A New Bismarck?
Charles F. Sabel
Theodore Lowi, always far-sighted in his fears, hapless in his remedial
programs and projects, has found a new way to be prescient and wrong. Historically
there is little that speaks for the plausibility of his dystopic condominium
of international capitalists and local oligarchs; conceptually there is much
that speaks against it. Yet in naming the threat of a new tyranny, and suggesting,
by a wink and a nod, that we need a Bonapartist leader to surmount it, Lowi
carries to the verge of caricature many of the categories and themes of current
discussion of the future of the Left. His intellectual audacity advances debate
by showing just how tightly many of our current assumptions corner us.
What Lowi says now is all the more remarkable for the unifying breadth and
depth it reveals in what he said before. Lowi is, of course, one of the most
distinguished of those post-War centrists who feared that the welfare state
was always disciplining the market too little or too much: too little redistribution
and regulation, and the masses would be driven to a misery that would soon
deliver them up to fascist demagogues; too much, and the state itself would
become an enemy of liberty even as it befriended the entrenched interests.
Observing the balance of state and market from the perch of this Archimedian
anxiety, he denounced New Deal administrative managerialism for decades as
a conspiracy against the rule of law and the well being of the common people.
As remedy he urged Congress to spell out its intention in precise but general
laws, to be interpreted by the letter. Even those who mistrusted managerialism
for the reasons he did feared that this solution would more likely destroy
the administrative state than reinvigorate it. The populist undercurrent in
his thought was often submerged in a torrent of disdain for the selfish and
self-deceptive smugness of the New Deal institutional architects and their
heirs.
Now, as the welfare state retreats, routed in part by the failures of the
very managerialism he decried, Lowi reveals himself a man of the Left, concerned
that the emergent regulatory regime will serve the powerful even more surely
than the New Deal administration. It is a turn that honors his humanity and
his intellectual integrity. As before, he sees the threat to democracy in
the illegitimate delegation of state power to private parties. But whereas
the deviltry was once done by administrative agencies colluding with those
they regulate, now it will be accomplished even better, he fears, by the states
and local elites, into whose joined hands big money is busily devolving responsibility
for keeping the population under control while it gluts itself on the rewards
of globalization. As the threat now is from too much market, the remedy is
to strengthen the state-not, surely, by more of the managerialism whose impotence
and corruption lie before us, nor by reinforcing Congress. In the wide world
the market rules. Rather, Lowi-as always, equally audacious and ambiguous
in his programmatic flights-provokes us with the suggestion (his only positive
one) that the Left today consider the possibility of . . . a new Bismarck,
a Bonapartist leader strong enough to check the greed of the international
capitalists without becoming ensnared in the coils of domestic law, yet caring
enough to protect the people without subverting its liberty. Bismarck, the
chancellor whose age made silence the citizens' first duty, as the inspiration
for a new voice of the people? If the national level is paralyzed by its own
overreaching, the international occupied by the enemy host, and the local
essentially corrupt, providential intervention is indeed the most reasonable
hope. Are we truly that desperate?
Lowi is plainly right that the chances of omnibus reform of national administration
and polices are close to negligible, and those of any comprehensive international
response-on the lines, say, of international Keynesian reflation-to economic
disruption and emargination are, if possible, more far-fetched still. But
he is, it seems to me, just as plainly wrong to think that the local is by
historical tradition or deep necessity bound to be a sump of reactionary domination.
Take first the history, remote and near: The Granger laws establishing public
authority over railway-rate setting, early regulation of occupational health
and safety, payment of workmen's compensation for injuries suffered on the
job, unemployment insurance-all of these innovations, and many more, originated
in the states and shaped or were incorporated into the parts of the New Deal
welfare state that Lowi does seem to admire. More recently, many states adopted
anti-takeover laws limiting the freedom of out-of-state corporations to make
hostile acquisitions. Some have pioneered systems of environmental regulation
that, require firms to account for and plan reductions in their use and production
of toxics. Using the pooled information that results, public authorities can
identify and more closely monitor the laggards, can diffuse best practices,
and can continuously update expectations of feasible improvements. Some of
these innovations, and many others besides, will eventually reshape, or become
incorporated into national institutions, with the certain result that the
very distinction between local and national levels of regulation on which
Lowi relies will be no clearer in the future than it has been up to now.
But, turning to the conceptual difficulties in Lowi's position, the notion
that state and federal regulatory innovations are so interpenetrating as to
form, in time, a complex whole is hardly surprising. It is, rather, the notion
of a strong correlation between, on the one hand, "good" and "bad"
government, however defined, and, on the other, national and local levels
of government that seems partial to be the point of aberrance. A reflexive
revulsion at newspaper reports of prison executions and welfare mothers whose
benefits may be cut before they are "job ready" may make us feel
today that life in the little platoon is hellish. But we know on reflection
both that local oligarchs and majorities can tyrannize local societies and
minorities, and that tyrannical national governments or majorities can usurp
the rights of the whole people or some of its parts. We know too that under
other circumstances local and national can each, by turns, be the saving remnant
that protects basic freedoms and the capacity to experiment new forms of association
and joint control from the interference of the other. The genius of American
constitutionalism, and the tradition of civic republicanism from which it
derives, has been precisely to seek institutional arrangements by which the
mutual influences of the local and the national could protect, under a range
of circumstances characteristic of each epoch, our right to be different while
discovering how better to further our common purposes.
The former, constitutionalist Lowi had a fine appreciation for the richness
and subtleties of institutional possibilities; and in this sense his current
project takes a step back. Or, more precisely, with respect to questions of
the institutional foundations of political architecture, he has abandoned
one error for its opposite: His earlier, restorationist program was self-defeating
because his insistence on the unimprovability of familiar forms did not square
with our sense of diffuse but pervasive institutional ferment. Now he claims
with equal implausibility that the world has changed so much that institutions
no longer have a place in politics. So, he suggests by evoking Bismarck, the
little good of which we are capable may only be called forth by a leader who
beguiles us with gifts and intimidates us in beating back our enemies. The
rigid discipline of the founding fathers or the discipline of the stern, yet
beneficent leader: these are the extremes left to those who would save a fundamentally
vicious people from itself.
But before we set aside Lowi's views as the oscillations of a singularly
anxious democrat, we should note how much the central themes of his work connect
to and illuminate the programs under construction by other thoughtful and
worried advocates of a renewed and truly popular democracy such as Bruce Ackerman
and Roberto Mangabeira Unger. Ackerman, in an ingenious new manuscript on
the "stakeholder society" co-authored with Anne Alstott, dismisses
the possibilities of national institutional reform as readily as Lowi and
scants the local and the international, treating them more as marginal than
menacing. To fill the void left by the collapse of New Deal managerialism
and the corresponding forms of citizenship, they propose a founding pact between
generations and between citizens and the polity: At 21, law-abiding US citizens
will be given a stake of $80,000 to be paid in installments, to spend as they
please. The stake will be financed by taxes on wealth and inheritance. Ackerman
and Alstott's hope is that the prospect of this share in the national wealth
will teach responsibility to the reckless (a rump of public social insurance
will be available for who squander their stake and other life chances, or
simply have very bad luck). The ceremonial transfer of the money, the dignity
of its possession, and the continuing discussion of the conditions of the
grant will recreate the solidarity that citizenship requires, teaching the
poor to honor the obligations of property and the rich to honor the duties
of redistribution. Such is the curiously acephalous populism of the estado
novo being ideated on the Connecticut.
Unger is, if anything, closer to Lowi's concerns. Writing increasingly from
and for Brazil, where they know a thing or two about leagues of rapacious
foreigners and local elites, not to mention the politics of chickens and pots,
he urges the construction of a "hard state"-one powerful enough
to resist the pressure of international capital while breaking the opposition
of the domestic oligarchs to the massive redistribution of wealth to the poor
which is the condition for further reform. At the apex of this hard state
will be a presidential Bismarck with a capirinhia. For a tight link
between the president and the people will be one of the chief mechanisms for
ensuring that the structures of the new state can be de-institutionalized
whenever the prospect of managerialist inertia threatens the mobilization
of popular power that protects the whole project from the tireless revanchism
of its enemies no less than the occasionally wearied complacency of its own
beneficiaries.
To establish these associations is not, of course, to demonstrate some common
insufficiency. It may indeed be that the international order is as powerful,
the local as enfeebled, or vicious, as these accounts presume. But the Left
is, after all, the party of ordinary human possibility: the party that believes
in our capacities to fashion decent, just, and workable solutions to our problems.
To say that amidst all the new possibilities created by the prosperity and
freedom-however incomplete-of our day, the "local" in the rich countries,
advanced and developing is so disconcerted by the forces threatening it, so
incapable of innovative response that it requires the protective guidance
of a Bismarck, is to raise questions about our confidence in the powers of
democracy. May we not fear that congeries of "local" citizens so
inert before the problems of the day will always be the ward, never the master
of the state that protects it? More benignly, as Ackerman and Alstott suggest,
we might imagine a world that can do without the local because individuals,
properly staked out, can do fine without the barest minimum of state. Then
we would wonder, more cheerfully, what it could mean to have a democracy without
a polity.
But it is just at this juncture, perhaps, that Lowi's proposal is most instructive.
The historical and conceptual implausibility of his characterization of the
local suggests we look hard at any programs that, with greater tact and circumspection,
share many of his assumptions in this regard. Before I bet the store on Bismarckian
populism, I would take a very careful look at "the local" to see
if now, as so often before, people don't have a better idea.
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