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Studying politics and the state from an
angle that reveals them as an emergent order may be instrumental in
overcoming the liberal’s or indeed anybody’s sweepingly hostile
presumption against them. A change of perspective of this kind may
enable us to discern among the tangle and turmoil of politics moves as
if by an invisible hand, bringing to the fore the benign effects of
practices habitually dismissed as corrupt or underhanded. Consider
political opportunism.
2.1 The Indeterminacy of Freedom and Heuristic Opportunism
What lends the system of political
freedom an often sordid and even corrupt quality, namely the opportunism
of shifting and duplicitous positions, makes it also more flexible and
representative. After all, in an adaptable political order, there is a
need for trial, error, and error elimination, demanding a kind of
responsiveness that leaves behind patterns both of apparent and real
opportunism. Introducing erratic and unpredictable conduct into politics
and thus dividing contestants, such patterns of opportunism may
eventually mark a path that brings foes together or at least allows for
pacific competition. There is a fine line between genuine opportunism,
on one hand, and political learning and experimentation, on the other.
In large measure, politics is about reconciling the irreconcilable.
Indeed, politics is the art of finding compromises and forms of power
sharing suitable to sustain repeated games that, in turn, produce a
durable atmosphere of effective trust.
2.2 Opportunism, Political Learning and Effective Trust
Effective trust is attained when people
act as if they trusted one another, without entering into relationships
of personal trust. Entrusting one’s political enemy with a high
political office is a case in point. Effective trust is brought about
not by personal encounters and the subsequent discovery of mutual
congeniality but rather by virtue of the constraining effects of
institutions that ensure fairness and prevent vicious and costly
retribution. Office and person become separable. The political and the
private personae are assigned distinct spheres. People cooperate
peacefully and productively in one sphere - say as employer and employee
- while being fundamentally at odds with each other in a different
sphere where they act as political partisans.
The classical liberal expectation that
social order may be derived from observing firm principles and certain
generally applicable rules of just conduct represents a necessary, yet
not a sufficient condition for citizenship in civil society. The
classical liberal’s overly pronounced confidence in static rules is
unrealistic because patterns of apparent and real opportunism play a key
role in balancing (1) the right to disagree with one another in a free
society against (2) the need to establish effective trust and peaceable
conditions. Political reality is subtle. Behaviour that gives the
appearance of opportunism and duplicity may be beneficial in helping to
feel one’s way in unchartered terrain, sound out the popular consensus
and its tolerance for innovation and nonconformity, forge alliances on
issues of lesser weight to gain support on questions deemed more
significant, withdraw from or reduce the impact of infelicitous
political experiments etc. Political manoeuvring is not exhaustively
captured when viewed solely under the aspects of mischief and bad faith.
Moreover, a measure of deviousness on the part of the politically
active may be inevitable and even required to effect the benefit of
living in a society that supports (1) high levels of rivalry alongside
(2) a condition of robust pacification.
3.0
Path Dependent Consolidation (1800 - 1900) – Establishing Effective
Trust, the Invisible Hand of Politics, and Feasible Freedom
From a divisive plurality of views on
immigration emerges in the 18th century a range of conditions ensuring a
preponderance and continuity of policies that favour immigration in the
U.S. While ineffective in terms of asserting their preferred policies
in that period, as becomes clear with hindsight, nativist and other
restrictionist forces always maintained a significant presence in the
political process and never ceased to search for opportunities to gain
the upper hand. Before we look at the factors supporting the path
dependent unfolding of a pro-immigration consensus in early U.S. policy
regimes, three fundamental starting conditions merit attention.
While the Constitution (1) outlines the
framework for political competition and the political discovery process
in the new republic, it is (2) parsimonious in regard to specific
substantive issues, avoiding preconceptions on controversial subjects
like immigration. Add to this that (3) the Constitution has been
prepared, ratified and actualised in a manner highly democratic by
historical comparison and, in that way, inclusive of the main interests
and protagonists invested in immigration. As a result, political
competition and discovery were made credible as fair processes. creating
an environment for trust-building repeated games and credible
commitment, which, in turn, encourage loyalty to the political order not
only by the winners but also by the losers in a given episode of
political decision making. By reinforcing trust in the rules of the new
political game, it was possible to meet the defining conditions of
feasible freedom: namely the ability of strike a balance between the two
pans of the scales of liberty: maximal dissension, on the one side,
and, on the other, peaceableness during competition and later in the
face of policy enforcement. This is a result that is as subtle as it is
important and powerful: it reflects the transrational mechanisms of
politics in a free society – an aspect that falls in the category of
“moves by the invisible hand of politics and the state.” Having reached
an insurmountable impasse on the rational level, with neither of the
parties willing to give up on their views concerning immigration
(abortion, capital punishment etc.), irreconcilability and emotional
tension are reduced by converting them into effective trust in a
repeated game that may yield disappointing outcomes on individual issues
but promises a net gain in terms of long-term overall coexistence.
While Jeffersonians steadfastly continued to translate “pro-immigrant polices into foreign-born votes” (p. 55), the Federalists, later the Whigs and still later the Republicans grappled with a legacy of nativism and other anti-immigrant positions. It proved an inheritance hard to shed, partly for reasons of conviction, partly for reasons of credibility, and partly for reasons of electoral calculation.
Until its total demise in the 1820s, the
Federalist Party was split on the immigration issue, with its leader
Alexander Hamilton urging the need to accommodate immigrant voters by
advocating open immigration policies, a position resonating strongly
with Federalists in the urban centres where immigrant voting blocs were
substantial.
Dissension among the Federalists is
indicative of the discovery and learning process that political agents
are subjected to by changing circumstances and competing proposals of
adapting to them. With unprecedented mass immigration setting in, there
were opportunities to profit from xenophobic propaganda, notably during
the 1837 depression. Especially Catholics and the Irish were subjected
to venomous attacks. But the long-term trend in favour of the newcomers
could not be reversed. During the 1844 presidential campaign, the Whigs
ran for the last time on an anti-immigrant platform, only to conclude
eventually that their narrow defeat had been due to a lack of immigrant
support. From then on, the Whigs dissociated themselves from nativist
currents. With that, the party system closed itself off from
anti-immigrant constituencies. From 1820 to 1860, immigrants as a
proportion of the total population had grown from 4.4% to 31.5 %.
Path dependent patterns of generous
immigration conditions were boosted when the expansion of U.S. territory
thanks to the Louisiana Purchase (1803) and the Mexican-American War
(1846/47) significantly increased demand for settlers and labourers.
Receptivity for immigrants was further strengthened with the spread of
industrialisation in the New World. Indubitably, the most basic and
weighty factor, however, helping to turn the first hundred years of the
U.S. into an era of accommodating immigration policies is to be found in
the “extraordinary shift in American government from … “a regime of
notables” to the world’s first mass-based democracy in which universal
white male suffrage, party organizations, and competitive elections
predominated.” (p.59)
Continued here.
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