Liberalism in the 21st Century Ctd: The Left

Yesterday's post, Enlightenment Liberalism in the 21st Century,  argued, in effect, that liberalism is The Peaceable Kingdom. As a line which appeared in rec.arts.books (USENET) years ago asserted, “Liberalism wagers that civility, cooperation and altruism have greater survival value than aggression and the will to power.” No one should be subject to the will of another. Liberalism is about efficacy and optimum outcomes* rather than “power.”**

This is in direct contradiction to powerful  “intellectual” themes from the 19th Century Central European intellectual avant-garde—Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud—which still are surprisingly influential in the academic humanities today. (“A left intellectual ideology which is backwards in respect to liberal modernity is one of the paradoxes of western civilization.”)

The Founders could not have warned against the illiberal mind-set of the left, because the left was a reaction against the Enlightenment which came after them.

Perhaps the most important difference between liberalism and the ideology of the left is that liberalism rejects us-vs-them thinking. The most famous three words of liberalism are those which begin the Constitution: “We the People.” By contrast, for the left there is always an oppressor. The end of the Communist Manifesto issues an implied call to war for an unnamed entity which is responsible for “your chains.” The language is everywhere. For example, Multiculturalism on Campus: Theory, Models, and Practices, states:

The revolution to the left engages people to become part of a utopian vision that is liberating ... one group subjugates and dominates (i.e., the oppressor from the right) and the other group is collaborative and empowering (i.e., the oppressed from the left).

In What's So Bad about Hate? (NYT) blogger Andrew Sullivan notes some of the consequences of this polar thinking:

The theorists behind these "isms" want to ascribe all blame to one group in society — the "oppressors" — and render specific others — the "victims" — completely blameless. And they want to do this in order in part to side unequivocally with the underdog. But it doesn't take a genius to see how this approach, too, can generate its own form of bias. It can justify blanket condemnations of whole groups of people — white straight males for example — purely because of the color of their skin or the nature of their sexual orientation. And it can condescendingly ascribe innocence to whole groups of others. It does exactly what hate does: it hammers the uniqueness of each individual into the anvil of group identity. And it postures morally over the result.

At its extreme, us-vs-them thinking has an anti-intellectual effect. Ideas are subject to blanket rejection on ad hominem grounds if articulated by the “other.” The tendency is suggested by Stephen Carter: “There is a partisanship that involves rooting for my side, and there is a partisanship that involves insisting that my side can do no wrong, that all the bad guys are on the other side.”

Eventually it becomes an attempt to limit the range of thought:

Almost any argument about race, gender, Israel, or the war is now apt to be infected by a spirit of self-righteous grievance and demonization. Passionate disagreement isn’t sufficient; bad faith must be imputed to one’s opponents: skepticism of affirmative action equals racism, antiwar sentiment equals anti-Americanism (or terrorist sympathy), criticism of Israel is by definition anti-Semitic, and so on. More and more people think they’re entitled to the right not just to ignore or disapprove, but to veto and banish. - Kurt Andersen

Once again, for liberalism, language is critically important.



(*) It's important to emphasize that the word "idealism" is a technical word in philosophy, and that this usage has little to do with the common usage of that term, which refers to dedication to achieving ideal outcomes without making compromises. - Steven Den Beste, denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2004/05/Inelegance.shtml (Emphasis added)

(**) “Live dangerously!” Nietzsche taught: “Live in conflict with your equals and with yourselves! Be robbers and ravagers as long as you cannot be rulers and owners.” Nothing could be further from the liberal spirit.

Enlightenment Liberalism in the 21st Century

The previous post argued the centrality of liberalism in American politics and culture. It cited the work of German-American historian Fritz Stern, one of the few intellectual thinkers who discusses liberalism as liberalism. Such great examinations of liberal political democracy as The Open Society and Its Enemies, I. F. Stone's The Trial of Socrates, John Murray Cuddihy's The Ordeal of Civility, and the works of George Orwell, are more typical, in that they are essentially about liberal modernity, but seldom, if ever, reference liberalism directly.

The Founders, despite the fact that “the Founding was an expression of the new liberal values of the Enlightenment,” likewise did not commonly speak of liberalism as the underlying spirit of their work. But examination of their work reveals abstract truths, applicable to all men and all times*, which they implied but did not articulate.

For example, the Founders relegated rulership to the dustbin of history. The title they conferred on the leader of the new nation they created, “president,” was no stronger at the time than “facilitator” is in ours. To this day no one is legitimately called “ruler” in our political hierarchy.

To be specific, what this implies is that liberalism holds that rulership is illegitimate. Rulership is incompatible with liberty. In “What Is Enlightenment?” Kant wrote, “Enlightenment is man's release from his self incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another.” In liberal societies, each member of the people is a citizen, not a subject. The difference is that the citizen is not under “direction from another.”

A corollary is that liberalism holds that no one should be subject to the will of another. If we achieve a truly liberal outlook, we do not even want to take advantage of anyone else, to “rule” or dominate or “get over on” or coerce. We should be past such behavior by the time we get out of high school.

This is a high standard. It means that we should not speak of election results as reflecting “the will of the people.” (Orwell wrote, “The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”) Rather, elections reflect the people's choice, arrived at by deliberation in which personal desire is mediated by reflection on the public good.

But isn't democracy that situation where the people rule? No. They govern. The Declaration does not say, “consent of the ruled,” it says “consent of the governed.”

Have you ever heard someone argue, “that's just semantics”? For liberalism, language is critically important. (Orwell, again, “the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.”) For instance, one can argue that the French Revolution segued into the Terror because of a flawed vision of liberalism. The agents of the revolution misunderstood progress as a movement from the will of the King to Rousseau's “general will,” a version of “the will of the people.” (It is also significant that of the formula “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” only the first two terms made it into the Declaration. Fraternity, or brotherhood, involves obligations “antecedent to choice,” as a passage cited by Randall Kennedy notes. The abrogation of moral choice facilitated the emergence of the Terror's murderous violence. We are constituted by the terms we use, and liberalism asks us to choose carefully. Or, as a previous post implied, Fraternity points to group identity and its vested interests.)
 (*) Lincoln, of course.