When you try to evaluate the survivability of liberalism from the other side of the aisle, the first point to acknowledge is that Donald Trump’s two victories demonstrated that there is a large bloc of the electorate willing to vote for a man who is the living antithesis of all things liberal and democratic.
Almost everyone I contacted for this essay, however, including Zakaria and Wooldridge, argued that all is not lost, that liberals must exercise concerted effort and willpower to once again speak to ordinary working- and middle-class voters.
In a wide-ranging response to my questions, Edmund Fawcett, the author of “Liberalism: The Life of an Idea,” argued that
liberals could recover if they became, as once, inclusive, democratic. If, that is, they made their promises for everyone, not just a few. They’d also need to relearn how to talk of their principles as if they mattered and we should care about them.
That brings in D.S.A. Name aside, they’re what for years we called progressives or social democrats. They want liberal promises for everyone. They want revenue or debt to spend on improving well-being and public services. To a left liberal (e.g., me), that’s appealing.
The liberal centrism of Zakaria and Wooldridge, Fawcett wrote,
feels ambiguous to me. Is it a meritocratic fight against cosseted advantage? Or a democratic fight to extend fairer shares to all?
It sounds more the first. In which case, yes, it does leave ground to the left for D.S.A. to win.
The D.S.A., Fawcett added, “might replace the Democratic Party (unlikely given first-past-the-post, bane of insurgents). Or its zeal and confidence might nudge Democrats leftward. I’d like to see that, but I’m not betting my pension on it.”
Fawcett’s argument is premised on his belief that there are four basic liberal principles:
Unchecked power can’t be trusted (whether of state, wealth or conventional opinion); life for people can get better; society is never harmonious but always in conflict; and everyone merits respect whatever rank, status, group, etc. they’re put into or they choose — the democratic seed in otherwise undemocratic creed.
While these principles, Fawcett continued, are hiding in plain sight,
the snag with those is they’re so worn down or travestied in public argument, so fine ground in the academy that liberals have trouble recalling why we care so about the ideals that those words name.
Liberals need to sound angrier, less patient with their detractors, yes. They also need to talk as if what they believe in mattered.
Sheri Berman, a political scientist at Barnard, put her finger on a core internal conflict facing those seeking to restore liberal credibility:
We still live in a world built on liberal principles: our main political, economic, and social institutions — democracy, markets, universities — are based on its principles.
The problem is that as more people have come to see these institutions as corrupt, dominated by out-of-touch elites, and no longer delivering for them, liberalism and in the United States the Democratic Party, which is most associated with it, has come to be seen as the embodiment and defender of an inept, ineffectual status quo.
While critics on the far left and right argue that the “fault lies with liberalism itself,” Berman wrote,
others including Zakaria and Wooldridge (and myself) disagree. We recognize today’s economic, political and social problems but see them as the consequence not of liberalism’s inherent flaws but of its poor implementation.
Liberals have long supported market economies because they rest on individual choice and reward individual effort, and since they are suspicious of concentrated power, they have viewed too much government control over economic life as dangerous.
But during the late 20th and early 21st centuries, liberals and the parties associated with them fell prey to a warped version of this view, promoting free markets above all else and forgetting that without careful government intervention, markets can threaten rather than support individual liberty and societal thriving.
Berman’s list of liberalism’s errors doesn’t stop there:
Rather than striving for government of, by and for the people, liberals allowed democracies to become dominated by out-of-touch elites and moneyed and organized interests, and producing policies that reflected their preferences rather than those of average citizens.
Key societal institutions, most notably, K-12 schools and universities, came to be seen as dominated by elites promoting ideas many of their fellow citizens do not share, and by diversity bureaucracies that too often judge people by group identity rather than individual character, rather than by a meritocratic ethos and a commitment to cultivating democratic citizens.
In other words, if liberalism began as a reformist movement challenging aristocracy, entrenched power and a social order favoring the few, it now faces a tougher challenge: itself.
“So where does that leave liberals?” Berman asked.
Liberalism can once again become a radical, progressive force but only if it is again willing to take on established power and the status quo, even though today that status quo is largely of its own making.
Liberals must show they recognize where the system they created went wrong and are willing and able to use their own distinctive principles to fix it: building a fairer, more just and more productive economy; a democracy responsive to average citizens rather than moneyed interests, organized minorities and out-of-touch elites; and civil society and cultural institutions that constructively engage dissent rather than censoring or punishing it.
As an inveterate pessimist, I am drawn to the notion that liberalism is on its last legs, but in this case, I don’t trust my own instincts.
Instead, I find the argument Aurelian Craiutu, a political scientist at Indiana University, made to me in a detailed email more credible. Craiutu readily acknowledged that all is not well with liberalism, noting that he agreed with
Wooldridge’s book that liberals should relearn the virtues of modesty, gradualism, moderation and pragmatism in order to avoid the errors which they have sometimes made.
For example, liberals closer to the classical liberal tradition must acknowledge that market pathologies such as monopolies and the political reinforcement of gross inequalities require the attention of political leaders.
But, superseding all that, Craiutu wrote,
these early death certificates are not only premature but deeply mistaken. It has often been proclaimed exhausted, nefarious or simply dead, but it is still with us today, while fascism and communism, two of its past fierce enemies, have almost entirely lost their appeal and their records speak for themselves.
Matthew Tobin contributed research to this article.
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