Conventional wisdom for a crisis

It would be hard to find someone whose view of Western economic systems was more Olympian than Martin Wolf. The son of cultured eastern European Jews who escaped the Nazis in London, he's the longtime chief economics commentator for Britain's Financial Times. Senior world financial decision makers rate the newspaper as their most credible source. It seems fair to say the FT talks to capitalists about capitalism and Martin Wolf speaks to the better angels of capitalists in its pages.

In The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism Wolf comes off as an intelligent classical liberal, "fiscally conservative" and "socially liberal." He's profoundly troubled by anti-democratic authoritarian populism. He argues for an humane interpretation of societies that he believes arose from the marriage of Anglo-European capitalism and democracy.

This book is a response to a new and troubling era. Its central argument is simple: when we look closely at what is happening in our economies and our polities, we must recognize the need for substantial change if core Western values of freedom, democracy, and the Enlightenment are to survive. But in doing so, we must also remember that reform is not revolution, but its opposite. It is not just impossible, but wrong, to try to re-create a society from scratch, as if its history counted for nothing. ... one cannot start anywhere else.

I'm not going to try to survey Wolf's appraisal of the wonders of capitalism. So much of what "the system" looks like derives from where we sit within it. My friends who are gig workers, baristas, and hotel cleaners see a different world than Wolf. 

But I do want discuss a little the question of citizenship in a democracy. Wolf insists that "the left" fails to appreciate that for most people, citizenship is a source of pride in a cold capitalist world.

A big mistake of the Brahmin left has been its contempt for patriotism, particularly working class patriotism. For the vast majority of ordinary people, citizenship is a source of pride, security, and identity.

Wolf's observation is true to my experience. For a lot of us, citizenship is the extent of what we can trust we possess. All of us need to honor that. Those of us repelled by patriotism tend to be people who have been privileged live in a wider world, who have been repelled by America's successive imperial wars, who are sick and tired of being lied to -- and who can only be proud of our country insofar as it strives to do better. And the very word -- patriotism -- undercuts itself. Many of us just aren't into living into the land of the fathers. But we all have to understand that citizenship matters; there I can go along with Wolf.

The successful capitalist countries attract the world; people want to move here. And our economies need people. So we live with the question of how insistent migration meshes with citizenship. And nobody cares more about and often has more pride in citizenship than newcomers who successfully jump through the hoops we erect.

The big question about migration is how to control it, not whether it should be controlled. The democratic state belongs to its citizens, who are bound by ties of loyalty and trust in one another. It is inevitable that who becomes as member of this community and on what terms is at least as much a political as an economic question.

We struggle over how immigration should be organized. Because of our American history, because Europeans settled this land by expropriating its inhabitants and also imported Black Africans striped of all human rights to do much of the work, we have a different history about citizenship and newcomers than old Europe. 

The defeat of slavery resulted in the 14th amendment to the US Constitution which promised that, if you are born here, you are a citizen. That's among the most important contributions of the Black struggle for freedom in this country. And it is very novel in the history of nation states.

What is also novel about migration to this country, something Wolf is conscious of, is that in the United States, citizenship is not connected to participation in a welfare state. We've neglected to build such a structure to manage our capitalism even for existing citizens, despite incomplete, tentative approaches like Obamacare and Social Security. And much of our hotly contested immigration non-system denies even that to legally-arrived newcomers.

... citizenship must matter a great deal if one believes in funding a specific national welfare state, as people of the left do, since it is a system of solidarity with people who live in one's own country.

Controlled migration that leads to citizenship is a different struggle here than in much of the rest of the capitalist world, for worse and for better. I found Wolf at best incomplete on this conundrum which is central to our current discontents. 

Wolf diagnoses the present ascendancy of dictator-in-waiting Donald Trump in the Republican party as a widespread character defect.

... the subservience of Republican elites is the product not so much of fear, as it was for many in the Germany of the 1930s, as of personal ambition and moral collapse.

I find this refreshing. Too many earnest Never-Trump Republicans aren't willing to go there about their former friends, but moral weakness should be impossible to overlook.

Wolf's diagnosis of our ills seems alarming and sound, his prescriptions perhaps too modest:

... liberal democracy is vulnerable to the selfishness of elites and ambitions of would-be despots. Historically, democratic republics have been exceptions. The normal human patterns have been plutocracy or tyranny. ... the combination of new technology with laissez-faire ideology has accelerated the emergence of a plutocracy dedicated to increasing its wealth and power and of new technologies with extraordinarily destructive potential. 

We do indeed need to build on the foundations we have. But we cannot go back to the past. ... Removing harms, not universal happiness is the objective.

I kept hoping somehow such an intelligent, wide ranging observer of our ills would have more to offer than what reads to me as humane conventional wisdom. Wolf is clearly one of the good -- but hope for a decent future, if we find any, is likely to come from less establishment and younger voices. I read Wold as knowing that.