The Ideology Shuffle: Growth vs. Green

One in a series of posts on the evolution of The Future and Its Enemies, featuring the original Washington Post article on stasis vs. dynamism.

Image by Ideogram.ai from prompt “create an illustration of the conflict between a political party of abundance and a political party of limits.>”

This article appeared in The Washington Post on April 1, 1990. The distinction I posited here was cruder than the ideas of stasis (in its technocratic as well as reactionary forms) and dynamism I developed in The Future and Its Enemies. Reading the essay for the first time in decades, I find this simpler distinction surprisingly apt for the current moment, when technocrats themselves are divided between the party of abundance (Ezra Klein, the Breakthrough Institute, YIMBY urban planners) and the party of limits (Bill McKibben, the Sierra Club, NIMBYs of all stripes). And then we have the strange, potentially explosive mixture of reactionaries and dynamists that is the Trump coalition. If my prediction was several decades ahead of the trend, it certainly seems relevant today.

A new ideological fissure is rapidly reshaping American politics, one that is displacing the notions of “left” and “right” that have dominated our poli­tics for decades. In fact, it is reshuffling leftists and rightists, creating surprising and sometimes bizarre new alliances between former opponents.

This divide isn’t over defense, spending, law and order or communism: it is between the proponents of economic dynamism and the advocates of stasis.

Although it has major implications for domestic and foreign policy, this new division is now particularly pronounced at the state and local level. Ultimately, it will define the most contentious is­sues of the coming decade: trade, immigration, urban growth and, above all, environmentalism.

On one side are those who see economic growth as fundamentally desirable. They accept, indeed rel­ish, capitalism’s “creative destruction.” They glory in human ingenuity, extolling the virtues of immigrant shopkeepers and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. They see economic opportunity as the only hope for the poor, and growth as the key to that opportunity. They view American individualism as a source of strength and a certain amount of disorder as the price of creativity.

On the other side are the prophets of “sustainability." They warn of limits to growth and decry the pace of modern life. They are suspicious of new technologies, seeing in them the seeds of future problems. They view the economy as essentially zero-sum. unable to bring prosperity to some without depriving others. They mourn the loss of community and the despoilation of the earth. Deriding their oppo­nents as “techno-optimists,” they prophesy worldwide disaster if we do not substantially alter our economic system.

This rift first appeared in the 1970s, with Jimmy Carter and Jerry Brown. This new kind of Democrat was not only willing but eager to preach limits and call for austerity and sacrifice. Simultaneously, and perhaps in response, the Republican Party dropped its tradition of cautious naysaying and embraced dynamism as a fundamental principle. Hence, the rise of the supply-siders and of the Jack Kemp-Newt Gingrich idea of “progressive conservatism.”

Since the '70s, peace and prosperity have changed the political background. Voters can now afford to grumble about oil spills, traffic and trade deficits, since they no longer face oil embargoes, gasoline lines and stagflation. The '80s marked a decade of rapid economic change and restructuring.

The politics of stasis evokes a calmer, gentler America, one less subject to the hurly-burly of “merger mania” or foreign competition. After a decade in which dynamism has been in ascendance, those who call for a static economy can look less like malaise peddlers and more like moderates.

“Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption,” said Carter in his “malaise” speech. “But we’ve discovered that own­ing things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.” In 1979, these sentiments sounded self-righteous and gloomy, an excuse for a lousy economy and a call to accept living with less. Ten years later, they would have fit into any review of the decade or, indeed, into George Bush’s inaugural address.

In this favorable environment, the old pro-stasis voices are speaking out with renewed vigor. “Most people do not recognize that, at least in rich na­tions. economic growth is the disease, not the cure,” as Paul and Anne Ehrlich put it in their new book The Population Explosion.

Meanwhile, new advocates of dynamism are emerging, often bridging the traditional ideological categories. Joel Kotkin, co-author of The Third Century: America’s Resurgence in the Asian Era, freely quotes Marx and criticizes as narrowly Eurocentric those who promote college courses on Western civilization. Yet his pro-entrepreneur, pro-immigrant, anti-protectionist message has found some of its most receptive audiences on the pro-capitalist right.

And lawyer Clint Bolick. of the Landmark Legal Foundation’s Center for Civil Rights, is mounting a “conservative” campaign for a positive approach to civil rights. Rather than litigating to block affirma­tive-action plans, Bolick tries to break down barriers to economic mobility.

Some of the most interesting pro-dynamism alli­ances are occurring not in the United States but abroad. Peruvian writer Hernando de Soto, whose book The Other Path is a bestseller throughout Latin America, calls himself a libertarian; his procapitalist analysis of the Peruvian economy’s “infor­mal sector” would put him on the American right. But he works with leftist unions of illegal entre­preneurs and sharply criticizes Peruvian conservatives.

They are, he says, “mercantilists” hostile to economic dynamism, deregulation and the rule of law. (De Soto's analysis has reached as far as South Africa. Aggrey Klaaste, editor of The Sowetan, finds striking parallels between The Other Path’s description of Peru and life in South Africa, where many black entrepreneurs must operate illegally.)

Obviously, the familiar left-right dichotomy doesn’t quite capture the emerging division. While the conservative movement's supply-siders include many advocates of dynamism, their ideological roots are firmly in the classical-liberal tradition. They are individualists and cosmopolitans, comfortable with displacement of the old order. The proponents of stasis, by contrast, tend to congregate on the left’s environmental fringe, while advocating a fundamen­tally conservative vision. They oppose change and call forth a nationalistic, land-oriented order reminiscent of the European right.

It is not surprising, then, that some odd associa­tions have emerged. Jesse Jackson’s praise for Michael Milken, an abomination from the usual leftist viewpoint, makes perfect sense when both men are seen as advocates of economic dynamism. So. on the other side of the divide, does the picnic for Jeremy Rifkin held last fall by the staff of Chronicles, a monthly published by the “paleo-conservative” Rockford Institute.

Now that the right’s anti-communist glue is evap­orating, and with it the centrality of the neoconser­vatives, the paleocons hope to mount a comeback. Their message combines a dollop of limited-govern­ment rhetoric with a communitarian, anti-immigrant, anti-free trade, anti-technology agenda. It doesn’t fit in very well with the Republican Party’s pro-dynamism platform, but it has garnered some environmentalist friends.

This ideological realignment has ramifi­cations in the world of practical politics. The question for both the Democratic Party and mainstream environmentalists is whether to adopt the politics of stasis as their prescription for economic and ecologi­cal health. The worldwide “green” move­ment offers a seductive—and inspiringly purist—alternative to accepting some risks, some changes and some pollution.

“I see the day in our lifetime that rever­ence for the natural systems—the oceans, the rain forests, the soil, the grasslands, and all other living things—will be so strong that no narrow ideology based upon politics or economics will overcome it,” said Jerry Brown in 1979. Many people think that day has come, at least in California. And Brown, back from exile, is now chairman of California's Democratic Party.

Green ideas are by far the most vital and exciting today’s left has to draw on. (After only six years of the green-oriented Utne Reader boasts a paid circulation of more than 200,000—twice that of The New Republic or The Nation.) Green ideology speaks of slowing life down and of viewing life whole. It evokes a world of natural beauty and human scale, in which people will fully understand the tools they use and will provide for themselves without depending on experts or specialists. It speaks not of “protectionism” but of “self-sufficiency,” not of “regulation” but of “community control.”

The politics of stasis is especially powerful at the state and local level. Although it has suffered elec­toral setbacks, “no growth” remains a rallying cry for both affluent homeowners and radical environmentalists. In 1988. New Jersey became the first state to adopt statewide growth controls. Over the last three years, growth-control measures have appeared on local ballots in California; 70 percent were approved.

Now an omnibus environmental initiative dubbed "Big Green" (with petitions printed on green recy­cled paper) is wooing California voters. Assemblyman Tom Hayden, whose political career is stymied, hopes his backing for Big Green will propel him to statewide office the post of "environmental advocate,” which the initiative would create.

Among its many draconian provisions, Big Green would decree that total carbon-dioxide emissions be cut by 20 percent by the end of the decade, by 40 percent by 2010. In a state growing by half a million residents a year with the concomitant increase in automobiles, electricity demand, and backyard barbecues that is a prescription not just for stasis but for economic depression.

The politics of stasis has proven it can win backing from grassroots activists. Indeed, a whole new movement has emerged, composed of local activists working to ban chemicals, oppose incinerators, and control urban growth. It began with neighborhood protesters but quickly took on green ideological coloring.

“These activists were strongly attached to the notion of community; deeply mistrustful of corporate, governmental and environmental elites; and willing to entertain the notion that the way to deal with a particular dump site ultimately led to the notion of industrial restructuring and dramatic political change,” writes Robert Gottlieb in the March-April issue of Tikkun. Like the grassroots activists with whom he sympathizes, Gottlieb slams the large, mainstream environmental groups as too concerned with containing pollution, not enough with radical economic change.

Will stasis play as long-term politics? Such activists constitute an alluring constituency for Democratic politicians, but embracing stasis as a political philosophy could cost the party what remains of its traditional constituencies. As Jesse Jackson’s move toward the politics of dynamism demonstrates, "keeping hope alive” doesn’t necessarily square with keeping things the same. And green prescriptions have a way of taking their toll on the upwardly mobile poor. The Los Angeles area's much-touted Air Quality Management District plan to reduce air pollution threatens to all but wipe out the region’s flourishing furniture business—a major employer of Latino immigrants—while producing plenty of jobs for college-educated consultants.

And given their open hostility to "industrialism,” it isn’t surprising to find greens less than sympathetic to manufacturing jobs. Yet those are the jobs that have provided middle-class lives for the Democrats’ already-diminishing blue-collar constituency. The green solution is redistribution, which, at best, offers the poor a less-bad life, not a good one.

And, of course, there’s the South — a region that remembers what it’s like to be poor and is none too eager to return to that status. Green advocates of “steady-state economics,” such as World Bank economist Herman E. Daly, deplore capital mobility, not only among nations but among regions. Without such mobility, the South would never have become the Sunbelt, and Southerners know that.

Finally, embracing the politics of stasis could mean cutting the Democratic Party off once and for all from what is most appealing about liberalism: its optimism. The Republicans will quite happily become the party of hope—they do, after all, claim a classical-liberal wing—and the Democrats may find themselves with nothing to offer but fear itself.

Mainstream environmentalists, too, face a choice about aligning themselves with those whose goal is to dismantle industrial society. Clean air and water, lovely places to hike, protection for endangered species—these are the environmental goals most Americans embrace. But average citizens do not long for the world of subsistence agriculture or localized economies envisioned by greens.

Asked to select the two most urgent problems facing the country today, respondents to a Los Angeles Times poll ranked the environment fifth—well behind crime, education, low morals and government spending. Fifteen percent of those polled included the environment among their top two concerns; by comparison, 14 percent selected unemployment, even though the unemployment rate is at its lowest level in two decades. The poll suggests that Americans value a clean environment, but not at the expense of prosperity. At the ballot box, dynamism is likely to be far more successful than stasis.

What do you think? Was I completely wrong? Utterly correct? Or somewhere in between? Please leave comments below.