The common good is a casualty to zero-sum competitiveness
Shibboleth, says Websters, is “a word or saying used by adherents of a party, sect, or belief and usually regarded by others as empty of real meaning.” Freedom as used by many Americans has taken on that sense. It has become, as in the original Star Trek episode, a worship word to be spoken as a signifier of tribe, but stripped of meaning. One utters it and genuflects without thinking about why.
What freedom has become is license for radical individualism stripped of responsibility to the matrix of relationships that sustain it. It is the mask worn by market-based thinking to convince us that there is somehow moral content behind consumption. Consideration of the common good is secondary, if a consideration at all. The mask wars of the recent Covid pandemic were fought over whether personal freedom has any obligation to the common good that protects mine while protecting yours.
E.J. Dionne this morning invokes Heather McGhee’s sense that racism harms us all. It frame society as a zero-sum competition between individuals rather than a cooperative venture (Washington Post):
As McGhee told Vox’s Sean Illing, “The zero-sum story is the idea that there’s this massive dividing line between Black people and white people, that they’re on opposite teams, and that progress for people of color has to come at white people’s expense.”
Unions, say political scientists Paul Frymer and Jacob M. Grumbach, reduce tensions between members of different races. They are built on “selling and realizing the idea that workers, no matter their backgrounds, can move forward together.” Not in competition with one another. Aside from the worker-owner power dynamic, this idea threatens the framing of society as a competitive market and the feeling among owners that if workers have more power, they have less.
Neoliberalism works just like that, argues The New Republic‘s Win McCormack:
In an essay titled “Dewey’s Liberalism and Ours,” the political philosophy scholar Michael J. Sandel excavates a divergent form of liberalism developed early in the twentieth century, during the Progressive Era. Classical liberalism, as well as its leftist, modernized version, egalitarian liberalism, were concerned principally with individual rights—in the first case, with individual rights against the state, in the second, with an individual’s right to a decent life in the context of modern industrial civilization. John Dewey’s principal concern was not with rights, however, Sandel explains. His principal focus was on the creation of a democratic process within which individual character and creativity could flourish. Dewey’s philosophy was one of communitarian liberalism (in Sandel’s seemingly paradoxical phraseology), and at its core was the institution of the public school and the process of education for citizenship and democracy.
In Catherine Broom’s interpretation of Dewey’s pronouncements on education, the overriding purpose of schooling was to inculcate in students the desire and the ability to seek the common good for society as a whole. “The public good,” she writes in the abstract of her article, “is understood as an imagined and communal space in which goods valued by society become collectively owned and shared through respectful and open contestation and negotiation. The argument is then made that schools are both part of the public good as well as involved in the development of this concept in students, but that the ability of schools to do this is being damaged by new discourses…. neo-liberal ideology is eroding this democratic idea.”
Let’s not get lost in trying to define neoliberalism this morning, but accept the framing for now. The conception of society as a market has made the very idea of common good subversive. Public schools in this understanding do not exist to better society, the one that sustains personal freedoms. but to better one’s position against one’s neighbors. Education, then, is just another commodity to be consumed.
Jason Blakely in a 2017 Atlantic article argues:
… neoliberalism’s aspirations go way beyond merely propounding a competitive market ideology in the classroom. The proponents of neoliberalism, Blakely explains, have sought to turn school systems themselves into competitive marketplaces, following the neoliberal principle that when public institutions don’t resemble markets by offering a range of consumer choices, the consumer is not really a member of a free society. In education, the neoliberal goal has been to privatize public schools to the extent possible, or, alternatively, to create forms of consumer choice, such as vouchers, that will constrain the public schools. Blakely points out that the battle over school choice is only the latest episode in a decades-long global contest between two models of freedom, the first based on the principles of democracy, the other on a market-directed ideology. The latter is often unpopular with the public, requiring force to carry out its mandates, as was the case in Pinochet’s Chile. “Authoritarianism and market freedoms can and often do go together,” Blakely argues.
The United States is headed there now. Too few will notice so long as gas is cheap and store shelves stock baby food.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.
If in a position to Play to win in 2022 (see post first), contact tpostsully at gmail dot com.