The Conservative Sensibility Read online

  Soon there were more than 500 NRA codes covering the manufacture of products from lightning rods to dog leashes to women’s corsets. Businesses were asked to display flags and posters emblazoned with a blue eagle, an emblem signifying participation in the NRA. General Hugh “Iron Pants” Johnson, an admirer of Mussolini and head of the NRA, declared, “May God have mercy on the man or group of men who attempt to trifle with this bird.”

  On April 20, 1934, Maged was fined one hundred dollars—serious money when the average family income was about $1,500—and sentenced to thirty days in jail. The New York Times reported that Maged “was only vaguely aware of the existence of a code.” Not that such ignorance was forgivable. It is every citizen’s duty to stay up late at night, if necessary, reading the fine print about the government’s multiplying mandates. “In court yesterday,” the Times reported, “he stood as if in a trance when sentence was pronounced. He hoped that it was a joke.”

  Actually, Maged’s sentence was a judicial jest. After he spent three days in jail, the judge canceled the rest of his sentence, remitted the fine, and, according to the Times, “gave him a little lecture on the importance of cooperation as opposed to individualism.” Then, like a feudal lord granting a dispensation to a serf, the judge promised to have Maged “measure me for a new suit.” Maged, suitably broken to obedience, removed from his shop window the placard advertising thirty-five-cent pressings and replaced it with a blue eagle. “Maged,” reported the Times, “if not quite so ruggedly individualistic as formerly, was a free man once more.” So that is freedom—embracing, under coercion, a government propaganda symbol.

  Strangely—or perhaps not—as the quantity and velocity of information and change increased in the second half of the twentieth century, so, too, did government’s delusions of mastery. Michael Barone notes that the Labor Department building, constructed in the 1960s, has two conference rooms adjacent to the secretary of labor’s office, one for management and one for labor, so the secretary could shuttle between them. The three big units of American society would work together subduing turbulent reality. This serene confidence that the future would be a more or less harmonious allocation of abundance was an afterglow of America’s preeminence at the middle of the twentieth century.

  In 1951, when the average American ate 50 percent more than the average European, Americans controlled two-thirds of the world’s productive capacity, owned 80 percent of the world’s electrical goods, produced more than 40 percent of its electricity, 60 percent of its oil, and 66 percent of its steel. America’s 5 percent of the world’s population had more wealth than the other 95 percent, and Americans made almost all of what they consumed: 99.93 percent of new cars sold in America in 1954 were US brands. By the end of the fifties, GM was a bigger economic entity than Belgium, and Los Angeles had more cars than did Asia. Such pell-mell economic progress produced soaring expectations: This would be the new normal. In 1950, 40 percent of Americans had never seen a television program; by May 1953 Boston had more televisions than bathtubs.

  Economist Robert Gordon, however, argues that an unprecedented and unrepeatable “special century” of life-changing inventions had a lingering echo in unrealistic expectations, so the future was bound to disappoint: “The economic revolution of 1870 to 1970 was unique.… No other era in human history, either before or since, combined so many elements in which the standard of living increased as quickly and in which the human condition was transformed so completely.” Gordon says that for most Americans in 1870, the world was more medieval than modern. Three necessities—food, clothing, shelter—absorbed almost all consumer spending. Except that often there really was no consumer spending involved because often all three necessities were made within the family. Households were not wired for electricity. Flickering light came from candles and whale oil, manufacturing power came from steam engines, water wheels, and horses. Urban horses, alive and dead, were a constant urban sanitation problem, as was the fact that window screens were rare, so insects commuted to and fro between animal and human waste outdoors and dinner tables indoors. A typical North Carolina housewife in the 1880s carried water into her home eight to ten times daily, walking 148 miles a year to tote thirty-six tons of it. Few children were in school after age twelve.59

  But on October 10, 1879, Thomas Edison found a cotton filament for the incandescent light bulb. Less than twelve weeks later, in Germany, Karl Benz demonstrated the first workable internal combustion engine. In the 1880s, refrigerated rail cars began to banish “spring sickness,” the result of winters without green vegetables. Adult stature increased as mechanical refrigeration and Clarence Birdseye’s Birds Eye frozen foods improved nutrition. By 1940, households were networked—electrified, with clean water flowing in and waste flowing out, radio flowing in and telephonic communications flowing both ways. Today’s dwellings, Gordon notes, are much more like those of 1940 than 1940 dwellings were like those of 1900. By 1940, gone was the lack of privacy for people mostly living and generally bathing in the kitchen, which often had been the only room that was warm year-round. Since 1940, however, only air conditioning, television, and the Internet have dramatically changed everyday life, and these combined have not come close to matching the impact of pre-1940 changes. By the end of the twentieth century, the classic modernization trek from rural conditions into sanitized urban life, and the entry of women into the workforce, were vast but unrepeatable advances.

  It would, however, be rash to assume that they were the last vast advances. “The uncivilized,” said Calvin Coolidge, “make little progress because they have few desires. The inhabitants of our country are stimulated to new wants in all directions.”60 Often their wants are prompted by undemanded products. Consider one that has become ubiquitous in a historical blink.

  In 1983, Motorola brought out a cell phone for which there was not much of a market. It was the size of a brick, weighed two pounds, and cost $3,995 (about $10,000 in today’s dollars). Its charged battery lasted half an hour. Until the arrival of cell phones for the masses, hundreds of millions of Americans, and billions of others around the planet, were generally satisfied with their telephone service. Suddenly, however, cell phones caused a wholesome epidemic of dissatisfaction. Instead of calling a place and hoping that the person to whom you wished to speak was there, you called the person, who had a phone in his or her pocket or purse. People were pleased, until 2007. Then the smartphone arrived, letting loose a tsunami of impatience on the part of people who soon could hardly imagine how they had been content with anything as primitive as the phones that in 2006 they had considered wondrous instruments of emancipation. Ten years later, billions of people had in their pockets and purses high-quality cameras, instant access to more information than is contained in the Library of Congress, and more computing power than the NATO alliance had at its disposal in 1960. Has there ever been a more dramatic demonstration of Say’s Law that supply can produce its own demand? The cell phone was not produced in response to an existing demand. Still less was the smartphone even imagined, let alone demanded, by the billions who soon snapped it up.

  The iPad was perhaps an even more interesting illustration of a demand occurring in response to the creation of a new product. After all, the smartphone was just an improvement, albeit a dramatic one, of something familiar: a mobile phone. But baffled consumers at first wondered what an iPad, which was neither a phone nor a laptop, was for. Crowds had gathered to purchase the first smartphone and continued to gather in response to each new iteration of it. But in 2010 no crowds flocked to snap up the first iPads. Yet by the end of the iPad’s first year, 7 million had been sold, and 11.55 million were sold in a single quarter of 2018.

  WELCOMING WAYWARDNESS

  The conservative sensibility delights in such waywardness, such surprises produced by the spontaneous order of an open, market society. The progressive sensibility yearns for predictability, for the sense that the future can be planned because the movement of society’s variables can be
anticipated and controlled. Consider an anxiety that affected progressives in the 1950s, when voters twice rejected their presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson, in favor of Dwight Eisenhower, whose electoral successes elicited a new strain in progressivism—disdain for average Americans. Progressives dismissed the Eisenhower administration as “the bland leading the bland”; they said the New Dealers had been supplanted by car dealers. How could they explain the electorate’s dereliction of taste? Here is how: The bovine masses had been manipulated, mostly by advertising, particularly on television, which in the 1950s became the masses’ entertainment and the epicenter of American marketing. Intellectuals, that herd of independent minds, were, as usual, in lock step as they deplored “conformity.” Fear of this had begun when the decade did, with David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950), which was followed by C. Wright Mills’ White Collar (1951), Sloan Wilson’s novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), William Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956), Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders (1957), and, most important, John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society, which expressed progressivism’s inherent and growing inclination toward scolding and condescension.

  Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956, asked: “With the supermarket as our temple and the singing commercial as our litany, are we likely to fire the world with an irresistible vision of America’s exalted purpose and inspiring way of life?”61 His question radiated disdain of America’s “consumer society.” Today, however, thoughtful people have more appreciation of the complex prerequisites—social, political, and intellectual—of a society that produces abundance. Such a society is comfortable with, and honors, the emancipation of choice and desire that results in supermarkets, advertising, and other things that are woven inextricably into the fabric of a free society. Those mundane things actually are related to what exalts America and makes it inspiring. Unbounded imaginative desiring can be a problem for democratic governance, but it is both a cause and a consequence of a democratic culture.

  Nevertheless, Galbraith brought to the progressive chorus a special verve in asserting that Americans are as manipulable as clay. Hence Americans were what modern progressives relish: victims, to be treated as wards of a government run by progressives. Advertising, Galbraith argued, was a leading cause of America’s “private opulence and public squalor”: Advertising inflamed Americans’ consumerism, which produced their reluctance to surrender more of their income to taxation for government to spend wisely. If, however, advertising were as potent as Galbraith thought, the advent of television—a large dose of advertising, delivered to every living room—should have caused a sharp increase in consumption relative to savings. No such increase coincided with the arrival of television, but Galbraith, unwilling to allow empiricism to slow his flow of theory, was never a martyr to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s axiom that everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts. Although Galbraith coined the phrase “conventional wisdom,” and thought of himself as the scourge of groupthink, The Affluent Society was the distilled essence of the conventional wisdom in faculty clubs.62

  In the 1960s, progressivism became a stance of disdain, describing Americans not only as Galbraith had, as vulgar, but also as sick, racist, sexist, imperialist, etc. Not amazingly, voters were not amused when told that their desires—for big cars, neighborhood schools, and other things—did not deserve respect. For progressives, however, that was precisely the beauty of Galbraith’s theory. If advertising could manufacture demands for whatever corporations wanted to supply, there was no need to respect markets, which exist to bring supply and demand into equilibrium. The Affluent Society was the canonical text of modern progressivism’s disparagement of the competence of the average American. Of course, if advertising really could manufacture consumer wants willy-nilly, few new products would fail. But many do. The Affluent Society, postulating the awesome power of manufacturers to manufacture whatever demand they might find it convenient to satisfy, was published nine months after Ford Motor Company put all of its marketing muscle behind a new product, the Edsel.

  Ford was not the first automobile company to demonstrate how wrong it is possible to be concerning the wonderful waywardness of unplanned economic dynamism: In 1903, the Mercedes Corporation concluded that there never would be a world market for more than 1 million automobiles because there would never be more than 1 million people trainable as chauffeurs. Galbraith was particularly impressed by the invulnerability of General Motors to the competition of rivals or the fickleness of consumers. In 1978, when General Motors enjoyed a 46 percent share of the domestic auto market, Galbraith was sure that auto manufacturers would not seriously compete with one another because they had a mutual interest in preserving their power to raise prices. He was especially confident that none would be so rash as to challenge General Motors: “Everyone knows that the survivor of such a contest would not be the aggressor but General Motors.”63 By 2014, after General Motors had struggled through bankruptcy with the help of a federal bailout, its market share was 17 percent.

  Instead of regretting such vanished supremacies, freedom-loving people should relish the way the future unfolds in spurts that defy anticipation. This is, after all, the story of the Great Enrichment. The primary technology of steam power—James Watt patented his rotary steam engine in 1781—produced the secondary technology of railroad steam locomotives, which produced a national market. The Internet, a primary technology, produced Amazon, which in 2015 dethroned Walmart as the nation’s largest retailer. And so it goes with the unplannable ricochets of developments in technology and consumer tastes.

  Galbraith was representative of the intellectuals who were, and are, impatient with people who are wary of government supplanting markets as the primary allocators of resources and opportunities. There were, however, other intellectuals on the way.

  At Oxford University in 1962 and 1963, a small coterie of students, most of them American graduates of American universities, merrily rowed against the leftist political currents that then, as now, flowed among intellectuals. Some of these rowers had been at the University of Chicago. Others had come within the ambit of scholars from there, including Milton Friedman, whose Capitalism and Freedom was published in 1962. All members of the coterie were infused with the doctrines of laissez-faire political economy prevalent in Chicago’s economics department, and in its Committee on Social Thought, where Friedrich Hayek had written The Constitution of Liberty (1960), which, like Friedman’s book, was published by the University of Chicago Press. A conservative member of the British parliament agreed to meet with these free-market firebrands, and he began the conversation saying, “Well, presumably we agree that at least the roads should be owned by the government.”64 The group greeted with stony silence this deviation from the tenets of limited—very limited—government. In one of the group’s favorite periodicals, The New Individualist Review, a quarterly published at Chicago, a theorist argued that government must own the lighthouses because no price mechanism could price the services that a lighthouse renders. This heresy provoked a spirited rebuttal: When the light sweeps the ocean’s surface, it improves the surface. As John Locke explained, ownership can flow from improvements made to nature’s materials, so the surface of the ocean becomes the property of the lighthouse owner, who can charge whatever price the market will bear for the right of ships to cross the illuminated surface. Case closed? Not quite. Does the property right lapse when fog prevents the beam of light from sweeping the ocean’s surface? Hairs were split, then split again, as ideological purity hung in the balance.

  These contumacious students, including this writer, were, as students frequently are, inebriated by ideas to the point of silliness. They were, however, early enlistees in a swelling army of people eager to provide an intellectual defense of capitalism as not merely efficient but also ethical, as singularly congruent with the political philosophy of an open society.

  Marx, a Victorian intellectual, predic
ted that capitalism would be undone by its immiseration of the proletariat. Actually, capitalism has done more to jeopardize itself by annoying intellectuals. Many of them look down their upturned noses at the marketplace, and therefore at those who thrive in it. The intellectuals’ disdain is a manifestation of resentment about the fact that markets generally function nicely without the supervision of intellectuals. Their disdain is, among other unattractive things, ingratitude. The vulgar (as the intellectuals see them) men and women of commerce who make markets productive also make the intellectual class possible. As George Stigler (University of Chicago; winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Economics) said, “Since intellectuals are not inexpensive, until the rise of the modern enterprise system, no society could afford many intellectuals.” So “we professors are much more beholden to Henry Ford than to the foundation which bears his name and spreads his assets.”65 Intellectuals’ disparagement of the system that supports them is a tangle of aesthetic and moral judgments: The profit motive encourages unlovely materialism by ratifying and rewarding it; commerce is comparable to poker in being a zero-sum transaction in which one person’s gain must equal one or more persons’ losses. Intellectuals also are disconcerted by the permanent unpredictability of things in a capitalist society, which defeats those who delight in discerning, and then planning, the future. Intellectuals are, as George Orwell wrote, in the business of discerning, or at least postulating, trends. They are, they think, visionaries whose farsightedness gives them privileged access to the future and a claim to the power to steer society toward its foreordained destination, aka progress. One problem, however, is that, as Orwell understood, intellectuals become invested in their prognostications. In 1963, when the Oxford University Press published the third and final volume of Isaac Deutscher’s admiring biography of Leon Trotsky, Oxford’s student Marxist club held a reception for Deutscher to celebrate the occasion. I was then a student at Oxford and attended this fete, where I heard Deutscher say: “Proof of Trotsky’s farsightedness is that none of his predictions have come true yet.” This was a glimpse into the mind of the true believer, a mind stocked with unfalsifiable propositions.