Theorists on the right and the left have tried to inflate a few policy disputes into national emergencies.
Theorists on the right and the left have tried to inflate a few policy disputes into national emergencies.
T his week, it is Thomas B. Edsall who wonders if liberalism is doomed, citing two books that are sharply critical of the center-left elite as an indictment of liberalism itself. Self-professed liberals have lost touch with the working class (true). Suddenly, liberals are facing challenges from populists on the right as well as a critique from the left, in the name of socialism.
Edsall avers:
It is, however, a leap of judgment to conclude that a governing philosophy that has dominated much of the West since the Enlightenment could in a matter of a few decades implode — a philosophy calling for constitutional government, representative democracy, the rule of law, independent courts, protection of minorities, civil liberties, market economies (with differing levels of state intervention), peaceful transfer of power, pluralism and tolerance.
Defined this broadly, there is no serious challenge to liberalism today: only a challenge to the self-importance of liberals who think they alone are sole heirs of all this. The problem, as usual, is the confusion and conflation of the rough set of policies and postures that were formulated in the 1990s with both the larger post–World War II American-led world order and with Enlightenment values themselves. Trust me, there were Enlightenment values before there was a eurozone.
Again, the problem is the idea that liberals exclusively own Enlightenment values. This is why, when populist governments win elections and begin appointing their men to the courts or to the bar, liberal watchdog groups claim that the independence of the courts has been ruined and that civil liberties are in danger. This is how liberals worked themselves up into real dread that Viktor Orbán would stage some kind of putsch earlier this year following his electoral defeat. Instead, he called his opponent to congratulate him when only 60 percent of the vote had been counted but the result was clear. Edsall repeats this mistake when he says that the election of Donald Trump represents the rejection of Enlightenment values.
In fact, most of Trump’s supporters are convinced that they are defending the Constitution and civil liberties. It is true that Trump challenged the results of the 2020 presidential election. In my view, this was wrong. But he eventually went home and played by the rules. The same cannot be said for the liberals who canceled the results of an election in Romania because they disliked the result.
The great promise of liberalism is political freedom and self-governance; all that pluralism they talk about. And yet, when faced with the prospect of a tax on imports, vigorous enforcement of immigration laws, or disagreement on a foreign policy issue, the self-proclaimed liberals cry that five centuries of enlightened government is being tossed on the ash heap. If populists and socialists aren’t allowed to inform any policy anywhere through democratic means, then liberalism’s promise of political freedom is a chimera.
Theorists on the right and the left have tried to inflate a few policy disputes into a conflict the size of the Reformation or as consequential as the Industrial Revolution. They’ve turned normal elections into national emergencies. But the fact is that the vast majority of people in the West share basic assumptions about politics. They believe in one vote per man or woman. They distrust governing institutions that seem too far removed from voter input, such as the European Union and international trade bodies. They believe in regular elections, human and civil rights, a certain kind of “live and let live” pluralism that is always negotiated but held together by custom and law. The great challenge to this over the past decade hasn’t been “illiberalism.” Truly illiberal systems, such as those modeled by China and Russia, are not attractive, except occasionally to liberals who wish they could build Chinese-style bullet trains that run through working-class neighborhoods. Instead, the challenge has been a hypochondriac ideology of liberalism that tries to remove normal political questions about trade, the economy, immigration, or international affairs from self-governing peoples and place them into the hands of cloistered liberal institutions.