The marketplace of ideas takes another L
Liberals are losing the argument, so Zack Beauchamp thinks they need to win with financing.
Zack Beauchamp, writing for Vox, writes that “conservatives help their young thinkers — and…liberals don’t.” It’s a bewildering take on multiple levels. For one thing, it’s simply not true: the liberal-intelligentsia complex is full of opportunties for young people to get involved. Every college of any size in the United States has a College Democrats chapter, and usually hundreds of others like Pride, various environmentalist and regional issues orgs, a Planned Parenthood chapter, and so on. Every major think-tank, NGO, and media org that I can think of has a significant staff of interns and entry-level workhorses. Beauchamp points to programs on the right like fellowships run by the National Review and the Claremont Institute, but everyone from the Roosevelt Institute to the Center for American Progress has similar programs. Beauchamp rights enviously that people on the right get “put in an environment where you’re reading and debating classic works of political thought and literature with other people who share those interests”; he says this at a conference about liberal ideas that’s hosting young liberals.
And all of this is just the overt stuff. If for example you want to become a liberal intellectual, you do not have to go the think-tank route — you can also just become a professor of political science. Or philosophy. Or gender studies. Or of critical theory. Or of any number of fields that fall into what we call, for a reason, the “liberal arts.” Beauchamp concedes in passing that “America’s intellectual institutions are pretty left [read-liberal] leaning places,” but he inexplicably proceeds as if this doesn’t undercut his argument.
And though he doesn’t dwell on this point either, Zack does touch on the real problem for professional liberals:
Yet I found myself struggling to give good advice. Sure, they could try for an internship at a liberal publication or think tank, but those are fiercely competitive and don’t pay much. They could apply for a PhD program, but teaching jobs were scarce even before President Donald Trump took a hammer to American academia.
The real problem is that no realistic job market is ever going to be able to accomodate the hilarious number of liberals who want to get paid to be liberals. The industry is mostly an unproductive racket as it is, full of do-nothing sinecures at the top and spam-heavy comms jobs at the bottom; the notion that we need more wonks, for example, rather than wonks who have better politics is absurd. It is true that leftists, meaning anticapitalists, have few if any dedicated career paths these days. But the difference between a socialist’s job prospects and a moderate Democrat’s job prospects is the difference between night and day.
This misread of the job market aside, however, what’s even more striking is the claim that liberalism needs a “pipeline” at all.
Zack insists that liberals don’t have one because of their “inability to think in ideological terms,” but this is exactly wrong. Liberals absolutely do have an ideological vision for how the cause of liberalism can and should win out in our society: it’s called the marketplace of ideas. In this conception, all you have to do is avoid government censorship, and in the ideological struggle that follows the good and true ideas will win on their merits. This is the liberalism of Milton, of Voltaire, of Mill, and of Obama, who insists that it is free speech that
offers us the possibility of a genuine marketplace of ideas, one in which the “jarring of parties” works on behalf of “deliberation and circumspection”; a marketplace in which, through debate and competition, we can expand our perspective, change our minds, and eventually arrive not merely at agreements but at sound and fair agreements.
The Constitutional Convention was Madison’s proof that the marketplace of ideas worked, for in it “no man felt himself obliged to retain his opinions any longer than he was satisfied of their propriety and truth, and waas open to the force of argument.”
In this vision of the discourse there is no need to build some artificial “pipeline” of investment and jobs programs and fellowships and so on to make sure liberalism wins, because liberalism will simply win on its intellectual and moral merits. That is why liberalism’s historic approach to this problem has simply been to oppose censorship and fight for a free intellectual marketplace. That is why a free press and universities free of government interference have always been so important to the liberal project; they are both the realization and the guarantors of liberalism.
What liberals like Zack have begun to notice is that this is not actually how political discourse works. Conservativism is never intellectually defeated as long as you have some rich old grandpas around paying people to be reactionaries; the game is won not on the intellectual merits of these politics, but because of how much money people are willing to invest in promoting them.
The role that investment plays in the popular success of ideology has been obvious to most people for a long time, but liberalism has yet to grapple with the direct implications. If we want something resembling the deliberative democracy the liberals envision then it is not enough simply to maintain an absolute ban on government censorship; on the contrary, the government may need to censor the outsized voice of the rich so that they don’t warp the discourse by pouring money into media outlets and other influence operations. This would mean, of course, much less influence for the private equity and venture capital financiers that fund outlets like Vox — and writers like Zack.
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