THE PENDULUM OF THE LEFT

What Pendulums Do (David Warsh, Economic Principals, 5/25/2003)

It’s been nearly thirty years since its stirrings reached my little corner of America and swept me up and carried me along — me and half my generation and most of the next....

For some years the term that seemed to describe it adequately was "the Turn to the Right."

But the more my friends and I reflected on our own experience, the more the Left/Right distinction lost its capacity to illuminate what had happened to us. We still felt ourselves to be "of the Left" ...

Yet we were nearly as enthusiastic about the new reforms — stable money, deregulation, corporate restructuring, tax simplification, auctions, emissions-trading and the rest — as were any of our friends on the Right. So the shorthand we came to employ among ourselves was to speak of "the Market Revolution." It is hard to convey now how surprising it was to those of us who became involved....

It wasn’t conservatism that conquered the world in the last quarter of the 20th century — it was capitalism....

Robert Nozick called it "the zig-zag of politics." Henry Adams described a 36-year cycle of governmental expansion and contraction. Arthur Schlesinger Sr. called his similar schema the "tides" of American politics. Albert Hirschman writes of "shifting involvements" between the public and private speres. Or as the newspaper columnist Nancy Nall put it just last week, "It's only a matter of time before the pendulum does what pendulums do."

It seems to me that the left is subject far more than the right to vagaries of fashion. (We conservatives would say that that is because leftists have few principles and little logic to ground their thought, but I am sure leftists would have alternative explanations -- perhaps that their minds are more open.) I would say that there have been few pendulum swings on the right; the right's changes have largely been reactions to swings on the left, as conservatives have searched for new ways to engage and persuade, or rebut, the arguments of the left.

Warsh is a fine economic journalist; he was a long-time columnist for the Boston Globe until the New York Times acquired it and pushed him out, but thankfully he continues on the Web. Here he makes an excellent point about a major pendulum swing on the left. The domestic successes of Ronald Reagan's presidency -- 1981's tax cut and 1986's tax reform -- were achieved with the help of Democrats, and not just conservative Democrats but liberals like Bill Bradley. Socialism and big government had been discredited by the end of the 1970s, and liberal fashion turned toward the free market.

Unfortunately, today the left's pendulum has swung back toward radicalism, and George W. Bush has a less pliable Congress to deal with, though it has Republican majorities.

Let me speculate as to the next pendulum swing: it will be driven by a growing recognition of the importance of cooperative, not coercive, institutions in spheres that the left has traditionally considered "non-market." George Bush's faith-based initiative, for instance, is a small nudge pushing traditional welfare programs in a more cooperative direction, in which the government no longer dictates methods, but supports private-sector parties. Here the left's rhetoric about "choice" will help us make our case. And, though Democratic politicians remain at an extreme, at the grassroots and in academia the pendulum is already swinging our way. I hope the Republican Party is ready to act; for, as history shows, the pendulum may be near the right for only a few years.

Posted by Paul Jaminet at May 28, 2003 9:08 AM