Alan Wolfe, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Boston College and Adlai Stevenson-style liberal, had a family connection to Dwight Macdonald growing up, the exact nature of which isn’t clear. He revealed this factoid during a lecture commemorating the 50-year anniversary of Michael Harrington’s The Other America (1962), which Macdonald helped popularise through a monograph-length review in The New Yorker (the transcript of Wolfe’s speech was reprinted in The Chronicle of Higher Education). This connection of Wolfe to a figure who formed part of that famous group known as the NYPIs – New York public intellectuals – makes the job of describing Wolfe’s output a bit easier. His writing is in that ‘not quite scholarship, not quite journalism’ genre that resembles what was produced in the era of ‘little magazines’ from the 1920s to the 1960s of which Macdonald was a prominent, if flaky, contributor.
Although a lifelong academic, most of Wolfe’s output has been in the form of book reviews. (At The New Republic he was, along with Cass Sunstein, responsible for reviewing the Big Ideas books in the social sciences). His own books are themselves largely examinations of the books of others. But they are also eloquent explorations of his own ideas. Although prolific in published works, repetition is not one of his crimes: all his books have been different and, more importantly, called for. The Human Difference (1993), a vital defence of humanistic sociology, would be my pick for his most interesting work, though his more recent At Home in Exile: Why Diaspora is Good for the Jews (2014), is something of a minor masterpiece.
Wolfe is a sort of purveyor of jejune liberal sentiments, considered by many on the left and right to be about as mainstream a progressive intellectual as there is, with regular contributions over the years to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic and The Wilson Quarterly. The folks over at Crooked Timber don’t look upon his mainstream credentials favourably, with regular contributor Henry Farrell, writing back in 2007, describing Wolfe as ‘a sort of Lowest Common Denominator of liberal wuffle’. Farrell wasn’t necessarily implying here that Wolfe was unintelligent; rather he meant that Wolfe’s diagnoses and prescriptions in public affairs were a little too obvious. I doubt that Wolfe’s subsequent publications have done much to sway Farrell’s thinking.
George Scialabba, writing in the Nation magazine, described Wolfe’s The Future of Liberalism (2009) as ‘admonitory, authoritative, benign and bland’. Such are very much the characteristics of Wolfe’s writing in both book and essay form, with a qualified acceptance of the last one. His writing is not brilliant. Rather it is straightforward, conversational, honest. His work covers lots of familiar ground, and he rarely troubles readers with original insights. But this is precisely the reason I’ve warmed to him. Sometimes robustness is preferable to brilliance. If you read lots of methodologically refined works on political and economic issues, it can be refreshing to read a generalist whose reasoning is commonsensical and whose conclusions undemanding.
With his latest book, The Politics of Petulance: America in an Age of Immaturity (2018), Wolfe certainly doesn’t break any ground or advance our understanding of the Trump phenomenon. What he does do though is distil for the reader the temperament of a particular kind of liberal, and why reclaiming such a temperament is of vital importance for today. Following the common trope in intellectual history of grouping a bunch of similar thinkers who wrote on similar issues around the same time and assigning them a retrospective name, Wolfe offers us the ‘mature liberals’ of the 1950s. The core of this group was Daniel Bell, Richard Hofstadter, Reinhold Niebuhr, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Lionel Trilling, though others are mentioned along the way. Wolfe singles these thinkers out not for their policy positions but for their approach both to the malignant spectre of Joe McCarthy and more broadly to the question of maturity in politics.
If we’re prepared to generalise, we have an idea of what constitutes the liberal temperament as distinct, but not wholly separate from, the liberal political agenda. At the beginning of his book Freedom’s Power: The True Force of Liberalism (2007), Paul Starr writes:
In everyday language,“liberal”
also has a meaning that predates but still bears on its political
use. “Liberal” often refers to such qualities as a tolerant and
open frame of mind, generosity of spirit, breadth of education, lack
of prejudice, willingness to acknowledge others’ rights, acceptance
of disagreement and diversity, and receptiveness to innovation (p.
3).
In the aforementioned The Future of Liberalism Wolfe spoke of the ‘temperamental openness’ of liberalism and how it ‘welcomes dissent to its own way of thinking’. We can go broader still, outside the context of American politics, to see what this temperament looks like. Granovsky was the name of a professor of World History (!) at Moscow University in the 1840s and 50s, who was commonly referred to as a liberal despite the word ‘liberal’ having no programmatic or ideological meaning in Tsarist Russia at the time. His liberalism was inferred from his temperament, which one historian describes as ‘peaceable and instinctively conciliatory’ (Offord 1985). The same goes for another 19th Russian intellectual, Boris Chicherin, whose contrast to the passionate, gregarious socialist Herzen was characterised also in terms of temperament: Chicherin’s biographer describes him as ‘a believer in patient investigation of facts, in rational self-control, in moderation in the choice of political means’ (Hamburg 1994).
Wolfe’s own preferred group of intellectuals are defined by a narrower conception of the liberal temperament. He calls them ‘mature liberals’ because they sought a ‘middle way’ not only between left and right ‘but between the naive and the cynical’. They rejected simplicity, believed in the tragic, rejoiced in the ironic. Political maturity
was the single most important
idea that the midcentury liberals bequeathed to American thought. It
was their antidote not only to Joe McCarthy but to all the demagogues
that had appeared throughout American history before him. Their great
hope was that the twin crises of depression and war would make it
crystal clear to the American people that the time had come for them
to get serious about politics (p. 18).
McCarthy was the Trump-like figure for these ‘midcentury liberals’, and Wolfe doesn’t have to strain very hard to find parallels between the Wisconsin senator and the Queens real estate developer. In McCarthy we had a petulant bully who attacked prestigious military personnel, a propagator of large-scale conspiracy theories, an ignoramus who consistently and sensationally lied whenever he had the opportunity. While Trump isn’t exactly a McCarthy clone with a Twitter account, he does have in McCarthy a uniquely American precedent. The most depressing contrast though is that McCarthy’s exit from politics (and from life in general) was swift and sharp, whereas I think we all have the unnerving sense that Trump, or at least his brand, will be with us for some time. Jeet Heer’s perceptive article ‘#AlwaysTrump’ in The New Republic lays out the future scenario where, even after having left office, Trump continues to smother his baleful influence all over the body politic.
The Politics of Petulance is not first-rate intellectual history. As in his other books, Wolfe’s approach to the history of ideas is breezy and competent. About the mature liberals we get a rich enough understanding of their complexities and shortcomings; but at just over a hundred-and-eighty pages of text we’re informed without being dazzled. Wolfe is perfectly aware as well of the potentially negative reaction to using a term like ‘maturity’. It’s possible, he admits, that the term ‘smacks of too much self-satisfaction’. Does he imply through association with these thinkers that he himself is politically mature, and others aren’t? Well, yes, is his answer:
I cannot ignore a truth that to me
appears obvious: some leaders are simply better for the country than
others, and what so often seems to characterize those who leave our
society worse off are personality traits lacking in depth and
perspective, needful of excessive flattery, focused almost entirely
on themselves, and full of petulant anger when they do not get what
they want (p. 21).
Although Wolfe isn’t blind to the economic dimension of Trumpism, there is nothing economic, or indeed really political at all, in his own suggestions for creating a post-Trump era. Whereas many books that have come out in the wake of Trump and Brexit by economists and political scientists offer tentative policy proposals, Wolfe, in keeping with the theme of his book, merely offers advice to his fellow citizens on how to think and behave like grown-ups. Like Tom Nichols in his The Death of Expertise (2017), Wolfe counsels laypeople to rethink their relationship to experts (i.e., trust them more often than not) and to avoid conspiracy theorising. Like the late Bernard Crick in his classic In Defence of Politics (1962), Wolfe implores his readers to recognise the ‘nobility’ of politics instead of pretending to be above or outside it. And like many others, he is generally in favour of greater humility in argument, though not necessarily civility as that word implies a mutual respect which is more often assumed rather than earned.
But most importantly, Wolfe is insistent that Americans ‘cannot continue to treat politics as immaturely as they currently do’. For him Trump’s election was, more than being part of the push-back against globalisation or irresponsible elites, a case of misbehaving men and women. And so the way forward isn’t a basic minimum income but for individuals to start behaving better. This is what would irritate those on Wolfe’s left and is commonly a charge levelled at centrist liberals, that they’re too anodyne in their prognoses. The anonymous Kirkus reviewer of one of my favourite books in recent years, Joseph Heath’s Enlightenment 2.0, made clear the paradox of Heath’s ‘impassioned critique of the current political climate’ and his ‘rather sedate’ proposal for another Enlightenment. And Jacques Lautman in the European Journal of Sociology concluded his otherwise positive take on two books by another mainstream liberal, Norwegian sociologist Stein Ringen, by noting the ‘discrepancy between his sharp condemnation’ of various trends in American politics and ‘the very gentle tone of the counter proposals he makes’.
The appeal of moderates is limited even in the best of times. In a time such as ours, their moderation is perhaps too moderate. Now that everyone is talking about Roosevelt’s New Deal as a model to build a legislative coalition on everything from income inequality to climate change, the last thing that (left-wing) people want to hear are proposals that only go half-way. Or, in Wolfe’s case, proposals that are not oriented around legislation at all but around proper conduct. Wolfe does address this at the end of The Politics of Petulance, looking at suggestions to modify the Electoral College, making voting easier and regulating campaign finance. All ‘valuable’ reforms, but even if implemented won’t do the job. For him, ‘politics alone cannot change our politics’ (his italics). What can is possessing a temperament that is appropriate for understanding and solving the collective issues of our time. Wolfe could almost be accused of essentially telling readers that they could do no better than to imitate him. That would definitely explain the curious fact about the liberal temperament: that is looks and sounds a lot like Alan Wolfe.
Comments