The Center Triumphant

Two Not-Great Men and one Nobel Prize Winner

If you love liberalism—not social programs, necessarily, but an open, inquiring attitude and a skepticism that breeds humility—this was a very good week.

Two less-than-great men, President Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, agreed to a deal to reduce federal spending and permit more federal borrowing.

None of the details merit elaboration nor will history assign them any transcendence. This was not a ‘new deal’ or morning in America. It was government by inches, generally the way it should be done.

For too long, public life has been dominated by partisanship. As a basis of organization political parties are useful, as are unions and chambers of commerce, but what we have seen in America in recent years is partisanship-cum-tribalism. It is a partisanship akin to nationalism (what Adam Smith called “the mean principle of national prejudice”)—blind loyalty to flag, political affiliation or tribe.

It was good to see Speaker McCarthy buck 71 of his Republican members and good to see the President stiff-arm Democratic progressives. Among the latter were the two Massachusetts Senators, Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, who voted no on the dubious principle that an imperfect solution is worse than none.

Warren and Markey were mirroring another Senator, the late Barry Goldwater, who upon his nomination for President in 1964 said, “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” He lost 44 states. Goldwater, a Republican, was the ideological opposite of Warren and Markey, but their temperamental twin. For some time, on both the left and right, rigid adherence to faction, what the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa labels the “call of the tribe,” has been the dominant political trend in America and elsewhere.

Mario Vargas Llosa

This call of the tribe, a seemingly primitive impulse, is reawakened from time to time, often by “dreadful charismatic leaders.” They and their followers reject the messy uncertainties of liberalism; they are faithful to the group first, to details and facts only second (if that). Why compromise when you are surely right? As opposed to tribalists, liberals (a word that Vargas Llosa uses to describe an attitude and approach, not a political platform) are inherently skeptical. They accept as provisional “even those truths that they hold most dear.” To liberals, trial and error is not a concession; given the inevitability of human error including their own error, it is the surest route, albeit a slow one, to social progress.

For tribalists, history is more or less written before it occurs; it has a “secret meaning” which gives to each event a coordinated logic. As Richard Hofstadter wrote of political paranoids--first cousins to political extremists—the trouble is not that they are not coherent, but that they are more coherent than reality. Since the meaning of history is already revealed—at least to themselves—compromise is seen not as concession but as violation and betrayal. Thus did such a sizable block of House Republicans, as well as most of the progressive “squad” members, figuratively join hands and vote no. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said she would “never” vote for “cuts to programs” (better a government shutdown of all programs?)

Tribalists, like the famous hedgehogs of Isaiah Berlin’s creation, thrive on generalities—theories of how the universe should work. Counterposed to them are foxes, for whom “the general does not exist,” only the particular case of a pothole to be filled, a budget to be balanced. Joe Biden is a fox. 

Unlike tribalists, liberals accept that life is often frustratingly random. Much as we would like to fit all events into an ordered jigsaw puzzle, liberals freed from the grip of ideology see history’s “infinite episodic diversity.” History has tendencies but not iron laws; it is an improvisation which we do our best to ameliorate. Slow-moving reform is (except for the rare urgent case) preferable to swift, radical change because it is consistent with the flawed nature of human intervention. It allows for course correction. Moreover, the skepticism of liberals toward themselves informs a tolerance towards others. The certainty of tribalists brooks no dissent; it offers their followers, whether in Puritan New England or on campuses today, a justification for intolerance. Since conformity is the superseding value, tribalism is antithetical to free individual expression (the new law in Arkansas restricting distribution of “harmful” books to minors—on pain of a prison sentence—is an increasingly common example).

Vargas Llosa was a youthful Marxist, almost a prerequisite for Latin American intellectuals of his vintage. A visit to the Soviet Union shook his faith, as did, closer to home, the grotesque trespasses by Fidel Castro’s Cuba. In the 1980s, by which time Vargas Llosa had long since lost his taste for utopian solutions, the radical group Shining Path terrorized, and murdered thousands of people within, Peru. In 1990, Vargas Llosa ran for President, advocating a center-right agenda of classical liberal reforms. He lost. The great novels—racy, political, witty—kept coming. In 2010 he won the Nobel Prize for literature.

The Call of the Tribe, his ode to liberal thinkers in history, was published this year. I am not sure that Biden and McCarthy have read it; they do not need to. They will need more of the fortitude they displayed last week. Spending was reduced: a good thing. The debt limit was raised, averting a potential default by the United States: also a good thing. In the future we could use more good things, even small ones—strike that, especially small ones.