Why Authoritarianism Is On the Rise

Historian Robert Kagan has put his finger on the resurgence of authoritarianism in the US and around the world with a brilliant article, "The Strongmen Strike Back." Kagan's explanation of why we are where we are makes clear that authoritarianism represents the great challenge to the liberal democratic order. By liberal democratic order we mean a society organized along the lines laid out in the Declaration of Independence, where individual rights and citizen participation in governance are the paramount values.

What Kagan points out is that this construct doesn't specifically deal with a range of security impulses common to humans, impulses that are traditionally met by such institutions as tribe, culture and ethnicity, among others.

His argument is the best I've seen. The article is rather lengthy but you will get the gist in the first few pages. After that it rings with tremendous insights throughout. Unless these issues can be addressed human freedom, already in retreat in many quarters of the globe, may face an increasingly uphill fight  in the years ahead.

Nelson Mandela's Body Left Us Today, But Not His Spirit

The world lost one of its greatest heroes today with the death of Nelson Mandela.  Mandela was from South Africa but a treasure of all humanity.  His messages of freedom, hope, equality, persistence, perseverance and magnanimity will continue to resonate, because they appeal to the better and affirming side of our natures.  As was said of Abraham Lincoln, "now he belongs to the ages."

Madibe Mandela was born in 1918.  Prophetically, his tribal name means "troublemaker."  Mandela was given the name "Nelson" by an elementary teacher who told him he needed to have a Christian name in order to attend school. 

Remarkably, Mandela was able to earn a degree in law in the rigidly-segregated South African system.  He was not, however, permitted to use it.  Following the massacre of 69 freedom demonstrators by security forces in 1960, he joined the freedom movement of the African National Congress and was soon under heavy surveillance by the police.  Nelson Mandela explained, "Good and evil are always at war.  Good men must choose."

He was jailed in 1962 and put on trial for treason.  After telling the judge in his final trial statement that he was willing to die for the cause of freedom, Mandela was sentenced to life at hard labor in 1964.  Days breaking rocks under the blazing sun and nights sleeping on the floor of an unheated eight by eight cell were to be his lot for the next 27 years.   

Mandela became a worldwide symbol of dignified and principled resistance to injustice.  Marches and vigils were held around the globe for his release and for the realization of his cause during all that time.  Nonviolent resistance from the 80% of black South Africans, much of it directed or inspired by their leader in prison, followed the model of Gandhi and Martin Luther King.  Finally, international sanctions drove the apartheid regime to the breaking point. 

Mandela was finally released from prison in 1990 at the age of 72.  He ran for election as South Africa's first democratically elected president by all its people in 1994, and won with 62% of the vote.  Despite all the injustice he had suffered, Mandela remained unscathed by bitterness and a visionary of reconciliation.  In his inaugural address, the president said, "Now is the time to heal old wounds."

Mandela served as president for five years and then stepped down and retired.  The voluntary relinquishment of power, so unusual for Africa, was another pointed object lesson from a man whose whole life constituted one.  "I am not a prophet.  I am not your ruler.  I am nothing but a servant," he explained.

Mandela was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 in tandem with Frederik Willem de Klerk, the last apartheid-era South African leader, "for their peaceful termination of the apartheid system."  His life and legacy are ensured for all generations.  The people of South Africa are not in glum and silent mourning tonight.  Instead, they are singing and dancing in the streets.  Rather than pine for what they have lost, they celebrate what they have gained, and the remarkable man who did so much to make it possible.  As Mandela summed up shortly before his death, "There is nothing more powerful than the words, 'This is not right.'"

                                                                        

What Liberals Believe about Personal Autonomy

Fourth in a series about the liberal perspective on human rights.

Liberals place a high value on personal autonomy, the principle that people should have the right to decide most things about their lives for themselves.   This pillar of freedom is the basis of a number of issues liberals have fought for and still fight for today.  Some of these include freedom of conscience about religion and from an imposed religion, women’s admission to college and to many career fields formerly restricted to men, the right to divorce, and reproductive rights such as to decide for one’s self about contraception and abortion.  It also applies to the liberal stance on consensual sexual relationships including the right to interracial and same-sex relationships and marriages. 

It may seem hard to imagine, but all of these practices were at various times forbidden by those who wished to impose their social and moral views on others through the force of law.  Freedom from state-sponsored religion was made unconstitutional in 1791 by the First Amendment’s clause against any “establishment of religion.”  Even so, “blue laws” were passed in most states that restricted commerce or various activities like playing baseball on Sundays under the premise that people ought to be in church instead.  Though most of these laws have been repealed, some still persist.  In thirteen states, for example, it is illegal to buy or trade a car on a Sunday! 

Women were completely excluded from higher education until 1837, when Mary Kellogg, Mary Caroline Rudd, Mary Hosford and Elizabeth Prall were the first women admitted in to Oberlin College in Ohio.   Sixty-three years later, in 1900, most colleges still accepted only men, and just 2.8% of women went to college.  As late as 1970 only 9% of college graduates were women.  Today they constitute the majority of college graduates.  This progress over time is not only a testament to the triumph of liberal egalitarian ideals over those who fought to keep women in their traditional subservient roles but also an example of what can happen when obstacles to personal autonomy are removed.  Just think how much more vibrant every field of endeavor is today, with America making use of 100% of its brain power instead of only half! 

The slow but inexorable movement of women into professions once limited to men is still going on.  It began with secretaries and teachers, continued with police officers and firefighters and finally spread to doctors and corporate executives.  The military is now about to open the combat arms to women volunteers.  It’s about time.  Will some women wash out because they will prove unable to carry an 80-pound pack on a 25-mile hike?  Doubtlessly so.  Then weed them out on their inability to perform the physical demands of the job, not because they are women.  There are some women who relish the challenge and will be able to do it, and our experience with law enforcement and firefighting tell us it will be more than many expect.  Leave it up to equality and personal autonomy, the values America was founded on, and marvel at the results. 

Bans on divorce or the requirement of an adversarial judicial process to determine “fault” were another vestige of the attitude that the state had an obligation to impose conditions on people’s personal lives.  It eventually became apparent to all but the most stubborn that trying to force people to stay in a marriage against their will was not working.  Common sense and the principle of personal autonomy won out.  Divorce laws were liberalized in the 1970s beginning with California, with the concept of no-fault divorce.  An interesting statistic is the higher incidence of divorce in conservative-voting states and lower incidence in liberal-voting states.  The Wall Street Journal conducted an analysis of census data and came to the conclusion that, “Overall, the report shows that people living in northeastern states have lower marriage and divorce rates. And while those in the southern states are more likely to get married, they also have higher divorce rates.”  It’s ironic that the very same socially conservative states that trumpet their commitment to “family values” and tried to prevent easily obtained divorce are the very states whose citizens have been the ones to most utilize it. 

Reproductive rights are another facet of personal autonomy.  The Supreme Court, in the case Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 struck down the state’s authority to outlaw birth control, basing their ruling on the right to privacy. The Court extended that ruling in 1972, deciding in Eisenstadt v. Baird that Massachusetts could not deny access to birth control pills to single people.  There was another big dust-up over the provision of birth control pills under President Obama’s health care law.  Conservatives and some religious organizations tried to make a case that people’s employers and churches should get to decide whether they get access to contraception.  The liberal view prevailed, as it should.  Anybody is free to give advice, but the decision is up to the person involved, not their boss or church.  That is what freedom is.  If my boss is a Jehovah’s Witness I should not be denied a blood transfusion I need because he doesn’t believe in it.  It’s my life.  I get to decide, not him.  The famous case Roe v. Wade in 1973 held that a woman’s right to an abortion in the first trimester of a pregnancy, until the fetus is viable, is also protected.  The basic principle underlying all these, whether it is called privacy, personal autonomy or some other name, is that people are entitled to make their own decisions regarding these personal matters.  They are nobody else’s business.

The same idea holds true with liberals when the subject is personal relationships.  Conservatives imposed and then fought to maintain controls on interracial and same-sex relationships for many years.  Though most states had repealed or had never enacted anti-miscegenation (against racial mixing) laws, all the former slave states except Maryland still had them on their books when the Supreme Court ruled them invalid in the 1967 case Loving v. Virginia.  At that time only 20% of Americans approved of interracial marriages according to the Gallup Poll.  By 2011 the liberal view had largely swept the country, with 86% supportive of marriage between people of different races. 

The same is momentously underway with regards to same-sex marriage equality, support for which has surged from 27% in the late 1970s to near 60% today.  Acceptance of the principle of personal autonomy is largely behind this change, along with a better understanding that sexual orientation is biologically determined.  The American Psychological Association, for instance, stopped categorizing homosexuality as a disorder back in 1975 and unanimously endorsed same sex marriage equity in 2011.  With “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” in the military repealed, marriage equality the law at the time of this writing in nine states and the District of Columbia, and the Supreme Court currently in 2013 weighing the federal Defense of (straight only) Marriage Act,  it now seems we are on the threshold of seeing the liberal position on this great human rights movement become widely enshrined across the land.  This is a struggle in which liberals, as allies of the LGBT community, can take special pride. Once again, personal freedom is triumphing over age-old prejudice thanks to those who have stood up for human rights and fought the good fight.   

The principle of personal autonomy has also played a part in other issues.  One is the right to conscientiously object to military service during those periods when America has had a military draft.  Another is the ongoing liberalization of marijuana laws in fifteen states, where possession is treated like a minor traffic infraction, or even full legalization, voted in by the electorate in Washington state and Colorado.  The failure of the Eighteenth Amendment in trying to enforce the Prohibition of alcohol from 1918 to 1933 is probably the strongest example of the futility of unduly trying to restrict personal autonomy.  The basic liberal perspective on human rights is therefore to favor personal autonomy, limiting it primarily when an action harms or interferes with the rights of others. 

What Liberals Believe About Fairness

Third in a series on the liberal perspective on human rights.

Liberals also support human rights because of an innate sense of fairness.  Liberals understand that legal equality does not mean equality of condition or results.  Some people will always be wealthier or smarter, some are good artists or athletes and others are not.  Not every student who applies will get accepted for enrollment into the college of their choice.  But what liberals really want to foster is a society where everyone has an equal opportunity to try, and a fair chance to acquire the tools for success. 

That’s why liberals always fight so hard to get better funding for poorer school districts, or poorer areas within a school district.  That’s why they are in favor of keeping college tuition as low as possible, with plenty of scholarship help available.  The statistics strongly show that kids from poorer families and families in which English is not the primary language do worse in school, have lower graduation rates, lower college attendance and graduation rates and lower lifetime incomes.  They also have higher incidences of unwed pregnancies, incarceration, chronic health problems and shorter life expectancies. 

Part of the reason liberals are concerned and want to do something about these problems comes from empathy and compassion.  It doesn’t feel right to send kids into the struggle of life with two strikes against them due to the financial conditions of their parents.  The other reason is pragmatic.  If equalizing school funding will help reduce crime, the dropout rate, the prison population, health care costs and result in more qualified students going to college and becoming successful members of the middle class, liberals wonder why would anyone not want to do it?The fairness issue goes beyond this to many facets of life and policy.  It’s why liberals favor a graduated income tax rather than the “flat tax” idea wealthy conservatives push.  In the early twentieth century Liberals and Progressives, including Republican and Democrats, passed the Sixteenth Amendment authorizing a federal income tax.  The principle was to make wealthier folks pay a higher rate of tax, based on the idea that first, they could afford it better, and second, they benefit more from what the taxes buy. 

How so?  Why not collect everything from, say, a sales tax, where everyone would pay the same percentage?  Well, the poor have to spend just about everything they earn just to get by.  Rent, groceries and the essentials of life take up almost the entire income.  So the poor would pay taxes on everything they earn.  The wealthy have a bigger cushion.  They don’t spend all their income, so they would not have to pay taxes on the part they invest or put away for things like college and retirement, things the poor person can scarcely do.  The rich also benefit more from the services government provides.  Police and fire protection guard the tycoon’s mansion, worth millions, from harm, conferring a much greater benefit than the same service provided to the average person’s humble house or apartment. 

Consider also that the same city street is worth different amounts to different interests.  Suppose a bank teller needs the street to get to work, and makes $30,000 a year.  Without the street this worker couldn’t get to the job, costing him or her $30,000 in earnings.  But the same street is worth a lot more to the bank.  Suppose the bank has 1,000 customers and $50,000,000 on deposit.  If the city doesn’t keep the street up and customers can’t get to the bank, they will likely take their deposits somewhere else.  The street, maintained at taxpayer expense, is worth $30,000 to the teller but $50,000,000 to the bank owner.  Is it fair to assess them the same amount for its upkeep?  Based on their relative abilities to pay and the relative value they get back, the liberal would say, “Definitely not!  That’s not fair.” 

What Liberals Believe about Equality

Second in a series on the liberal perspective on human rights.
 

Liberals believe in equality before the law, and they believe it for real rather than just paying lip service to the concept.  The Declaration of Independence famously states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”  Liberals like Abraham Lincoln believed that meant slavery was inconsistent with the principles of freedom.  “No man is good enough to govern another man, without that man’s consent,” he said.  Conservatives looked for reasons to create exceptions.  Surely, they felt, equality, though a good concept for white, Christian, property-owning men, could not apply to blacks, people of other non-Caucasian races, slaves, Jews, Hindus, women and the landless.  All couldn’t really mean “all,” could it? 

The Fourteenth Amendment avows, “No State shall…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”  Liberals like Elizabeth Cady Stanton believed that meant women, as well as men, deserved the right to vote.  It took 72 years and a constitutional amendment, the Nineteenth, to accomplish that.  Some, such as conservative Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, still don’t think the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment requires equal rights for women.  Here is what he said about it:  “In 1868, when the 39th Congress was debating and ultimately proposing the 14th Amendment, I don't think anybody would have thought that equal protection applied to sex discrimination, or certainly not to sexual orientation. So does that mean that we've gone off in error by applying the 14th Amendment to both?  Yes, yes. Sorry, to tell you that.”  So, we still have people, even prominent ones, looking for reasons to deny equal rights. 

Liberals, on the other hand, take the wording at face value.  No one can be denied equal rights, period.  In proposing legislation to end the racial discrimination against African-Americans in his day, President John F. Kennedy observed, “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue.”  Kennedy based his views on strong sources.   Where should we search for the right answer to this issue?  He said, "It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.  The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.”  His answer, based on both, was an emphatic “Yes!”  Modern liberals are proud to emphatically agree.      

The uncompromising liberal view of equality has therefore been applied in a wider and wider circle over the centuries.  The principle was clearly enunciated in the beginning of the country, but was not realized in many people’s daily lives.  The pursuit of the dream to bring Jefferson’s words to fruition continues in our own time, concentrating now most urgently on the LGBT community.  This unfinished work shows liberalism at its best.  Carved over the entrance to the Supreme Court building are the words “EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW.”  The views of certain retrograde Associate Justices not withstanding, that is what liberals continue to strive for, confident in the ultimate realization of America's egalitarian founding ethos.  As Martin Luther King declared, "the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice."       

Freedom in Society, Part 4

I conclude this four-part series with a reminder of the reason government exists. In Western thought it is part of a social contract whereby the citizens institute an authority with the mandate to protect their natural rights, those of life, liberty and property, or their pursuit of happiness, if you prefer, in the Jeffersonian expression and extension of the third natural right. It is a compact in which the peace-loving and law-abiding seek security against the predatory and destructive.

We have seen that there are frequently tradeoffs to be made when conflicting liberties collide. It has long been recognized, for instance, that freedom of speech does not include the right to incite deadly panic and that property rights no longer confer an "owner" with the right to bind fellow human beings to unpaid service and deprive them of their liberty. One's freedoms become limited when they begin to detract from those of others.

The level of essential protection and necessary restraint is in the eye of the beholder. These are often questions to be determined by the political process. In the times of the Robber Barons of the late nineteenth century, for instance, a laissez-faire understanding of freedom meant that the strong and powerful had license to employ and house workers under appallingly unsafe and unsanitary conditions and to keep them in such penury that many felt forced to risk sending their young children into mines and factories to earn a few extra pennies a day. The rise of the Populist and Progressive movements, however, led to the adoption of child labor laws, building codes and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. The "right" of the bosses to cruelly use their laborers and tenants and bilk consumers ran into the countervailing rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness of their victims.

So it is today. We see extremists who hold that their right to property means the government has no authority to tax them. Others maintain they have a right to bring loaded firearms to political events. Others yet contend that while a national program to defend citizens' health and lives against foreign enemies is warranted a national program to defend citizens' health and lives against disease and infirmity is impermissible. And there are those who say that rights to things like fair trials with evidence must be dispensed with in certain cases to be determined by them.

These arguments are not new; there have been such since the early days of the republic. The boundaries have always been a bit fuzzy, and the voices of the extreme and the self-serving have usually been the loudest and always the better funded. Yet over time the advocates of decency have advanced nonetheless. As Dr. King put it, "The moral arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice."

Freedom does not mean the right of the cruel and unscrupulous to take advantage of the honest and innocent. Quite the contrary, it means the right of the latter to defend themselves against the former.

Freedom In Society, Part 3

In the last two blogs I have been examining the development of the social contract theory as introduced by Thomas Hobbes and further developed by John Locke. Their view of freedom under law, particularly in the case of Locke, with his "life, liberty and property" formulation of natural rights, restated by Jefferson as "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," was integral to the founding ethos of the United States.

As we look at the concept of freedom in action there are always gray areas and special considerations to take into account. For example, Jefferson's "freedom is not license" and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's famous "freedom of speech does not give one the right to shout 'fire' in a crowded theater" exemplify the principle that it is inadmissible to exercise one's own rights by denying them to others.

That is why one person's right to enjoy loud music in the middle of the night gives way to his neighbor's right to enjoy quiet during normal sleeping hours. That is also why the property owner's right to the labor of his slaves was eventually overturned in favor of the rights of the slaves to their liberty. The general principle is that human rights trump property rights.

These principles lie at the heart of many controversies in contemporary society. If the data show that talking on one's cell phone while driving is equivalent to driving drunk then do the people have the right to legally ban the practice? In other words, does the state's responsibility to protect the lives of its citizens carry greater weight than a driver's freedom to talk on a hand held phone, just as it does with the drunk's freedom to drive a car? I would agree with the eighty percent who say yes, it does.

The same consideration is at the heart of environmental disputes. When a certain level of air pollution is shown to cause a certain number of cases of asthma, heart disease, stroke and the like, is there a point at which the need to protect people's lives and well-being outweighs the right of drivers, fireplace owners or industries to pollute the air without restriction? Of course it does. The question is where to draw the line.

Similarly, we maintain a military defense to protect citizens' lives against foreign enemies. The property right some might prefer to control all their money is superseded by the need to collect taxes to pay for this defense. Is it so much different to hold that the need to protect citizens' lives against disease is an issue of the same kind? It is difficult to see why one is accepted by practically all while the other is styled an alien concept by some. The under girding principle is the same, that the people acting together are obligated to protect the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness of society's members.

Freedom in Society, Part 2

Last time we took a look at the inception of social contract theory in Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes taught that civilization required a bargain between people and government wherein citizens give up some freedom to do as they wish and live under legal authority in order to enjoy some security. The ruler enforces order and the people obey the laws. Once such a civil society is established, he believed, the bond is irrevocable.

John Locke accepted the premises of Hobbes' argument for the necessity of giving up some freedom in exchange for security but came at the question from a little different angle. In his Second Treatise of Government, written in 1690, Locke asked some new questions. What interests would have been so essential to a people that they would have yielded some of their freedom of action in order to see that these were protected? Locke came up with three such interests, which he termed the "natural rights." He identified life, liberty and property as these three rights.

But where Hobbes saw submission to lawful authority a one-time event which bound people to obedience thereafter, Locke saw a reciprocal social contract. In his view the governmental authority was established to safeguard the three natural rights. The government was responsible for protecting the citizens' lives from foreign armies or murderers, their liberties from oppressors or kidnappers and their property from thieves. The citizens were obliged in return to obey laws against murder, kidnapping and thievery. Now if a citizen "broke the contract" and stole, then the government could rightfully take away that person's rights by imprisonment, for instance.

That was as far as Hobbes went. But Locke asked, what if the government was the one taking or failing to preserve its people's lives, oppressing their liberties or despoiling their property? In that case, he declared, it was the one breaking the contract and the people would have the right to replace it and establish a new one to better preserve their natural rights. Locke thus made the social contract mutual and reciprocal. The check on the people was to obey the law and the check on the government was to serve their interests.

Where Hobbes' one-sided social contract served as a justification for constitutional monarchy, Locke's formulation instead promoted liberal democracy as the preferred structure to protect liberty under law. That is liberal in the original sense of liberal meaning freedom, a democracy in which civil liberties are protected.

It is in the Lockean sense, of course, that the founding ethic of the United States was established. In the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson echoes Locke in the, "inalienable rights" of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" and in holding that, "when a long train of abuses" has proven the government remiss in its part of the bargain that the citizens may of right, "erect new safeguards for their future security." In other words, they may change it or even overthrow it violently if there is no other recourse.

I'll explore some further ramifications for rights and the state in my next post.

Freedom in Society, Part 1

The question of freedom is an important one. Freedom is a cardinal value in America, and much of our civic debate centers on what should be regarded as inviolable freedoms and what can or should be subject to limitations. The question has an important bearing on our conception of civilization itself, its standards and its bounds. Must we give up any freedom in order to live in society? And if so, how and where should we set the limits?

The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes began thinking and writing about these ideas in the seventeenth century. His great treatise Leviathan (1651) hearkens back to a time before organized society when humans had perfect freedom. Imagine a nomadic Stone Age type of existence before either law or government. Without institutional restrictions on behavior there was perfect freedom. Hobbes refers to this life as the "state of nature." Yet at some point people decided to abandon this perfect freedom and live under the rules and restrictions of society. Why?

That is because though there was perfect freedom there was no security. In the state of nature the prevailing mode of human intercourse was "the war of all against all," resulting in a life that was typically "nasty, brutish and short." If I enjoyed perfect freedom to kill you and take your food I stood under similar threat from you to do the same to me. At some point, Hobbes surmised, people decided to put an end to this dog-eat-dog existence by setting up a leader with the authority to enforce order.

Thus was born what Hobbes called "civil society" under what is now termed the "social contract." The Leviathan would protect the persons and properties of the citizenry and punish evildoers. In return the people would obey his laws. People would not be as absolutely free as before, but they would be more secure. They would enjoy general liberty to conduct their own affairs so long as they refrained from preying on others or disturbing societal order. It was an arrangement freely entered into, Hobbes felt, and unbreakable once formed.

Thus was established the intellectual foundation of constitutional monarchy and liberty under law. It wasn't perfect but it was a start. I'll discuss how the concept was extended in my next post.