Notes on the Condition of Liberalism

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/21/opinion/condition-of-liberalism.html

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Welcome, reader, to my inaugural newsletter. If you feel inspired to subscribe, I promise digressive comments on political questions, friendly rejoinders to critics, overly detailed arguments about Christianity and conservatism and the state of the West, a lot of writing about pop culture — television and the movies mainly — and perhaps just a bit of book promotion when I next manage to produce a book. The plan is to run this weekly in addition to my columns, with occasional weeks off for holidays and other interruptions, though it’s possible that it will transition to semimonthly if I can’t keep up the pace.

The initial few installments will extend some subjects from recent columns — specifically fantasy-blockbuster television and the Second Vatican Council. But a frequent newsletter preoccupation will be what you might call, with a nod to Thomas Carlyle, the condition-of-liberalism debate — meaning, of course, the condition of the entire liberal-democratic order, not just the state of the Democratic Party. So I thought I’d start with a general statement about where I’m coming from as a participant in the running argument about liberal democracy, the threats it faces and its prospects for renewal or collapse.

To that end, here are five points to organize my thoughts:

1. The condition of liberal-democratic society right now is … not great. The pessimistic side of Francis Fukuyama’s famous “end of history” analysis, in which he foresaw the triumph of liberalism ushering in an age of drift and anomie and simple sadness, has been amply vindicated in the developed world in the last 20 years. What I call “decadence” in my second-to-last book, a sense of stagnation and repetition and sclerosis in both politics and culture, is the immediate problem. The longer-term one is a slide toward a comfortable dystopia, closer to Huxley than Orwell and to P.D. James than both, in which an aging society continues to retreat from faith and hope and charity, abandoning a disappointing material reality for virtual spaces and online entertainments, offering pot and circuses to the masses and designer drugs and euthanasia to the miserable and old, enduring spasms of rebellion and disruption but generally defaulting to a medicated, distracted, dehumanized stability.

2. This liberal order, even in decay, is unlikely to be simply defeated by an external rival, because no international alternative to liberal-democratic politics currently enjoys the requisite mixture of legitimacy, competence and dynamism. There is more divergence in the world’s power centers than might have been expected 20 years ago, more resurfacing of civilizational distinctives, more cracks in the Pax Americana. But there is also a convergence in decadence — slowing growth even in the world’s rising powers, declining fertility in most places and serious blundering by the regimes in Moscow and Beijing. The world is multipolar but it is not yet postliberal, because no clearly superior technique for mastering the currents of modernity has yet surfaced — not in Russia or China, not under Islamism or Bolsonarismo or Hindutva …

3. … and not within Western society itself. Western liberalism’s internal critics have a lot of valid points without yet having a plausible path to a genuinely postliberal society — be it Marxist, degrowth environmentalist, anarcho-Durdenist or Catholic-integralist. The internal forces that are seen as most threatening by liberalism’s embattled defenders, Trumpism and wokeism, are plausible agents of a deepening decadence — the first one pushing the political system toward periodic crises, the second dropping a blanket of conformism, anti-intellectualism and self-censorship on a realm of culture and ideas already suffering from mediocrity and torpor. But both right-authoritarianism and what Wesley Yang has termed the “successor ideology” of wokeness seem likely to be politically self-limiting in pretty important ways. The most thoughtful forms of postliberalism, meanwhile, tend to offer sweeping philosophical critiques that cash out in policies that are actually relatively familiar — the recent postliberal conference at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, for instance, was dismissed by Jonah Goldberg as a gathering of “pro-life New Dealers,” and the organizer, Sohrab Ahmari, then quite reasonably embraced the label. Could such a politics overthrow neoliberalism or defeat secular liberalism? Maybe. But absent true calamity, the path to a Catholic Empire of Guadalupe or any other fully post-Madisonian formation seems quite obscure.

4. This means that there is time and space for liberal democracy’s renewal. But liberalism cannot easily renew itself, because despite what certain of its detractors and some of its champions insist, it isn’t really a political-moral-theological system in full; rather, it’s a deliberately thinned-out structure designed to manage pluralism, which depends on constant infusions from other sources, preliberal or nonliberal, to generate meaning and energy and purpose. There are moments of transition and turmoil when liberalism appears to stand alone, and liberals sometimes confuse these moments for an aspirational norm. But nobody except Hugh Hefner, Gordon Gekko and a few devotees of the old A.C.L.U. can bear to live for very long under conditions of pure liberalism. Instead, the norm for successful societies and would-be society builders is liberalism-plus: liberalism plus nationalism (as in 19th-century Europe or Ukraine today), liberalism plus intense ethnic homogeneity (the Scandinavian model, now showing signs of strain), liberalism plus mainline Protestantism (the old American tradition), liberalism plus therapeutic spirituality (the mode of American culture since the 1970s), liberalism plus social justice progressivism (the mode of today’s cultural left), etc., etc. Something must be added, some ghost needs to inhabit the machine, or else society begins to resemble the portraits painted by liberalism’s enemies — a realm of atomized, unhappy consumers, creatures of self-interest whose time horizons for those interests are always a month rather than a decade, Lockean individuals moving in a miserable herd.

5. This creates a curious problem for defenders of the liberal order facing off against their challengers and critics. Liberal democracy obviously has a lot to fear from illiberal and postliberal forces: In the near term, they are potential agents of crisis and disruption; in the long run they might replace the liberal order, as it once replaced the ancien regime. But the liberal order also cannot live without the forms of regeneration, solidarity, creativity and — above all — metaphysical hope that a postliberal impulse reaches for and that liberalism alone struggles to supply. So the liberal needs to be able to look even at forces that seem most threatening, whether the Trumpist right, the illiberal left or something else, and recognize in them impulses and desires and demands that require satisfaction, not just denunciation. And someone who is not fully a liberal, someone loyal to the Constitution but not really to Locke or John Stuart Mill, but who also doubts the rival paths on offer and would prefer not to plunge the liberal-democratic world into revolutionary chaos, has to live with a balancing act: Rooting for the best of postliberalism to help our society escape its decadence, while being realistic about what’s actually possible and resisting illiberal forces that threaten only chaos, or some Americanization of the authoritarianisms already on offer elsewhere in the world.

This last description, as you can probably tell, is a self-description. So the next time this newsletter takes up these issues, you’ll know where (and with whatever confusions) I’m coming from myself.

A scattering of links, this time on postliberal themes.

Richard Hanania on 2022 as Fukuyama’s vindication.

Fukuyama on the continuing end of history.

Fred Bauer on liberalism’s internal decay.

Tyler Cowen on classical liberalism and the new right.

Michael Hanby makes the postliberal case against postliberalism.

Shadi Hamid on the divide between liberalism and democracy.

Aris Roussinos on British postliberalism.

My first column on postliberalism, from the distant world of 2016.

Quotes or developments relevant to Western decadence; may be replaced by “this week in anti-decadence” when more hopeful developments intrude.

“The truth of our economy — and that of many other developed economies — is that for a generation we have created the synthetic feeling of growth without actually enjoying much real improvement in productivity.

That feeling of enrichment has come from two sources: ultralow interest rates and cheap goods supplied by outsourcing production to places without the same regulatory and environmental standards as the U.K. This has left us free to borrow heavily and regulate ourselves into economic oblivion while still being able to buy lots of stuff.

Then, last year, inflation came back. From then on, it was game over and the pain had begun. …

None of this can be fixed by a short-term cut in taxation. Indeed, rising taxes are actually the symptom of these problems, a sign that economic dynamism has failed to keep pace with our expectations of the state and with living standards.

As any market type would tell you, suppressing a symptom, rather than addressing a cause, just leads to distortions, market failure or backlash. Slashing taxes before you have demonstrated any serious ability to address the reason for them is like trying to dress the economic mutton up as lamb.”

— The Telegraph columnist Juliet Samuel on soon-to-be-former Prime Minister Liz Truss’s failed tax-cut gambit (Oct. 14)

I’ll be speaking at the University of Pennsylvania on Thursday, Oct. 27, at 7 p.m., on the theme of “From Reaganism to Trumpism: How Conservatives Decided It Was Evening in America.” The talk is free and open to the public.