The Birth of the Consumer Republic

Michael Sandel, in Democracy's Discontent, sees the birth of the consumer-oriented political culture in the the writings of Walter Weyl and, more generally, in a strand of Progressivism that didn't quite match up with Woodrow Wilson or Theodore Roosevelt in the 1912 election.

In the republican tradition of political economy that informed nineteenth-century American debate, producer identities mattered because the world of work was seen as the arena in which, for better or for worse, the character of citizens was formed. Consumptions, when it figured at all in republican political economy, was a thing to be moderated, disciplined, or restrained for the sake of higher ends. An excess of consumption, or luxury, was often seen as a form of corruption, a measure of the loss of civic virtue. From Jefferson's agrarian republicanism to Lincoln's celebration of free labor to Brandeis' call for industrial democracy, the emphasis on producer identities reflected the attempt to form in citizens the qualities of character necessary to self-government.

A politics based on consumer identities, by contrast, changes the question. Instead of asking how to elevate or improve or restrain people's preferences, it asks how best - most fully, fairly, or efficiently - to satisfy them. The shift to consumer-based reform in the twentieth century was thus a shift away from the formative ambition of the republican tradition, away from the political economy of citizenship. Although they did not view their movement in quite this way, the Progressives who urged Americans to identify with their roles as consumers rather than producers helped turn American politics toward a political economy of growth and distributive justice whose full expression lay decades in the future.

I don't really know what to say about this, which is, I suppose, a terrible fault for a blogger.

In this book, I am stumbling on to these old arguments, stacked up and dusty in cobwebbed corners, and the nostalgic impulse to try to bring them down, to make use of them, nearly overwhelms me at times. Some might truly be warped and broken from disuse, but it can be hard to distinguish that which was unjustly forgotten from that which was put away for good reason.

I'm still in this book's headspace; I'll try to sort out its arguments when I finally get through it.