Alex Zakaras, author of FREEDOM FOR ALL - Episode 601 - Voices in my Head (the Rick Lee James Podcas

Well, welcome back to Voices in My Head. As always, I am your host, Rick Lee James. I'm so grateful for all of you who are listening, and I know that we're going to have a great conversation today. We're going to be diving into some big questions about freedom, democracy, and the future, future of liberal society. My guest is Alex Zakharas. He's the professor of political science at the University of Vermont and author of several works on American political thought, including including his brand new book releasing on October 28th called Freedom for All: What a Liberal Society Could Be. And it comes from Yale University Press. It's both a defense and a reimagining of liberalism, what Zakaris calls a radical liberalism. And we're going to be talking about that on our episode today. Alex, thank you so much for joining me here on Voices in My Head this week.

Rick, thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Well, I want to jump right into your new book, actually. I'm excited to read it. I haven't had a chance to yet, and I, I want listeners to know that because usually I try to read all the books beforehand, and I just haven't had a chance to get a copy because it hasn't released yet. But what I've been reading about it is fascinating, and I'm, I'm really looking forward to your perspective, and I know our audience will be as well. So let's start with a question real quick that I know is probably stirring on people's minds when they hear this: radical liberalism. And I wonder if you could first, before we get into what you mean by radical liberalism, unpack what it means just to— by your definition of liberal, uh, in itself, or liberalism. Because I think maybe some people have a different idea with our right-left politics culture that we have. I think the classical liberalism definition is, is often lost.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm glad you asked that. So you're right that the way we use the term liberal in our common conversations about politics is not actually the same. It's a different meaning than the one that historians and political scientists tend to use. So when we use the word in our ordinary political discourse, it usually just describes people who are left of center, right? And so it's a very broad category. It includes a whole range of different political opinions to the left. But When historians and political scientists talk about the liberal tradition, we're talking about a very particular tradition of ideas and institutions that developed in the modern West, arguably as early as the 17th and 18th centuries, but that really came to its own in the last couple of centuries. And I would say, you know, the core features— the way I define liberalism, it says, as sort of sharing a common goal and sharing a set of common strategies. So the common goal for liberals has always been to create conditions under which people can live freely. And liberals have emphasized personal freedoms above all. So when you think about rights to speak and associate, rights to worship freely, rights to work on our own terms, rights to form relationships on our own terms, rights to own property— these have been central commitments in the liberal tradition. And then we also think about a set of strategies. So liberals have tended to believe that there's a host of political strategies that are well designed to try to protect people's freedoms. These include a bunch that'll be really familiar to all of us: constitutions, individual rights overseen by independent judiciaries, free media, open civil society, checks and balances, economic markets. These are some of the core institutions that liberals have always believed in. Now, one thing that I'll emphasize about liberalism understood in this way is that it is a kind of a big tent tradition, and it includes people both on the right and on the left. So Ronald Reagan, using the definition that I've just given, liberalism, was a liberal, and so was Franklin Roosevelt, right? So in the book, I defend a liberalism that's very much in the Franklin Roosevelt tradition. That's very much on the left. But it's important to acknowledge that liberalism as a, as a tradition encompasses a broad range of different, different points of view.

Well, thank you. I really appreciate you sharing about that. And now that we have kind of a definition we're working from, maybe you could help us explore a little bit when you add the word radical to it, what you mean by that as far as like radical liberalism radical liberalism and why you think it's— really, I think it's a source of hope is what you're calling it, but I'd love to hear a little more about that.

Yeah, thanks for asking. And I think in this political climate, it's important to clarify what exactly I mean and don't mean by that. Sure. So by radical liberalism, I simply mean a liberalism that takes the idea of human equality seriously. And in particular, a liberalism that treats everyone in our society as having an equal claim to freedom. Right? Freedom has always been, as I was just saying, the most important value in liberal politics. Radical liberalism insists that we need to build a society that's actually free for everyone. And in a sense, that's the challenge that I put to readers in the opening chapters of the book. Do we really believe that we're all equal and we have an equal claim to live free lives? And if so, what would it actually take to implement that thought, to take it seriously, to build a society that honored it? One thing that's very clear is that it would be a society very deeply different than the one we live in today.

Well, and I agree with you, and I, um, I, you may not know this, but my day job, I actually work as a chaplain in a hospital. And so I spend a lot of time seeing a lot of different people from a lot of different backgrounds. And as much as I would, would like to see the equality of everyone, I think I can see very clearly on a human level daily that we are not all on the same footing, unfortunately, and that a commitment to actually making sure everyone shared that equality together— I love that idea. I think it's a beautiful idea for sure. So thank you for sharing that as we go a little bit deeper here tonight. Is there something— you hearing something scratching a little bit on your end? Or maybe—

I'm not actually.

Okay, it might just be something I'm hearing. So everybody listening, I apologize. I just wanted to make sure it wasn't something I was doing. All right. Well, in the book, you argue that the American right has corrupted the idea of freedom. And I'd love to hear from you how exactly this has happened and why it's so urgent for the left to reclaim freedom as a central idea.

Yeah, great. So there's a longstanding debate in this country about the meaning of freedom. You know, most Americans agree in identifying freedom as, as probably the most important American value. We describe ourselves as the land of the free, right? But we disagree, it turns out, a lot, and have for a long time, about what that means. And over the last 50 years or so, the right has really been very successful in promoting what I would call a weak and emaciated idea of what freedom means. And, you know, the idea that you often hear on the right is that freedom basically boils down to not being told what to do. You're free to the extent that other people, and especially government, are not messing with you, you might say, right? So it's an idea of freedom that points towards fewer regulations, lower taxes, less spending on public school— public goods like schools, like job training programs, like childcare. The less government you have in your life, the freer you are in this sense. All right, so you may remember when Elon Musk took to the stage wielding his infamous chainsaw that was actually engraved with the phrase "Long live freedom." And so the idea of freedom that he was celebrating and taking an axe to public programs was very much this idea of freedom, right? Nobody's telling me what to do. And one thing that's important to notice about this idea of freedom is that it's compatible with tremendous poverty, tremendous lack of opportunity, tremendous lack of access to healthcare and other public resources, for example. It's compatible with exploitative work conditions as long as you have the right to quit your job, right? It's compatible with massive inequalities. So as long as people are leaving you alone, right, no matter how desperate you are or limited your options actually are, you look free according to this conception. This is a conception of freedom, I should say, that's always been popular among the wealthiest Americans. So today the billionaire class is very much on board with an idea of freedom that's mainly about cutting regulatory agencies which would exercise oversight over their businesses, slashing their own tax rates, et cetera. The idea of freedom that I defend in the book is different, and this— and I should have said this in answering your last question about what radical liberalism means. I mean, one of the things that lies right at the heart of it is this kind of different and more muscular, I would say, idea of freedom. So freedom, in my view, um, and this is the kind of freedom I think that's most worth having, um, means the power to make choices, right? This idea has very different political implications. You know, freedom means the power to make choices, then building a free society absolutely means that people need access to good schools and to college or job training programs they can afford, and to healthcare and to decent wages and affordable rents, right? Paid family leave and such, because Without these things, the range of options that are actually available to us really shrinks, right? And when you talk about, you know, your perception of inequality among the patients you serve, my guess is that a lot of it comes down to feeling like their range of options has really shrunk.

Yeah.

And actually have the power to make choices in really vitally important areas of their lives.

Yeah, and I think if I could just elaborate a little bit more on what I mean too when I see that, Whenever a person goes into the hospital, one thing that a chaplain does is we listen for what their concerns are. What is it that's really troubling them, worrying them? And one thing that obviously happens to everyone when they go in is, how am I going to pay for this? You know, that's like the idea that the healthcare is so expensive. And so they are already feeling like their hands are tied behind their back a little bit, already not feeling well. And now I have this mountain of debt. And then that creates less opportunities in the long run because now you're chained to this. Enormous debt. So, um, and there's some people that can afford it better than others because they have better insurance. There's some people that have more wealth than others. Uh, I particularly work at a safety net hospital, which means we care for everybody regardless of, of their income. But I know that that always creates challenges for people. And, and if we're not looking for ways to help provide for all to be able to get the same healthcare, which is the perspective that I'm coming from a lot of the times, it helps me see the way that we need to find ways to elevate people and And I think that's why I'm appreciating what you're saying tonight, especially, is it really is about giving people better choices and more choices in their life than what they would have had otherwise. Well, and you also write about the American social contract, and you say that it's been fundamentally broken. And I'd love it if you could explain to our listeners tonight just, first of all, what you mean by the American social contract. Again, just starting kind of a basic definition there, and then maybe some of the ways that you, you feel like it's obviously been broken. Sure.

So, yeah, when I talk about the social contract, I'm talking about a kind of understanding. I work partly on the history of American ideas. I've spent a lot of time writing about the Jacksonian era, among others. So thinking about the way Americans have understood their own economy and the distinctive promise of the American economy and society. One common thing that you see surface over and over again is this basic expectation. Look, Americans are willing to tolerate a measure of inequality, but what they expect in return is widespread opportunity, right? And there's a sort of understanding that if you work hard, if you exercise a measure of discipline so that you save a little bit of the money you're earning, that you can get ahead in the world, right? You can eventually afford a house, you can put your kids through college, you can, you know, save for retirement, you can enjoy a measure of financial security so that you're not worried living paycheck to paycheck, right? And, you know, that's the— that's— you can live with dignity, then have a dignified work life where you feel respected and taken seriously. This is the social contract that I think has frayed so deeply over the last 50 years in American politics. I really think this is a core aspect of our current political crisis. So when, you know, political scientists disagree as to how we got into the mess that we're in, I mean, we're living through some pretty dark times in our country right now. For me, it comes back time and again to the widening inequality and the fraying of this basic social understanding that's happened over the last 50 years. I'll say one other aspect of the social contract comes out of our commitment to democratic norms, right? And the idea— I mean, democracy represents an ideal of equal voice in political decision-making, right? And so where power, political power in our society gets so unbalanced that it's monopolized by a handful of really, really wealthy people. That also undermines the basic understanding that Americans have had of the sort of promise of their politics and society and economy for a very long time. So, just, yeah, I mean, I set out to write this book a little over 3 years ago, and really the motivation for me was my perception of metastasizing inequality in our midst. And it's not just inequality of wealth and not just inequality of income, it's also inequality of power, vastly unequal opportunity, vastly unequal political voice, right? In all of these areas now, our society is defined by this immense gap between the haves and the have-nots. And I've— and as I've been saying, I think this gap fuels so much of the resentment that is destabilizing our politics, um, and that getting a handle on it, um, and, and thinking constructively about how to frame a new social contract, how to bring about a more humane and egalitarian economy where opportunity is actually widely dispersed, um, is sort of a key to, to thinking ourselves out of the, um, the mess that we're in.

Yeah, well, and as you, as you say that, I, I was reminded I heard recently, and I wish I could remember who said it, but it seems like we're in a place where as you say, not everybody is on equal footing when, when we're playing the game, so to speak. And the illustration that I heard was two people are playing chess together, and one person makes their move on the chessboard, the other person stands up and punches you in the face. And, and they said, they said, uh, they said, you know what, studying chess, getting better strategies, it doesn't help you in that instance when your opponent is not only not playing by the rules, they're just getting up and completely doing a crazy thing that there's no way to stop it, you know. And sometimes it feels like what I'm seeing is very much that kind of— when you talk about breaking the social contract, it's not just breaking the social contract, it's like ripping it up and throwing it in the flames and doing something completely different while the other people are trying to play by the rules. And that's what I think makes it so difficult. And I wonder if this might be a good way to kind of move into talking a little bit about what you describe as corporations as tyrants. And, and I'd love to hear more about what you mean by that and what some democratic remedies might be that you're envisioning for things like that that might help us to have some more equal footing and be playing the same game together, so to speak.

Yeah, great. I'm happy to talk, to speak to that. Let me just step back one minute because there's so much to say about where we are in terms of sort of the depth of inequality in our society, but one, I mean, you talk about the chess game, one thing that I mean, just strikes me over and over. I mean, we live in the richest country in the history of the world, right? And on any given night in the United States, there's 3/4 of a million people sleeping in the streets or in homeless shelters. And if recent research is to be believed, there's several million more who are sleeping in their cars or crashing on couches with people, you know, relatives, friends, but who don't have a place to live, right? I mean, this is what things have come to. It is just It's the extremes of inequality, right, that where some individuals have more money than the GDP of small countries at their command, right, and others are living in the streets just speaks to what I would describe as a profound moral sickness in our society, right? And so to transition into your next question, yeah, I mean, part of the story that I really think deserves— so we talk about inequality commonly in terms of income and wealth, and I actually think unequal power is the more important story here. It's sort of upstream, you might say, from unequal power and wealth— sorry, unequal income and wealth. And, you know, if you just cruise around your local bookstore or your online bookseller and look for books about corporate malfeasance and misbehavior, there's just an avalanche of stuff out there by really good journalists, scholars, and, uh, and researchers, um, in the last decade or two, right, touching just about every corner of the American economy. So whether it's tech companies, whether it's oil companies, whether it's big chemical companies, whether it's big agricultural companies. The— what— and I've spent a lot of time sort of immersed in those literatures trying to figure out what's going on. And what these scholars conclude time and again is that we have a broken system, right, where we've allowed massive corporations to become so wealthy and powerful that for one thing they operate more or less above of the law a lot of the time, right? I mean, you know, it was widely reported that virtually nobody went to jail. No, no banking executive went to jail despite the massive fraud and malfeasance that led to the financial crisis 15+ years ago. But whether it's, you know, dumping poisonous forever chemicals into our water supply, whether it's you know, pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and then leading a kind of denialist charge to subvert climate legislation, whether it's, you know, you name it. I mean, the— there's a— there's on the one hand a kind of culture of lawlessness where companies are essentially immune from public prosecution. And the reason is that public prosecutors are underfunded. They're increasingly hesitant to go toe-to-toe with lavishly funded corporate defense teams. They have resorted instead to defer— what are called deferred prosecution agreements, which slap basically mild penalties on corporations that, that end up toothless in many cases for pretty serious instances of malfeasance. We know that companies spend hugely in our election cycles. We know that for every $1 spent by unions and public interest lobbyists, something like $37 is spent by corporate lobbyists in Washington, so we know that they have their hands on the steering wheel when it comes to making public policy and preventing public interest legislation from going into effect. And we also know that, that over the course of the last 50 years, partly by undermining and gutting really the power of unions in this country, that corporations have developed tremendous power, discretionary power over their employees, right? So that now the bargaining leverage that ordinary people have when they're making labor contracts with multi-billion-dollar companies without union representation is just minuscule, right? Um, and so companies hold all the cards and can dictate increasingly insufficient wages, right? Um, insufficient benefits, um, insufficient work hours, right? Lack of job security, et cetera. So the— yeah, so I mean, one of the essential claims that I defend in this chapter on tyranny is that we should see these multibillion-dollar corporations as having accumulated so much power, political power and economic power, that they're basically able to do what they want with relative impunity.

Right.

Um, we could talk again about Purdue Pharma and the opioid crisis. We could talk about, uh, you know, I mean, there's, there's endless instances of egregious systematic corporate misbehavior that, that yields nobody in jail, um, and executives walking away with, um, a tremendous amount of money.

Yeah. Well, I appreciate you explaining that, and I, I am all about finding ways to use our imagination in powerful ways that can change the tide, to give people choices, to give them back the power that maybe is being held over their heads and doing things. And I always think that for every real choice that we have in a society, just as in our life, somebody had to imagine that. Somebody had to imagine ways to make this unequal, you know. And it's a really sad thing to think that there are people in the world that are not just imagining imagining wonderful, creative, very good things to do for the world, but they're imagining ways to actually attain more power and keep more people down. And, and I mean, we see it throughout history. I mean, you don't have to go that far back to see, uh, I mean, even in modern times, terrible atrocities that happen because of someone's corrupt imagination in some ways. So I, I wonder if you could talk to us just in the, the little time we have left tonight. You write about countervailing power, which, as you explain it, I want to hear more about this, what it is and why that's so vital for functioning in a liberal democracy. But I can't help but think that there must be— it must be that we're going to have to use some creative imagination to get there. And I'd just love to hear more about countervailing power.

Yeah, good. Uh, thank you for that. And actually, you know, I'll answer one of your questions, and then as you're answering the next one, asking the next one, I'll be thinking about of things I should have said. In addition, actually, I can bridge these two a little bit. So people who think about corporate governance and corporate law are increasingly writing and thinking about just different ways of organising our corporations, right? So there's this whole flowering of literature about worker ownership, about worker cooperatives, about what— about the German model called co-determination, where corporate boards are split between shareholder representatives and worker representatives, which gives corporate governance a whole different flavor, makes them much more accountable to the long-term interests of workers. One of the— one of the big problems with the way our corporations are run, and this has really become acute problem over the last few decades is the prevalence of shareholder interests, right? So, so company executives are now strictly accountable to their shareholders who are demanding quarterly profits, right? And this really at the expense of their responsibilities to workers, to communities, to long-term research and development. And part of what it would take to fix this is reimagine the way corporations are governed and to build what I'm calling countervailing power. So, I mean, if you think, as I do, that so many of the problems that we're living through now arise from an intense concentration of power, political and economic power, in the hands of a handful of really powerful, really wealthy people, people who are increasingly just sort of dictating the terms of our economic life to everybody else. I mean, to imagine a more democratic economy and society is to imagine how ordinary people can come to organize themselves more effectively and begin pushing back, right? I mentioned the decline in unionization in this country, which is sort of emblematic. We've lost We've lost our capacity to organize ourselves in many different ways. In the middle of the 20th century, about 30% of American employees were unionized. Now it's down around 10%. 6% of private sector workers are unionized. America is a real outlier among advanced democracies in this respect. In the middle of the 20th century, we organized ourselves into large membership organizations. Associations, like fraternal associations or the American Legion, or religious associations that brought people together across different social classes and built solidarity and with it the capacity to exercise political power. So rebuilding those, those, those forms of collective power I see as is probably the most important challenge we face as a society in the coming decades. I think rebuilding the power of organized labor is probably the most important of those. We face immense headwinds and challenges in that respect, but there just isn't any way to, to push back effectively without organization and without the kinds of solidarity that come from being organized and working together towards shared civic and economic objectives. Unions throughout much of the 20th century provided that for so many working Americans, and the decline of unions has meant effectively that they no longer have a seat at the table. Wow.

Well, thank you for sharing that. I think what I'm hearing from you, and it almost feels like a plea in some ways, like to come together, to not allow yourself and others to be taken advantage of in such ways anymore, and especially among impoverished people trying to find ways to put power back in the hands of people who don't have it, into the disenfranchised and the marginalized. And so I really appreciate you taking the time not only to write this book, but as you begin talking about this, I hope you have some very fruitful conversations in the coming days about this. And I know that everyone who writes, or just like a great artist, everybody has influences upon them. I wonder if you could give us just maybe one or two people that you feel like the world would be a better place if you read these authors. I'd just love to hear kind of your take on that as we start to wrap down our conversation tonight.

That's a great question, and there are so many ways I could answer it.

Yeah, not exactly an easy one, sorry, but I think you'd have some great opinions on this.

There's just a lot. I, yeah, so one, there's a political scientist at Yale named Jacob Hacker who writes very eloquently about the rise of financial insecurity in America and the rise of what he calls plutocratic populism. So the way our sort of corporate titans have used populist tropes to mobilize folks, especially on the right, in ways that often undermine their own economic interests. I think that's— so his analysis is really telling in our time. I, uh, there's a book called Democracy in Black by, uh, a writer named Eddie Glaude, uh, who's a sort of Princeton political theorist and, uh, and professor of religion, sort of thinking through what it would mean to reimagine American democracy along lines of racial equality and inclusion, which I think is a wonderful book for our moment. Um, let's see, there's a book, uh, by, uh, well, let me stop there.

No, that's great. And, and I'm glad you said Democracy in Black Acts. I thought— sorry, that's actually one that I have in my Kindle that I'm about to start reading very soon. So I'm glad you recommended that tonight. Um, so always lots of great choices, and I always love to, to pick the range of great writers, and I consider you to be one of them. And I, I'm so grateful that you were able to bring your perspective here on our podcast tonight. And I'll look forward to hearing more of your conversations with others in the coming days and learning. And I know these are difficult times to have conversations, especially with sometimes, I'm sure, people that, that don't want to share the same view or don't even want to listen. But I really appreciate you making ways to help us have good conversations together, which is what my hope would be in the coming days. I just don't think we'll get out of where we are if we don't begin to listen to each other better and to be able to hear perspectives. And so I really appreciate you being one of the voices in my head this week, which is why I called the podcast this so long ago. So is there anything that we missed tonight? I always just like to check. I know that we can't cover everything you wrote about, but is there anything that you would like to leave our audience with before our time is done this Well, let me first, before I say that, thank you, Rick.

I mean, you know, creating these spaces to have civil and searching conversations about some of these important topics is a real important service that you're doing. I was just listening to one of your spots on what is authority the other day. You're a born political theorist. My students in my introductory political theory class. So, so you're— again, I, I appreciate what you do.

Oh, thank you.

As far as, um, yeah, I mean, as far as what I would leave folks with, um, you know, just sort of relating to the last thing I said and the importance of building countervailing power, people who study citizen power and how it is that we can and sort of reclaim our political system and our economy invariably conclude that there's no power without organization. And so I think for the most— I mean, a lot of people and a lot of my students in this moment are feeling pretty pessimistic and wondering what it is they can do. The most important, most fundamental answer to that is join something, whether it's a protest movement, whether it's a union, whether it's a local political association, whether it's your local political party. Political parties used to be vibrant membership organizations in the mid-20th century that provided, you know, mutual aid to their members and that people, you know, felt good about belonging to. They're not that anymore, because we don't treat them that way. So, you know, there are new and interesting forms of political solidarity being born. You know, there's an organization called Debt Collective which is mobilizing people who are in debt, medical debt, educational debt, and trying to build power among them. There are new renters unions developing in places like Los Angeles getting tenants together to figure out how they can exercise power collectively. But the lesson from all of these is the same: unless we're willing to invest time, go to meetings, hash out priorities together, and work together to try to make a better future, we're not going to get anywhere. So, so I would just, yeah, leave folks with that, that little, little lesson drawn from the scholarship on social movements and social change.

Oh, that's an excellent spot for us to be left with tonight. Thank you so much. So as I say to my guests every week, Alex Zakharas, thank you for being one of the voices in my head this week.

Thank you, Rick. Have a wonderful evening.