The Age of Abundance
I’ve just finished reading The Age of Abundance, by Brink Lindsey (full disclosure: Brink is one of the people who oversees my work as an adjunct scholar at Cato). This social and economic history of the post-war period is an engaging and thought-provoking read.
The centerpiece of the book is an exploration of the consensus of the 1950s and the way that consensus was upended by the turmoils of the 1960s. I’m just young enough that the social convulsions of the 1960s and 1970s had just recently been added to the history books I read in school, and they got short shrift from my history teacher who had been teaching the same course since the 1950s. Likewise, when I started paying serious attention to politics in the late 1990s, the aftershocks of the 1960s were still being felt (I remember Bill Clinton’s pot smoking-being discussed by friends in high school, for example) but the issues still being debated from that era felt increasingly stale. I had heard plenty about the 60s, but most of what I’d heard had been random and fragmentary.
So it was fun to read a coherent, lively account of what happened during that turbulent decade. I don’t think I appreciated what a radical, violent, and exciting decade it was. And I learned a number of things I didn’t realize before. That the evangelical movement was born in the 1940s and was widespread by the 1960s, but had a strongly apolitical character until the late 1970s, for example.
I was also impressed by the way Brink uses recent social history to frame the contemporary political landscape. In his telling, the contemporary right and left are the intellectual descendants of the counterculture (which arose during the 1960s in response to the smug, liberal conformism of the 1950s) on the one hand and the Goldwater conservatives (which arose in response to the counterculture) on the other. He suggests that each side is trapped in an ideological confusion that is the mirror image of the other. The countercultural left hated capitalism, even as it embraced the liberating social changes—feminism, greater sexual openness, environmentalism, and greater free speech and tolerance—that could not have happened without the affluence capitalism produced. The movement that emerged from the Goldwater campaign, in contrast, staunchly defended capitalism while defended a traditionalist morality that capitalism was steadily undermining.
And this, of course, makes libertarianism the ideology of the responsible center: supporters of both capitalism and the liberal social changes it produces. And while few independent voters self-identify as libertarians (much less Libertarians), they’re libertarian insofar as they reject the left’s antipathy to capitalism and the right’s antipathy to social tolerance. There is, of course, an element of the pundit’s fallacy here, but I think there’s a lot of truth here too. Over the last four decades, public attitudes have shifted dramatically rightward on economic issues (even with a sweeping Democratic victory this fall, it’s hard to imagine a return to the 1970s’ levels of taxes, regulations, unionization, or monetary expansion) and leftward on social issues (feminism, gay rights, and sexual openness have all made great strides). I think it’s pretty clear that the left has been gradually winning on social issues while the right has mostly won on economic issues. While neither side has been all that libertarian, the net effect has been to push things in a libertarian direction.
I also think it would be helpful if more libertarians talked about things in these terms. Too many libertarians seem to define libertarianism as a very specific and restrictive political program: as a laundry list of government programs to be abolished, or equivalently as a very short list of government programs that won’t be abolished. By that measure, libertarianism is nowhere close to successful. But if we define libertarianism more broadly as a set of general ideas and attitudes—pro-market, pro-tolerance, skeptical of authority—the last few decades look a lot better from a libertarian perspective. Few major government programs have been abolished, but the role of market in the economy has expanded dramatically, and partly as a consequence people are freer than they’ve ever been to live their lives as they seem fit without interference from those in authority.
It was a great read and I recommend you pick up a copy. In a follow-up post, I’ll discuss one of the book’s few weaknesses.
i read it last week, and enjoyed it a great deal. lots of nice data even if you don’t buy into brink’s thesis. anyone who like’s age of abundance might also enjoy the moral consequences of economic growth benjamin m. friedman.
— razib · Jun 27, 07:06 PM · #
“He suggests that each side is trapped in an ideological confusion that is the mirror image of the other. The countercultural left hated capitalism, even as it embraced the liberating social changes—feminism, greater sexual openness, environmentalism, and greater free speech and tolerance—that could not have happened without the affluence capitalism produced.”
This isn’t necessarily a “confusion”. There’s an old idea on the left, going back to Marx, that capitalism makes possible new and unprecedented kinds of freedom that were previously impossible, while simultaneously creating barriers to further progress that can’t be overcome without overcoming capitalism. Of course, a libertarian would disagree with this position, but I find it a bit disingenuous to portray it as “confusion” for the sake of making libertarianism appear to be “the ideology of the responsible center”.
— chiasmus · Jun 27, 08:03 PM · #
Libertarianism has been a fringe ideology for a long time. That has its benefits— ideological clarity and minority zeal, for instance— but it also has negative consequences as well. Too many libertarians, and specifically libertarian pundits and bloggers, are trapped in a “how extreeeeeeeeeme can I be” kind of mindset that tends to emerge from fringe politics. People want to be taken seriously and make a name for themselves in their niche; they want to push their philosophy to its logical ends; and since they have little chance of being in power, they don’t need to worry about actually creating a winning policy platform. I think libertarianism is in a triumphalist, ascendant mode right now. I’m libertarian enough to be happy about those things and pragmatist enough to be worried anytime a particular movement gets too excited about its own recent success. I do think, however, that the libertarian movement writ large will have to abandon some of its more outsized and uncompromising tendencies to take full advantage of its new shining moment.
— Freddie · Jun 27, 09:17 PM · #
And the federal government has won on surveillance, militarization, and interrogation issues.
Paging James Poulos — we need to hear the Pink Police State theme music in the background here.
— Matt Frost · Jun 27, 09:54 PM · #
Talk about moving the goal posts. It takes a tremendous act of imagination combined with tautological logic to carve out a political center that the vast majority people consider fringe.
— Joseph · Jun 28, 12:11 AM · #
Good article but I wonder how attitudes will be shaped by the coming trends:
1) The rise in welfare and healthcare costs thanks to the Boomers ageing, much of which will be borne by younger taxpayers.
2) The superstar economy. Most compensation will go to a fraction of the workforce, akin to pay for entertainers and elite sports stars. Conversely, the middle class will not see take-home pay rise (it’s likely to even decrease) thanks to 1).
3) The effects of illegal immigration. The children of current illegal immigrants from Mexico are showing worrying signs of developing into an underclass. Educational achievement is very low and illegitimacy rates are shooting past fifty percent.
— Ali Choudhury · Jun 28, 04:00 PM · #
Having played some small role in the business of the 60s I generally agree with the syopsis you give based on the book. But I suggest that the changes in American society and gov’t since then have been driven by technology to a large degree. It’s hard to realize now but as an early early boomer, I remember the first TV in my middle class neighborhood. Long distance telephoning was expensive and troublesome (you had to speak to a sequence of ‘operators’). I remember the first InterState I drove on. I could go on and on. Political and social histories have to consider technology as a prime reason for the way we’ve developed.
— JohnMcC · Jun 29, 06:45 PM · #