Defining Liberalism: Randall Kennedy's 'My Race Problem—And Ours'

In The Liberal Founding this weblog cited Professor Rowley's list of characteristics of liberalism: “universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism (or human flourishing).” In essaying a definition of liberalism perhaps the first task is to observe that by and large the left disagrees, both in fundamental outlook, and on nearly every point of liberal thought.

I was first directed to this point by Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, which, though not liberal itself, clearly assumed that to discuss 'liberal' as synonymous with 'left' would be conceptually incoherent. The issue is confused because media discourse generally treats 'liberal' and 'left' as synonymous.

An illustrative example of this fundamental dichotomy is Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy's My Race Problem—And Ours, published in Atlantic, May 1997. Jim Sleeper analyzed some of Kennedy's arguments in his ironically titled Liberal Racism:

First, Sleeper critiqued the left's rejection of liberal universalism in favor of class—particularly racial class. Sleeper said that [effective crusading against racism originates from] "people who yearn for justice, not merely for the advancement of a particular group," and quoted Glenn Loury's apt phrase, "... the moral requirements of a humanism which transcends race."

Sleeper cites Kennedy:

... Analogizing race to family is a potent rhetorical move used
  to challenge those, like me, who are animated by a liberal,
  individualistic, and universal ethos which is skeptical of, if
  not hostile to, the particularisms—national, ethnic, religious,
  and racial—which seem to have grown so strong recently.

That is, family, and in particular “brotherhood,” in the political realm is incompatible with the liberal universalism and individualism cited by Rowley above. [Note that while the Founders wholeheartedly embraced the 'liberty' and 'equality' of the Continent's rallying cry, liberté, égalité, fraternité, “brotherhood” is absent from their discourse. In contrast with the left, liberalism is public and civil.]

The reason is that the obligations of family—or racial brotherhood—tend to be “antecedent to choice,” in the artful phrase Kennedy borrows from Michael Sandel. Brotherhood, or in more general terms, 'community,' tends to be coercive in ways that liberalism's equivalent term, The People, is not. [A phrase I grew up with was “put three Americans together and they form a committee.” De Tocqueville noted the tendency of the citizens of the infant American nation to form “voluntary associations.”]

This brings us to a crucial fact. In a world of kings and emperors, sultans and rajahs and warlords, the Founders created a nation with no rulers. To this day no one in our politics—mayor, county executive, governor, president—is legitimately called a ruler. This is because a ruler is someone who can subject others to their will, and in a free country no one can do that. We carelessly speak of an election as expressing the will of the voters, perhaps because we are influenced by one of Rousseau's terrible errors, the notion that “the general will is always right” (which laid the foundation for the Terror). [As Orwell warned, “the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”]

'Community' as used by the left means that the group is everything and the individual is nothing (and thus the rejection of the liberal principle that the locus of freedom is the individual and not the group or class). It is because communitarianism rejects justice in favor of class, subjects civil rights to the notionally less selfish claim of “group rights,” that Kennedy objects to racial kinship. "I reject the notion of racial kinship," he wrote. "I do so in order to avoid its burdens and to be free to claim what the distinguished political theorist Michael Sandel labels 'the unencumbered self'."

The harmful effect of treating a person as a representative of a (racial) class, at the expense of justice (the equal civil rights of the single person) can be seen in the treatment of Justice Clarence Thomas. The liberal position is "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it," but Justice Thomas regularly confronts audiences who take the position that a black man does not have the right to be conservative. This is a double standard as well as a denial of equality, rightly opposed by "people who yearn for justice, not merely for the advancement of a particular group" (as noted above).

To Summarize:
First, 'liberal' and 'left' are not synonymous.
Second, the left's orientation toward class in the form of racial community cannot be reconciled with the universal justice favored by liberalism.
Third, rulership and its attendant coerciveness is illegitimate in our liberal society. The coercion of a 'general will' (saying "the people rule" instead of saying "the people govern") is implicit in left communitarianism.
 
This is just a beginning. I hope to post further on this topic.