Monday, October 01, 2007

No Antibodies

Joseph Stiglitz is a brainy man: full professor of economics at Yale at age 27, 1979 winner of the John Bates Clark award for the most significant contribution by an economist under 40, the Nobel Laureate for economics in 2001. Stiglitz is eminently capable of separating economic sense from economic nonsense.

Stiglitz is also one of the great intellectual luminaries of modern liberalism. He chaired President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers then went on to serve as chief economist to the World Bank. His recent books have attempted to find a way to reconcile his commitment to economic equality with democratic liberties, not only in the United States but around the world.

So when such a man encounters an argument that combines economic nonsense with an attack on democratic liberties, what do you suppose he does?

No, guess again.

The embarrassing answer is: He folds up like a deck of cheap playing cards.

The argument is contained in Naomi Klein's new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Boiled down from 500 pages of fevered language, it goes like this:

Over the past 40 years, we have seen command-and-control systems collapse and fail all over the planet, from Soviet communism to Latin American populism to Saddam Hussein. When command-and-control systems fail, economists often urge a switch to competitive enterprise instead. This is very wrong, wicked, and opportunistic of them. Instead, the only morally correct response to the failure of command-and-control is more command-and-control. The good news is that resistance to market tyranny still flourishes. Prominent among Klein's examples of resistance are Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

This is not a very smart argument, nor is it a very morally appealing argument.

Yet when called upon to review Klein's book by the New York Times Book Review, Stiglitz dares only to faintly signal his disapproval. He begins by summarizing the book thus:

There are no accidents in the world as seen by Naomi Klein. The destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina expelled many poor black residents and allowed most of the city’s public schools to be replaced by privately run charter schools. The torture and killings under Gen. Augusto Pinochet in Chile and during Argentina’s military dictatorship were a way of breaking down resistance to the free market. The instability in Poland and Russia after the collapse of Communism and in Bolivia after the hyperinflation of the 1980s allowed the governments there to foist unpopular economic “shock therapy” on a resistant population. And then there is “Washington’s game plan for Iraq”: “Shock and terrorize the entire country, deliberately ruin its infrastructure, do nothing while its culture and history are ransacked, then make it all O.K. with an unlimited supply of cheap household appliances and imported junk food,” not to mention a strong stock market and private sector.

Stiglitz does recognize that this is nuts. But he goes all mealy-mouthed rather than say so. Instead he mildly murmurs,

Klein is not an academic and cannot be judged as one.

Are only academics, then, expected to engage in rational thought? Apparently so.

And what of Klein's sympathy for violent Islamists and Latin authoritarians? Stiglitz disapproves - but like some dainty dowager, he signals his disapproval by refusing to allow mention of the subject in his drawing room.

Klein ends on a hopeful note, describing nongovernmental organizations and activists around the world who are trying to make a difference.

Well yes I suppose one could say that Hezbollah is "trying to make a difference." But what kind of difference?

The point is not one about Naomi Klein. As has been said, we have seen her kind before. The point is about Joe Stiglitz. The liberalism of the 1950s and 1960s was discredited and destroyed by its inability to resist anti-democratic radicalism at home and abroad. His generation of Democrats worked through the 1990s to try to overcome that deadly legacy. And yet now again, they are succumbing to their old weakness. I suspect that in the privacy of his room, Stiglitz reacted to Klein's work with intellectual disdain and moral revulsion. And yet in the publicity of his column, he could summon up only gurgles of reservation.

This is not a spirit that a democracy can count upon in an hour of trial. It is as if there is something in the very makeup of modern liberalism that lacks antibodies to resist those who would destroy everything modern liberals in fact hold dear. From one point of view, that's a great tragedy. From another, however, it suggests why, despite all their disappointments with the Bush administration, Americans do not and will not trust liberals and Democrats to defend them.

10/01 09:30 AM