Return of the 'L' Word: An Interview with Douglas Massey

In the months since John Kerry's defeat last November, asking "What's wrong with liberals?" has become something of an obsession for pundits across America. Did they lose because they were crushed by the right-wing attack machine, because of those ever-nebulous moral values, because they were soft on national security, or because they hadn't bashed corporations enough? Some of these? All of these?

In Return of the "L" Word: A Liberal Vision for the New Century, Douglas Massey takes a long, hard look at these questions and comes up with some surprising answers. His book reminds us of just how much liberalism has accomplished over the 20th century, of why it eventually declined, and what liberals need to do to usher in a new realignment in politics, one that wrestles the country back from the now-dominant right.

Part of the answer, Massey contends, is to create a new market-based vision for liberalism, one that avoids the pitfalls of both conservative free-market dogma and the leftist ideologies of old. Building off insights from the rapidly-expanding field of economic sociology, Massey argues that markets are essentially human constructions, and liberals shouldn't seek to oppose markets with big government, but rather, ensure that these markets are working in the public interest.

"The time has come," he writes, "for liberals to tell the public that markets are not 'free,' but human-created institutions that citizens have a right to supervise and mange for their own benefit. Liberals need to abandon their lingering hostility toward market mechanisms, embrace them, and substitute a new rhetoric of 'democratic markets' for the false metaphor of the 'free market.'"

Massey, the Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University, recently sat down to discuss his vision for a new liberalism.

Bradford Plumer: Your book is about the possibility of bringing liberalism back into American politics. I'd like to start off by asking how you would define liberalism, broadly conceived.

Douglas Massey: Well, for me, liberals are people who seek to use government to promote the general welfare. The United States, after all, was founded by men of liberal sentiment who were seeking to promote the greatest good for the greatest number, by creating a constitutional order for the creation and expansion of liberty. And that order was imperfect at first, but then in the 20th century liberals succeeded in enfranchising, in a very real way, the vast majority of Americans and pushed that project forward.

MJ: Now after a long string of successes in the 20th century—from the early Progressives, to the New Deal, to the civil rights movement, to Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society—why do you think liberalism reached a peak and started to decline somewhere in the 1960s?

DM: By the 1960s, liberal Democrats had been in power a long time, and they got arrogant, and really started taking a lot of their constituents for granted. In particular, a couple of things that came to a head. The civil rights movement really came to fruition in the late '60s and led to a re-writing of the rules of the American political economy in a way that would enfranchise African-Americans. Now in doing so, it necessarily imposed some costs on people who had benefited under the old order. In particular, the white working classes were called upon to make certain economic sacrifices. And I think the liberal elites saw any resistance to these social changes, among the working classes, as simple racism and hence dismissed it. But the working class was really being called upon to make some economic sacrifices and I think if Democrats had made an extra effort to ease the transition here, they could've accomplished two things: they could have perpetuated the Democratic coalition and advanced the cause of civil rights.