A patriotic revival?

Pro-America and pro-pluralism are two great tastes that taste great together

It feels gauche to recommend myself, but earlier this summer I moderated a panel about climate change at the Liberalism For the 21st Century Conference, and I thought it was very interesting — not because of me, but because of my co-panelists. This conference was about liberalism in the broad philosophical sense, and you can tell the organizers had their roots in right-liberalism, because the panel was the sort we left-liberals wouldn’t put together. Nonetheless, I think Jonathan Adler, Joseph Majkut, and Nils Gilman delivered a lot of insights.

Climate Catastrophism Leads to Illiberalism but Doesn’t Solve the Problem

Adler and Majkut suggest that liberalism, broadly construed, absolutely contains the intellectual and moral resources to address climate change, but, as Gilman argues, the “climate emergency” concept tends to take people in illiberal directions. And as Adler says, a lot of the environmental advocacy community exhibits watermelon (green on the outside, red on the inside) tendencies: They are superficially focused on the fact that industrial activity generates pollution, but more fundamentally motivated by anti-capitalism than by the desire to address specific problems. Conversely, on the right, opportunists deny that any problems exist, and there is an ongoing project of delegitimizing any kind of epistemic institution that could say, “Look, I also enjoy the convenience of gasoline, it just happens to be true that pollution is also a problem and we need a balance of considerations.”

The result, I think, is a kind of dangerous situation in which liberal political movements cede too much space to right-wing illiberals and to the kind of leftists who write op-eds about how air conditioning is bad or maybe we should all eat bugs. Climate change is real and addressing it is important, but liberalism is even more important. Liberals need to have the self-confidence to say that pluralistic politics and normal economic analysis can incorporate accurate information about air pollution without rethinking the foundations of society.

Some other recommendations:

• Alice Evans on norms.

• Alon Levy on what northeastern high-speed rail should cost.

• Angie Schmidt on Jellyroll.

---

Good news this week: The Real Time Crime Index has launched (crime is going down), the Advisory Committee on Historic Preservation has a draft proposal to streamline housing and transportation infrastructure (and it would be helpful if you commented positively on that idea), the latest income and spending numbers are all good, and we’re getting some new surgical techniques to make infections rarer. There was also a potentially exciting breakthrough in banana science.

Comment of the week from Binya: My takeaway from this article is the enduring pointlessness of the 'split the difference' / 'I was for it before I was against it' mindset apparently beloved of career politicians on hard policy matters, which we're seeing in Gaza today. Wars either happen or they don't. Few will care or even remember how many qualifiers were in your speech before you acted to authorise use of force, and rightly so.

Domestic policy is more subtle because you can have healthcare reform of a wide variety of types, but still, the proposals that define people's careers tends to be big, and all that really matters is if you ultimately vote for or against them.

---

Our question this week comes from Matt A: Are there small bore national pride-enhancing projects we could embark on? At the state or national level? It feels like we used to do a better job of growing and tending our national pantheon and I wonder if we could get back to that

This is an interesting question. Stepping back, I find it fascinating how much the Biden/Harris candidate swap has done to get rank-and-file liberals invested in American patriotism.

It’s interesting in part because Biden, in his explicit political presentation, is very invested in patriotism. He’s not really a great set piece orator, and wasn’t even when he was younger (his most memorable speaking moments tend to come in debates or hot mic gaffes when he’s speaking off the cuff). But the big speeches of his 2020 campaign, his inauguration, and his presidency have been laced with patriotic themes about the “soul of America.” By all accounts, he’s a big fan of airport bookstore historians and all kinds of Americana. But despite his best efforts, none of this stuff was contagious. With Harris, I think it’s been a smaller part of her presentation but a larger part of what resonates with the audience. Kamala Harris makes liberals proud to be an American in a way that Biden doesn’t. I cannot prove experimentally that this is related to her race and gender, but I think it probably is.

Regardless of the cause, though, I think it’s palpably the case that Harris has the opportunity to articulate and inscribe a vision of inclusive patriotism that people will be invested in, so I think this notion of little national pride projects is timely.

The first step, though, is articulating a rationale for it in a world where Democrats tend to suffer from agenda-crowding in the face of dozens of competing interest group demands.