Party of 1 represents an attempt to bring a literate and reflective perspective to political commentary in the blogosphere. With its regular blog posts Party of 1 will endeavor, like many other sites, to go through the political news from the Internet so you don’t have to, while at the same time offering commentary from the author/editor’s unique perspective. Plans for newsmaker interviews and feature reporting are in the works. Furthermore, Party of 1 will present daily press reviews, complementing services already available at other sites. One review will focus strictly on the editorial and op-ed pages of the leading American papers. The other will be a general press review of the five “quality” London papers. These reviews should appear daily before midnight, US Central time.
The proprietor, author, and editor of Party of 1 is David Cole — an individual who has had a checkered career. He started out as an academic, but his thinking had too much of a polemical bent to permit him to compile much of a record of strictly academic publications. He has spent a total of 11 years teaching undergraduate political science courses at two of the more obscure, out-of-the-way outposts in American higher education. If Cole has one advantage when it comes to putting forward a site such as Party of 1, it is that he has exposed himself to a wider range of ideologues than is probably healthy for a young man. He immersed himself in the study of ideological perspectives across the political spectrum in the English-speaking world — radical, liberal, and conservative. If he can say nothing else, probably at least should have a good feel for how ideologues of various types will react to breaking news. (It is worth noting that there is more than one David Cole whose ruminations appear in the media. The proprietor’s full name is David R. Cole; he is not the David Cole who is a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. Nor is he the David Cole who is affiliated with the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Surely, both these gentlemen will be happy to have this cleared up.)
A political consultant of Cole’s acquaintance made the following comment to him a number of years ago: “These days everything has to be pitched to one side or the other.” That is to say, within the blogosphere, conservatives read Instapundit and Power Line; progressives read Daily Kos and Talking Points Memo; everyone reads only what they agree with, more or less strictly, and never the twain shall meet. Let’s be clear: Party of 1 will not operate that way. This site will provide you with an ideologically eclectic perspective — which is not to say that we will play it strictly 50/50 or straight down the middle. Readers are free to attribute whatever ideological bias or leaning they perceive to the site. Nevertheless, you are likely to find enough material to prevent diehard supporters of either major American political party from being completely happy with the site.
What, then, does Party of 1 stand for? For one thing, you will not find much support for laissez-faire economics on the site. Party of 1 stands for an economic system that serves the public interest. This puts it at odds with much of the libertarianism to be found so often in the blogosphere. Party of 1 insists that the political foundations of the economic system ought to be acknowledged. A moment’s reflection ought to confirm that the economy cannot function outside of a context of law and politics. In a state of anarchy, mundane economic activity would grind to a halt. It follows that economic actors ought to acknowledge political obligation and should not demand unlimited prerogative. The polity establishes the framework within which the economy can function, and so it follows that legislators are entitled to restrict and regulate the economy so that it serves the public interest. What other standard can legislators apply when they provide the political and legal framework that economic actors require and even demand? Sadly, the contemporary economy functions in such a way as to, as it were, throw much of the public under the train rather than to serve the public interest.
While Party of 1 may then present a left perspective on the economy, its point of view is not completely “progressive.” Its strongest dissent from progressive views will be found on what have come to be known as “issues like abortion and gay marriage.” That is not to say that the proprietor is a religious conservative; his religious views would prove to be far too heterodox for some, although he is a regular churchgoer and therefore may be regarded as a religious extremist by others. Party of 1 dissents from “progressivist” views when they threaten to provoke destructive devolutionary pressures within the polity and to reverse the traditional class-based character of the political system, such that the “progressive” party becomes ever more professionalized, white-collar and “silk-stocking.” Such a party may end up pursuing “issues like abortion and gay marriage” while at the same time taking a more and more “accomodationist” stance on the core economic question. Furthermore, at their most extreme, “progressivist” measures may even pose a threat to religious freedom. Government should not be in the business of making everyone religious, but neither should it take on the task of trying to make everyone secular. A problem has arisen with regard to accommodating people of religious and secular, parochial and cosmopolitan views within the same polity, and it would be helpful if this could be addressed just like any other public policy problem.
It must be admitted that there is no prospect of a political movement that would realize all of Party of 1’s political commitments and preferences, except perhaps in the intermediate to (very) long term. Such a thing would have had to have come about in the 1970s or 1980s — and it did not. In the meantime, the economy has become ever more globalized, manufacturing has been replaced largely by services, and the workforce has become ever more white-collar and college-educated. Those for whom Party of 1 would like to provide a voice are the “left-behinds,” culturally and economically. At the same time, this cohort appears to comprise a set of “swing voters” who support is needed to win elections and govern effectively in America — and, furthermore, this would seem to be a cohort toward which progressives ought to feel an obligation. Nevertheless, what Party of 1 would like to see, probably cannot be accomplished for the time being. Even so, it has to be insisted that is such a program is not carried out, a price will be paid. To testify to this perhaps is all that Party of 1 can expect to accomplish. The way things ought to be — an economy that serves the public interest, decentralized political authority, more local initiative and autonomy in polity and economy, a way of life that puts less pressure on traditional communities — probably cannot be realized until long after the lifetimes of the proprietor and those who will be reading this blog. For one thing, the current system is all that we know, and we do derive considerable benefits from it. In the meantime, perhaps a perspective can be presented that at least helps us to achieve an understanding of what cannot be changed immediately.
A word should be said about the day-to-day operation of this site. To operate such a site as an online “community” might be a worthwhile undertaking — but for the time being Party of 1 cannot be such a thing. For one thing, the proprietor has had to take on part-time work, and outside of that he plans to concentrate on contributing original material to this site. This precludes him from spending much time moderating online discussions. Indeed, the objective of the site in large part is to establish the proprietor’s own authority. To that end, comments in response to blog posts will be permitted, but users will have to register to do so. The proprietor cannot permit bullying or abusive remarks directed at himself — and the definition of “bullying or abusive” will have to be left to the proprietor. Politically literate denizens of the blogosphere know there is a great deal of libertarianism out there — and this site is likely to run afoul of this. Cole cannot allow himself to be bullied on his own website.
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Party of 1’s proprietor, David Cole, comes to the blogosphere from an academic background. He hopes that the website will be enriched by the perspective that his academic experience provides. To that end, he hopes that readers will appreciate a few excerpts from some of the thinkers who have influenced him through the years.
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was a member of that generation of “refugee scholars” who managed to escape from Central Europe to America before World War II. The import of her work largely was to bemoan the depoliticization of affluent capitalist society. In what she described as a “society of jobholders,” individuals by and large become politically passive and the democratic legacy stretching back 2500 years to ancient Athens had been, as it were, sacrificed for a mess of pottage. In her essay, “The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure,” she expressed regret that the American founders had not mandated the New England-style town meeting in the Constitution as the form of local government.
Hannah Arendt
We frequently encounter individuals of the type who positively seethe at the thought of any restriction on their prerogative. They want government “off their backs,” to the degree that they contemplate (fantasize about?) the near-total abolition of government. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, her study of the Nazi and Communist phenomena, Arendt reflected upon “this new human type, [who] would be flattered at being called a power-thirsty animal, although actually society would force him to surrender all his natural forces, his virtues and vices, and would make him the poor meek little fellow who has not even the right to rise against tyranny, and who, far from striving for power, submits to any existing government and does not stir even when his best friend falls an innocent victim to an incomprehensible raison d’etat.” Arendt realized that, while the abolition of government was a fantasy, what might emerge would be a sort of dictator who enforces the rules of laissez-faire, so that market society would function like a sort of automaton; indeed, such a condition seems to be the aspiration of so many of our contemporaries. But what if a situation arises in which this “power-thirsty animal” wishes to speak up against the regime? Well, when we speak up in public, we are appealing to the collective — and our friend has managed to get the collective abolished. The dictator may treat political dissent as something like incitement to riot. And so our “power-thirsty animal,” who might at one time have strutted about like a Nietzschean superman, becomes an impotent, “poor meek little fellow.”
Arendt, then, offers food for thought for laissez-faire conservatives — and sometimes also for progressives as well. Consider this observation from her masterwork, The Human Condition: “In our understanding, the dividing line is entirely blurred, because we see the body of peoples and political communities in the image of a family whose everyday affairs have to be taken care of by a gigantic, nation-wide administration of housekeeping.” What does she mean by “a gigantic, nation-wide administration of housekeeping”? Arguably, something like this: Suppose you are a religiously devout parent. You understand it to be your duty to teach your children that they ought not to “do it,” at least not until they are adults. But somewhere a social scientist is wielding a study that purports to show that universal sex education would lower the nationwide rate of STD’s. So, your children have to receive instruction in the use of condoms, with bananas being used as models. Maybe this would indeed lower the rate of STD’s, although the assumptions of social-science studies are not always indefeasible. Furthermore, parents, schools, churches, and other institutions would like to be able to make their own decisions about these matters according to their own tacit understandings and traditions. Whenever authority is centralized, especially on the scale of a continental nation, we are set up for the buildup of centrifugal devolutionary pressures. Are the purported benefits worth the blowback that will come in the wake of the implementation of “a gigantic, nation-wide administration of housekeeping”?
Visit the homepage of of the Hannah Arendt Organization
Order Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition from Amazon.com
Order Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism from Amazon.com
John N. Gray (1948- ) is a British academic, recently retired from the London School of Economics. Over the course ofhis career, Gray underwent an unusual evolution; he “flipped” from one side of the political spectrum to the other, moving from being a Tory to a supporter of New Labour. One should be careful, however, about placing him on the ideological spectrum, because his thought is difficult to categorize.
John N. Gray
From Party of 1’s perspective, Gray’s most important work is the scrutiny he devoted to the thinking of Friedrich A. Hayek, whom politically literate individuals will recognize as the most important academic apostle of laissez-faire. Gray searched long and hard for the ultimate justificatory principle of Hayek’s thinking — and, when he found it, it left him cold. The third edition of his monograph on Hayek marked the transition in his political leanings. While respecting Hayek’s achievement, he concluded that Hayek’s “argument [ does not support ] any of the larger claims of Hayek’s political philosophy. It does not provide a foundation for liberalism, or justify the enormous claims Hayek makes for free markets. It has little, if any, normative content, and contains nothing to assist the choice between the diverse regimes, liberal or non-liberal, that are found in the world in the wake of socialism. It works only as an impossibility theorem against the most hubristic types of economic planning. It demonstrates that a powerful twentieth-century project – the Marxian project of replacing market processes with central planning – is unachievable. It tells us little else.”
Gray eventually came to lose patience with the United States, where the thought of Hayek perhaps has been most influential; he concluded that America was not doing right by its own people. In one of his more recent monographs, False Dawn, he remarks: “In the United States free markets have contributed to social breakdown on a scale unknown in any other developed country. Families are weaker in America than in any other country…. The free market has produced a mutation in American capitalism, as a consequence of which it is coming to resemble the oligarchical regimes of some Latin American countries more than the liberal capitalist civilization of Europe or the United States itself in earlier phases of its history…. The private, gated communities whose high walls and electronic security devices protect their inmates from the dangers of the society they have deserted are a mirror image of America’s prisons…. In late twentieth-century America, the free market has become the engine of a perverse modernity. The prophet of today’s America is not Jefferson or Madison. Still less is it Burke. It is Jeremy Bentham, the nineteenth-century British Enlightenment thinker who dreamed of a hyper-modern society that had been reconstructed on the model of an ideal prison.”
Order John N. Gray’s Hayek on Liberty (3rd edition) from Amazon.com
Order John N. Gray’s False Dawn from Amazon.com
In his Hayek monograph, Gray remarks that “free markets are not spontaneous developments; they are artefacts of state power. The free market in nineteenth-century Britain was a creature of parliamentary absolutism. It was constructed by the fiat of a strong state.” Here he betrays the influence of the Austrian anthropologist and economist Karl Polanyi (1886-1964), best known for his seminal work of economic history, The Great Transformation. Polanyi often is belittled for allegedly harboring an attachment to a “myth of a golden age.” As a matter of fact, what he believed was that the wisdom accumulated throughout human existence prior to the 19th century, as revealed by his study of comparative economic history, should not be discarded. The notion of a completely autonomous, self-regulating market was flawed, he insisted; any attempts to institute such a thing would be self-consuming. Markets there must be, but not completely self-regulating ones, he argued; instead, the workings of the marketplace should be embedded within the context of the larger society.
Karl Polanyi
Polanyi had to confront what may be called the “rain-dance argument,” to wit: If you want rain, do a rain dance — and if, after the rain dance, it does not rain, this simply shows that you have not done the rain dance sincerely enough. In The Great Transformation, Polanyi discusses the laissez-faire version of the rain- dance argument: “Indeed, [economic liberalism’s] partial eclipse may have even strengthened its hold since it enabled its defenders to argue that the incomplete application of its principles was the reason for every and any difficulty laid to its charge…. Its apologists are repeating in endless variations that but for the policies advocated by its critics, liberalism would have delivered the goods; that not the competitive system and the self-regulating market, but interference with that system and interventions with that market are responsible for our ills.” Arguments of the same form, irresponsible though they may be, continue to appear in contemporary polemic; they persist because the larger legal and political framework for the marketplace can not be disposed of, and because government and the “private” marketplace can never be completely disentangled. More than likely, Polanyi’s observations in this connection will have to be cited over and over again on this website.
Polanyi also confronted what he described as variations on the theme of a “grand antiliberal conspiracy.” His reflections may indeed impress the reader as poignant at a time at which “socialistic” measures are being insisted upon by the power brokers of affluent society as being “prgmatically necessary.” From Polanyi’s perspective, it is unsurprising that such a situation arises over and over again; human beings cannot stand unrelenting exposure to centrifugal forces, and when those forces become overwhelming, a defensive reaction sets in. The 19th century had been the occasion for just such a scenario. “The supporting forces were in some cases violently reactionary and antisocialist… at other times radical imperialist… or of the purest liberal hue. In Protestant England, Conservative and Liberal cabinets labored intermittently at the completion of factory legislation. In Germany, Roman Catholics and Social Democrats took part in its achievement; in Austria, the Church and its most militant supporters; in France, enemies of the Church and ardent anticlericals were responsible for the enactment of almost identical laws…. On the contrary, everything tends to support the assumption that objective reasons of a stringent nature forced the hands of the legislators.”
Visit the homepage of the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy at Concordia University in Montreal
Order Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation from Amazon.com
Historian and social critic Christopher Lasch (1932-1994) assembled an ideologically eclectic body of work in which he upheld a left-of-center critique of capitalism while at the same time he scrutinized the excesses of an increasingly white-collar, professionalized left. A concise summary of his views can be gleaned by a few excerpts from his 1991 monograph, The True and Only Heaven.
Christopher Lasch
“I have no intention of minimizing the narrowness and provincialism of lower-middle-class culture; nor do I deny that it has produced racism, nativism, anti-intellectualism, and all the other evil so often cited by liberal critics. But liberals have lost sight of what is valuable in lower-middle-class culture in their eagerness to condemn what is objectionable. Their attack on ‘Middle America,’ which eventually gave rise to a counterattack against liberalism – the main ingredient in the rise of the new right – has blinded them to the positive features of petty-bourgeois culture: its moral realism, its understanding that everything has its price, its respect for limits, its skepticism about progress.”
“My own faith in the explanatory power of the old ideologies began to waver in the mid-seventies, when my study of the family led me to question the left’s program of sexual liberation, careers for women, and professional child care. Until then, I had always identified myself with the left….”
“My growing dissatisfaction with the new left did not imply any break with the historic traditions of the left, which I held in higher regard more I came to understand them. The trouble with the new left, it seemed to me, lay precisely in its ignorance of the earlier history of the left, as a result of which it proceeded to recapitulate the most unattractive features of that history: rampant sectarianism, an obsession with ideological purity, sentimentalization of outcast groups.”
“The conviction that most Americans remained politically incorrigible – ultranationalistic in foreign policy, racist in their dealings with blacks and other minorities, authoritarian in their attitudes toward women and children – helps to explain why liberals relied so heavily on the courts and the federal bureaucracy to engineer reforms that might have failed to command popular support if they had been openly debated.”
“The use of legalistic strategies to advance the rights of minorities divided liberals from the working-class constituencies that once made up the heart of the New Deal majority…. Their well-meaning efforts to help black people, women, gays, and other victims of legal discrimination smacked of paternalism.”
“[Ronald Reagan's] “traditional values” [invoked] ““the code of the cowboy, the man in flight… from everything that tied him down…. Reagan played on the desire for order, continuity, responsibility, and discipline, but his program contained nothing that would satisfy that desire…. Under Reagan, the inner logic of the market became fully explicit: idealization of the man on the make; the pursuit of quick profit; feverish competition leading (as a means of stabilizing it) to the creation of far-flung economic empires impervious to local, state, and finally even national control; a widening chasm between rich and poor; hostility to labor unions; urban redevelopment designed to raise real estate values and to force lower- and middle-income families out of the city; discouragement of public facilities, public transportation in particular – all in the name of ‘family, work, neighborhood, peace, and freedom.’”
Visit the “Christopher Lasch Online Resources” website
Order Christopher Lasch’s The True and Only Heaven from Amazon.com
Order Christopher Lasch’s The Revolt of the Elites from Amazon.com
Order Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism from Amazon.com