The Future and Its Enemies:
The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress
By Virginia Postrel
The Free Press
(272 pp., $24.50)

In The Future and Its Enemies, Virginia Postrel argues that the real fault line in American politics lies between those who welcome and those who resist the future. "Two poles, stasis and dynamism, increasingly define our political, intellectual, and cultural landscape," writes Postrel, the editor of the libertarian magazine Reason. "The central question of our time is what to do about the future."

Postrel correctly notes that opposition to change and progress is entrenched. Sometimes the foes are motivated by self-interest. Lawyers in Texas, for example, recently secured a ruling that may bar the sale of the software program Quicken Family Lawyer in the state on the grounds that its manufacturer is illegally practicing law. Other times the foes are motivated by philosophy. Some liberal intellectuals, for example, insist that the Internet is creating a dangerous divide between digital haves and have-nots. One wag at a recent Harvard conference went so far as to argue that the Internet discriminates against illiterates, since people who cannot read cannot use it.

As Postrel observes, "It's easy to make the future sound scary." And Washington is full of interest groups whose existence depends on doing just that. Unions oppose globalization even though it increases our standard of living. Consumer advocates oppose bigger trucks even though they save consumers hundreds of millions of dollars. Environmentalists oppose bovine growth hormone and genetically engineered seeds even though they raise agricultural productivity. Privacy advocates oppose efforts to map the gene pool of Iceland even though it likely will lead to major medical discoveries.

It has become common to decry Wal-Mart as a threat to small-town businesses while ignoring the lower prices Wal-Mart offers to working people, or to pine for the family farm while forgetting agribusiness has driven our food prices down to the lowest in the world. It has become almost second nature for many Americans to doubt the future and resist change.

Yet dynamism and innovation are the very factors driving the growth of the New Economy. Postrel reminds us that Americans once believed in the future and that we must do so again if the United States is to move forward. As Postrel puts it, "Under ordinary circumstances, for the random individual, life in a dynamist society tomorrow will be better, on the whole, than life today. It will offer more variety, more opportunity, more options, more knowledge, more control over time and place, more life." This is a positive vision resonating with most Americans.

Hopeless "Stasist"

Postrel, however, embraces only change driven by individuals and companies acting in free markets. To her, anyone believing we should collectively try to shape the future is a hopeless "stasist." In Postrel's opinion, government support of research to combat global warming is misguided. So too are government policies to cure cancer or foster education. The television "v-chip," automobile air bags, environmental impact statements, mass-transit subsidies, antitrust laws, the recent Internet copyright bill, federal drug reviews, the Family and Medical Leave Act, age discrimination laws, bans on human cloning, and toy safety standards (which "override fun as a value") are all stasist follies, she believes.

Thus, Postrel lumps in among the enemies of progress New Democrats and others who are trying to make government and civil society forces for good in the New Economy. Some New Democrats might be tempted to dismiss Postrel as a fringe libertarian intellectual. But I suspect a large share of the pro-market, pro-growth wing of the Republican Party would say "Amen" after reading her manifesto.

Four Orientations

To include New Democrats among the enemies of the future is to fish with too wide a net. Most New Democrats would agree with Postrel that central planning, technocratic micro-management, and command and control regulation are antithetical to the New Economy. But their solution is to modernize and reinvent government rather than abandon it.

Postrel's division of the political world into two camps -- stasists and dynamists -- is too narrow. A more realistic framework would postulate four major political orientations: Old Democrats, New Democrats, Values Republicans, and Libertarian Republicans.

Both types of Democrats look favorably toward government and collective action while both types of Republicans do not.

Old Democrats and Values Republicans rebel against the future. They don't want to just slow down change, they want to reverse it -- Values Republicans to the social order of the 1950s and the economic order of the 1920s, and Old Democrats to the social order of the 1960s and the economic order of the 1940s.

New Democrats and Libertarian Republicans embrace the future. Both support open trade, technological progress, and free markets and competition. But unlike Libertarian Republicans, New Democrats believe that government and civil society can and should play a role in helping America advance in the future. In particular, they believe that government has two key roles to play: fostering progress and helping those left behind by change.

Government's Roles

Well thought-out government policies -- such as support for R&D and education and training -- can boost technological innovation and economic growth. Postrel dismisses the Defense Department origins of the Internet as far less significant than its current bottom-up growth. Yet without early government support, the Internet would not exist today.

Old Democrats' solution to the problem of those left behind by change is to retard progress or stop it altogether. In reality, to help all Americans enter the winner's circle, we have to speed up the rate of change, not slow it down. It's no accident that wages in the bottom third of the labor market rose faster than the wages of the wealthy in the last two years marked by technology driven productivity growth. It's no accident that the states whose economies grew fastest in the last decade were ones with the fastest rate of economic "churn" (i.e., birth of new businesses and death of old businesses).

New Democrats must stake out a clear, strong, and unequivocal position in favor of the future and the fundamentally progressive forces embedded in new technology and innovation. Technological progress is the solution to many of society's ills, including a healthier environment, greater sense of community, faster income and job growth, and the attended benefits growth brings (i.e., alleviating poverty, paying off the deficit, saving Social Security). New Democrats must rigorously oppose those who would seek to stop progress in the name of self-interest or ideological stasis.

"Safe Change"

As Ed Kilgore, a frequent contributor to this magazine, points out, the secret of President Clinton's success over the last six years can be boiled down to two words: "safe change." The President embraced change and progress. In 1992 he asked Americans to make change their friend. But rather than adopt the "every man for himself" ethic held by so many Republicans, the President and New Democrats argue that government and civil society can give Americans the tools they need to manage change.

Helping people manage change helps them to accept change. Postrel correctly points out that in times of dynamism and change like ours, the ranks of the enemies of the future grow. She acknowledges that an "open-ended future can be genuinely scary, [and] the turmoil it creates genuinely painful." But her advice to those adversely affected by change is "just get over it and deal with it!"

But Americans aren't willing to leave every man for himself. This fact, more than any other, explains the phenomenal success of President Clinton and his Third Way allies in Europe. It also suggests that the Third Way synthesis of dynamism and communitarianism is the winning political and policy formula. Given a choice between backward-looking big government and forward- looking individualism, Americans will choose the latter every time. But if New Democrats give Americans a third choice, animating government with change and compassion, innovation and inclusion, they will pick it every time.

Robert D. Atkinson is the director of the Progressive Policy Institute's Project on Technology, Innovation, and the New Economy.