Toward a New Common Sense of Abundance
From The Observatory
Source: Human Bridges Project
Common sense is contested terrain.
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“Toward a New Common Sense of Abundance” by Colin Greer and Eric Laursen is licensed by the Observatory under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
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“Common sense (which, in truth, is very uncommon) is the best sense I know,” the 18th-century British writer Lord Chesterfield advised his son. But common sense doesn’t stay that way. While it appears to most people to be something solid and steady, it changes from age to age, defined and redefined by the push and pull between rival social movements and the social, political, and economic forces that support one social movement over another.
U.S. history—like any other country’s history—is replete with such shifts in common sense. Examples include:
The American Revolutionary War, when independence from Great Britain rapidly went from being a marginal viewpoint to a majority position.
The American Civil War, when emancipation underwent a similar shift.
The New Deal, when a comprehensive social safety net suddenly became an accepted and expected part of the national fabric, and
The Civil Rights era, when political and economic equality, beginning with the campaigns of Black Americans, at last became applicable to other people of color, women, immigrants, and sexual minorities as well.
These shifts created a new consensus understanding of what we expect of government and what we expect from and extend to one another. They often occur in periods of political crisis or deep economic insecurity, when the entire culture seems to be in peril.
A new common sense can move society in a more inclusionary direction, where an ethos of abundance and embracing the democratic distribution of resources among the public at large seems reachable. When this happens, a common identity is extended to a wider circle within society, and security—physical and economic—is assumed to be possible for all as well.
Shifts in common sense can also, however, move society in the opposite direction sometimes during periods of crisis, but are often driven by fears and anxieties triggered by the very changes that previously moved society in a socially and politically progressive direction.
This occurred in the aftermath of World War I, when the Red Scare hysteria led to harsh new laws limiting immigration by national groups who were viewed as undesirable. Another such shift in common sense was embodied by the opposition to the Civil Rights movement, which generated a campaign of “massive resistance” in the South. In the Reagan era, the common sense of inclusiveness and an expanding field of rights was called into question and began to reverse. Following the apparent end of racial discrimination at the highest levels during the Obama years, Americans again turned to more conservative leadership, and common sense moved right. Today, the MAGA movement shares many of the same impulses that informed each of these previous exclusionary turnings.
The underlying tensions that caused these shifts leverage latent exclusionary ideas based on a single factor: biology. Deploying emotion and often irrational fear, reactionary forces succeed in racializing white identity, making it easier to set those who identify as white against other segments of society. White people of all social classes come to think in racialized terms even when they are unaware of it. For example, their understanding that some problems require social solidarity is checkmated by their fear that they would have to give something up to achieve it.
Often, this new common sense about identity turns the progressive agenda on its head. Suddenly, it’s the dominant white social and cultural group who are oppressed, and the civil concept of rights is redefined as a struggle on their behalf, rather than for the truly marginalized. Fears about economic security and identity built on underlying racial prejudice, against people of color and immigrants, and gender prejudice, against newly assertive women and the LGBTQ+ community, find their focus in a shallow, zero-sum economic calculation that if these groups achieve a better place in society, it must be at the expense of the culturally dominant white community.
The rise to dominance of latent biological biases plays to white people’s narrower sense of identity, even though these biases often work against their own material interests. Examples in U.S. history include: Jim Crow laws that closed off many lines of work to African Americans; intelligence tests in the post-World War I era created to marginalize immigrants; laws restricting immigration, which rob the society of labor and expertise it needs to expand; and cuts to the social safety net that hurt the middle class along with the least advantaged and make social mobility more difficult for everyone.
The material beneficiary, most often, is not the culturally dominant but aggrieved group, but a much smaller group we call the Third Force: the propertied elites who amass capital and control access to it, and the institutions that defend and promote their interests. The Third Force benefits from laws and customs that discriminate based on race or citizenship status, because they create a larger pool of low-wage labor, and from safety net cuts, which often do the same while helping to keep the elites’ taxes low.
In diametrical opposition to any universal goals, the Third Force argues for a biologically based common sense that deflects demands for change in the standard of living for the majority of people, instead delivering abundance to the few. In the service of this new common sense, the Third Force promotes a set of assumptions built on a quasi-religious faith in austerity for the masses: that a society built on competition will always create greater social welfare than one built on mutual aid, that the free market is sacrosanct, that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector, and that dependence on the state is harmful to the public and democracy.
In practice, these assumptions seldom impact the Third Force; exceptions are made for the subsidies, grants, legal and tax advantages they enjoy from the government and the rescue packages they require during periods of crisis, all of which shelter them from the harsh realities of a truly unmanaged free market.
An apparatus of think tanks, lobby shops, law firms, and pressure groups nevertheless develops to amplify this brand of common sense. When combined, the elements generate a set of structural doctrines, including that profits and corporate prosperity must come before working people’s well-being, and the body of doctrine under the heading neoliberalism, which insists on public sector austerity and open borders for corporate investment and repatriation of profits.
The plantation economy—an economic regime that diverts attention from racial or caste-based exploitation and impoverishment by capitalizing on latent racial predispositions and prejudices—satisfies the Third Force’s need for cheap labor while fulfilling the dominant group’s desire to maintain its social and cultural hegemony at the same time. The price paid is permanent marginalization of people of color, women, the LGBTQ+ community, and other groups; the creation of a permanent economic underclass, including many of the dominant social and cultural groups; and universal, chronic insecurity and instability of identity for all groups except the Third Force. Once in place, this system becomes the new common sense.
How To Push Back Against a Malignant, Exclusionary Social and Political Common Sense?
The word “polis” was used by the ancient Greeks to describe their city-states. We think of it as a state or society characterized by a sense of community; a way of life or social system whose members share an understanding of its goals and how it operates, their obligations toward one another, and their expectations for how they should be governed. Common sense is the product of these expectations and conventions: the set of assumptions that helps us think collectively. If our goal is to substitute a common sense founded on an inclusionary agenda of abundance in place of one built on exclusion and exploitation, we need a social movement that delivers on three essentials, rooted in our sense of polis.
The movement must be universalizing: A universalizing social movement aims to make the achievement of economic mobility and security—a culture of abundance—a commonsense expectation for all through liberation from oppression.
Social movements are the setting in which common sense is shaped and reshaped, for better or worse, creating a readiness for a new way of viewing society’s problems and challenges. This, in turn, facilitates a shift to a new discourse on public policy, which can then be translated into action at the governmental level. As such, building a social movement that embraces every group in society is essential to convincing the public that economic mobility and a high degree of physical and economic security are possible for all of us: that the zero-sum assumption is unfounded.
When this process plays out successfully, the result can be powerful, society-wide change. In 1966, hoping to build on the movement for social change that the Civil Rights movement created, leaders including Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King Jr., and A. Philip Randolph crafted “A Freedom Budget for All Americans,” a visionary document that aimed to link racial justice with the achievement of economic justice for all. These leaders recognized that a turning point had been reached; that the long-term attainment of Civil Rights for Blacks would depend on widening the movement to embrace the demand to end poverty and, importantly, forge stronger ties with (still white-dominated) organized labor.
While Washington did not embrace the sweeping goals of the Freedom Budget, some of its detailed recommendations were adopted as elements of the Great Society social programs. This could not have been achieved without the shift in common sense that the Civil Rights movement helped bring about.
Liberation must always be defined as covering as wide a population as possible, as it was during the Civil Rights era, when in a few short years the struggle for recognition of Black Americans’ civil rights spread to other communities, including Latinos, Native Americans, women, the elderly, migrant workers, and the disabled. Similarly, today, we see a burgeoning movement in opposition to the expulsion of undocumented persons.
But this movement will not become universalizing if it does not also embrace rural and working-class white people who have seen their economic supports knocked out by the policies promoted by the Third Force. One reason the Great Society was only a partial success, it has been argued, is that, while embracing voting rights and some other elements of the Civil Rights agenda, the Johnson administration failed to develop a program to address the economic concerns of the white working class, leaving those constituencies up for grabs.
Despite the many obstacles and multiple oversights, however, American society has made tremendous social progress during periods when such broad-based coalitions came together: for example, during the Populist era and the New Deal, and again in the early 1960s, when a consensus briefly formed on the need to eradicate poverty. These movements drew strength from alliances of rural and urban workers, from a vigorous industrial labor movement, as well as electrification and other programs that improved the lives of the agricultural population, aiming to create a less unequal and more democratic economy.
The movement must address the scarcity mind, historical and trans-historical trauma, and malignant bonding, three factors we discussed in our earlier articles: These constitute the axis along which common sense is formed, pushing it either in an inclusionary direction, typified by goodwill, or an exclusionary direction saturated in malignancy.
The material condition of scarcity is familiar to us today, given the mounting evidence of the effects of climate change, the race to lock up valuable natural resources, and widening economic inequality. But scarcity can also be a psychological state, the scarcity mind: an imposition on experience that shapes how we observe and understand events and one another.
For individuals, trauma can be the result of accidents; physical and psychological abuse in interpersonal, social, or institutional relationships; and war, natural disasters, illness, or other disturbing experiences. But it also has a trans-historical impact, accumulated over thousands of years of our species’ often harsh, violent development. How and with whom we bond—individually and in communities—is driven by our desire not to experience either trauma or scarcity, even if it means drawing boundaries that leave many of us outside.
That is when bonding becomes malignant, solidifying communities built on resentment, bigotry, and a desire to exclude those who are “different.” The result is a narrowing of the “we”—the larger community’s shared identity—and a decreased ability to even discuss urgent common problems such as climate change, social and economic inequality, and the upsurge in displacement and mass migration, let alone agree on processes to address them.
This narrowing further marginalizes communities outside the dominant cultural group, raising the social and economic barriers, they have long faced, even higher. This, in turn, encourages those communities to adopt a politics of blame and shame, focused on securing limited advances for their particular group, which further narrows the “we.” The result is that politicized differences—based on race, gender, other human characteristics, or behaviors—inhibit both marginalized communities and economically challenged members of the dominant cultural group from attaining any sense of collective belonging.
The only way for an inclusionary social movement to successfully oppose the scarcity mind, overcome trans-historical trauma, and achieve healthy bonding is by promoting a cultural expectation—a common sense—of universal abundance that a broad range of groups can embrace. Critical to achieving this is the establishment of an unformulated solidarity with the holding environment, or caregiving sector: the vast network of delivery systems and volunteer initiatives that underpin every human society, reflecting people’s impulse to engage in mutual aid. When its goals are in sync with the moral and ethical imperatives inherent in the holding environment, the movement can draw upon its reserve capacity, or store of trust and assurance, known as goodwill.
The movement must deliver on the changes it promises: Credibility is achieved through delivery, which is why the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the Civil Rights movement, and elements of the Great Society are considered to have been historically successful in shifting the definition of common sense and diminishing the power of biological—i.e., cultural issues.
All too often, however, what purports to be an inclusionary social movement only achieves a “performative” common sense that pays lip service to the victims of injustice without delivering effective advocacy or action. This cycle does more harm than good, building up an expectation of bad faith and failure in the groups that the movement pledged to solidify.
Delivering change—creating a culture of abundance—cannot be understood simply as a matter of reforming current practices and institutions, eliminating waste and abuse, and speeding up the execution of public sector projects. This only solidifies the common sense that these institutions are fundamentally flawed.
Rather, the movement must commit to extending these benefits and resources to as broad a population as possible: the commitment necessary to build a broadly cohesive society. Neither is making government “good” sufficient inspiration to create a movement, because it lacks a vision for a better society: a new common sense. It does not propose to reform or revolutionize the system at its root and therefore cannot propel the creation of a culture of abundance.
The movement must address the challenge of the Third Force: If the new common sense is to include higher wages for working people, affordable housing, and high-quality public education and research, for example, the Third Force will have to share the burden. That means accepting narrower profit margins, ending its war against trade unions, and agreeing to higher corporate and wealth taxes, as well as limits on its ability to purchase the support of public officials.
The Third Force is likely to protest that these sacrifices will hobble companies’ ability to compete and that they are unaffordable in any case. An inclusive, universalizing movement should reply that we cannot maintain a cohesive society if we cannot credibly promise abundance for all, and so not making these changes is itself unaffordable. But to carry that conviction into action requires a vision that appeals to the broadest population.
Good News
The good news is that even in the midst of the Trump/MAGA era, people are once again taking up the challenge of creating an abundance agenda based on goodwill, rejecting austerity myths in favor of using society’s resources for the benefit of the entire public, equally. This manifests itself in the newfound popularity of political candidates who articulate a growing demand that the necessities of life should be affordable for everybody, not just the wealthy. These candidates draw on a vibrant history of inclusionary social activism that has repeatedly overturned existing common sense and forced change on a reluctant power structure.
At the same time, people are questioning why the public sector is unable to execute vital public infrastructure projects, from road and bridge maintenance to affordable housing to public transportation and schools. Robust public infrastructure equally accessible to all and benefiting all communities is critical to reducing inequalities of wealth, furthering social justice, and nurturing an economy of abundance.
But building the groundswell of support necessary to launch an economy of abundance is not possible without the existence of a broad culture of abundance: a vision that counters the scarcity mind, persuading people to look past their own, parochial interests. When that vision is universalizing, it can become the common sense of a renewed and strengthened polis.
