Matt Stoller recently penned a piece that got a lot of attention, including a favorable recommendation from Glenn Greenwald. Personally, I found Stoller’s piece a little hard to follow. I had to read it more than once to be sure I understood his main points. He confused me at the beginning when he began talking about “a long-standing, disturbing, and unacknowledged affinity liberals have with centralized war financing.” How does a country use a decentralized method of financing war? Is he talking about the Democratic Party or the liberal wing of the party? Why is he focused on war financing at all?
The answer, which becomes apparent many paragraphs later, is that he is talking about war financing because libertarians care about it in a way that liberals do not. Stoller says that libertarians hate Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt because they all waged “big-ass wars” that had to be financed, and the way those wars were financed involved structural reforms that libertarians dislike. I don’t think that Stoller is saying that liberals should hate Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR, but he is suggesting that we ought to take a look at the legacies of their war financing. For me, it’s the kind of boutique point that makes libertarianism so boring. Stoller’s argument then moves to detailing the history of war financing, but he conflates it with abuses of federal power like the Palmer Raids. If there is a causal connection here, Stoller doesn’t make it for us. When it comes to FDR, he reduces the complex process by which we reacted to the nuclear age by building a military-industrial complex to this simple formula:
FDR also fused the liberal and union establishments with the corporate world, creating the hybrid “military-industrial” complex that is with us to this day (see Alan Brinkley’s “End of Reform” for a good treatment of this process).
Do I have to read the book to know how FDR erred?
Stoller goes on to argue that the centralization that occurred under FDR was used for the dual-purposes of financing and fighting wars and implementing the modern social welfare system. As he sees it, liberals cannot support one without supporting the other. In the interest of fairness, I will let Stoller make his own argument for this thesis:
Modern liberalism is a mixture of two elements. One is a support of Federal power – what came out of the late 1930s, World War II, and the civil rights era where a social safety net and warfare were financed by Wall Street, the Federal Reserve and the RFC, and human rights were enforced by a Federal government, unions, and a cadre of corporate, journalistic and technocratic experts (and cheap oil made the whole system run.) America mobilized militarily for national priorities, be they war-like or social in nature. And two, it originates from the anti-war sentiment of the Vietnam era, with its distrust of centralized authority mobilizing national resources for what were perceived to be immoral priorities. When you throw in the recent financial crisis, the corruption of big finance, the increasing militarization of society, Iraq and Afghanistan, and the collapse of the moral authority of the technocrats, you have a big problem. Liberalism doesn’t really exist much within the Democratic Party so much anymore, but it also has a profound challenge insofar as the rudiments of liberalism going back to the 1930s don’t work.
This is why Ron Paul can critique the Federal Reserve and American empire, and why liberals have essentially no answer to his ideas, arguing instead over Paul having character defects.
Stoller is touching on something I wrote about a couple of months ago. I talked about how progressives need to act like they are the natural leaders of this country again. But we can’t do that because we have too much distrust of power. We’re so busy standing on the outside critiquing the Establishment that no one is going to hand us the keys to become the Establishment. And too many liberals don’t want that responsibility because it would tarnish their purity. Stoller doesn’t have an answer to Ron Paul because he’s decided the system is so rotten that it is not only indefensible, but irredeemable. That leaves him with no solutions. And a progressive without a belief in progress is just a crank.
If you look at Ron Paul’s political philosophy in toto, you’ll realize that Paul basically opposes every progressive accomplishment since about 1913. I’ve never heard him oppose female suffrage, but he’d like to roll back just about every other thing the federal government has done since the creation of the Federal Reserve. The only way a progressive can reach the point where their beliefs converge with Ron Paul’s is if they’ve basically given up on this country and on progressivism. It takes a certain kind of personality to come to this type of conclusion during the most productive Democratic term of office since LBJ pushed through the civil rights legislation and enacted the Great Society.
There’s a bizarre myopia in a progressive ignoring that Ron Paul’s philosophy is the complete negation of the Progressive Era, the New Deal, the Civil Rights Era, and the Great Society just because he’s right about the War of Drugs and he shares a belief that the U.S. is overcommitted militarily and is infringing on our privacy and civil rights. Naturally, you can make common cause with him on areas of shared concern, but we’re talking about making him president here, are we not?
Stoller and Greenwald will tell us that they’re not talking about Paul as president, that they’re only talking about him to raise awareness about issues. Part of the problem with that assertion is that most of us are talking about Paul as a presidential candidate. When we say he’s an unreconstructed neo-confederate who is the mortal enemy of progressivism, we’re not diminishing that he’s right on the War on Drugs or torture or a variety of other things. We’re saying that we’re not taking him seriously as a presidential candidate. We’re saying that we can’t support his campaign.
Ultimately, Stoller’s argument comes back to war financing, which I think he equates with the Federal Reserve. He doesn’t, however, make a compelling case that the Fed is the cause of U.S. militarism, nor does he explain how we ought to finance the Pentagon or our debt differently.
I don’t understand why anyone thought this article was profound or important. It has some interesting observations, but it’s incoherent. If I were his prof, I’d make him write it again and see if he could make a point.
