In the 1930s, Lippmann saw himself participating in an ideological project to redefine liberalism for an age of political and economic turmoil—the same project that Keynes had attempted a dozen years earlier in The End of Laissez-Faire. And it made sense to group Hayek, Mises, and Keynes together. They all still called themselves liberals and considered themselves inheritors of the same Enlightenment intellectual tradition. They were all anti-Nazi and anti-Soviet and had come of age believing that free trade and the gold standard were essential to the preservation of individual liberty. But this shared tradition had been fracturing for years, and with Roosevelt the breach became irreparable.
Lack of curiosity and lack of empathy have always been defining characteristics of the official authorities on obesity and weight control and of most of the self-appointed (lean) authorities.
Public health and medical authorities have slowly come to accept what research and physician iconoclasts had argued as early as the 1960s, that heart disease is a complex process and the end result of a metabolic disruption that manifests itself throughout the human body. We cannot ascertain whether we will live a long and healthy life from a single number and a single biological entity. (The measures that are best at doing that, in any case, are far better indicators than LDL cholesterol.) For most of us, the primary sign that we’re at high risk of heart disease or premature death from any chronic disease, including cancer, is not whether our LDL cholesterol is elevated, but whether we have the cluster of metabolic disorders now known as metabolic syndrome, which itself seems to be a consequence or manifestation of insulin resistance.
In a backward rural South, impoverished white elites under a Democratic Party flag divided poor blacks against poor whites, enjoyed unbreakable majorities in state legislatures, and resisted democratic liberalism until the 1960s, when a South grown richer gave in to a combination of federal pressure and pragmatic calculation. Cultural conservatives in the South—for example, the Southern Agrarians (to be noted later)—defended the region’s “higher” values against the crude “materialism” of the North. Theirs was an example of the “withdrawal” strategy taken by critics of liberal modernity on the right who chose to resist in books rather than politics.
[Abraham Maslow] accepted Freud’s clinical method without accepting his philosophy. Man is driven by sexual urges, dominance urges, territorial urges; but these are only the lower part of the picture. Shaw had always asserted that there are saintly men and women in whom the sex-drive has been transcended; but in the Freudian era, this was taken for old-fashioned idealism. But it is a logical consequence of Maslow’s ‘hierarchy of values’ theory. The ‘transcendent’ urges—aesthetic, creative, religious—are as basic and permanent a part of human nature as dominance or sexuality. If they are less obviously ‘universal’, this is only because fewer human beings reach the point at which they take over.
Fraternity, which the French Revolution added to the liberty and equality which have always been categories of man’s political sphere—that fraternity has its natural place among the repressed and persecuted, the exploited and humiliated, whom the eighteenth century called the unfortunates, les malheureux, and the nineteenth century the wretched, les misérables.
But, assuming that non-logical conduct is, on the whole, predominant in those actions that affect the course of history, we may legitimately wonder why this has not been widely recognized.
Perhaps most important, politics itself has been taken over by markets. In a 1993 essay, the political scientist Robert A. Dahl explained why almost all democratic countries had chosen not to organize themselves as purely market-driven but instead left a large role for the state. He pointed out that there were many things in society that one would want to insulate from market forces—politicians’ and citizens’ votes, for example. But even those have now become a tradable good, with money dominating politics to the extent that the rich—companies and people—can effectively buy votes, writing and rewriting rules to suit them.
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