The inability of the United States Congress to come to an agreement that would allow an increase in the federal government's debt ceiling is based upon an ideology that its hostile to the idea, expressed by Thomas Hill Green, the philosophic father of "modern liberalism," as well as by Catholic social philosophers such as Jacques Maritain, that government should act as a positive instrument for the public good. Despite of their utterly reactionary politics, the Tea Party caucus in Congress is proof positive that ideas matter and have consequences, particularly ideas about politics, economics and law.
As the current gridlock illustrates, the United States has begun to experience a number of profound, interrelated political and economic problems that are caused, both directly and indirectly, by our dogmatic and often unconscious adherence, collectively as a political culture and individually as Americans, to a systematically developed set of ideas that emphasize the importance of the individual and deny the existence of the public interest, as something different and distinct from a mere aggregation of competing interests.
Contrary to popular misunderstanding, the Tea Party and other right-wing ideologues are not conservatives, as that term is understand in political philosophy. Rather, the ideas that they have embraced are profoundly liberal. The quintessential expressions of their political philosophy are epitomized in the writings of John Locke and his intellectual descendants whose vision of politics became the bedrock upon which the American liberal democracy has been founded.
Locke's political philosophy asserts that human beings are by nature solitary, aggrandizing individuals and that, consequently, the preferred form of social and political relationships with others, including the state as the organized expression of political society, is solely contractual. Locke's ideology, because it apotheosizes the individual, asserts that the self alone is the irreducible unit and concrete reality upon which all political societies and their governments are organized; and that the promotion and protection of the individual and his interests, particularly as they relate to property, are the primary objects of all public policy.
The effects of this largely internalized liberal worldview, in one form or another, continue to shape and to inform almost all current American political discourse. Paradoxically, the continuing vitality, persistence and intractability of Locke's ideology of radical anti-social individualism, although it has precipitated many of the problems which the United States now confronts as a political culture, also impairs the ability of this country's political leaders and citizens to imagine alternatives beyond the current political status-quo.
The pervasive and largely unquestioned acceptance of liberal ideology continues to limit our ability as citizens to acknowledge the existence of competing visions of political reality in Western political theory, and to deliberate about alternative political philosophies and policies, a number of which might provide guidance to the very real political and social challenges which Americans confront on a daily basis.
Because of their adherence to the fundamentals of Locke's politics and their inability to step outside of the liberal paradigm, the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt and the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson were able, at best, to effect only modest, incremental changes, many of which were quickly undone as more reactionary adherents to the unadulterated version of Locke's liberalism successfully eviscerated many of the achievements of those two administrations.Because the influence of Locke's political philosophy upon almost all aspects of American political, economic, social and ethical life is so pervasive, a similar fate has now befallen the administration of Barack Obama as it opted to try to govern from the proverbial political "center."
Further, at the economic level, the classical liberal paradigm of unfettered competition and limited government involvement no longer explains economic reality. The evidence shows that unfettered competition based upon free market decisions in which goods and services are sold to the most willing buyers does not create individual opportunity for ordinary Americans or an abundance of business opportunities. Adam Smith's "invisible hand" has not prevented loosely regulated financial markets from plundering the wealth of this country through Ponzi schemes and excessive speculation.
The evidence also shows that the insecurities of the marketplace persuade those who are successful to institutionalize their advantages. Monopolies, oligopolies and plutocracy are the result, as is demonstrated at almost all levels by the ever-increasing growth and consolidation of a few huge corporations and the continued decline of small businesses, particularly in the financial, manufacturing and consumer sectors of the economy.
Consistent with Locke's fear of concentrated power, the founders of the American Republic devised a constitutional system for the United States in which political power was distributed between the federal government and the individual states. The object, as James Madison commented, was to disperse political power: "The federal Constitution forms a happy combination in this respect; the great and aggregate interests being referred to the national, the local, and particular to the State legislatures."
Historically, this constitutional compromise has not been without its downside. Continued political disagreements and uncertainties about the limits of the federal government's authority later provided a justification for Southern Secession and the Civil War. As did Southern apologists for slavery, putative defenders of "States' Rights" today inevitably invoke the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to argue that the federal government's powers are expressly circumscribed by a limited grant of authority from the states in which sovereignty continue to repose.
Because the process of amending the constitution was intentionally made so cumbersome by the Founders, meaningful structural change at the federal level is virtually impossible to effect. To the extent to which institutional change is impossible, the Lockean consensus -as a result of the incorporation of his ideas about the need to limit and diffuse the power of government to protect the interests of property owners--remains invulnerable
The inescapable reality is that we are today not only locked in Locke, but entombed in his politics. Our inability as a culture to extricate ourselves from the eighteenth century notions of politics that are Locke's legacy to us has now become the occasion of our country's demise.