The Nation has an interview with Roberto Unger. It asks.
What is the way forward for progressives in a time when it seems both centrism and authoritarianism are resurgent?
Progressives should try to move in a forward direction- not in a sideways or backwards one. This means refusing to get bogged down by Identity Politics, Grievance Studies, and a Manichaean obsession with Equality or the Environment. Technology has lifted our horizons. Progressives should be like sherpas taking us up 'local peaks' on the fitness landscape from which we can spy even greater heights. The trouble is, this needs technical knowhow. Smart people no longer feel welcome in 'Progressive' circles. Thus, the true progressives now look or sound like Libertarians or Hayekians.
What should be the character and scope of a national program that progressives in and outside the Democratic Party can and should embrace? There are many places to look for answers to these questions, and no doubt the answers will have many inspirations.
One of the most incisive articulations of an American progressive alternative is that of Roberto Mangabeira Unger, a Harvard Law professor, philosopher, and former Brazilian politician. He has written over two dozen books addressing an unusual diversity of topics, including critical legal theory—which he helped develop—economics, philosophy, and religion. Given this range, it would be unfair to reduce Unger’s work to one core idea. But perhaps the major theme of his work is summed up in his argument that “society is made and imagined, that it is a human artifact rather than the expression of an underlying natural order.”
The notion of 'Society' as having some separate existence is indeed an artefact- an unnatural and paranoid one. Progressives must stop trying to grok this sort of shite so as to end up saying 'Language speaks us!' or 'A necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of injustice is the existence of the Law!'
What this means is that nothing in our society—the economy, liberal democracy, the legal order, etc.—is predetermined toward some definitive end.
Thus Progressives won't deliver progress. But we knew this already. That's why we think they are shit.
They are human creations, artifacts whose forms can therefore be challenged, transcended, and ultimately reoriented for the purpose of greater human liberation, individually and collectively.
But this won't happen coz nothing predetermines or makes definite the end to which these shitheads work.
What makes Unger’s progressive vision of society unique are its religious and prophetic elements.
Bolsanoro gets a lot of votes from religious 'charismatics'. No doubt, those guys speak in tongues and believe the gift of prophesy might descend on them any moment now.
He sees human beings as having a divinelike capacity to transcend their societal circumstances to achieve greatness.
So, fuck we need Progressives for?
What prevents them from doing so is the false assumption that there can be no substantial alternative to inherited political institutions.
It's also what prevents them saying 'Qwexkldqje! Tlljcw ghg eejjvessw?' because of their false assumption that there can be no substantial alternative to conversing in inherited natural languages rather than just shouting out nonsense words.
His work exposes this false necessity while providing progressive social, political, and economic alternatives to it.
Which the Brazilians rejected.
In this regard, his work can offer progressives key resources for exposing the false necessity of the American liberal status quo and thinking constructively about a different progressive vision for the United States.
If you have a progressive vision, just spill the beans already. Let us decide for ourselves.
The Nation recently spoke with Unger about his proposal for an alternative progressive track for American politics. Along the way, we discussed racial injustice in the United States, Donald Trump’s election, democratizing new technologies, the future of education, and progressive taxation. Of pressing importance is the topic of structural economic and political change, and in turn, whether Unger’s vision is impractical. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
DANIEL STEINMETZ-JENKINS: Right now the streets are filled with protesters demonstrating in the aftermath of George Floyd’s brutal killing by Minneapolis police. Progressives have long struggled to confront and overcome racial injustice in the United States. You have criticized their approach, the dominant approach, to racial oppression. What is your understanding? And what is your proposal?
ROBERTO MANGABEIRA UNGER: To grasp the meaning of this moment for the future of the country, it is useful to begin by distinguishing the immediate background—the failure of the established approach to racial injustice in the United States—from the larger context of which this failure forms a part: the disorientation of American progressives and the long-standing absence in American politics of any program responsive to the needs, interests, and aspirations of the working-class majority of the country, white or black.
The prevailing response to racial injustice in the United States has been the integrationist orthodoxy. It treats racial injustice as a threshold issue, to be addressed before all problems of economic equality and opportunity. Its signature expression is affirmative action.
Which simply means re-apportioning rents. But Economic Rent is not a good thing in itself. We want to be increasing elasticities of supply and demand such that mobility increases while rents decline. This is Econ 101.
It has done little for those who most require protection, the vast number of black people who languish in prisons and dead-end jobs. This approach has offended the white working-class majority, who believe themselves to be victims of a conspiracy between sanctimonious white elites and the representatives of black workers. And it has provided a model for the identity politics that has addressed legitimate demands for respect and recognition only by diverting the country from engagement with its structural problems.
What is the solution? Tiebout sorting- a subsidiarity based fiscal and legal mix arrived at by local communities. Higher level Agencies can be investigated using statistical tools and regulated via consent decrees. Progressives should be explaining how new technology can be used to make their own neighborhood much nicer and more livable. Some people are doing this. But they expect to be shouted down by 'Progressives'.
There is an alternative. The alternative is to distinguish individualized racial discrimination from the advancement of the unequipped, the excluded, and the impoverished.
How stupid do you have to be to
fail to distinguish a guy who went to Harvard from a guy without a G.E.D whose unfair criminal conviction means he can't get back his minimum wage job on a garbage truck?
Individualized racial discrimination should be criminalized, as it is in many countries.
No need. It is enough that it be a tort.
Social advancement should be predicated on real disadvantage or exclusion, wherever it is found.
No. Raising productivity and elasticity of factor supply is all that is required.
Racial stigma should serve as only one of the standards that, together with other forms of disadvantage, trigger such advancement. Race should be combined with class rather than separated from it.
Progressives should not be concerned with hysteresis effects like Race or Class stigma. Who gives a fuck where you came from? What matters is where you are going. If it's somewhere real cool, lots of people are going to be walking with you.
DSJ: How did the country arrive at its present situation, with the presidency in the hands of Donald Trump, after decades in which millions of working-class voters abandoned the Democratic Party?
Obama answered that. It was the Progressive's 'circular firing squad'. Unger said he wouldn't vote for Obama second time round.
RMU: The principal vehicle of American progressives, the Democratic Party, failed to come up with a sequel to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
What about 'the Great Society' as Johnson's continuation of the 'New Frontier' was known?
The sequel would have had to be very different from the original, which focused on economic security rather than economic empowerment and offers no model for how to bring more American workers into the good jobs of the most productive parts of today’s economy.
Who the fuck needs such a model? The thing is blindingly obvious! Millions of America of all classes and races have made sacrifices in order to gain higher marginal product skills and credentials. There are some glaring 'Mechanism Design' failures as well.
Let us look coldly at what has happened since then. Having begun under Lyndon Johnson by treating the poor as an insular minority in need of support and blacks as another insular minority in need of rights, progressives offered nothing to the working-class majority of the country other than later to dissolve them into a series of group identities and special interests.
What the majority wanted was lower taxes and not pissing blood and treasury away in Vietnam. This meant making the Public Sector more efficient. But, historically, that was a cause dear to Progressive hearts!
Conservatives responded with the formula by which, under Democratic as well as Republican administrations, they won and wielded power for half a century: combining material concessions to the moneyed class with moral concessions to the moneyless classes.
Because the moneyless class has a very strict moral code. You have to promise them to bribe the rich before they will vote for you. Obviously, the only way Progressives can come back to power is by promising to rob and rape the moneyless class so as to fulfil what they believe to be a Government's moral duty to bribe the rich and provide them plenty of virgins from poor families to sacrifice to Hecate.
For this whole period, the United States has had no economic growth strategy
because only 'catch up growth' can be a matter of strategy. Once the low lying fruit have been picked even Japan's MITI can do nothing but sit around with its thumb up its butt
other than cheap money, delegated by the federal government to the central bank,
how shite is this guy at Econ?
and productivity growth has stagnated. The majority of American workers have felt—and been—abandoned.
They have also felt anally probed by Extra Terrestrials.
Into the expanding vacuum that resulted from
the fatal wound Bernie bros dealt Hilary
these successive abdications came the plutocratic populism of Donald Trump: a big fat hoax, given that it has done nothing for the abandoned majority other than to wage war against low-skill immigrants while continuing—it must be acknowledged—to get high employment, with relatively few good jobs, on the basis of the cheap-money policy.
What's so bad about 'cheap money'? Why should the moneyless object to it?
What an opportunity for the progressives, if they had a program. They don’t.
Lots of smart people have programs for making things better for everyone in the area. If there really were a Progressive movement, it would cobble these together into a platform. But there isn't any Progressive movement. There is 'wokeness' and there is careerism and nothing in between.
DSJ: What, then, should be the character of a national alternative that progressives in and outside the Democratic Party can embrace?
RMU: The progressive program the country needs would address the supply as well as the demand sides of the economy, production as well as consumption. It would seek to innovate in the economic, educational, and political arrangements that shape the primary or fundamental distribution of advantage and opportunity rather than devoting itself solely, as the humanizers of the supposedly inevitable have, to the after-the-fact correction, through progressive taxation and redistributive social spending, of market-generated inequalities. More generally, the individual should be secured in a haven of capability-assuring educational and economic endowments and of safeguards against private and governmental oppression.
This is what moneyed Mummies and Daddies do for the precious little babies. It seems Unger thinks 'Progressivism' is a bourgeois sort of paternalism. Fair enough. Why not get Schools and Colleges to repeatedly warn their students against playing with rough boys or dropping their aitches or, most importantly, getting preggers by the chauffeur?
Society all around him, however, should be opened up to contest, experiment, and innovation.
Bourgeois parenting is all very well, but it can't be extended to the whole of Society. Rough boys are needed to do the tough jobs. I suppose one could get in immigrants to do the 'contesting' and 'experimenting' and 'innovation', but what if they don't play nice? What if they drop their aiches?
In that storm, the individual, once safe and equipped, can move unafraid.
Coz the chauffeur is holding the umbrella. What nice eyes he has! But I mustn't fuck him otherwise I'll end up preggers with a baby which drops its aitches.
The storm does not arise spontaneously. It needs to be arranged.
The true aim of the progressives should be a deep freedom, achieved by changing the structure of social life, rather than a shallow equality.
Society's structure changes all the time. We may aim to prevent destructive changes but rarely succeed. This does not matter if some other structural change has an offsetting effect. It is foolish to aim at something which no two people can agree about. Progressives should stick to objective things e.g. technology and mechanism design. It is not the case that the way to change Society structurally is by replacing hand-shakes with anal fisting.
The struggle against entrenched and extreme inequality
is either paranoid shite or virtue signalling shite
is subsidiary to the larger goal, to become bigger together.
No. Growth doesn't give a shit about historic or paranoid grievances.
And the method should be structural change—the criterion of depth—change in the established institutional arrangements and ideological assumptions.
and replacing handshakes with anal fisting
Real structural change is not the replacement of one indivisible, predetermined system—socialism for capitalism—by another.
That is exactly what it is.
It is fragmentary but cumulative.
In which case it is not structural. Every day we lose lots of cells. But they are replaced. Our structure does not change much. On the other hand, cremation does bring about pretty rapid structural change.
The goal of shared empowerment and the refusal to take the established institutional form of society as an unsurpassable horizon are what together oppose the progressive to the conservative.
Who cares what progressives oppose? Their circular firing squad is only lethal to those who indulge their fantasies. True, Umber could not damage Obama. But his ilk did damage Hilary. By contrast, they help Trump when they pour vitriol on him. Why? Because they use phrases like 'unsurpassable horizon'. This makes them sound as stupid and ignorant as they undoubtedly are.
These generalities mark a direction.
No they don't. Unger has nothing to contribute but vacuous verbiage. That is his own unsurpassable horizon of solipsistic self-regard.
They do not excuse us from proposing the initial steps by which to begin to move in that direction in a particular society and time.
So make those fucking proposals already.
A combination of innovations in the economy, education, and democratic politics would start to give shape to the alternative that the country lacks.
But that is already happening! Progress occurs irrespective of in which direction Progressives are pissing against the wind.
DSJ: You have argued in your most recent book, The Knowledge Economy, that progressives need an approach to the supply side of the economy. What does such an approach entail for the future of the American economy and the situation of American workers?
RMU: At the heart of the economic part of a progressive program must be the attempt to develop a socially inclusive form of today’s most advanced practice of production, the knowledge economy, informed by science and devoted to perpetual innovation. It exists in every sector of the American economy—in intellectually dense services and even in precision agriculture, as well as in the high-tech industry with which we tend, too narrowly, to identify it. In every sector, however, it appears only as a fringe, a series of insular vanguards of production excluding the overwhelming majority of businesses and workers.
If a vanguard includes the majority, it isn't a vanguard. Why not say the majority must become above average?
Practices, more than technologies, are what set the knowledge economy apart.
Research and Experimentation set 'the cutting edge' apart. But this carries a risk, and therefore a reward premium. The elementary theory of portfolio choice explains why the 'average' can't be 'cutting edge' without 'robustness'- i.e. high probability of collapse.
These practices bring production closer to discovery. The insularity of the knowledge economy results in both economic stagnation and economic inequality.
No. Investing in the knowledge economy may be a waste of money. The tech might not work. Some other country might beat you to the punch. Talk of 'insularity' is stupid. On the other hand, it is true that Beyonce's snobbish refusal to hire millions of middle aged men like me as backup dancers is a leading cause of economic stagnation and inequality. The insularity of the Music industry is preventing me from earning a good living twerking my ass off.
It causes economic stagnation by denying the most advanced practice to most economic agents.
Like Beyonce refusing to hire me as a backup dancer.
And it roots economic inequality in a lengthening chasm between the advanced and backward parts of production.
Also the fact that tall people are tall is at the root of the lengthening chasm between them and shorties.
To move toward an inclusive knowledge economy, the country needs to develop a 21st century equivalent to the 19th century system of agricultural extension by which it created, on its agrarian frontier, family-scale agriculture with entrepreneurial attributes.
Very true! We should offer the huddled masses yearning to breathe free a ten year family based monopoly to make breakthroughs in specific areas of nanotechnology or quantum computing. Daddy will concentrate on the Fundamental Research. Mummy will develop in silico applications. Baby will build the working prototype. Rover, the dog, will secure venture capital and see to the due diligence side of things. This type of hi-tech 'homesteading' is bound to succeed!
That would require establishing between the government and the producers an intermediate cadre of support centers, with wide autonomy and professional management and financed by a combination of subsidies and fees, to give a wider range of small- and medium-size enterprises broader access to advanced practice and technology, as well as to capital, and to identify and disseminate best practice.
This shit has been tried a thousand times in different countries. It has always been a waste of money. Why? Guys who are any good in the 'intermediate cadre' get hired to do the job properly on a full time basis. Worthless rubbish stay on but have to proactively recruit from a diverse community of disabled gender reassigned drug addicts looking to break into the booming market for Intergalactic Cruise-liners. Then, they get mugged by their clients and refuse to leave the office.
But it is not enough to lift up businesses.
No! We must feed starving farmers and educate illiterate College Professors and house property developers and provide crutches to people who can walk and guide dogs to sighted people and so on and so forth.
It is also necessary to reach out, by analogous means, to people who have little or no relation to business organizations. The best place to begin is the middle part of the job structure—the part most hollowed out by the economic changes of recent decades—improving the equipment and skills of people such as machine repair technicians and nurse practitioners.
This market already exists. But it features 'information asymmetry'. That is why some invest in relevant signals while others don't. Unger, cretin that he is, thinks this is a homogenous class.
The goal would be to turn them into technologically equipped artisans.
But the Training Provider will only provide a one size fits all course that is profitable but which does not impact on long term job outcomes.
From there, it is possible to move, with similar methods and intentions, both up and down the job hierarchy.
Because what people really want to do is move down the job hierarchy.
This second wing of the productive uplift effort in turn merges into initiatives designed to strengthen labor in its relation to capital. No dynamic of inclusive rise in productivity can flourish against the background of low-wage and insecure labor. In the United States, as around the world, stable employment is ceasing to be the norm. More and more jobs are temporary, part-time, or otherwise insecure. The reality of labor performed under decentralized contractual arrangements, rather than as part of a stable labor force assembled in large productive units, cannot be reversed.
Of course it can! There is no reason for fatalism on this score.
It results from changes in the forms of production. But it can be mastered by the law to prevent flexibility from meaning insecurity. The free-for-all gig economy must not become the rule. The counterpart to productive uplift is new labor law—to organize, represent, and protect unstable labor.
So, Umber admits nothing irreversible has happened.
DSJ: Progressive politicians like Bernie Sanders and progressive academics like Thomas Piketty have emphasized the role of redistributive taxes—including taxes on wealth—in diminishing inequality. Why do you resist? And what do you see as the proper place of taxation in a progressive program?
RMU: No progressive program is feasible without a substantially higher tax than the United States now implements. Comparative fiscal experience reveals the truth about taxes. Structural or institutional change reshaping the fundamental distribution of opportunity and advantage decisively overshadows anything that can be achieved by retrospective redistribution through tax and transfer.
Structural and Institutional change happens anyway. What can't happen is top down Structural Change in a country like America absent prolonged exigent circumstances. But Fiscal policy can and does change relatively easily. It is foolish to say 'nothing can be done till everything is done.'
Moreover, in determining the overall impact of the budget on both its revenue-raising and spending sides, the aggregate level of the tax take and how it is spent count for more than the progressive profile of taxation.
Fiscal impact is determined by exogenous factors. But this is true of all spending.
A tax that is neutral toward relative prices
does not exist
may make it possible to raise much more public revenue with much less economic trauma, as the European social democracies do through heavy reliance on the avowedly regressive value-added tax, and then to spend it on redistributive public services.
VAT does change relative prices.
That is not a reason to reject the steeply progressive taxation of both individual consumption and wealth, so long as we understand that the redistributive effects of these taxes are likely to be modest unless we have the power and will to radicalize them and to tolerate the resulting economic disruption. Evidently, many progressive politicians prefer pietistic gestures to transformative effects. Bereft of a structural program, they simply want to show on whose side they are. And some of them are now distracted by the pleasant thought that, regardless of special circumstances, they can evade the whole problem by printing money instead of raising it.
I suppose Unger means MMT.
DSJ: The economic changes that you propose, including a socially inclusive knowledge economy,
coz anybody can do Quantum Computing, right?
seem to have far-reaching implications for education.
coz custodial staff will teach A.P Calculus
What are they, and how can they be reconciled with a class divide that is also an educational divide in America?
Schools will become a Hogwarts were the sorting hat is inclusive. It can turn the cat into a Calculus instructor. This will end the educational divide, coz all the jocks will turn into cheerleaders and the nerds will get them preggers and then the Goths will sacrifice their babies to Baphomet on Prom Night.
RMU: The United States suffers from a severe form of educational dualism. Its schools are some of the best and the worst among high-income countries. There are two tasks. The first task has to do with the institutional setting of the school system. In this vast, unequal country, organized as a federation, the priority is to reconcile the local management of the schools with national standards of investment and quality. Such a reconciliation is incompatible with the exclusive dependence of the schools on local public finance. And it requires cooperation within the federal system to take over failing schools and school systems, fix them, and return them fixed.
Coz the Federal Government is known for fixing schools, right? Betsy deVos is a very stable genius and she's gonna Make America Great Again.
The second task is to recast education on a model of teaching and learning that gives primacy to the acquisition of analytic and synthetic capabilities over the mastery of information.
Unger is educated and gets paid to educate people. But he is shit. Recasting education won't make anyone less shit at thinking. The most we can do is screen them out.
That does so by preferring selective depth to encyclopedic superficiality in dealing with content. That puts teamwork among students, teachers, and schools in the place of individualism and authoritarianism in the classroom. And that deals with every subject from contrasting points of view. This approach is no less suitable to practical, vocational training than to general education, once the focus of such training shifts from job-specific and machine-specific skills to the higher-order capabilities required by the knowledge economy and its technologies. But it does depend on the creation of a nationwide teaching career through cooperation within the federal system.
The school under democracy should not be the instrument of either government or the family.
Coz the Federales should run everything.
It should be the voice of the future and recognize in each young person a tongue-tied prophet.
Why not in animals as well?
DSJ: Can these alternatives in the economy and in education advance unless we remake our political institutions? Our democracy was not organized to facilitate structural change unless crisis forces transformation.
RMU: A deepening of democracy must accompany, in a progressive project, the economic and educational changes for which I have argued: Political institutions set the terms under which change in all other areas can happen.
Yet, change occurs in a manner which fundamentally alters how political institutions work and what they do. Thus Institutions don't matter. Economic forces, Mimetic effects, and Incentive Mechanisms determine the functioning of Institutions. This is why Institutionalism collapsed in Econ.
The mark of such a deepening is to strengthen our collective ability as citizens to master the shape of society rather than to have it imposed on us by history or necessity. As a result, it diminishes the need for crisis to serve as the enabling condition of change and weakens the power of the past to determine the future.
Crises occur whether or not they are 'needed'. Man evolved on an uncertain fitness landscape.
Here there are three major focal points for institutional innovation. The setup of the government, as defined in the Constitution, which powerfully shapes our ability to change society through politics:
It is foolish to say we need to change the Constitution before doing anything else.
the pace of politics. The arrangements that influence the level of popular engagement in political life: the temperature of politics.
Popular engagement isn't a good thing. A high temperature is a sign of disease. We pay politicians to get on with a job which is similar to plumbing or garbage disposal. We don't want to waste our time engaging in this ourselves. We also don't want nutters running amok in the streets.
And the relation of the national government to the states and towns: the federal system.
A defining feature of the constitutional architecture of the United States is its combination of a liberal principle of fragmentation of power with a conservative principle of the slowing down of politics, expressed in Madison’s plan.
Screw Madison. He died long ago. Only mean girls are called Madison in films about High School.
Americans believe mistakenly that these two principles are naturally and necessarily bound together. They are not. They are connected by design to inhibit the transformation of society by politics.
Also the TV screen is watching you. So is the neighbor's cat. This planet was itself designed by an alien species for some malign end.
We can reaffirm the liberal principle but repudiate the conservative one, for example, by allowing either of the political branches to call early elections for both branches in the presence of an impasse. But it is futile to raise this issue in the United States now. The constitutional setup is revered as part of the national political identity. Those who have dissented from this view, beginning with Thomas Jefferson, have gone unheard.
What is the result? The US is the richest and most powerful country in the world. If it aint broken, don't fix it.
Of the other two areas of possible innovation in the arrangements of democracy—the level of participation and the reshaping of federalism, progressives have given priority to the first and dismissed the second as marginal to their aims.
The Tea Party did a lot of 'raising participation'. So did MAGA. Why naively believe that the Progressives are on the same page a the masses? The reverse is likely to be the case.
The initiatives that would raise the level of organized popular engagement in political life would reform the relation between money and politics,
It would make politics much much more expensive.
the terms of free access to the means of mass communication by political parties and organized social movements, and the electoral regime.
The Ku Klux Klan must get equal air-time? That's a good idea?
They are indispensable to a progressive program. Placing them first, however, is a misjudgment. All are highly contentious, legally as well as politically. By contrast, the reenergizing of federalism has immense potential appeal, cutting across divisions between left and right and offering a wonderful device for developing the economic and educational alternatives the country needs.
What is Unger saying? Progressives should advocates 'States' Rights'?
Cooperative federalism, vertically among the three levels of the federal system and horizontally among the states and municipalities, can serve as the initial stage of determined and broad-based experimentation in American public life. Contrary to common prejudice, strong initiative by the national government and the empowerment of state and local government are not opposites.
Is Unger speaking of 'subsidiarity'? Why not go further and advocate 'Tiebout sorting'? Let communities offer different fiscal and public good mixes and then concentrate on reinforcing their comparative advantage. This happens by default in any case. Let it be done more systematically.
It is possible to have more of both at the same time, so long as we define clearly which responsibilities of each part of the federal system are exclusive and which are concurrent. Later on and within limits designed to prevent oppression and abuse, parts of the United States should be able to diverge from the predominant policies and arrangements in the country and create countermodels of the national future. Without such a dialectic of dominant and dissident solutions, no vital democratic experimentalism can take hold.
If people know a thing is an experiment, their short term and long term Expectations diverge. This means the thing is likely to fail because people are aware it might fail.
DSJ: Aren’t you demanding and expecting more than political reality allows? Can’t your views be dismissed as utopian? For a leftist or any sort of progressive, isn’t there a choice in the end between inadequate reform and impossible revolution?
RMU: I am a revolutionary by conviction as well as by temperament. I believe it is likely that I am living in a counterrevolutionary interlude in a long revolutionary period in the history of humanity. I am determined that my thoughts and actions not be controlled by the biases of the interlude. But I understand that revolutionary change today must differ in form and method as well as in substance from what it was in the past. For any program, the direction and the choice of the initial steps are crucial. It does not matter that the steps are longer or shorter. It matters that they be the right moves in the right direction. My criticism of the American progressives is not that the steps they take are too small. It is that they are steps in the wrong direction, taken under the influence of bad ideas about the future, the present, and even the past. The notion of a sudden leap into another regime of social life is a fantasy. Its practical role today is to serve as an excuse for its opposite. Once its fantastical nature has been exposed, what remains for the disappointed fantasists is to sweeten the world that they have despaired of reimagining and remaking.
So Unger isn't really a revolutionary. He may as well have faith in the Rapture or the Omega point or the technological singularity.
DSJ: For the alternative you defend to advance, step by step, it needs a social base, a coalition, that doesn’t yet exist. What base does your program imply? And how can it become a majority coalition without winning support from groups, such as the small-business class, that have been mainstays of American conservatism?
RMU: Every consequential agenda for change in society builds its own base over time. But that effort has to begin by engaging the classes, communities, and forces that exist. It must move them to revise, little by little, their imagination of the possible as well as their understanding of their interests and identities. A program like the one that I have outlined must go in search of a transracial progressive majority. That convergence needs to include large parts of the blue-collar and white-collar working class, of the racially stigmatized underclass, of the small-business class, and even of the restless aspirants of the professional and business class. Such a majority is within reach. Nothing in the alternative direction that I have described is incompatible within any part of this majority. The single most dangerous bias of the left is its prejudice against the small-business class, which has always had an outsize influence on the country’s self-understanding. That class now shades into the growing legions of the self-employed. To give up on it and on them is to prepare defeat.
I don't think Obama or Clinton 'gave up' on this class. I think they were careful to woo them. It was McCain who fell flat on his face by focusing on 'Joe the Plumber'. Why? The Democrats were lowering taxes on 98 % of small business owners.
DSJ: Even when you deal with economic and political practicalities, your ideas have a prophetic undertone. Another recent book of yours is called The Religion of the Future. The country has had its prophets. Does it really need new ones?
RMU: When politics is most serious, it is also about who we are and what we can and should become. It turns into a struggle over consciousness as well as over institutions. The message of the American prophets—including Emerson, Whitman, and Lincoln—was that the individual shares in the divine attribute of transcendence over context and becomes more human by becoming more godlike. Under democracy, which puts its faith in the constructive genius of ordinary men and women, this idea comes down to earth and informs the organization of society.
Man may become more God like. Bureaucrats and Politicians are likely to become more Snake like.
It is not good enough to say that the message has failed to be enacted and that the country should return to its founding ideals. The message itself should be rethought. From the outset, it bore a double taint, which compromised and corrupted it. It misrepresented the relation between self-construction and solidarity, failing to do justice to the presence of the latter within the former. As a result, it tempted Americans to think of themselves as little self-crowned Napoleons. The second stain on the prophetic teaching was to exempt American institutions from the reach of challenge and change and hold them up as the definitive form of a free society. The exemption amounted to a species of idolatry, for which the American republic has paid and continues to pay a terrible price.
So terrible, that there's a long queue of people from round the globe hoping to move to the US and get citizenship. By contrast, the Burmese had a wonderfully Left-Liberal Constitution in 1948. Yet that rich and beautiful country is a shithole for the majority- though no doubt some people do very well there.
The prophetic voice must speak again in the United States. In breaking its silence, it must also correct its message.
Prophesy is about correctly predicting the future. Unger confuses gobshites with Prophets. Let them correct their message, on the basis of focus groups, by all means. But force them to pay taxes on the money they swindle from their admirers. As for Political Philosophy, let stupid gobshites study it if they can pay for that type of imbecility. Don't subsidize the thing. It is pure vanity.
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