What A Dispute About Jacksonian America Can Teach Us About The Merits Of The Welfare State

Many thanks to the reader who correctly ascertained that I'd be interested in Jill LePore's joint review of What Hath God Wrought? and Charles Sellers' The Market Revolution. This paragraph captures something enormously important for politics in general, and not just the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century:

Howe offered an early version of his critique of Sellers at a conference held in London in 1994, in which he demurred, "What if people really were benefitting in certain ways from the expansion of the market and its culture? What if they espoused middle-class tastes or evangelical religion or (even) Whig politics for rational and defensible reasons? What if the market was not an actor (as Sellers makes it) but a resource, an instrumentality, something created by human beings as a means to their ends?" Sellers summarized Howe's argument as "Market delivers eager self-improvers from stifling Jacksonian barbarism" as against his own "Go-getter minority compels everybody else to play its competitive game of speedup and stretch-out or be run over." Fair enough. "Where Howe's assumptions suggest that I undervalue capitalism's benefits and attractions," Sellers continued, "my assumptions suggest that he underestimates its costs and coercions." Again, fair enough. But Sellers attributed these "warring assumptions" not to different evidence, methods, theories, or strategies of analysis but to the two historians' different values. Howe writes from "within the bourgeois middle-class culture," Sellers scoffed, while his own (presumably more Waldenesque) life had taught him that "relations of capitalist production wrench a commodified humanity to relentless competitive effort and poison the more affective and altruistic relations of social reproduction that outweigh material accumulation for most human beings." In other words, money talks, but it can't buy you love.

Note that what's under discussion here isn't the welfare state, it's the existence of market competition in the private sector. And what Sellers seems to me to be missing is the long-term view. If you end your examination of history in 1848, you can probably find any number of instances of the growth of market competition doing enormous harm. In fact, here's an example from Howe:

Did internal improvements benefit everybody? No. Sometimes local farmers or artisans went bankrupt when exposed to the competition of cheap goods suddenly brought in from far away. Northeastern wheat-growers were hurt once the Erie Canal brought in wheat from more productive midwestern lands. Some of them could switch from grains to growing perishable vegetables for the nearby cities, but others had to abandon their farms. Generations later, travelers could find the ruins of these farmhouses among the woods of New England. Before the great improvements in transportation, such farms, however inefficient on their infertile and stony soil, could yield a living producing for a nearby market.

But over the long run I don't see how you can possibly deny that residents of the Northeastern United States are better off for having the ability to purchase grain from the midwest. The alternate universe in which northeastern farmers are the only source of northeastern food is a universe in which the great northeastern megalopolis and all the prosperity it's engendered just couldn't exist.

At the same time, per Sellers the idea that this is just a happy-go-lucky process in which everyone wins or everyone gets what they "deserve" is ridiculous. It's a pure myth of democratic capitalism. People are born, they acquire some skills, they do some work, and then they find themselves buffeted by technological and global shifts that are entirely out of their control. One possible response is always to try to hold back the winds of change and stifle long-term progress. But a much, much, much better response is a decent welfare state—secure retirement, basic provision of health care and transportation services, decent schools—so that it's tolerable for people to expose themselves to economic change. In the first half of the nineteenth century, this idea didn't really exist. But it does today, and it's worth fighting for.