Harry Hutchison: Responding to "How not to do Social Justice"

Mirror of Justice friend Harry Hutchison, professor at George Mason Law School, offers this response and supplement to my post yesterday (here):

Well said but it is important to remember the lead role played by American citizens in the potential crackup of Obamacare. In what follows, I must confess that my analysis is far from original. In any case I think two things are worth noting given the problems emerging with respect to the Affordable Health Care Act.

 First, Americans were only too willing to avoid the warnings offered by many analysts which suggested that the Affordable Health Care Act, representing the promise of Progressivism, would promise more than it could possibly deliver. Second, it is important to remember what Patrick J. Deneen has said about Tocqueville and the individualist roots of Progressivism which may explain why Americans were only too willing to believe, the often unbelievable promises of the law itself.

Deneen suggests that although the major figures of Progressivism would directly attack classical liberalism, a lucid understanding of Tocqueville’s analysis supports the conclusion that Progressivism arose not in spite of classical liberalism but because of its inherent and supreme emphasis upon, and cultivation of individualism. Whereas the idea of the individual is at least as old as Christianity, individualism within the context of Progressivism represents a new experience of self that arises with the diminution of a strong connection to a familial, social, religious, generational and cultural setting wherein change occurs relatively slowly consistent with a hierarchical (aristocratic?) society. With the onset of notions of highly individuated equality, Americans have (perhaps) experienced a new conception of the self—a self that emerges, unfettered by historical ties, as individuals are now defined by their membership in something larger—humanity itself. Liberated from embedded ties that ground us in quotidian reality, individuals crave unity—unity that is found within the pursuit of the ideal.

Liberated from membership in mediating groups, individuals seek forms of protection from the uncertainty that arises from the vagaries of human life. Thus understood the acclaimed conflict between individualism and the collective represents a false dichotomy because in reality unmediated individualism reinforces the state. The State grows on what it gives the individual (presumably affordable health care on demand at low costs) while diminishing the role of competing local institutions such as the church or family. The individual is seen as desperately alone and her only source of support is the State. If we are all, as individuals profoundly weak, alone and isolated, the State is obligated to support us in our autonomy and isolation as a fundamental requirement that is the fulfillment of a democratic commitment to individuality and equality. The Affordable Health Care Act was sold to individuals who were only too willing to believe the promise that this law would ultimately free them and us from the need to depend on our communities, churches, employers and other mediating institutions. Instead, it would free us to pursue our fulfillment (whatever that means) knowing that the existence of a “right” to healthcare would help us achieve the unachievable, the illusion of autonomy.  Other casualties emerge include a pre-commitment to truth.

Harry Hutchison

George Mason School of Law