Who's a liberal?

Public Interest, Summer, 2001 by William A. Galston

IT is reported that after Thomas Babington Macaulay, the nineteenth-century British historian and statesman, delivered a typically emphatic speech in the House of Commons, one of his colleagues remarked to another, "By God, I wish I were as sure of anything as Macaulay is of everything." As I read Brian Barry's Culture and Equality, [ ] that quotation rushed unbidden into my mind. Barry has delivered a thumping book, brimming with certitude, written in what Alan Wolfe has recently called a "take no prisoners" style. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I am one of the combatants Barry chooses to shoot rather than incarcerate.)

Ever since the publication of his book Political Argument in 1965, Barry has been regarded as one of the most insightful political philosophers working in the Anglo-American tradition. His approach is broadly liberal, in both the philosophical and political senses of the term. In the tradition of philosophical liberalism, he seeks principles to which persons he regards as reasonable could give their willing assent. Along with other contemporary political liberals, he emphasizes equality, suitably understood, as the guiding value of decent politics. In his most recent books, Theories of Justice and Justice as Impartiality, he has offered both a critique of John Rawls's theory of liberal constitutional democracy and an alternative theory leading to similar conclusions about the role of the activist state in securing the conditions of fair equality. While he has changed his mind on some important matters during the past 30 years, he has never wavered in his belief that reason is capable of arriving at general p rinciples of politics applicable to all human beings.

In his latest book, Barry is affronted by the challenge to universal principles posed by contemporary theories of group rights, cultural nationalism, and special privileges and exemptions from generally valid laws. He views these theories, which he lumps together under the aegis of "multiculturalism," as a return to the errors of the nineteenth-century Romantic-irrationalist revolt against the Enlightenment, a stance that if put into practice could exacerbate ethno-cultural conflict and lead to the oppression of individuals. His purpose in Culture and Equality is to delegitimate multiculturalism, theoretical root and practical branch. His strategy takes the form, if not the content, of a nineteenth-century Catholic Syllabus of Errors, arraying and refuting all manner of what he regards as dangerous foolishness.

Along the way, Barry manages to say many things with which some conservatives are likely to agree. For example, he voices skepticism about the "disparate impact" analysis of employment discrimination, and he is a huge fan of Justice Scalia's majority opinion in the Oregon v. Smith case, which held that American Indians do not have a constitutional right to use peyote in their religious practice. But conservative readers should not be lulled into complacency. Barry's critique of multiculturalism is in the service of an egalitarian economic and social agenda far closer to the one I helped promote as a Clinton administration official than to anything conservatives could possibly stomach.

BARRY is admirably frank about the political frame of his philosophical and policy analysis. The practical effect of multiculturalism, he asserts, is to divert attention from real economic and social injustices and to weaken, if not altogether dissolve, what would otherwise be a united and purposeful coalition for redistributive egalitarian policies. This is a favorite theme of New York public intellectuals such as Todd Gitlin and Michael Tomasky, with whom Barry seems to have been consorting of late, and it represents an honorable effort to reassert the agenda of the Old Left over against excesses of identity politics. After much of the practical socialist agenda had been discarded in the famous dustbin of history, Irving Howe once remarked that "socialism is the name of our desire." The irresistible left-egalitarian coalition is the name of Barry's desire. Fair enough. But as a piece of serious political analysis, it is a fantasy.

How does Barry's thesis fail as political analysis? First, there has rarely been much of a market in the United States for redistributive programs. Even at the height of the New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt delivered rhetorical broadsides against the "dole" and sold Social Security as a contributory program, carefully downplaying its redistributive features. In the late unlamented 2000 presidential contest, Albert Gore's oft-repeated critique of George Bush's tax cut as regressively oriented toward the top 1 percent of taxpayers failed to capture many hearts or change many minds. In the United States, distribution tables--of taxes, income, wealth, or whatever--prove of little moral consequence on their own. Redistributive policies can be sold and sustained only when linked to publicly compelling moral premises ("If you work, you shouldn't be poor"). This feature of American political culture both annoys and baffles left-leaning Europeans, but it means that no special causal factor (whether multiculturalism or anything else) need be invoked to explain the weakness of redistributive egalitarianism in the United States, it's the occasional success that requires explanation.