The Reformism of Fear

Two of the most famous aphorisms attesting to a “pessimism of the intellect/optimism of the will” mentality are, “Power concedes nothing without a demand” (Frederick Douglass), and “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (Audre Lorde). On the one hand, these two sentences promise that change only comes out of a struggle with an entrenched and stubborn enemy—a promise that naturally might lead to some pessimism. On the other, they do promise change—the possibility of change, at least. Being able to envision the dismantling of the master’s house is the necessary initial step on the way to finding the right tools with which to do the job.

As with the quasi-hero worship that Gramsci himself is sometimes subjected to, it is hard to separate these two phrases from a certain romanticism—a mixture of melancholic angst and sublime defiance. I use the term deliberately: the 1857 speech in which Douglass uttered “Power concedes…” is one of the many times he also quoted a line from Lord Byron’s Childe Harold—“Who would themselves be free, must strike the blow.” (Here is another speech with the line.) As Ethan Kytle has argued, Byron’s poetry and romanticism generally inspired not only Douglass (whose surname was adapted from a Walter Scott hero), but also Harriet Beecher Stowe and many other antislavery activists, black and white, men and women.

In addition to Douglass’s own romanticism, those who use these phrases today also often invoke them somewhat romantically, treating them as a form of progressive positive thinking, as exhortations about will or energy rather than as poetic efforts to underline the structural difficulties of achieving justice. You just have to keep demanding! You just have to turn your back on the master’s tools! You’ll get there!

Organizing is, of course, brutally hard, and optimism of the will is not to be scoffed at. But the popular, romantic theory of change embodied in these two quotes is—particularly when they are marshalled as standalone admonitions—all too meager as a historical analysis. Yet this has not stopped even exceptionally clear-sighted historians from dropping into its shallow embrace from time to time.

The instance I’m thinking of at the moment comes from Samuel Moyn’s Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Harvard, 2018), which I want to take a moment to talk about as a whole first before dialing in on a specific passage.

Not Enough is like all of Moyn’s work: a frontal assault on the lazy reader. His argumentation is so tight, so exacting, and yet his scope, his understanding of the stakes of his arguments and of the arguments with which he is engaging, is so formidably panoramic that I imagine it is very difficult—probably impossible—to get anything out of his work unless you have your entire mental apparatus deployed.

Not Enough tells a two-part story: first, how equality became a goal for state action through the emergence of the welfare state; and second, how that ideal was supplanted by sufficiency within a neoliberal (or, if that word chafes you, let’s say developmentalist) consensus. This story dovetails with Moyn’s previous work on human rights, as he demonstrates that the human rights movement that emerged in the 1970s melded with and mutually supported this new ideal of sufficiency as a universal goal of state and private action. Fortuitously, human rights and sufficiency created a package of moral and political idealism and action that seemed both comprehensively bold and yet efficiently operationalizable. The glamor of this package, Moyn concludes, drew the last shreds of attention away from the older ideal of equality, which was already—and for separate reasons—in full retreat.

That summary may be a bit opaque without a fuller explanation of the distinction Moyn draws between sufficiency and equality. One way to think about the difference is to contrast distributive and redistributive programs. To some extent, all distributive programs are redistributive—the something you give to person A either came from person B or could have gone to person B—but generally redistribution is not their purpose. Preferably, distributive programs do not substantially change the positions of the people or institutions from whom resources are drawn. Distributive programs are supposed to be, as the saying goes, “no skin off their back.” Redistributive programs, on the other hand, are supposed to change the overall map of where resources are located, moving some resources closer to some people and further away from others. It is as important that there be a ceiling on how much resources one person can hoard as it is that no one go entirely without resources.

Sufficiency, in other words, is entirely compatible with inequality—as long as everyone makes it over a certain minimum, it doesn’t matter how much the richest people have. Equality, however, presupposes material sufficiency, while also insisting that excessive concentration of wealth creates its own set of problems which also need to be addressed.

The history of these two ideals as Moyn tells it is both intricate and expansive: I was rapt while watching him connect one piece of his story to another. I was also grateful—as a framework, the contrast between sufficiency and equality has helped me greatly in some of my own scholarship. Yet if Moyn clearly and confidently tells a historical narrative about sufficiency replacing equality as the highest ideal of political action and moral aspiration, he seems more undecided about the strategic relation between the two concepts.

Moyn’s overall goal in the book is to convince readers that sufficiency is not a proper ultimate goal, in the sense that he views the history of the past forty years or so as a demonstration that when sufficiency is prioritized, inequality is unchecked or even encouraged. “[E]ven if it is entirely possible for those who care about sufficiency simply to prioritize it, insisting that they value equality as a postponed next step,” he writes, “it is far more common to believe that the goal of achieving sufficiency depends on embracing more inequality” (4). Inequality is, in a sense, a bribe that is paid to the very wealthy to induce them to try to solve global poverty through philanthropy or some other non-redistributive means. If one tries to fight inequality as well as deprivation, the implication goes, the very rich will simply withdraw their munificence: you will end up beating neither inequality nor poverty.

However, Moyn reconsiders and suggests that this may not be the case. Sure, the financial titans may withhold their charity in the face of egalitarianism, but “It might be that you have to strive at [a] more equal society even to get the most vital needs met,” he muses (5). Rather than trying to convince the wealthy that sufficiency is an achievable and worthwhile goal, frighten them into opening their wallets by bruiting a redistributive solution to poverty.

Almost at the end of the book, he returns to this suggestion that a more radical drive for equality is the only kind of demand that can secure sufficiency. He invokes the concept of “the reformism of fear,” a term that French theorist Pierre Rosanvallon introduced in his book The Society of Equals (2011; translated into English 2013) used to describe the kind of concessions made by conservative governments from Bismarck to Nixon to strengthen welfare and social rights. Yet in this scenario, the pressure was applied not only from below but also from outside.

It can be no accident that the era of relative material equality in the mid-twentieth century was also the age of totalitarian regimes and of the Cold War, which exacted an appalling toll on the world. National welfare built a floor of protection and [a] ceiling on inequality only in the presence of frightening internal and external threats—a prominent and well-organized labor movement and a communist menace, however magnified out of proportion… Governance expanded to secure material equality because the state was viewed as less frightening than the threats only it could stave off. By contrast, the human rights movement at its most inspiring has stigmatized governmental repression and violence, but it has never offered a functional replacement for the sense of fear that led to both protection and redistribution for those left alive by the horrors of the twentieth century. (219)

This argument resembles in some ways both Jefferson Cowie’s “Great Exception” thesis and Ira Katznelson’s story of the “Southern cage” surrounding the New Deal. In all three cases, the mid-century ascension of the welfare state (at least in the US) emerged in a symbiotic relationship with something unholy. For Cowie, the suppression of immigration after 1924 (among other factors) created the kind of working-class solidarity and sense of national cohesion that made “universal” (i.e., for whites) social programs seem both feasible and merited. For Katznelson, FDR and his Brain Trust took a gamble that keeping white Southern Democrats in the fold was a reasonable price to pay for the New Deal’s legislative progress, leaving Jim Crow for another day. And in Moyn’s case, the welfare state was a kind of by-blow of the brutal Soviet, fascist, and Chinese experiments in redistribution.

It is not hard to see why such narratives are being put forth in today’s political climate. All three suggest—even though the authors strive to forestall the implication—that the conditions which produced social democratic triumphs are either unrepeatable, undesirable, or both. That suits a certain spirit of romantic bleakness that one can find easily on Twitter (and many other places besides).

Yet it is possible, I think, to peel away a little the facts of the histories that Moyn, Katznelson, and Cowie have written from the psychological assumptions they make about their historical actors’ motivations and decisions. For instance, is “reformism of fear” really such a solid thesis to account for US or UK emulation of the kinds of central planning and robust social welfare they observed in totalitarian countries? Fear there was in abundance—of that there is no doubt. But is that all there was? Not envy or curiosity or admiration? Not competitiveness or inspiration?

Of course, we do have brilliant studies of transatlantic crosspollinations of reform driven by those kind of emotions, with Daniel Rodgers’s Atlantic Crossings and James Kloppenberg’s Uncertain Victory taking pride of place. But those are also histories where the master’s tools are precisely the instruments being taken up in the cause of reform, where power is looking for something to fix even before a demand is made.

Perhaps those histories did not sufficiently register the limitations imposed by using the master’s tools. I think that is a fair assessment, and I imagine that they would be written differently today. Yet there is a willingness to think beyond fear and force as the motivations for change that I still hope to hold onto, and that I think we must hold onto simply in order to be open to a wider range of human motivations in our sources. We need, I think, to be prepared to find optimism of the intellect as well as optimism of the will in our histories.