It is encouraging when my writing is compared to heavy artillery, even when it is by a friend whose “position” that “artillery” was supporting. At the very least, that means that my words are having some impact and have (we can hope) a certain precision about them.

Turning to the original Ross Douthat and Peter Suderman posts that prompted Michael’s comments and Will Wilkinson’s dismissive response, I am surprised to find very little disagreement in principle between the two. That is the sort of amicable discussion that should be had between libertarians and conservatives on economic and moral questions, and which, unfortunately, is very often lacking.

How did it all start? We can happily assign blame to the left in this case. For the reader’s convenience, so he can skip following every link, I will lay out the evolution of this argument. The American Prospect ran a column by one Garance Franke-Ruta (what a name!), which was part of a series dedicated to helping make the Democrats competitive in the “culture debate.” So far, so boring, right? As it happens, it is a little more interesting than it sounds.

Here is Franke-Ruta on the research of the pollsters Nordhaus and Shellenberger from American Environics:

Lumping specific survey statements like these together into related groups, Nordhaus and Shellenberger arrived at what they call “social values trends,” such as “sexism,” “patriotism,” or “acceptance of flexible families.” But the real meaning of those trends was revealed only by plugging them into the “values matrix” — a four-quadrant plot with plenty of curving arrows to show direction, which is then overlaid onto voting data. The quadrants represent different worldviews. On the top lies authority, an orientation that values traditional family, religiosity, emotional control, and obedience. On the bottom, the individuality orientation encompasses risk-taking, “anomie-aimlessness,” and the acceptance of flexible families and personal choice. On the right side of the scale are values that celebrate fulfillment, such as civic engagement, ecological concern, and empathy. On the left, there’s a cluster of values representing the sense that life is a struggle for survival: acceptance of violence, a conviction that people get what they deserve in life, and civic apathy. These quadrants are not random: Shellenberger and Nordaus developed them based on an assessment of how likely it was that holders of certain values also held other values, or “self-clustered.”

Over the past dozen years, the arrows have started to point away from the fulfillment side of the scale, home to such values as gender parity and personal expression, to the survival quadrant, home to illiberal values such as sexism, fatalism, and a focus on “every man for himself.” Despite the increasing political power of the religious right, Environics found social values moving away from the authority end of the scale, with its emphasis on responsibility, duty, and tradition, to a more atomized, rage-filled outlook that values consumption, sexual permissiveness, and xenophobia. The trend was toward values in the individuality quadrant.

Franke-Ruta goes on to cite Michael Adams, also of Environics, who writes this in a new book called American Backlash:

“While American politics becomes increasingly committed to a brand of conservatism that favors traditionalism, religiosity, and authority,” Adams writes, “the culture at large [is] becoming ever more attached to hedonism, thrill-seeking, and a ruthless, Darwinist understanding of human competition.” This behavior is particularly prevalent among the vast segment of American society that is not politically or civically engaged, and which usually fails to even vote. This has created what must be understood at the electoral level as a politics of backlash on the part of both Republican and Democratic voters: Voters of both parties, Environics data show, have developed an increasingly moralistic politics as a reaction to the new cultural order.

Of course, those of us on the right may laugh at the description of contemporary conservatism as reflecting tradition, religion or authority, but to understand where this debate on “markets and morality” (as Michael put it) started we have to look to the argument of this column. The argument is simply that over the last decade or so more Americans have become more crass, individualistic and self-indulgent while also finding that older bonds of social solidarity (that’s a scary word for libertarians right there) have weakened or vanished, and it goes on to say that politicians who have exploited this reality have been successful as voters hungry for reliable traditional “values” and the social order they do actually provide (many of whom are low-income voters, those whom the Democrats believe ought to naturally support the Dems on economic questions, beset by the ills of divorce, illegitimacy, abortion, etc.) have supported them. No prizes for guessing the party these politicians belong to. From a social scientific perspective, we can see that this is a very simple kind of analysis of anomie leading to a structural need for solidarity. In this sort of analysis, the GOP has succeeded because it provided a function and fulfilled a social and psychological need that the Dems were not able to provide and fulfill. Call the analysis Durkheim Lite.

What might get libertarians all hot and bothered about this sort of plodding, not really very provocative analysis? Here’s the quote that attracted attention:

American voters have taken shelter under the various wings of conservative traditionalism because there has been no one on the Democratic side in recent years to defend traditional, sensible middle-class values against the onslaught of the new nihilistic, macho, libertarian lawlessness unleashed by an economy that pits every man against his fellows.

“Libertarian lawlessness.” That has to stick in the craw of every committed libertarian, as there is nothing that annoys them more than being associated with indifference or hostility to morality and order. The so-called “libertarian” trends in culture have brought us a “traditionalist” reaction, says Franke-Ruta. Now traditionalists know this is not entirely true, as there has been no reaction worth mentioning. The spirit of “nihilistic lawlessness” has caught the GOP in its wave and has taken most of the “traditionalist” voters with it.

Ross Douthat touched on the subject, noting correctly that cultural degeneration also stems from the usual suspects that conservatives have hounded the left and libertarians about for decades, and Mr. Suderman quoted him from this post. That quote prompted Mr. Suderman to say this:

I suspect this is a somewhat prevalent notion in a lot of circles, and even many conservatives have been guilted into feeling as thought they have to choose between economic freedom and moral rectitude. In so many cases, whether it’s the environment or cultural values, the left has convinced the public—even many conservatives—that there’s a sliding scale between righteousness and economic growth, and that, consequently, the job of government is to set policies that try to balance between the two allegedly opposite ends.

Mr. Suderman rejects the sliding scale or trade-off model absolutely as a concept (the role of government in one sense doesn’t even enter directly into the question). He proposes the counter-argument (which I have encountered in a more simplistic form as the “we can have it all” argument) that a more libertarian economy strengthens a society’s morals:

The book’s main argument, as laid out in a recent presentation at a joint AEI-Brookings event, is that, contrary to prevailing ideas like Franke-Ruta’s, economic growth actual produces a society of sounder morals. Friedman singles out four specific developments that occur in response to stronger economies: 1) Provision of opportunity 2) Tolerance – racial, religious, and otherwise 3) Greater willingness and ability to provide for the disadvantaged and 4) Strengthening of public institutions. His point is that, while so many people try to place economic growth and moral correctness at opposite ends of the spectrum, the two are really one in the same. And, of course, economic growth happens best in exactly the sort of libertarian, free-market economy that Franke-Ruta says erodes traditional values. The correlation simply isn’t there.

Aside from the odd phrase “moral correctness,” this is all pretty clear: if economic growth does not make people more moral, it certainly undergirds a more stable moral order and provides the means for people to act in a more “moral” way. We could easily make mincemeat of this understanding of morality, much of which does not really touch on morality. For instance, the strengthening of institutions is a sign of increasing social solidarity, which is not necessarily at all the same as improved morality. A society may be wealthy and full of very strong, reliable institutions and still be given over to the most egregious abuses and evils.

Likewise, there may be a greater ability to provide for the “disadvantaged” and perhaps even a greater inclination to do so, which is all very well, but this tells us nothing about what the wealthy society does with the rest of its wealth or what the rest of its considerable wealth has done to that society’s moral fibre, to use a rather arcane expression. There also seems to be no taking account here of the frequent social upheaval of the market’s capacity for “creative destruction,” which was not intended as a compliment when Schumpeter coined it and it is still not a good thing, or the disintegrative and atomising effects of the constant movement of labour in the internal market (to say nothing of the influx of new labour from abroad). Healthy societies do not have individuals and families engaged in the lifestyle of modern nomads moving between cities several times in their lives. If the social bonds in this country are growing weaker and weaker, it is partly because Americans simply do not stop moving. We all know what benefits are derived from such dynamism, but any stable system can only take so much kinesis before it breaks down or explodes.

Mr. Douthat, for his part, seems to be saying that economic growth and sound moral order are not strictly antithetical, but that the former is only the beginning of conservatism and that economic growth can have destabilising effects on social order. Michael weighed in with a few moderate remarks about how Mr. Douthat was making sense, and he was then labeled a collectivist and told to be quiet. Now I have jumped in rather belatedly, and will probably have more of my own to say about this next time.