From
The anti-liberal moment by Zack Beauchamp at Vox:
Quote
Shortly after its post-World War I creation, the foundations of Germanys Weimar Republic began to quake. In 1923, Hitler staged an abortive coup attempt in Bavaria, the so-called Beer Hall Putsch a failure that nonetheless turned Hitler into a reactionary celebrity, a sign of German discontent with the post-war political order.
One contemporary observer, a legal theorist in his mid-30s named Carl Schmitt, found the seeds of the crisis within the idea of liberalism itself. Liberal institutions like representative democracy, and the liberal ideal that all a nations citizens can be treated as political equals, were in his view a sham. Politics at its core is not about compromise between equal individuals but instead conflict between groups.
Even if Bolshevism is suppressed and Fascism held at bay, the crisis of contemporary parliamentarism would not be overcome in the least, he wrote in 1926. It is, in its depths, the inescapable contradiction of liberal individualism and democratic homogeneity.
Schmitts critique of liberalism proved terrifyingly accurate. The struggle between the Nazis and their opponents could not be resolved through parliamentary compromise; the Weimar Republic fell to fascism and took the rest of the continent down with it.
Ive been thinking about Schmitt a lot lately. Not about his dark fate he became an enthusiastic Nazi but instead about his prescience. Schmitt saw something in German politics, deep flaws in its liberal order, before they became obvious to other political observers and ordinary citizens. His philosophical critique predicted political reality.
Schmitt haunts our political moment because we are seeing a flowering of criticism of American liberalism. In recent years, serious thinkers on both the left and right have launched a sustained assault on the United States founding intellectual credo.
These criticisms do not arise in a vacuum. They stem from real-world crises, most notably the 2008 Great Recession and the rise of far-right populists like Donald Trump to power. These shocks to the system show, in the eyes of liberalisms contemporary critics, that something is profoundly wrong with the fundamental ideas that define our politics. It is a belief that the liberal idea has become obsolete, as Russian President Vladimir Putin recently declared.
Unlike Schmitt and Putin, the intellectual critics of liberalism opponents do not typically challenge democracy itself. But they are united in believing that American liberalism as currently constituted is past its expiration date, that it is buckling under the weight of its contradictions. Their arguments tap into a deep sense of discontent among the voting public, a collapse of trust in the political establishment, and a growing sense that institutions like Congress arent delivering what the public needs.
On the right, the anti-liberals locate the root of the problem in liberalisms social doctrines, its emphasis on secularism and individual rights. In their view, these ideas are solvents breaking down Americas communities and, ultimately, dissolving the very social fabric the country needs to prosper.
Liberalism constantly disrupts deeply cherished traditions among its subject populations, stirring unrest, animosity, and eventually political reaction and backlash, Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule, one of the most prominent of the reactionary anti-liberals, said in a May speech.
Left anti-liberals, by contrast, pinpoint liberal economic doctrine as the source of our current woes. Liberalisms vision of the economy as a zone of individual freedom, in their view, has given rise to a deep system of exploitation that makes a mockery of liberal claims to be democratic an oppressive system referred to as neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism in any guise is not the solution but the problem, Nancy Fraser, a professor at the New School, writes. The sort of change we require can only come from elsewhere, from a project that is at the very least anti-neoliberal, if not anti-capitalist.
The defenses from Americas liberal intellectual elite have been weak at best. The most prominent defenses of liberalism today are either laundry lists of its past glories or misplaced attacks on identity politics and political correctness, neither of which are adequate to the challenge presented by liberalisms newly vital critics on the reactionary right or socialist left.
If liberalism is to endure, liberals have to join the fight. And that starts with understanding why liberalism is in trouble and just what, exactly, its up against.
Quote
One of liberalisms historical sources of strength is seeing the world for what it is, adapting its doctrines to fit changing realities rather than trying to make the world fit an older version of liberalism. Modern liberals need to do the same with the problems raised by its current critics. They we need to recognize that there are serious flaws in liberalism as it exists. Leftists are correct that neoliberal faith in the market was far too devout; conservatives are right that liberals have been too inattentive to the importance of community.
Quote
But liberal adaptation to change is not merely a process of self-flagellation. It also involves identifying what new ideas are bubbling up that can be adapted to strengthen liberalism, pinpointing the raw materials for generating enthusiastic new liberal movements and visions. The obsessive focus on a handful of overeager college organizers and professors is a mistake; it obscures the undeniable fact that organization around group identity has helped create a number of vital political movements that are defending liberalisms central component parts.
Think about the Movement for Black Lives, dedicated to liberal ideals of equal citizenship and non-coercion. Think about the fact that roughly 4 million Americans around the country turned out for the 2017 Womens Marches, using a call for womens equality as means of organizing against Trumps threat to American democracy more broadly.
Think about the #MeToo movements role in fighting back against a pervasive source of unfreedom and inequality. Think about the backlash to Trumps travel ban and family separations, how young people around the world are using their generational identity to mobilize around climate change, and how laws aimed at repressing minority voters have become a rallying cry for the defense of free and fair elections.
The people doing the work to defend equality, freedom, and democracy today base their activism on the experiences of specific identity groups. They tend to use specific oppressions as a jumping-off point, weaving together different groups experiences into a tapestry of solidarity. Particularism is not isolating, but rather a means of generating a broad-based critique of social inequalities that can improve democracy for all.
Liberals will not succeed by tut-tutting activists who care about the oppression of their own communities. They succeed by developing a vision of liberalism that harnesses activists energy and sense of injustice.
The defense of liberalism begins by recognizing that there is a crisis, that anti-liberals are once again asserting themselves intellectually in ways that should worry liberalisms defenders. It will triumph by seeing the world for what it is, and changing liberalism to meet it not by insisting on arguments well past their expiration date.
If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
Help
