The battle cry of this magazine notwithstanding, there is no capital-“H” Hegelian History, and nothing — certainly not political liberty — is inevitable. It was far from inevitable that a congress of farmers and lawyers meeting in Philadelphia in the late 18th century would adopt as a national creed the most radical interpretation of the already extraordinary English conception of liberty, or that it would succeed in practical terms. The American experiment could have failed in any number of ways.
And yet . . . it’s an awfully American-looking world out there: In the English-speaking nations, of course, Anglo-American liberalism thrives to such an extent that the leftwardmost credible political elements in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, etc., flatly socialist within recent memory and sometimes openly Marxist, have been reconstituted along Clinton-Blair lines; the northern-European welfare states that became the Anglo-American Left’s model of progress after the disgrace of socialism have gone through 20 years of spasmodic reform along lines that could have been (and sometimes were) dreamed up by Newt Gingrich; we should have no illusions about the character of the regime in Beijing, but capitalism with Chinese characteristics looks every year more like capitalism, period; the great free-market reformer of the last days of the 20th century was a bearded fellow in a blue turban working in New Delhi; from Santiago to Seoul, American expectations about freedom of speech, freedom of the press, etc., are the norms against which policies are measured, even when, as in the recent case of South Korea, some political trends are moving in the wrong direction.
Comments