Communitarian Democrats

Posted by Paul

There has been a hubbub in the left-blogosphere of late about the Democrats and whether they should become more "communitarian". You can find link roundups here and here. I don't have time to comment on all moves by all players, or even to give my considered view of the issue. But I did want to make a couple of points.

The first is to stress the need for more clarity in the content of the communitarian recommendation. As far as I can tell, there are two main possible proposals: (1) Democrats should support public policy that conduces toward a social world more in line with certain liberal "moral values." Such policies might range from requiring V-chips in televisions to banning altogether certain references from television shows during certain (or all) hours of the day. (2) Democrats should not support more or different public policy proposals than they already typically do, but they should get out their bull-horns more often. That is, they should denounce publicly certain forces that contribute to the moral worsening of our society, but they should be steadfast in their opposition to the employment of the coercive aparatus of the state to further these moral ends.

The importance of distinguishing the two should be obvious, though I find that the "communitarians" are reluctant to come right out and say which they mean.

Matt Yglesias seems to reject both proposals. Matt is impressed by the "Rawlsian saw" that the liberal position is to recognize a distinction between the coercive realm of politics and public policy and the idea of a background culture within which various comprehensive moral views vie for the allegiance of a society's individual members. Matt says that it is the job of politicians to "enact a policy environment that allows people of different views to contest values," but that the politicians themselves should not enter into these sorts of contests. Making policy, he says, is "what politicians are for"; they are not supposed to be cultural critics or social commentators. Those jobs are left up to citizens within the background culture.

But it is hard to recognize a clear distinction here. Matt wants Joe Lieberman to keep his mouth shut about the sexual inuendo he might see on Friends, because in making those comments he oversteps the proper bounds of his political role. Yet why would Lieberman be overstepping in this case, but not overstepping when he endorses traditional liberal policy preferences such as a minimum wage or certain welfare policies or the right of a woman to abort a fetus? The idea that there is a clear-cut distinction between the values at stake in either debate is hard to swallow. It seems right to say that liberals endorse a minimum wage (or what have you) because liberals are concerned that some people are not being treated with respect, or because some people need their interests protected, or because some people are exploiting others. These are concerns with the nature of the social world, and it is not obvious that concerns about, say, corporations trying to sell kids video games with graphic violence are not relevantly similar to those that motivate traditional liberal concerns and policy preferences.

In referring to the "Rawlsian saw" Yglesias fails to note one important, yet often ignored, fact about Rawls's position: Rawls's idea of public reason--the idea that there is a sphere of distinctively "political" values which alone are the proper bases of public policy--is fundamentally an idea about which reasons it's permissible to adduce in the political sphere; it is not fundamentally an idea about which political institutions or policies are the right ones for a liberal democracy. The latter question must await an inquiry into the idea of public reason, and it is not at all clear from the outset how that question will be answered.

Rawls's view is that a value is properly introduced into the political sphere when it can be the object of an "overlapping consensus" among reasonable but conflicting comprehensive moral doctrines. This criterion is motivate by what Rawls calls the "duty of civility", the duty citizens have to try in good faith to offer only grounds that others would not be reasonable to reject. Many take away from Rawls that political values thus cannot be controversial--after all, if they were, then people who disagree with them might not be unreasonable to reject them. They then assume that Rawls is saying that political policy can rely only on grounds that all accept.

But if this were so, no public policy would ever be justified. The reason is obvious: there is no such policy that does not find opposition from some person in some social quarter. Fortunately for Rawls, he is not committed to accepting that result, because for him the idea of "reasonable rejection" remains a normative one: there are some moral views that cannot be reasonably rejected, because they are simply too well-grounded in cogent, commonsense moral principles--even if people don't recognize them as such. The wrongness of slavery is one such moral view.

Now, I don't want to get into too much Rawlsian exegesis here. My point is simply that the old "Rawlsian saw" does not so clearly support Yglesias's view that politics is not the place for the promotion, protection, or endorsement of controversial moral values. While the duty of civility does force citizens to question whether or not the values they politically invoke are values that they can rightly expect others to endorse, it does not obviously lead to the conclusion that politics and politicians ought to be neutral with respect to the moral status of the social world we inhabit. Rawls emphasizes this point when he says, in Political Liberalism (p. 192), that the duty of civility requires citizens to seek a reasonable, moral common ground, not some admittedly implausible form of moral neutrality.

Given all this, I do not think it is obvious that the respect for persons that liberals often invoke to defend their preferred economic policies does not also justify the regulation or banning of, say, professional boxing or violent video games. While there are strong constraints on the reasoning that must precede controversial political pronouncements and policy proposals, nothing in the liberally plausible idea of public reason seems to support the sharp distinction between the political and the background culture that Yglesias invokes. This does not mean that the balance of permissible political reasons will not fall every time on the side of Yglesias's preferred policies. The freedoms he's inclined to defend may well be the freedoms that a proper exercise of public reason would lead to. It does mean that liberal neutrality--i.e. neutrality-as-Rawlsian reasonableness--does not threaten, in the way that Yglesias's defense might suggest, to cut off all possible foundation for the traditonal left-liberal policies that are surely near and dear to his heart. That would be an unfortunate result indeed.

Posted by Paul at April 14, 2005 04:27 PM