are we dealing with here?

Colleges are just too plural from the get-go to expect a brilliant designer to come up with A PLAN that will cause the institution to turn.  Too many cats, not enough dogs.

Yes it is possible that design itself can be a plural enterprise.  And that is probably the best that can be hoped for–that as the place really starts to crash enough people on the inside will get religion and pitch in on new approaches.  But even then the line between  “design” in a Bucky Fuller sense and muddling through gets kind of muddied.

An approach designed from the top is bound to fail due to excess authority.  An approach too willing to indulge higher education’s characteristic chaos is bound to fail due to inertia in the face of crisis.  Will splitting the difference work?  Maybe, but that could fail too if the crisis is deep enough, and if it continually outraces efforts to keep up with it.  That’s what is called a predicament.

——-

Fenster on Christensen here.