Clashes of rights

It is commonplace to see “culture wars” issues framed as clashes of rights: the “right to life” versus the right to bodily autonomy; the right to freedom of religious expression/conviction versus the right not to be discriminated against (see, for instance, the case of the Colorado website designer who doesn’t want to design wedding websites for same-sex couples); the right of parents to control what their children read in school versus the right of children not to have their intellectual horizons constricted by their parents’ particular beliefs.

More interesting, perhaps, is the clash of rights identified by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis in their 1986 book Democracy and Capitalism: Property, Community, and the Contradictions of Modern Social Thought. Progressive activists, they pointed out, frequently have used the discourse of personal rights to challenge property rights, or at least what their opponents saw as such. The Black students in 1960 who entered segregated drugstores and sat at lunch counters were, among other things, asserting their “personal” right to be treated equally as human beings against the drugstore owners’ property right to exclude anyone from their premises.

The conflict between personal and property rights “is elevated to a central dynamic of liberal democratic capitalist societies by two fundamental historical tendencies,” Bowles and Gintis argued (p. 29). Those tendencies are “the expansionary logic of personal rights,” on the one hand, and “the expansionary logic of capitalist production” on the other. They contrasted their view of “liberal democratic capitalism as an intrinsically conflictual social system” (p. 29) with the view that rights tend to fit together harmoniously, especially in the U.S., a view expressed, according to B&G, in Louis Hartz’s classic The Liberal Tradition in America.

While B&G were talking about a particular kind of conflict, one rooted in a collision of two “expansionary logics,” observers have long been divided on whether liberal democratic capitalism is marked more by “conflict” or by “consensus.” Hence there are, or at least there used to be, “conflict” versus “consensus” history, and “conflict” versus “consensus” sociology. This could obscure the point that conflict and consensus exist in all societies and at all times, but in different proportions. The 1950s in the U.S. were supposedly a time of more consensus, which spawned the well-known “end of ideology” thesis (the locus classicus being Daniel Bell’s 1960 book The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties).

Assuming for the sake of argument that the 1950s in the U.S. were characterized by greater (at least apparent) consensus, the decade seems to have been aberrational, at least in terms of what followed it. 9/11 perhaps produced a brief period of relative consensus, but it was gone in the wake of the Bush/Blair decision to invade Iraq. Neither in the Reagan nor the Clinton eras was there much consensus in evidence, even if Reagan’s deployment of platitudes and uplifting rhetorical imagery occasionally suggested the opposite to some observers.

A functioning democracy probably should not strive for “consensus” anyway, but for the management of conflict such that it furthers, or at least does not impede, the kind of problem-solving, experimental, “reflexive” political process recommended by Knight and Johnson in their The Priority of Democracy (2011) (see here). But this would require a society with less material inequality and greater political participation than the current U.S. Conflict is endemic and “ongoing,” to use Knight & Johnson’s word, so the trick is to keep the “terms of disagreement” within a reasonable range, to “structure” those terms so that people are not arguing past each other, to ensure that arguments are actually arguments in which the participants remain, at least in theory, persuadable by facts and evidence, while somehow mobilizing the energy that the arguments generate to address problems for which the label “existential” does not seem, at least in some cases, an exaggeration.