Repudiating Liberalism
Small Futures.
by Richard H. De Lone
for the Carnegie Council on Children. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 258 pp. $12.95.
During the course of the 1970’s a new political outlook has increasingly come to dominate the political thought of the American Left. It is an outlook that has almost no overt connection to Marxism, that is reformist rather than revolutionary in both style and strategy, and that proclaims its attachment to political freedom and the democratic process. Yet it is characterized by a profound if not always explicit hostility to the principles of liberalism as traditionally understood. The animating ideal of this new viewpoint is egalitarianism, and its central policy recommendation and most distinctive feature is its call for the redistribution of income. Among the leading exponents of “redistributionism” are such prominent authors as Christopher Jencks, John Rawls, and the economist Arthur Okun.
The redistributionist doctrine also seems to have found a rather surprising institutional home—the Carnegie Council on Children. This study commission, composed of Chairman Kenneth Keniston and ten other experts on issues relating to children and the family, was established by the Carnegie Corporation to “develop policy recommendations for ways in which the needs of children in the 1970’s and 1980’s should be met.” In its earlier report, All Our Children, the Council had already asserted its view that the problems plaguing the American family were basically neither moral nor cultural but economic, and that income redistribution was the key to their solution. With the publication of Richard de Lone’s Small Futures, the Council has now endorsed not only a thoroughgoing overhaul of America’s socioeconomic structure but also a repudiation of its liberal political traditions.
The Council’s attack on liberalism could hardly be expressed with greater explicitness. It is voiced both by de Lone in the body of the book and by Keniston in a foreword, where he makes it clear that the assault is directed “not [at] the liberalism of one wing of the Democratic party, but [at] that deep and largely implicit set of assumptions shared by both major parties and by the overwhelming majority of Americans, a world view whose origins lie in the thought of men such as Adam Smith and John Locke.” The essential defect of liberalism is alleged to be the inherent conflict between its commitment to equality in the political sphere and its acceptance of inequality in the economic sphere. De Lone formulates the issue in terms of a clash between equal political rights and unequal economic prerogatives. In fact, there is no contradiction here at all. The founders of liberalism frequently and emphatically spoke of the right of property, and equality of rights in the political as well as the economic realm is perfectly compatible with unequal outcomes in the exercise of those rights. For example, while everyone may have an equal right to run for political office, no one is guaranteed an equal chance of succeeding. If America were committed to equality of outcomes, we would choose our public officials by lot (as the Athenian democracy did) rather than by election.
According to de Lone, this same supposed contradiction within liberalism has led to the repeated failure of American reform movements, including the Great Society initiatives of the 1960’s. A telling indication of the futility of such efforts is held to be their failure to have achieved greater economic equality—i.e., a significantly more equal distribution of income—in the United States over the past 100 years. There is something rather odd about this criticism of the reformers, inasmuch as de Lone is castigating them for failing to attain a goal that he himself argues they never intended to pursue. He acknowledges that their efforts were aimed not at equalizing the distribution of income but at alleviating poverty and at promoting equality of opportunity. And he further notes that “no specific degree of equality of condition, no desired distribution of goods, resources, power, or influence, is implied by equality of opportunity.”
But de Lone is not content to draw the issue sharply between the liberal ethos and the redistributionist ethos, and then to argue for the superiority of the latter. Instead, he devotes a considerable portion of his book and its principal rhetorical thrust to arguing that liberalism has been a failure even in terms of fulfilling its own goals, that it has been utterly unsuccessful in alleviating poverty or providing equality of opportunity. In seeking to establish this contention, de Lone engages in an incredibly selective and tendentious use of evidence. On the issue of social mobility, where a great deal of sophisticated research has recently been done, de Lone simply ignores much of it. (For example, he does not confront some of the central findings in Christopher Jencks’s Inequality, which was also funded by the Carnegie Corporation, and which concludes that in the United States there is “an enormous amount of economic mobility from one generation to the next.”) Moreover, he often distorts the views of those scholars he does cite. Even Michael Harrington, in a laudatory review of Small Futures in the New Republic, felt compelled to acknowledge that de Lone, in his use of Stephan Thernstrom’s research on social mobility, “treats complex matters too casually,” and “only borrows from it those elements which fit in with his own argument.”
But de Lone also employs a much more effective tactic in his attempt to discredit liberalism’s performance in making progress toward its own goals: he alters the definitions of both poverty and equal opportunity. In a prosperous society, de Lone asserts, “poverty is not a state in itself. It is a symptom of broad social inequality.” Hence he argues in favor of defining poverty by the purely relative standard of one-half the national median income rather than by a fixed “poverty line.” This would mean, of course, that even a substantial increase in the standard of living of the poor could not reduce poverty if proportionate advances were also made by the rest of the population. In short, the issue of poverty is transformed by fiat from a matter of need to a matter of distributional inequality.
Now, to be sure, since notions of what constitute necessities vary in different times and places, some relative considerations must come into play in attempting to establish a sensible criterion of poverty. But to endorse a wholly relative standard of poverty, as de Lone does, is absurd. On the basis of such a standard, one could actually eliminate poverty without improving the material conditions of the poor at all. Simply take away income from the non-poor until the median income is sufficiently reduced, and you will have achieved the statistical abolition of poverty.
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The definitional problem regarding equality of opportunity is much more complicated. De Lone himself never discusses it directly, and it is impossible here to give more than a very cursory account of this issue. In the first place, equal opportunity requires an absence of government-sponsored privileges or restrictions that favor some citizens over others in the quest for advancement. But beyond that, the traditional understanding of America as a land of opportunity was that the children of the poor, if they had ability and were willing to work hard, could realistically expect to rise to an income level and occupational status above that of their parents. Those whose ability and/or efforts were particularly great might even make the transition all the way from “rags to riches.” And on a much broader scale, it would be possible for entire groups that began in poverty to progress over several generations to a level of socioeconomic parity with the population as a whole (a goal that many immigrant groups have now achieved or even surpassed). With the important exception of black Americans—where there are signs that greater progress is now being achieved—this is a standard that the United States has largely attained.
De Lone, however, adopts a newer, more abstract, and vastly more stringent criterion of equal opportunity. There must be “equal life chances” for all children: those born to the poorest and least educated parents must have the same statistical chance of attaining economic and occupational success as those born to the richest and most highly educated parents. This, of course, is a standard that the United States does not come close to achieving. But it is also a standard that no other society comes close to achieving. De Lone cites an article by Seymour Martin Lipset in support of the point that rates of social mobility in the United States are no higher than those in other industrialized nations, and concludes that despite the “lingering feudal traditions” of European societies, “the facts of socioeconomic mobility are much the same in Europe and the United States.” Characteristically, de Lone neglects to mention a central point in Lip-set’s essay—namely, that the nations of the Soviet bloc are no nearer to attaining absolute equality of opportunity than the capitalist nations of the West. It would appear, then, that neither liberalism nor a capitalist economy is the critical obstacle preventing the achievement of full equality of opportunity.
The central factor working against the attainment of complete equality of opportunity in both liberal and Communist societies is clearly the differential material and (especially) cultural advantages bestowed by parents upon their children. There is an obvious solution to this problem: take children away from their parents and raise them in a common institutional setting. One can understand, however, why the Carnegie Council might have found it impolitic to offer this recommendation as its major contribution to the national debate on “family policy.” In any case, de Lone strives to minimize the family’s role as a source of inequality, putting forth a strained and unconvincing “situational theory of child development” which instead identifies class as the key factor. Accordingly, his proposed solution to the problem of unequal opportunity turns out to be not a familyless society, but a classless one.
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The chief practical recommendation of Small Futures is a “credit tax plan” for redistributing income that “would reduce the ratio between the top and bottom fifth of earners from its current eight to one to something like four to one. . . .” While this would by definition reduce inequality of condition, it is hard to see how it would do very much toward achieving de Lone’s criterion of equal opportunity. It is also hard to see what reason there would be, given de Lone’s principles, for stopping at so relatively modest a reshuffling of economic resources, not to mention leaving untouched the other sorts of advantages that more favorably situated parents would still be able to pass on to their children. Sure enough, the last two pages of Small Futures reveal that income redistribution is but a prelude to the “future themes of egalitarian policy.” These would include policies aimed at eradicating “inequalities in power, control of resources, control of time, richness of human experience and, correlatively, in the array of human potentials each individual has a chance to exercise. . . .” At last, the perverse but inexorable logic of de Lone’s argument becomes clear. If everyone in society is assigned the same socioeconomic status, such inequalities in child-rearing as still persist will no longer produce any inequality of opportunity, for there will no longer be any differential opportunities to strive for. In this sense, at least, absolute equality of condition would unquestionably be accompanied by absolute equality of opportunity.
Given the incredible degree of government intervention in people’s lives that would be required to achieve and maintain such equality of condition, it is easy to understand de Lone’s hostility to liberalism, with its commitment to personal freedom and to a separation of the public and private spheres. The extreme conclusions of Small Futures reveal where some of the radically egalitarian premises of redistributionism lead if they are zealously followed through. Still, it is probably safe to assume that more sober advocates of income redistribution like Rawls and Okun, who remain attached to important elements of the liberal spirit, would be unwilling to endorse de Lone’s chilling Utopian fantasies. But what is one to make of the fact that they were unanimously approved by the members of the Carnegie Council on Children?
