Beautiful post. I love your opening lines: "As a measure of how lefty my upbringing was, we had a portrait of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt hanging on the kitchen wall. My parents were ’60s activists-turned-urban pioneer social workers.." I encourage you to do a full post on your upbringing even if just a slice of a few months or years period that you feel meaningful. Thank you for the documentary recommendations.
Thank you! My upbringing has been a running theme throughout, the contrast between what I was raised to believe and what I've found in trying to pursue that as a career. Here's another piece I did about my time as Bill Moyers' research assistant: https://ivyexile.substack.com/p/magical-sorkinism
Daniel Moynihan had a big flaw in an analysis that otherwise made some sound points: he ignored the role of the illicit economy, particularly the economy of the retail trade in forbidden substances that blew up by an order of magnitude- 10x- between 1960 and 1976, and then tripled again by 1983. Dealing drugs paid better than most entry-level jobs; it could be capitalized and carried on as a side business with money from legitimate jobs- and by using welfare benefits converted to cash; retailing illicit drugs is just plain more fun than most jobs- of any sort- in a lot of ways. As the trade gets more organized with "crews" and "gangs", jail time gets easier for the connected. Inventory security is increased, although hardly assured (most home invasions related to the drug trade are not reported to police.) The illicit drug economy shifts over time from epidemic, to pandemic, to endemic.
There are many socially corrosive downsides, as well. Which is why I refer to the War On Drugs as the Dry Rot of Public Policy. The top priority is to get the retail trade out of the hands of teenagers, the entry-level employees. Cannabis legalization is an important step in the right direction, but it needs to be understood that it's around 50 years overdue. The political economy of the illicit drugs trade-a monopoly granted to career criminals by Prohibition- was never taken into account by Daniel Moynihan in anywhere near its actual significance. It was treated as incidental by him. He gave it only cursory notice. Meanwhile, 100,000 illegal retail outlets were spreading like mycelia all over the country. Drugs in high schools are never good, but in schools in poor urban neighborhoods, the attractions of that money have undermined social trust, value systems, concepts of family stability and responsibility...while valorizing criminal profiteering, alienation, cynicism, social irresponsibility, and corruption in law enforcement (including a level of prosecutorial discretion that's weighted heavily toward corralling "the dangerous classes.")
Note that I speak of drug DEALING, first and foremost. The problems of drug use, drug abuse, and addiction get all the attention. I feel no need to enumerate them because most people do get that part. But what they don't comprehend is the attraction of making money in a criminalized market, which is a separate feature from "the problems of drug abuse and addiction." It's worth noting that the more successful and the higher up the supply chain the dealers are, the less they're inclined to dabble in their own product. That fact does not diminish the criminal aspects of the work, or the role played by violence and intimidation. https://edlatimore.substack.com/p/9-lessons-from-living-by-crackheads (That Substack post is just something I found in Notes a minute ago. I've found abundant evidence--including personal observation--that confirms its points, which are commonly accepted wisdom for anyone familiar with the milieu described.)
It's no longer a business for dilettante outlaws the way it was in the 1970s, either. A mature market in illicit drugs is a cutthroat business, and once the throats start getting cut it's a business reserved for those who can handle the heat. Poor people seeking upward mobility in a cash business that often practically mandates firearms ownership. I could list some of the negative impacts to vital social institutions like marriage and parenting, community integrity, church attendance, the safety of streets and parks, shared values in neighborhoods, etc. But I'd prefer that readers give a few minutes of thought to that on their own.
That's what Daniel Moynihan missed. Same with William Julius Wilson, Marvin Olasky, Abigail and Stephan Thermstrom, Donna Shalala, Thomas Sowell, etc. (You'd think Sowell would get it, but he falls back on punitive moralizing on the subject. I have moral concerns about drug use, too. But punitive moralism adds terrible consequences to the situation, and noble intentions are irrelevant. The key is depriving the illicit market of revenue. Incarceration does not do that.)
And no, my policy solution is not some Luxury Belief blanket "drug legalization" easy answer. I'm not that simple-minded. Some of my policy recommendations can be found on my Iconoclasms page. Mostly, I just want to point out that the impacts of Prohibition-enabled illicit drugs economy have been undermining American society for over 50 years--four times as long as the duration of alcohol prohibition and there's still no comprehensive social analysis that has factored in the economic and social impacts.
One thing I've noticed about a lot of progressives from the Greatest Generation and the Silent Generation is that they could have incredible life experience and book learning -- often far more than future generations -- but still be pretty blind to how grounded they were in a hokey old-fashioned Mickey Rooney sort of sensibility that probably wasn't as universal even during the 20s and 30s as the mass media of that time might suggest. Hard-bitten worldly intellectuals who nonetheless on some level ran on golly gee Shirley Temple assumptions about the world. They simply could not imagine, based on their own upbringings and neighborhoods, that Great Society generosity might incentivize a lot of social pathologies, for instance.
I was an activist with Students for Sensible Drug Policy back in college, and was never as full-tilt for legalization as some of my friends. I was more a decriminalize small amounts of soft drugs sort of person so it wouldn't ruin thrill-seekers' lives while mostly allowing the symbolic "just say no" stuff to continue. Much as people make fun of D.A.R.E. it's probably the best starting point for kids however many will eventually peel off.
"I was an activist with Students for Sensible Drug Policy back in college, and was never as full-tilt for legalization as some of my friends. I was more a decriminalize small amounts of soft drugs sort of person so it wouldn't ruin thrill-seekers' lives"
Yes, that position is what I'm criticizing: it does nothing to address the size of the illicit market. The condition of user decriminalization while retaining a completely criminalized and unregulated retail market merely shifts the situation to what applied in 1920-1933 with Prohibition War I: a functional monopoly over the market by career criminals, supplying a huge base of "decrminalized" customers. The decriminalization of small amounts is an improvement, but only kinda sorta. It has no effect on the cornering of the lucrative market by organized crime. (And users of the forbidden substances are still technically guilty of crimes like perjury, for doing things like making false statements on Pell Grant applications. A host of discriminatory provisions continue to affect users of illegalized substances in ways that never applied during Alcohol Prohibition.)
Making drug law reform all about user decrim is merely thinking about the drug scene in User terms. The key to understanding the full extent of the iatrogenic problems induced by Prohibition is to think like a Dealer.
As with Alcohol Prohibition, the core of the problem of Criminal Prohibition of Substances centers around the massive lucrative criminal marketplace that the policy practically institutionalizes, de facto! Simple decrim doesn't touch those aspects. User decriminalization for a first possession offense- not just for pot, but for an array of other substances including crack and opioids- has been the policy discreetly in practice for 30 years or more nationwide, including in "hardline antidrug" states. It was the only way to clear court dockets. But it's temporizing. The illicit market is still way more than $100 billion annually, possibly still more than $300 billion- to the extent that the dollar figure may have declined since the 1980s, it's because the price of hard drugs has steeply declined!
That said, establishing a sensible regime of regulated legalization of this wide array of substances is not as simple as lifting Alcohol Prohibition was. It isn't as simple as saying "make Everything as generally available to adults as alcohol." Federal legalization of cannabis is an important first step. But pot is not the majority of the illicit market in drugs in dollar terms, and the markets for hard drugs have always been where most of the problems reside.
My position is that the real trouble of criminalized drug prohibition began 100 years ago, with the Supreme Court decisions that forbade physicians to use their prescription powers for the purpose of addict maintenance. (iirc there were two of them, I'll get the details in a little while.) The defendants in the cases do seem to have been acting as "script docs", profiteering from brief visits where they wrote opioid or cocaine prescriptions for anyone who made a 15 minute appointment. But the response of forbidding even non-profiteering physicians from putting opioid addicts on a maintenance regime shifted the entire market to the street, and it's been a bonanza for the smuggling and organized crime distribution syndicates ever since.
(Comparisons with the Oxy phenomenon are useful- but only to the extent that they show how "medicalization" can be done wrong. The comparisons to that failure discount the fact that the inventory control technology exists to do medical addiction maintenance ethically and properly. The heart of the Oxy problem was always the diversion of mass quantities. That doesn't "prove" that medicalization and physician addiction maintenance "doesn;t work"; it's an indictment of the absurd lack of regulatory controls that existed in the 1990s, when prescription tracking and accountability was entirely in the hands of separate agencies in each US State! )
The genie is out of the bottle as far as there being unstoppable consumer demand for illicit substances, the big question for me is "harm reduction" in the real sense of the term: how can society discourage, stigmatize, make harder to find, make more expensive, and get it across to people that the stuff can be really bad for you. Whether it's pot or hallucinogens or a lot of things, a bunch of drug cultures adopt a pseudo-religious outlook in which the drug is a sacrament and their profound spiritual movement is only being held down by The Man for selfish reasons. I have known a bunch of potheads who really thought of it as health food as opposed to a more nuanced hey something that will make you feel funny and the music sound better that might also make you fat and lazy. It's a different question with hard drugs, but I still think a bunch of people slide into addiction from basic ignorance or overestimating their own willpower.
"The genie is out of the bottle as far as there being unstoppable consumer demand for illicit substances"
No, no, no. That's a statement of resignation to the narrative that the market for "illicit substances" has reached such massive proportion- and hence is so entrenched- that it's Endemic. Permanent. And that hence the Drug War must continue to fight it out with brigades of dealers, with a level of enforcement that's reached the dimensions of a low intensity civil conflict. We have around 100,000 gang members in US prisons. Perhaps 2-3 times that many on the street.
You're still making the fatal mistake of viewing the problems- and therefore the solutions- as primarily revolving around the User. The core problem to be solved is the Market! The illicit drugs retail industry employs as many entry-level workers as the fast food business. Unlike counter service and fast food cook, it's an inherently violent illegal business. It corrupts law enforcement like nothing else.
It's interesting to me that- having read every page of your Substack- this is the first time I've run into a lingering vestige of the Safe Suburban Middle Class College Educated Professional Managerial perspective that you've recognized elsewhere as a serious problem that impedes clear thinking on public policy. Your remarks indicate to me that you still aren't grappling with ground-level realities on this issue.
I get the difficulty; this problem has some unique features that are resistant to clear understanding. It's easier to just gloss over them. Considering the implications of the existence of the market, the history of its growth over time, and the role played by the expansion of Federal drug Prohibition efforts between the Harrison Act of 1914 and the simplistic, overly punitive, irrational Controlled Substance Act of 1970 makes for an uncomfortable and challenging review- and discussion of the prospect of reforming the "drug laws" in any way that might appear to liberalize "consumer market access"- even by medical prescription- to any substance other than cannabis is still off the table. The very idea of liberalizing drug laws at the supply end was taboo, for decades on end. Even home cultivation of a household quantity (the single sanest reform provision) was ruled out of bounds. A 1996 popular ballot initiative was required to even shift the status of marijuana in one of the states- California- to the place occupied by alcohol during Prohibition (alcohol manufacture and inventory had some very liberal exemptions, for both medical and "sacramental religious" use in the Prohibition Era.)
And now we have the utter catastrophe of the opioid epidemic that has led some observers to conclude that "legal opioids gave us the Oxycontin epidemic." No, the lack of a centrally supervised regulatory regime, the resistance of pharma companies and drugstore lobbying in Congress to 1990s era DEA requests to improve accountability, and the ability to game the system in ways that are utterly obvious to anyone who has been in the Drug Scene gave us the opioid crisis. The role of the Sacklers and Purdue in miseducating physicians about the addictive properties of opioids--as long as they had the magic wand of an MD prescription waved over them- was only one facet of the problem, considered at the User end. The vast majority of the Supply end of the problem resulted from two factors: crooked physicians who took the inexplicably negligent regulation and enforcement policies of their particular State to turn their practices into pill mills; and the ensuing diversion of mass quantities of DEA Schedule II substances into street markets--including a heavy component of retail outlets already previously established and in place to serve the illicit demand for marijuana and other goods on the illicit menu. In the first years of the Oxy epidemic, the pills were a huge bargain, compared to marijuana. More people have a taste for a strong opioid high than they do for a strong marijuana high. The difference is that while marijuana has a trivial discontinuance syndrome, an opioid habit often assumes crisis proportions. It also stops being a bargain, and turns into a daily struggle to keep the supply on hand.
Now there's finally a central Federal prescription monitoring database that almost all of the States are connected with, in order to prevent doctor shopping across state lines.1 The formerly laxly regulated States have tightened up their rules. It's gotten very difficult to obtain any opioid through prescription, particularly for chronic pain patients. "Regulated legalization" remains in place--opioids are still among the most commonly prescribed pharmaceuticals. But prescription opioid maintenance of addicts by prescription remains as illegal as it's been since 1924- even though we now have the regulatory structure in place to detect and curb abuses, and the technology related to ensuring accountability is much more reliable. (Some States have provisions to allow addict maintenance with methadone or buprenorphine. In my observation, confirmed addicts are often inclined to use those regimes on a temporary basis- often after getting busted- before returning to the street market to return to their opioid of choice. To me, user access to their opioid of choice in conjunction with the stabilization resulting from getting it from a physician is much less worrying than the requirement to resort to the illicit markets. Few addicts really WANT fentanyl, for that matter. It's just that they don't find methadone sufficient.
Opioid addiction is strange that way; it's arguable that making addicts chase their supply leads to a more intractable addiction than if they're simply permitted to use it as a matter of routine. I'm simply talking medical evidence here. It's also a matter of record that some opioid addicts eventually mature out of addiction; they exhaust its appeal and quit.
Whatever the case with User outcomes (it really is only their call, ultimately), there's one indisputable effect of prescription maintenance: it deprives the illicit market of a customer. If enough addicts are permitted to shift their consumer demand to a regulated medical practice, the illicit markets will shrink drastically from being deprived of their customers. Addiction maintenance does not mean anyone can get it from a doctor; the condition of physical addiction is required, and that's easily ascertained (real addicts react to narcotic antagonists like Narcan by going into withdrawal within minutes.)
Don't you see? We've gotten the priorities reversed. The most important thing is to deprive illicit suppliers of their currently massive addict consumer base. As long as the illicit street demand is huge, everything else is just trimming around the edges.
(1. Two notable exceptions: California and Missouri. CA has always made it practically impossible for nonresidents to obtain or fill Schedule II prescriptions; their current opioid problems are of recent duration, and often due to in-migration of addicts from other states. Not sure about Missouri.)
One thing that I’ve noted as missing from nearly all general historical overviews of the 1960s and 1970s is the reality of the generation divide, and how far and wide the “drug culture” spread without notice by the parental generation. We’re talking about a social phenomenon hitherto unknown in world history: tens of millions of Americans under age 30 choosing initiation into a criminal(ized) activity with an illicit market, within a span of less than ten years (1967-1977.)
There are partial precedents: the introduction of tobacco to England in the 17th and 18th century, where tobacco pipe smoking as a social habit was largely youth-driven and deplored by older adults; the headlong plunge of young people (including young American women! college students!) into binge drinking during the era of alcohol Prohibition, the Roaring ‘20s. But the crucial difference is that neither behavior was officially criminalized! Possession and use of personal quantities of alcohol was never made a Federal crime. Some states and localities criminalized personal possession of alcohol, but the statutes were enforced selectively, if at all. Whereas in the 1960s, anyone who got into the drug scene knew they were social pariahs, criminals. The laws made by the preceding 2-3 generations made that explicit.
I'm curious as to why you think Daniel Patrick Moynihan's ideas were brilliant and that it was only that bad actors did the wrong thing with structures they built?
The first decades of the New Deal were not a centralized technocratic dictatorship, the semi-populist and decentralized features of the Republic still held as did the democratic governance structures of the old decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties of old. A great example is the TVA, which is erroneously recorded as having been hyper centralized and technocratic but in reality was decentralized with local communities, both people wise and local interest-groups wise, being deeply involved in its policy formulations, designs, and ways of execution, there were a bunch of times they launched programs all on their own or changed programs launched by the center, against the center's manager's wills. Guy like Moynahan lamented this and would comment that it would have been much better if it had been stripped of its democratic features, but they did get what they wanted specifically there in another geography: A hyper centralized version of it was conducted in Indo China within some parts of the Mekong River Delta project and it those parts were by and large a planning disaster. At one point, against the wills of the local communities (they even at some points brought in Marines to enforce yt happening) they built a dam that the community said would lead to disaster flooding and then a couple of years after it was built it collapsed and tens of thousands of people died and far more had their lives ruined.
Moynahan et al, in some cities, against the will of people, demolished whole communities, packed them into these big dreary buildings, said this was a great idea because they would be near production sites, and all the while were pursuing a policy of deindustrialization that then led to much of those sites being shut down.
The list goes on.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan's was drowning in elitism and technocratic arrogance. He, or at least his public persona, fiercely believed in his own cognitive superiority and a was dismissive towards any broader public debate. He and those like him appeared intellectually superior due to their institutional authority but usually failed to deliver effective solutions in practice. Their sted fast refusal to subject their plans to integration or public debate, confident in their own infallibility, led to significant policy failures once these ideas were implemented. And they almost never acknowledged their shortcomings. If they were being honest, I can't help but wonder if they were delusional. If they were so sure of themselves then why did they refuse, every single time, to debate, at length and in good faith, their ideas, plans, and perspectives with any one outside of the itty bitty tiny bubble they lived in
One of the central themes of my Substack is the arrogance of technocracy, and I certainly agree that Daniel Patrick Moynihan was an arrogant technocrat who made many damaging decisions. It's why I'm forced to reluctantly conclude that Buckley ultimately won so many arguments. But Moynihan was also genuinely intellectually curious and genuinely invested in ordinary people's welfare, and never entirely forgot where he came from. Whereas today's technocrats have no intellectual curiosity to speak of and virtually all emerge from an affluent conformist monoculture revolving around the same few cookie cutter schools, institutions and zip codes. Any hope for reviving the sort of New Deal model you describe, where federal muscle is put to work empowering communities to implement their own idiosyncratic decentralized approaches, depends on somehow resuscitating Moynihan's virtues. His flaws we've still got plenty of!
Yes. I would add that there is reason to believe that Buckley was BSing about what/who he was doing PR work for and was just pushing for the same thing but in a different form. A good example from the 1970s when he was fully up and running is the dictatorship of Pinochet in Chile who the whole "side" that Buckley was a part of was doing heavy PR work for. My whole life I'd read and heard that they were doing "free market", then I met this girl from the region who put mw onto some stuff that I checked, and its clear. There are two lanes of evidence, one is publicly made pronouncements/decreed/laws from their legislative branch but more so from their executive branch's public statements on, I forget what it was called but it was like their version of the USA's Federal Register. And the other is murkier because it was illegal actions (like guys intimidating business owners/managers, lots of other stuff), that line is open for a lot of debate but i doesn't appear there's any serious dispute that it went on to *some* extent. But even if you just drop that whole lane and stick purely with the public for sure stuff, it becomes clear that they were not doing "free market", they were in fact doing cartelization and central planning. Same in the 1980s, cartelization and private sector central planning, eventually *mostly* geared around the FIRE industry. Buckley et al were really just backdoor pushing for the creation of a variation of the 20th centuries centralized "corporatist" state, it seems they even initially were making some amount of attempt to try to have an organized religion arm of the socio-economic super structures, like Portugal, Spain, and some of teh other 20th C corporatist states had. All the while pretending to be essentially the opposite of what they were
I was never a Buckley guy growing up, he could be entertaining but I'm too midwestern middle class to find his aristocratic manner very appealing. My chief association with him was that he was the old man cheerleading for the Iraq War that so quickly became a fiasco. I assume he had a bunch of skeletons in his closet, including some of the Cold War-era skullduggery that went on in the name of fighting communism. That said, while there's a lot of truth to what you're saying that a lot of maneuvering supposedly for a "free market" was actually fueled by greed and cartelization, I think the "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" narrative is often used as a crutch to explain away the failures of leftist economic policy: "yes that country that elected a communist is now a notorious hellhole, but that's only because of sabotage by western capitalists." Amidst all the intrigue there were some people aligned with the west, some people aligned with the Soviets, and probably many more non-ideological people trying to play both sides to their maximum monetary advantage.
The Chile case that girl taught me about that I mentioned was what initially put me onto the cartelization/central planning angle; in the Chile is far more obvious because it was so explicit and blatant, they government was not too infrequently literally mandating production for a lot of SMEs mandating their sales destinations. Central planning.
But while its far less obvious in ours, I still found *some* glimpses of it from the formal government side. For example, I mentioned to Mike in another post in this reply space, they airline industry. An element within the Reagan admin seems to have been set up, that took formal actions, that in conjunction with private industry (and I suspect Big Finance), took actions in at at least one huge aspect of the airline industry and behaved in a way that was like halfway towards being a Soviet industry control committee when through a variety of actions (some of which could be argued to be in essence illegal as they required twisted interpretations of the Airline Dereg Act) contrived the Airports hub-and-spoke system that we have today.
There's a good book, doesn't mention that stuff or others that I think are much more important to but too long to mention here, and its an imperfect book, its also old so it doesn;t capture big recent stuff like post 2008 stuff of things that had formed/further developed in the 90s/2000s, but it a pretty good book if your interested in the subject matter, it by John Munkirs and its titled 'The Transformation of American Capitalism: From Competitive Market Structures to Centralized Private Sector Planning'
It doesn't surprise me that "free market ideology doctrine" wasn't applied in Chile. The coup against Allende was 1) a US government backed (with US private sectory corporate support) overthrow of a new government- a that had made overtures to the Soviets and Cuba. US foreign policy in the Cold War in Latin America always preferred any other form of government but that- in the 1970s alone, the US backed military regimes and coups in Bolivia, Uruguay, and Argentine- basically the entire Southern Cone.
Saving the world for Ideology- "free enterprise"- was not at the top of the list. The Monroe Doctrine that the US had asserted since 1820--rightly or wrongly, it's still a key part of US Latin American policy-- was at the top of the list. All the talk about the "right-wing, monetarist, private enterprise" Chicago School of Economics being the new economic blueprint for Pinochet's Chile- that's really about international finance arrangements, World Bank, IMF, BIS loans in return for "austerity" and the development of an export trade goods industry, i.e., free trade globalization.
McGill U. economics professor R. T. Naylor has a good summary of the policies of the Pinochet regime in his book Hot Money and the Politics of Debt (pub. 1987, 1994, 2004)
Of course Pinochet's junta was doing cartelization. One of the primary revenue sources has always been mining- mostly for copper. Extraction industries lend themselves to oligopoly and national monopoly. Unsurprisingly, the richest person in Chile- worth an estimated $21 billion, or around 8% of annual national GDP- is the widow of a Chilean copper mining magnate, deceased 2005.
Hi. My point is that they lied about what the the core design of the system was there and that lie is still repeated today (probably pretty much every times unintentionally) and that there was overlap in the casts of characters who just a few years later were, in the public and private sectors, guiding the structures changes in the USA economy that occurred then and also claimed the were doing "free market". I know you claimed (I hope I dont come across as rude here, I dont mean to be, if I do, sorry) in you other response that we had centralized our economy way back in the 19th century but we hadnt yet, there were centralization, and there were indeed a whole lot after the war with a great deal of consolidation (and yes that was real centralization, my pint is always that we built towards it after the war then took a giant leap), but we then took this giant leap between some point in the 1970s and the 1980s and this was being BS called a pursuit of "free market" but that was a lie it was intentionally the opposite
"A hyper centralized version of it was conducted in Indo China within some parts of the Mekong River Delta project and it those parts were by and large a planning disaster. At one point, against the wills of the local communities (they even at some points brought in Marines to enforce yt happening) they built a dam that the community said would lead to disaster flooding and then a couple of years after it was built it collapsed and tens of thousands of people died and far more had their lives ruined."
This was a US-funded project, in Vietnam, in the 1960s-10970s? "Marines" meaning the USMC? All new information to me. I'd like more details and/or link references.
My own keyword searches aren't turning up anything. That's an awfully big story, to not appear in the newspapers of the day.
Yeah, marines, it often occurred in military operations areas and large parts of it were not development projects but were military projects, the Mekong extends across a few countries and the project was at various points throughout it, the Mekong River Delta was the Marines main AO, the Army's main AO was the Central Highlands. Its hard to find because it wasnt a big attention getter but you can if you try real hard (BTW, the specific project I mentioned may have been deforestation in regards to the cause of the floods, not a dam), they did a whole lot of projects around the world that were inspired by the TVA, in the 1950s they booted up the Mekong River one, but these were *often* (not always, I dont have sense of the ratio) perverted versions in that they were these very centralized and top down versions of the TVA
A measure of how pervasive leftist groupthink has become in the university-educated professional classes. I am retired now but in my careers - first in Education and then subsequently in Architecture - I never had one solitary colleague who was not somewhere on the left of the political spectrum.
We had National Review in our house and I remember “Firing line”. I have always respected Moynihan as being intellectually honest, a trait that is vanishing from our culture.
Whatever hope there is for successful, sustainable policy lies in responsible public servants having intellectually honest discourse and sadly there's been less and less of that over the years. There are a lot of basically well-meaning partisans who earnestly believe politicians can tell some little white lies to get programs over the hump, and then the experts can swoop in behind the scenes and finetune the agency. But there are no shortcuts, and when promises fail to come true people tend to want to blame the opposition rather than look in the mirror.
A big part of the problem with the project that Moynihan and others championed was they apparently did not understand what they had done. They seemed to have believed that the core of the success of the New Deal was the establishment of social programs designed to remedy social ills. I argue that those who worked on the Great Society programs were witnessing the destruction of what the New Dealers had created due the administration's decision to both cut taxes and embark on a war.
I don't doubt that program bloat is a real problem. But I point to the income gains made by black men relative to white men over 1940-70 under the New Deal economy, much of it done without special programs. And these programs do seem to have helped in the early years when the cultural momentum of the old economic regime continued on after its end in 1971. By 1980 it was petering out and the establishment of a new "shareholder-primacy" economy after 1980 has served to prevent further gains. As a result, a culture of failure for lower class people has been reinforced by the economic environment, which when coupled with the lower starting position for lower class blacks pre-1970, has been particularly pronounced for them.
It is definitely important to include the contexts of globalization and the financialization of the economy in assessing the downsides and/or unintended consequences of social programs, there have certainly been no shortage of pundits blithely declaring that welfare makes people not want to work without acknowledging that so many of the good jobs were structurally disappearing. It's very easy to tell people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps as the ground crumbles beneath them.
But I suspect ultimately even had Kennedy-Johnson been more fiscally responsible, and the economic regime changed less dramatically, organizational psychology and the bureaucratic imperative to grow and justify itself would eventually have led to something like the blob we know today, more concerned with maintaining itself than in empowering its clients.
The elephants in the room here are centralization and de-democratization. We hyper centralized and intensely de-democratized, so special interest groups grew far more powerful than they otherwise would have been, if it wasn't the specific groups that did become powerful, then it would have been some other ones
Absolutely. I was raised a very conventional progressive blindly supporting whatever massive centralized federal program left-leaning pundits were upselling, and part of my journey toward a more ambivalent and heterodox centrist position was learning about block grants as a policy major in college. Subsidiarity is so obviously a better idea than one-size-fits-all diktats from Washington, and progressives' dogmatic devotion to centralizing ever more power in ever less accountable federal bureaucracies is perhaps their biggest intellectual blind spot.
But maybe not. Had the pro-worker economy been allowed to continue, fewer people would need programs . Also had the inflation been avoided, conservatives would have been unable to proceed with their tax cut policies. They would instead attack Dems on regulatory and program bloat serving a positive function rather than the destructive policy they actually pursued.
There was a third path that was itching to be taken by most people, and that was an unwinding of both sides of the coin and a return to semi-populism and decentralization. The post of yours in your self reply to this post mentions the " Enlightenment project", but both paths along with the one we ended up taking, are based around hyper centralization, intense de-democratization, near zero policy variability, and locking almost all human beings out of any ability to meaningfully participate in any public sector or private sector policy conversations, no matter what their arguments are, or the degree of strength of those arguments, and while ignoring that fact that there are a great many different argument across the entirety of any given conceptualization spectrum, but by definition very close to 100% of all arguments of all sorts from very part of every spectrum, are not only locked out but never even heard by those doing the locking
I see cultural evolution as the principal mechanism through which historical change happens. The "path" taken is the one determined by the rise of fall in population share of various cultural constructs or "memes".
I use memes to refer to constructs of beliefs, practices, tools etc. that tend to be transmitted as a whole. So it's a bit different than the original use of the word in The Selfish Gene.
We did not evolve in the direction you suggested because the cultural constructs that would do this did not rise in frequency, that is that path was not adaptive in the environment of the modern world.
One has to work with evolution, with the flow of history. This is why things like the territorial empires of old simply don't happen. Where once you had political stability, you no longer do and the whole thing becomes too hard for what it gets the imperial power. A similar thing happened with archaic states once moralistic religions were invented. They no longer could compete.
Hmmm, ok, I would say that there are observations that pose some challenges to what you say here: "We did not evolve in the direction you suggested because the cultural constructs that would do this did not rise in frequency, that is that path was not adaptive in the environment of the modern world."
In the latter 1970s, where the rough temporal space within which the path divergence occurred and where the alternative path I described would have* been taken, this path in regards to the beliefs an practices of most of the population, and it seems explicitly so, was the most organic one to take. If you scour the time period, you can seem much commentary that will contain many variations of the phrase "we just traded one machine for another and the new one's worse". The path that was taken was forced, and a necessary part of enabling it to be taken was mass scale deception, and some of those deception's contents strongly suggest that culturally the path I mentioned was the most natural. For example, people were fed up with many of the centralized regulatory structures, on example of which is was the Arline industry regulatory regime centered around the old CAB; so there was public support for de-regulation, however, it was repeatedly promised to people by its initiators in the later 70s and then by the follow stages executioners of it in the 80s, that while they would de-regulate it, they would not allow airline cartelization, they then repeatedly lied again and again, literally dozens of people in senate confirmations hearings for relevant posts promised first not to allow excessive consolidation and then after a while they promised NO MORE consolidation, but they approved all but one M&A attempt involving a major airline and didn't even look at the many small airline M&A and then used the power of the state to assist them (in some cases, arguably quite illegally) in setting up the airline/airport industry's hub-and-spoke system.
Most all people did not want the great leaps towards further publicly and private centralization that occurred. And structurally it was also more natural to decentralized. What we got was the least natural and adaptive. UNLESS!: your saying that the mere fact that we had done the deep de-democratization and hyper centralization that enabled it is what makes it culturally (since it was only a tiny share of the population's whose culture actually mattered and the path we took comported to it) and environmentally, since they structures that did it controlled the environment,
But in the current day context you may be wrong. As the desire for decentralization seems to be back again, and the means by which our current system has appeared over it pathologies while also producing the material distributions that maintain the equilibrium in our political economy which generates it, namely its ability to run large and persistent federal budget deficits, large and persistent trade deficits, and high liquidity may draw to a close soon; and then the equilibrium in the political economy may break and the most natural and most likeliest path would be a not insignificant amount of decentralization, and I suspect this would also lead to a not insignificant amount of re-democratization. The flow of history is, among other things, the ebbs and flows of centralization and decentralization.
BTW, it could be argued that we do have territorial empires today, they just call themselves countries, like Nigeria, also, is the Global Economic System so different than *some* of the old empires that *at least some* people refer to as territorial empires, such as the pre Westphalian Holy Roman Empire?
UNLESS! you're saying that the mere fact that we had done the deep de-democratization and hyper centralization that enabled it is what makes it culturally (adaptive)
Yes, precisely. Since the rise of hierarchical societies ca 8000 years ago, those as the top have always run things. Revolutions just change who is at the top, not top-down control and so it has always been.
And yet, I live in a society in which a non-elite such as myself has a comfortable lifestyle and lives a pretty free existence, at least in terms of what matters to me. How did this come to pass if elites are always in control and hoarding it all to themselves?
How it happened is that elites are people just like us with all sorts of different interests, situations and personality quirks, etc. This means they squabble among themselves and need to elicit the support of non-elites to further their own interests. This gives commoners a way to influence results.
So, to answer why what you advocate for did not happen (i.e. was not adaptive) is because no elites calling for such could gain a sufficient commoner following to enact their vision.
A non-sequitur first, but need to say it every time Pat Moynihan comes up.
The caliber and stature of US Ambassadors used to be so high earlier. Kennedy appointed John Galbraith and Nixon appointed Moynihan as ambassadors to India. Who is the ambassador today? (My point exactly)
Yes the role has itself diminished, but still one should be able to persuade a few of the Moynihans of today to take up the job!
And now a sequitur! You write:
"Moynihan’s vision relies on a critical mass of sufficiently thoughtful, principled, and intellectually honest public servants, most especially toward the top, of whom I’ve seen painfully little evidence over the years"
(Other than ambassadorships!) the caliber of public servants especially at the federal level is quite high today. In any given cycle it may go up or down a bit, but overall these are top-notch. And when you compare with public servants in other countries it's not even close (excluding countries like Singapore, but the scale is so different it's a difficult comparison)
A handful of names, just off the top of my head:
Avril Haines (DNI)
Atul Gavande (USAID Deputy)
Gary Gensler (SEC)
Janet Yellen (Treasury)
Merrick Garland (AG)
Any other country would kill for this caliber of public servants. The Clinton Administration (imo) had the very best cohort of public servants, but I'd put the current lot up against any of the prior ones (FDR/JFK/LBJ/BHO).
Those were all sequiturs if you ask me… I certainly agree that the United States has a more credentialed/”educated” governing class than many other places where the position is something you bought or are given because you’re somebody’s in-law. (Although it does seem like that describes a ton of our ambassadors these days!) And there’s much less garden-variety corruption in the sense of skimming off the top for one’s direct personal enrichment.
The issue is how meaningful those credentials are and how substantive the education was/is. Unfortunately, vast swathes of the policy discourse are just vaporware – lots of jargon and abstractions and statistical regressions without grappling with fundamental questions of incentives and institutional dysfunction and human nature. Of course there are many excellent public servants conscientiously doing their best, but there are also many careerist apparatchiks primarily seeking to benefit their partisan allies and rise through the ranks. From my experience studying with, working with, and covering the governing class, I’ve come to doubt there’s enough of the first category to make up for the second.
Beautiful post. I love your opening lines: "As a measure of how lefty my upbringing was, we had a portrait of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt hanging on the kitchen wall. My parents were ’60s activists-turned-urban pioneer social workers.." I encourage you to do a full post on your upbringing even if just a slice of a few months or years period that you feel meaningful. Thank you for the documentary recommendations.
Thank you! My upbringing has been a running theme throughout, the contrast between what I was raised to believe and what I've found in trying to pursue that as a career. Here's another piece I did about my time as Bill Moyers' research assistant: https://ivyexile.substack.com/p/magical-sorkinism
Thank you. I'll check it out.
This is awesome, and describes a lot of us. Thank you.
Daniel Moynihan had a big flaw in an analysis that otherwise made some sound points: he ignored the role of the illicit economy, particularly the economy of the retail trade in forbidden substances that blew up by an order of magnitude- 10x- between 1960 and 1976, and then tripled again by 1983. Dealing drugs paid better than most entry-level jobs; it could be capitalized and carried on as a side business with money from legitimate jobs- and by using welfare benefits converted to cash; retailing illicit drugs is just plain more fun than most jobs- of any sort- in a lot of ways. As the trade gets more organized with "crews" and "gangs", jail time gets easier for the connected. Inventory security is increased, although hardly assured (most home invasions related to the drug trade are not reported to police.) The illicit drug economy shifts over time from epidemic, to pandemic, to endemic.
There are many socially corrosive downsides, as well. Which is why I refer to the War On Drugs as the Dry Rot of Public Policy. The top priority is to get the retail trade out of the hands of teenagers, the entry-level employees. Cannabis legalization is an important step in the right direction, but it needs to be understood that it's around 50 years overdue. The political economy of the illicit drugs trade-a monopoly granted to career criminals by Prohibition- was never taken into account by Daniel Moynihan in anywhere near its actual significance. It was treated as incidental by him. He gave it only cursory notice. Meanwhile, 100,000 illegal retail outlets were spreading like mycelia all over the country. Drugs in high schools are never good, but in schools in poor urban neighborhoods, the attractions of that money have undermined social trust, value systems, concepts of family stability and responsibility...while valorizing criminal profiteering, alienation, cynicism, social irresponsibility, and corruption in law enforcement (including a level of prosecutorial discretion that's weighted heavily toward corralling "the dangerous classes.")
Note that I speak of drug DEALING, first and foremost. The problems of drug use, drug abuse, and addiction get all the attention. I feel no need to enumerate them because most people do get that part. But what they don't comprehend is the attraction of making money in a criminalized market, which is a separate feature from "the problems of drug abuse and addiction." It's worth noting that the more successful and the higher up the supply chain the dealers are, the less they're inclined to dabble in their own product. That fact does not diminish the criminal aspects of the work, or the role played by violence and intimidation. https://edlatimore.substack.com/p/9-lessons-from-living-by-crackheads (That Substack post is just something I found in Notes a minute ago. I've found abundant evidence--including personal observation--that confirms its points, which are commonly accepted wisdom for anyone familiar with the milieu described.)
It's no longer a business for dilettante outlaws the way it was in the 1970s, either. A mature market in illicit drugs is a cutthroat business, and once the throats start getting cut it's a business reserved for those who can handle the heat. Poor people seeking upward mobility in a cash business that often practically mandates firearms ownership. I could list some of the negative impacts to vital social institutions like marriage and parenting, community integrity, church attendance, the safety of streets and parks, shared values in neighborhoods, etc. But I'd prefer that readers give a few minutes of thought to that on their own.
That's what Daniel Moynihan missed. Same with William Julius Wilson, Marvin Olasky, Abigail and Stephan Thermstrom, Donna Shalala, Thomas Sowell, etc. (You'd think Sowell would get it, but he falls back on punitive moralizing on the subject. I have moral concerns about drug use, too. But punitive moralism adds terrible consequences to the situation, and noble intentions are irrelevant. The key is depriving the illicit market of revenue. Incarceration does not do that.)
And no, my policy solution is not some Luxury Belief blanket "drug legalization" easy answer. I'm not that simple-minded. Some of my policy recommendations can be found on my Iconoclasms page. Mostly, I just want to point out that the impacts of Prohibition-enabled illicit drugs economy have been undermining American society for over 50 years--four times as long as the duration of alcohol prohibition and there's still no comprehensive social analysis that has factored in the economic and social impacts.
One thing I've noticed about a lot of progressives from the Greatest Generation and the Silent Generation is that they could have incredible life experience and book learning -- often far more than future generations -- but still be pretty blind to how grounded they were in a hokey old-fashioned Mickey Rooney sort of sensibility that probably wasn't as universal even during the 20s and 30s as the mass media of that time might suggest. Hard-bitten worldly intellectuals who nonetheless on some level ran on golly gee Shirley Temple assumptions about the world. They simply could not imagine, based on their own upbringings and neighborhoods, that Great Society generosity might incentivize a lot of social pathologies, for instance.
I was an activist with Students for Sensible Drug Policy back in college, and was never as full-tilt for legalization as some of my friends. I was more a decriminalize small amounts of soft drugs sort of person so it wouldn't ruin thrill-seekers' lives while mostly allowing the symbolic "just say no" stuff to continue. Much as people make fun of D.A.R.E. it's probably the best starting point for kids however many will eventually peel off.
"I was an activist with Students for Sensible Drug Policy back in college, and was never as full-tilt for legalization as some of my friends. I was more a decriminalize small amounts of soft drugs sort of person so it wouldn't ruin thrill-seekers' lives"
Yes, that position is what I'm criticizing: it does nothing to address the size of the illicit market. The condition of user decriminalization while retaining a completely criminalized and unregulated retail market merely shifts the situation to what applied in 1920-1933 with Prohibition War I: a functional monopoly over the market by career criminals, supplying a huge base of "decrminalized" customers. The decriminalization of small amounts is an improvement, but only kinda sorta. It has no effect on the cornering of the lucrative market by organized crime. (And users of the forbidden substances are still technically guilty of crimes like perjury, for doing things like making false statements on Pell Grant applications. A host of discriminatory provisions continue to affect users of illegalized substances in ways that never applied during Alcohol Prohibition.)
Making drug law reform all about user decrim is merely thinking about the drug scene in User terms. The key to understanding the full extent of the iatrogenic problems induced by Prohibition is to think like a Dealer.
As with Alcohol Prohibition, the core of the problem of Criminal Prohibition of Substances centers around the massive lucrative criminal marketplace that the policy practically institutionalizes, de facto! Simple decrim doesn't touch those aspects. User decriminalization for a first possession offense- not just for pot, but for an array of other substances including crack and opioids- has been the policy discreetly in practice for 30 years or more nationwide, including in "hardline antidrug" states. It was the only way to clear court dockets. But it's temporizing. The illicit market is still way more than $100 billion annually, possibly still more than $300 billion- to the extent that the dollar figure may have declined since the 1980s, it's because the price of hard drugs has steeply declined!
That said, establishing a sensible regime of regulated legalization of this wide array of substances is not as simple as lifting Alcohol Prohibition was. It isn't as simple as saying "make Everything as generally available to adults as alcohol." Federal legalization of cannabis is an important first step. But pot is not the majority of the illicit market in drugs in dollar terms, and the markets for hard drugs have always been where most of the problems reside.
My position is that the real trouble of criminalized drug prohibition began 100 years ago, with the Supreme Court decisions that forbade physicians to use their prescription powers for the purpose of addict maintenance. (iirc there were two of them, I'll get the details in a little while.) The defendants in the cases do seem to have been acting as "script docs", profiteering from brief visits where they wrote opioid or cocaine prescriptions for anyone who made a 15 minute appointment. But the response of forbidding even non-profiteering physicians from putting opioid addicts on a maintenance regime shifted the entire market to the street, and it's been a bonanza for the smuggling and organized crime distribution syndicates ever since.
(Comparisons with the Oxy phenomenon are useful- but only to the extent that they show how "medicalization" can be done wrong. The comparisons to that failure discount the fact that the inventory control technology exists to do medical addiction maintenance ethically and properly. The heart of the Oxy problem was always the diversion of mass quantities. That doesn't "prove" that medicalization and physician addiction maintenance "doesn;t work"; it's an indictment of the absurd lack of regulatory controls that existed in the 1990s, when prescription tracking and accountability was entirely in the hands of separate agencies in each US State! )
The genie is out of the bottle as far as there being unstoppable consumer demand for illicit substances, the big question for me is "harm reduction" in the real sense of the term: how can society discourage, stigmatize, make harder to find, make more expensive, and get it across to people that the stuff can be really bad for you. Whether it's pot or hallucinogens or a lot of things, a bunch of drug cultures adopt a pseudo-religious outlook in which the drug is a sacrament and their profound spiritual movement is only being held down by The Man for selfish reasons. I have known a bunch of potheads who really thought of it as health food as opposed to a more nuanced hey something that will make you feel funny and the music sound better that might also make you fat and lazy. It's a different question with hard drugs, but I still think a bunch of people slide into addiction from basic ignorance or overestimating their own willpower.
"The genie is out of the bottle as far as there being unstoppable consumer demand for illicit substances"
No, no, no. That's a statement of resignation to the narrative that the market for "illicit substances" has reached such massive proportion- and hence is so entrenched- that it's Endemic. Permanent. And that hence the Drug War must continue to fight it out with brigades of dealers, with a level of enforcement that's reached the dimensions of a low intensity civil conflict. We have around 100,000 gang members in US prisons. Perhaps 2-3 times that many on the street.
You're still making the fatal mistake of viewing the problems- and therefore the solutions- as primarily revolving around the User. The core problem to be solved is the Market! The illicit drugs retail industry employs as many entry-level workers as the fast food business. Unlike counter service and fast food cook, it's an inherently violent illegal business. It corrupts law enforcement like nothing else.
It's interesting to me that- having read every page of your Substack- this is the first time I've run into a lingering vestige of the Safe Suburban Middle Class College Educated Professional Managerial perspective that you've recognized elsewhere as a serious problem that impedes clear thinking on public policy. Your remarks indicate to me that you still aren't grappling with ground-level realities on this issue.
I get the difficulty; this problem has some unique features that are resistant to clear understanding. It's easier to just gloss over them. Considering the implications of the existence of the market, the history of its growth over time, and the role played by the expansion of Federal drug Prohibition efforts between the Harrison Act of 1914 and the simplistic, overly punitive, irrational Controlled Substance Act of 1970 makes for an uncomfortable and challenging review- and discussion of the prospect of reforming the "drug laws" in any way that might appear to liberalize "consumer market access"- even by medical prescription- to any substance other than cannabis is still off the table. The very idea of liberalizing drug laws at the supply end was taboo, for decades on end. Even home cultivation of a household quantity (the single sanest reform provision) was ruled out of bounds. A 1996 popular ballot initiative was required to even shift the status of marijuana in one of the states- California- to the place occupied by alcohol during Prohibition (alcohol manufacture and inventory had some very liberal exemptions, for both medical and "sacramental religious" use in the Prohibition Era.)
And now we have the utter catastrophe of the opioid epidemic that has led some observers to conclude that "legal opioids gave us the Oxycontin epidemic." No, the lack of a centrally supervised regulatory regime, the resistance of pharma companies and drugstore lobbying in Congress to 1990s era DEA requests to improve accountability, and the ability to game the system in ways that are utterly obvious to anyone who has been in the Drug Scene gave us the opioid crisis. The role of the Sacklers and Purdue in miseducating physicians about the addictive properties of opioids--as long as they had the magic wand of an MD prescription waved over them- was only one facet of the problem, considered at the User end. The vast majority of the Supply end of the problem resulted from two factors: crooked physicians who took the inexplicably negligent regulation and enforcement policies of their particular State to turn their practices into pill mills; and the ensuing diversion of mass quantities of DEA Schedule II substances into street markets--including a heavy component of retail outlets already previously established and in place to serve the illicit demand for marijuana and other goods on the illicit menu. In the first years of the Oxy epidemic, the pills were a huge bargain, compared to marijuana. More people have a taste for a strong opioid high than they do for a strong marijuana high. The difference is that while marijuana has a trivial discontinuance syndrome, an opioid habit often assumes crisis proportions. It also stops being a bargain, and turns into a daily struggle to keep the supply on hand.
Now there's finally a central Federal prescription monitoring database that almost all of the States are connected with, in order to prevent doctor shopping across state lines.1 The formerly laxly regulated States have tightened up their rules. It's gotten very difficult to obtain any opioid through prescription, particularly for chronic pain patients. "Regulated legalization" remains in place--opioids are still among the most commonly prescribed pharmaceuticals. But prescription opioid maintenance of addicts by prescription remains as illegal as it's been since 1924- even though we now have the regulatory structure in place to detect and curb abuses, and the technology related to ensuring accountability is much more reliable. (Some States have provisions to allow addict maintenance with methadone or buprenorphine. In my observation, confirmed addicts are often inclined to use those regimes on a temporary basis- often after getting busted- before returning to the street market to return to their opioid of choice. To me, user access to their opioid of choice in conjunction with the stabilization resulting from getting it from a physician is much less worrying than the requirement to resort to the illicit markets. Few addicts really WANT fentanyl, for that matter. It's just that they don't find methadone sufficient.
Opioid addiction is strange that way; it's arguable that making addicts chase their supply leads to a more intractable addiction than if they're simply permitted to use it as a matter of routine. I'm simply talking medical evidence here. It's also a matter of record that some opioid addicts eventually mature out of addiction; they exhaust its appeal and quit.
Whatever the case with User outcomes (it really is only their call, ultimately), there's one indisputable effect of prescription maintenance: it deprives the illicit market of a customer. If enough addicts are permitted to shift their consumer demand to a regulated medical practice, the illicit markets will shrink drastically from being deprived of their customers. Addiction maintenance does not mean anyone can get it from a doctor; the condition of physical addiction is required, and that's easily ascertained (real addicts react to narcotic antagonists like Narcan by going into withdrawal within minutes.)
Don't you see? We've gotten the priorities reversed. The most important thing is to deprive illicit suppliers of their currently massive addict consumer base. As long as the illicit street demand is huge, everything else is just trimming around the edges.
(1. Two notable exceptions: California and Missouri. CA has always made it practically impossible for nonresidents to obtain or fill Schedule II prescriptions; their current opioid problems are of recent duration, and often due to in-migration of addicts from other states. Not sure about Missouri.)
One thing that I’ve noted as missing from nearly all general historical overviews of the 1960s and 1970s is the reality of the generation divide, and how far and wide the “drug culture” spread without notice by the parental generation. We’re talking about a social phenomenon hitherto unknown in world history: tens of millions of Americans under age 30 choosing initiation into a criminal(ized) activity with an illicit market, within a span of less than ten years (1967-1977.)
There are partial precedents: the introduction of tobacco to England in the 17th and 18th century, where tobacco pipe smoking as a social habit was largely youth-driven and deplored by older adults; the headlong plunge of young people (including young American women! college students!) into binge drinking during the era of alcohol Prohibition, the Roaring ‘20s. But the crucial difference is that neither behavior was officially criminalized! Possession and use of personal quantities of alcohol was never made a Federal crime. Some states and localities criminalized personal possession of alcohol, but the statutes were enforced selectively, if at all. Whereas in the 1960s, anyone who got into the drug scene knew they were social pariahs, criminals. The laws made by the preceding 2-3 generations made that explicit.
I'm curious as to why you think Daniel Patrick Moynihan's ideas were brilliant and that it was only that bad actors did the wrong thing with structures they built?
The first decades of the New Deal were not a centralized technocratic dictatorship, the semi-populist and decentralized features of the Republic still held as did the democratic governance structures of the old decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties of old. A great example is the TVA, which is erroneously recorded as having been hyper centralized and technocratic but in reality was decentralized with local communities, both people wise and local interest-groups wise, being deeply involved in its policy formulations, designs, and ways of execution, there were a bunch of times they launched programs all on their own or changed programs launched by the center, against the center's manager's wills. Guy like Moynahan lamented this and would comment that it would have been much better if it had been stripped of its democratic features, but they did get what they wanted specifically there in another geography: A hyper centralized version of it was conducted in Indo China within some parts of the Mekong River Delta project and it those parts were by and large a planning disaster. At one point, against the wills of the local communities (they even at some points brought in Marines to enforce yt happening) they built a dam that the community said would lead to disaster flooding and then a couple of years after it was built it collapsed and tens of thousands of people died and far more had their lives ruined.
Moynahan et al, in some cities, against the will of people, demolished whole communities, packed them into these big dreary buildings, said this was a great idea because they would be near production sites, and all the while were pursuing a policy of deindustrialization that then led to much of those sites being shut down.
The list goes on.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan's was drowning in elitism and technocratic arrogance. He, or at least his public persona, fiercely believed in his own cognitive superiority and a was dismissive towards any broader public debate. He and those like him appeared intellectually superior due to their institutional authority but usually failed to deliver effective solutions in practice. Their sted fast refusal to subject their plans to integration or public debate, confident in their own infallibility, led to significant policy failures once these ideas were implemented. And they almost never acknowledged their shortcomings. If they were being honest, I can't help but wonder if they were delusional. If they were so sure of themselves then why did they refuse, every single time, to debate, at length and in good faith, their ideas, plans, and perspectives with any one outside of the itty bitty tiny bubble they lived in
One of the central themes of my Substack is the arrogance of technocracy, and I certainly agree that Daniel Patrick Moynihan was an arrogant technocrat who made many damaging decisions. It's why I'm forced to reluctantly conclude that Buckley ultimately won so many arguments. But Moynihan was also genuinely intellectually curious and genuinely invested in ordinary people's welfare, and never entirely forgot where he came from. Whereas today's technocrats have no intellectual curiosity to speak of and virtually all emerge from an affluent conformist monoculture revolving around the same few cookie cutter schools, institutions and zip codes. Any hope for reviving the sort of New Deal model you describe, where federal muscle is put to work empowering communities to implement their own idiosyncratic decentralized approaches, depends on somehow resuscitating Moynihan's virtues. His flaws we've still got plenty of!
Yes. I would add that there is reason to believe that Buckley was BSing about what/who he was doing PR work for and was just pushing for the same thing but in a different form. A good example from the 1970s when he was fully up and running is the dictatorship of Pinochet in Chile who the whole "side" that Buckley was a part of was doing heavy PR work for. My whole life I'd read and heard that they were doing "free market", then I met this girl from the region who put mw onto some stuff that I checked, and its clear. There are two lanes of evidence, one is publicly made pronouncements/decreed/laws from their legislative branch but more so from their executive branch's public statements on, I forget what it was called but it was like their version of the USA's Federal Register. And the other is murkier because it was illegal actions (like guys intimidating business owners/managers, lots of other stuff), that line is open for a lot of debate but i doesn't appear there's any serious dispute that it went on to *some* extent. But even if you just drop that whole lane and stick purely with the public for sure stuff, it becomes clear that they were not doing "free market", they were in fact doing cartelization and central planning. Same in the 1980s, cartelization and private sector central planning, eventually *mostly* geared around the FIRE industry. Buckley et al were really just backdoor pushing for the creation of a variation of the 20th centuries centralized "corporatist" state, it seems they even initially were making some amount of attempt to try to have an organized religion arm of the socio-economic super structures, like Portugal, Spain, and some of teh other 20th C corporatist states had. All the while pretending to be essentially the opposite of what they were
I was never a Buckley guy growing up, he could be entertaining but I'm too midwestern middle class to find his aristocratic manner very appealing. My chief association with him was that he was the old man cheerleading for the Iraq War that so quickly became a fiasco. I assume he had a bunch of skeletons in his closet, including some of the Cold War-era skullduggery that went on in the name of fighting communism. That said, while there's a lot of truth to what you're saying that a lot of maneuvering supposedly for a "free market" was actually fueled by greed and cartelization, I think the "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" narrative is often used as a crutch to explain away the failures of leftist economic policy: "yes that country that elected a communist is now a notorious hellhole, but that's only because of sabotage by western capitalists." Amidst all the intrigue there were some people aligned with the west, some people aligned with the Soviets, and probably many more non-ideological people trying to play both sides to their maximum monetary advantage.
The Chile case that girl taught me about that I mentioned was what initially put me onto the cartelization/central planning angle; in the Chile is far more obvious because it was so explicit and blatant, they government was not too infrequently literally mandating production for a lot of SMEs mandating their sales destinations. Central planning.
But while its far less obvious in ours, I still found *some* glimpses of it from the formal government side. For example, I mentioned to Mike in another post in this reply space, they airline industry. An element within the Reagan admin seems to have been set up, that took formal actions, that in conjunction with private industry (and I suspect Big Finance), took actions in at at least one huge aspect of the airline industry and behaved in a way that was like halfway towards being a Soviet industry control committee when through a variety of actions (some of which could be argued to be in essence illegal as they required twisted interpretations of the Airline Dereg Act) contrived the Airports hub-and-spoke system that we have today.
There's a good book, doesn't mention that stuff or others that I think are much more important to but too long to mention here, and its an imperfect book, its also old so it doesn;t capture big recent stuff like post 2008 stuff of things that had formed/further developed in the 90s/2000s, but it a pretty good book if your interested in the subject matter, it by John Munkirs and its titled 'The Transformation of American Capitalism: From Competitive Market Structures to Centralized Private Sector Planning'
It doesn't surprise me that "free market ideology doctrine" wasn't applied in Chile. The coup against Allende was 1) a US government backed (with US private sectory corporate support) overthrow of a new government- a that had made overtures to the Soviets and Cuba. US foreign policy in the Cold War in Latin America always preferred any other form of government but that- in the 1970s alone, the US backed military regimes and coups in Bolivia, Uruguay, and Argentine- basically the entire Southern Cone.
Saving the world for Ideology- "free enterprise"- was not at the top of the list. The Monroe Doctrine that the US had asserted since 1820--rightly or wrongly, it's still a key part of US Latin American policy-- was at the top of the list. All the talk about the "right-wing, monetarist, private enterprise" Chicago School of Economics being the new economic blueprint for Pinochet's Chile- that's really about international finance arrangements, World Bank, IMF, BIS loans in return for "austerity" and the development of an export trade goods industry, i.e., free trade globalization.
McGill U. economics professor R. T. Naylor has a good summary of the policies of the Pinochet regime in his book Hot Money and the Politics of Debt (pub. 1987, 1994, 2004)
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Hot_Money_and_the_Politics_of_Debt/z9C5bA5xN84C?hl=en
Used to be available to read free on archive.org- at least you can still see the cover of the 1st edition. https://archive.org/details/hotmoneypolitics00nayl
Since I own a 1st printing hardcover copy, I have to note that this link gives an incorrect publication date- 1976. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Hot-money-and-the-politics-of-debt-Naylor/2b2f35c05b5958a51632ad13f91455e35c496c02
Open Library link https://openlibrary.org/books/OL1805797M/Hot_money_and_the_politics_of_debt
Of course Pinochet's junta was doing cartelization. One of the primary revenue sources has always been mining- mostly for copper. Extraction industries lend themselves to oligopoly and national monopoly. Unsurprisingly, the richest person in Chile- worth an estimated $21 billion, or around 8% of annual national GDP- is the widow of a Chilean copper mining magnate, deceased 2005.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chileans_by_net_worth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%B3nico_Luksic_Abaroa
Hi. My point is that they lied about what the the core design of the system was there and that lie is still repeated today (probably pretty much every times unintentionally) and that there was overlap in the casts of characters who just a few years later were, in the public and private sectors, guiding the structures changes in the USA economy that occurred then and also claimed the were doing "free market". I know you claimed (I hope I dont come across as rude here, I dont mean to be, if I do, sorry) in you other response that we had centralized our economy way back in the 19th century but we hadnt yet, there were centralization, and there were indeed a whole lot after the war with a great deal of consolidation (and yes that was real centralization, my pint is always that we built towards it after the war then took a giant leap), but we then took this giant leap between some point in the 1970s and the 1980s and this was being BS called a pursuit of "free market" but that was a lie it was intentionally the opposite
I agree, the process ran far beyond what had previously been possible or imaginable in the 1980s.
From an entry on my Iconoclasms blog:
Late 20th Century American History: The Expansion of Globalization, Tax Policy, and Widening Wealth Disparity
America: What Went Wrong, by Donald Barlett and James B. Steele
The Politics Of Rich And Poor, by Donald Barlett and James B. Steele
America: Who Really Pays The Taxes? by Donald Barlett and James B. Steele
America: Who Stole The Dream? Donald Barlett and James B. Steele
https://substack.com/@adwjeditor/p-137502109
I recommend the book Partners In Power by Roger Morris, too--the three chapters titled "Washington"
"A hyper centralized version of it was conducted in Indo China within some parts of the Mekong River Delta project and it those parts were by and large a planning disaster. At one point, against the wills of the local communities (they even at some points brought in Marines to enforce yt happening) they built a dam that the community said would lead to disaster flooding and then a couple of years after it was built it collapsed and tens of thousands of people died and far more had their lives ruined."
This was a US-funded project, in Vietnam, in the 1960s-10970s? "Marines" meaning the USMC? All new information to me. I'd like more details and/or link references.
My own keyword searches aren't turning up anything. That's an awfully big story, to not appear in the newspapers of the day.
Yeah, marines, it often occurred in military operations areas and large parts of it were not development projects but were military projects, the Mekong extends across a few countries and the project was at various points throughout it, the Mekong River Delta was the Marines main AO, the Army's main AO was the Central Highlands. Its hard to find because it wasnt a big attention getter but you can if you try real hard (BTW, the specific project I mentioned may have been deforestation in regards to the cause of the floods, not a dam), they did a whole lot of projects around the world that were inspired by the TVA, in the 1950s they booted up the Mekong River one, but these were *often* (not always, I dont have sense of the ratio) perverted versions in that they were these very centralized and top down versions of the TVA
A measure of how pervasive leftist groupthink has become in the university-educated professional classes. I am retired now but in my careers - first in Education and then subsequently in Architecture - I never had one solitary colleague who was not somewhere on the left of the political spectrum.
We had National Review in our house and I remember “Firing line”. I have always respected Moynihan as being intellectually honest, a trait that is vanishing from our culture.
Whatever hope there is for successful, sustainable policy lies in responsible public servants having intellectually honest discourse and sadly there's been less and less of that over the years. There are a lot of basically well-meaning partisans who earnestly believe politicians can tell some little white lies to get programs over the hump, and then the experts can swoop in behind the scenes and finetune the agency. But there are no shortcuts, and when promises fail to come true people tend to want to blame the opposition rather than look in the mirror.
A big part of the problem with the project that Moynihan and others championed was they apparently did not understand what they had done. They seemed to have believed that the core of the success of the New Deal was the establishment of social programs designed to remedy social ills. I argue that those who worked on the Great Society programs were witnessing the destruction of what the New Dealers had created due the administration's decision to both cut taxes and embark on a war.
I don't doubt that program bloat is a real problem. But I point to the income gains made by black men relative to white men over 1940-70 under the New Deal economy, much of it done without special programs. And these programs do seem to have helped in the early years when the cultural momentum of the old economic regime continued on after its end in 1971. By 1980 it was petering out and the establishment of a new "shareholder-primacy" economy after 1980 has served to prevent further gains. As a result, a culture of failure for lower class people has been reinforced by the economic environment, which when coupled with the lower starting position for lower class blacks pre-1970, has been particularly pronounced for them.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-the-new-deal-order-fell
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/social-consequences-of-economic-evolution
It is definitely important to include the contexts of globalization and the financialization of the economy in assessing the downsides and/or unintended consequences of social programs, there have certainly been no shortage of pundits blithely declaring that welfare makes people not want to work without acknowledging that so many of the good jobs were structurally disappearing. It's very easy to tell people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps as the ground crumbles beneath them.
But I suspect ultimately even had Kennedy-Johnson been more fiscally responsible, and the economic regime changed less dramatically, organizational psychology and the bureaucratic imperative to grow and justify itself would eventually have led to something like the blob we know today, more concerned with maintaining itself than in empowering its clients.
The elephants in the room here are centralization and de-democratization. We hyper centralized and intensely de-democratized, so special interest groups grew far more powerful than they otherwise would have been, if it wasn't the specific groups that did become powerful, then it would have been some other ones
Absolutely. I was raised a very conventional progressive blindly supporting whatever massive centralized federal program left-leaning pundits were upselling, and part of my journey toward a more ambivalent and heterodox centrist position was learning about block grants as a policy major in college. Subsidiarity is so obviously a better idea than one-size-fits-all diktats from Washington, and progressives' dogmatic devotion to centralizing ever more power in ever less accountable federal bureaucracies is perhaps their biggest intellectual blind spot.
But maybe not. Had the pro-worker economy been allowed to continue, fewer people would need programs . Also had the inflation been avoided, conservatives would have been unable to proceed with their tax cut policies. They would instead attack Dems on regulatory and program bloat serving a positive function rather than the destructive policy they actually pursued.
There was a third path that was itching to be taken by most people, and that was an unwinding of both sides of the coin and a return to semi-populism and decentralization. The post of yours in your self reply to this post mentions the " Enlightenment project", but both paths along with the one we ended up taking, are based around hyper centralization, intense de-democratization, near zero policy variability, and locking almost all human beings out of any ability to meaningfully participate in any public sector or private sector policy conversations, no matter what their arguments are, or the degree of strength of those arguments, and while ignoring that fact that there are a great many different argument across the entirety of any given conceptualization spectrum, but by definition very close to 100% of all arguments of all sorts from very part of every spectrum, are not only locked out but never even heard by those doing the locking
I see cultural evolution as the principal mechanism through which historical change happens. The "path" taken is the one determined by the rise of fall in population share of various cultural constructs or "memes".
I use memes to refer to constructs of beliefs, practices, tools etc. that tend to be transmitted as a whole. So it's a bit different than the original use of the word in The Selfish Gene.
We did not evolve in the direction you suggested because the cultural constructs that would do this did not rise in frequency, that is that path was not adaptive in the environment of the modern world.
One has to work with evolution, with the flow of history. This is why things like the territorial empires of old simply don't happen. Where once you had political stability, you no longer do and the whole thing becomes too hard for what it gets the imperial power. A similar thing happened with archaic states once moralistic religions were invented. They no longer could compete.
Hmmm, ok, I would say that there are observations that pose some challenges to what you say here: "We did not evolve in the direction you suggested because the cultural constructs that would do this did not rise in frequency, that is that path was not adaptive in the environment of the modern world."
In the latter 1970s, where the rough temporal space within which the path divergence occurred and where the alternative path I described would have* been taken, this path in regards to the beliefs an practices of most of the population, and it seems explicitly so, was the most organic one to take. If you scour the time period, you can seem much commentary that will contain many variations of the phrase "we just traded one machine for another and the new one's worse". The path that was taken was forced, and a necessary part of enabling it to be taken was mass scale deception, and some of those deception's contents strongly suggest that culturally the path I mentioned was the most natural. For example, people were fed up with many of the centralized regulatory structures, on example of which is was the Arline industry regulatory regime centered around the old CAB; so there was public support for de-regulation, however, it was repeatedly promised to people by its initiators in the later 70s and then by the follow stages executioners of it in the 80s, that while they would de-regulate it, they would not allow airline cartelization, they then repeatedly lied again and again, literally dozens of people in senate confirmations hearings for relevant posts promised first not to allow excessive consolidation and then after a while they promised NO MORE consolidation, but they approved all but one M&A attempt involving a major airline and didn't even look at the many small airline M&A and then used the power of the state to assist them (in some cases, arguably quite illegally) in setting up the airline/airport industry's hub-and-spoke system.
Most all people did not want the great leaps towards further publicly and private centralization that occurred. And structurally it was also more natural to decentralized. What we got was the least natural and adaptive. UNLESS!: your saying that the mere fact that we had done the deep de-democratization and hyper centralization that enabled it is what makes it culturally (since it was only a tiny share of the population's whose culture actually mattered and the path we took comported to it) and environmentally, since they structures that did it controlled the environment,
But in the current day context you may be wrong. As the desire for decentralization seems to be back again, and the means by which our current system has appeared over it pathologies while also producing the material distributions that maintain the equilibrium in our political economy which generates it, namely its ability to run large and persistent federal budget deficits, large and persistent trade deficits, and high liquidity may draw to a close soon; and then the equilibrium in the political economy may break and the most natural and most likeliest path would be a not insignificant amount of decentralization, and I suspect this would also lead to a not insignificant amount of re-democratization. The flow of history is, among other things, the ebbs and flows of centralization and decentralization.
BTW, it could be argued that we do have territorial empires today, they just call themselves countries, like Nigeria, also, is the Global Economic System so different than *some* of the old empires that *at least some* people refer to as territorial empires, such as the pre Westphalian Holy Roman Empire?
UNLESS! you're saying that the mere fact that we had done the deep de-democratization and hyper centralization that enabled it is what makes it culturally (adaptive)
Yes, precisely. Since the rise of hierarchical societies ca 8000 years ago, those as the top have always run things. Revolutions just change who is at the top, not top-down control and so it has always been.
And yet, I live in a society in which a non-elite such as myself has a comfortable lifestyle and lives a pretty free existence, at least in terms of what matters to me. How did this come to pass if elites are always in control and hoarding it all to themselves?
How it happened is that elites are people just like us with all sorts of different interests, situations and personality quirks, etc. This means they squabble among themselves and need to elicit the support of non-elites to further their own interests. This gives commoners a way to influence results.
So, to answer why what you advocate for did not happen (i.e. was not adaptive) is because no elites calling for such could gain a sufficient commoner following to enact their vision.
I did explore this idea a bit here.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/what-might-have-been
A non-sequitur first, but need to say it every time Pat Moynihan comes up.
The caliber and stature of US Ambassadors used to be so high earlier. Kennedy appointed John Galbraith and Nixon appointed Moynihan as ambassadors to India. Who is the ambassador today? (My point exactly)
Yes the role has itself diminished, but still one should be able to persuade a few of the Moynihans of today to take up the job!
And now a sequitur! You write:
"Moynihan’s vision relies on a critical mass of sufficiently thoughtful, principled, and intellectually honest public servants, most especially toward the top, of whom I’ve seen painfully little evidence over the years"
(Other than ambassadorships!) the caliber of public servants especially at the federal level is quite high today. In any given cycle it may go up or down a bit, but overall these are top-notch. And when you compare with public servants in other countries it's not even close (excluding countries like Singapore, but the scale is so different it's a difficult comparison)
A handful of names, just off the top of my head:
Avril Haines (DNI)
Atul Gavande (USAID Deputy)
Gary Gensler (SEC)
Janet Yellen (Treasury)
Merrick Garland (AG)
Any other country would kill for this caliber of public servants. The Clinton Administration (imo) had the very best cohort of public servants, but I'd put the current lot up against any of the prior ones (FDR/JFK/LBJ/BHO).
Those were all sequiturs if you ask me… I certainly agree that the United States has a more credentialed/”educated” governing class than many other places where the position is something you bought or are given because you’re somebody’s in-law. (Although it does seem like that describes a ton of our ambassadors these days!) And there’s much less garden-variety corruption in the sense of skimming off the top for one’s direct personal enrichment.
The issue is how meaningful those credentials are and how substantive the education was/is. Unfortunately, vast swathes of the policy discourse are just vaporware – lots of jargon and abstractions and statistical regressions without grappling with fundamental questions of incentives and institutional dysfunction and human nature. Of course there are many excellent public servants conscientiously doing their best, but there are also many careerist apparatchiks primarily seeking to benefit their partisan allies and rise through the ranks. From my experience studying with, working with, and covering the governing class, I’ve come to doubt there’s enough of the first category to make up for the second.
“...a few of the Moynihans of today...”on that list. Not a one. I’ve tried to come up with a name I’d submit. I failed.