While reading Thomas Edsall’s essay “Is This Liberalism’s Last Stand?” in the New York Times, I learned a new term: Precariat. When I saw that precariat wasn’t on the Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary, I concluded it was economic jargon, a brainiac term that only economic geeks are familiar with. But as I researched further, I discovered it’s not jargon at all. Apparently, it’s been in usage for about thirty years. Guy Standing even wrote a book about it in 2011: “The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class.”
Precariat is a portmanteau—blend—of “precariously” and “proletariat,” which Merriam-Webster defines as the “the laboring class, especially the class of industrial workers who lack their own means of production and hence sell their labor to live.” Simply put, the precariat are those living on the edge economically, particularly in relation to their employment.
Mr. Edsall’s opens by asking whether liberalism, which he defines as “the combination of carefully regulated free markets with individual and intellectual freedom,” is an endangered species.
Being an intellectual and philosophical liberal (which doesn’t translate into being a political liberal), I was intrigued by Mr. Edsall’s query. After all, the liberal ethos has been the driving engine of Western Civilization since the Enlightenment. That includes American constitutional governance, individual rights and liberties, and the rule of law before which everyone is equal. (Please don’t guffaw. That’s merely the ideal.)
The Industrial Revolution, which followed on the heels of the rise of liberalism, shifted the focus of liberalism beyond governance to economic concerns. Inventions, like the cotton gin and reaper, and developments, like harnessing steam power, not only fueled that industrial model, it also caused tremors throughout the populace, especially with immigrants.
That industrial system required human labor. The potato famine in Ireland during the 1840s coincided with the industrialization of America. It drove many Irish to seek a new start in America, where they were welcomed…sort of. They found work, but not dignity in terms of livable wages and human respect. They were relegated to living in shanties as they eked out a borderline existence. By the end of the nineteenth century, urban areas congested with the working poor were dubbed ghettoes, which is a derivative of “ghèto,” an Italian word for where Venetian Jews were forced to live.
In addition to their customs and mores, the Irish brought their religion—Roman Catholicism—with them, and that instantly put them in the line of fire of bigots in heavily Protestant America. That gave rise to the first anti-immigrant political party: the Know-Nothing Party. To give it a veneer of respectability, it soon changed its name to the American Party.
In 1833, a new word was coined for the new economic system: Capitalism. Its cast of characters changed from the Ancien Régime—the old order—but the system—rule by economic elites—remained intact. In place of aristocratic overlords, industrial barons and managerial elites began holding sway—power—over the common people. In place of land were factories, and in place of castles, manors, and palaces, gilded edifices were constructed on hilltops or faraway in the countryside to keep the moneyed elite above and beyond the masses.
Those conditions are what led Henry David Thoreau to pen in “Walden Pond” one of his most incisive lines: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
That’s changed somewhat since Thoreau’s time. Many still lead lives of desperation, but beginning with the rise of the labor movement, the masses don’t go down quietly. They want their fair share of the ever-expanding wealth pie. But over the past fifty years, that share has proportionally gotten smaller. What used to be a slice became a bite and is now a nibble. And the fear is it’ll soon be crumbs.
What to do? Can the old way of resolution still work?
Mr. Edsall delineates a couple of hurdles facing the liberal ethos today. One is that since moderation and compromise are core principles of liberalism, it’s the antithesis of extreme. That’s a disadvantage in this era of polarization because moderation and compromise are “insufferably boring for those seeking ideological excitement” about “where to draw the line between free-market capitalism and government intervention to prevent exploitation.”
After World War II, Winston Churchill said, “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
Can the same be said about capitalism?
To be continued.
