Adam Gopnik: Why Liberals Struggle to Defend Liberalism ("Liberalism is, truly, the love that dare not speak its name.")
Adam Gopnik: Why Liberals Struggle to Defend Liberalism ("Liberalism is, truly, the love that dare not speak its name.")
We may be months away from the greatest crisis the liberal state has known since the Civil War. How come it’s so hard to say what we’re defending?
This is the guy who 100% didn't realize he was playing a parody of himself in the opening scene of Tár.
Still, this is how the good work of governing gets done, by those who accept the weight of the world as they act to lighten it. Obama’s history—including the feints back and forth on national health insurance, which ended, amid all the compromises, with the closest thing America has had to a just health-care system—is uninspiring to the idealizing mind. But these compromises were not a result of neglecting to analyze the idea of justice adequately; they were the result of the pluralism of an open society marked by disagreement on fundamental values. The troubles of current American politics do not arise from a failure on the part of people in Ohio to have read Rawls; they are the consequence of the truth that, even if everybody in Ohio read Rawls, not everybody would agree with him.
. . .
What’s curious about anti-liberal critics such as Gray is their evident belief that, after the institutions and the practices on which their working lives and welfare depend are destroyed, the features of the liberal state they like will somehow survive. After liberalism is over, the neat bits will be easily reassembled, and the nasty bits will be gone. Gray can revile what he perceives to be a ruling élite and call to burn it all down, and nothing impedes the dissemination of his views. Without the institutions and the practices that he despises, fear would prevent oppositional books from being published. Try publishing an anti-Communist book in China or a critique of theocracy in Iran. Liberal institutions are the reason that he is allowed to publish his views and to have the career that he and all the other authors here rightly have. Liberal values and practices allow their most fervent critics a livelihood and a life—which they believe will somehow magically be reconstituted “after liberalism.” They won’t be.
The vociferous critics of liberalism are like passengers on the Titanic who root for the iceberg. After all, an iceberg is thrilling, and anyway the White Star Line has classes, and the music the band plays is second-rate, and why is the food French instead of honestly English? “Just as I told you, the age of the steamship is over!” they cry as the water slips over their shoes. They imagine that another boat will miraculously appear—where all will be in first class, the food will be authentic, and the band will perform only Mozart or Motown, depending on your wishes. Meanwhile, the ship goes down. At least the band will be playing “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” which they will take as some vindication. The rest of us may drown.
Try publishing an anti-Communist book in China or a critique of theocracy in Iran. Liberal institutions are the reason that he is allowed to publish his views and to have the career that he and all the other authors here rightly have. Liberal values and practices allow their most fervent critics a livelihood and a life—which they believe will somehow magically be reconstituted “after liberalism.” They won’t be.
Least tried to death lib argument
Gray can revile what he perceives to be a ruling élite and call to burn it all down, and nothing impedes the dissemination of his views. Without the institutions and the practices that he despises, fear would prevent oppositional books from being published. Try publishing an anti-Communist book in China or a critique of theocracy in Iran. Liberal institutions are the reason that he is allowed to publish his views and to have the career that he and all the other authors here rightly have. Liberal values and practices allow their most fervent critics a livelihood and a life—which they believe will somehow magically be reconstituted “after liberalism.” They won’t be.
This is nonsensical.
Liberalism does not allow anything and everything to be published. And it does not allow opposition or critique either. Not when it feels threatened.
It allows these things outside of any threat to itself because there is ultimately no point in rocking the boat when there is no threat.
This is the same for communism. Ultimately the only repression that we seek to do is that which protects communist existence. Once communism is firmly established and no longer in ideological wartime there would be no more suppression of opposition, because there would be no need to. We would be the cultural and ideological hegemony and would be able to rely on the cultural and ideological produce of communism to sustain that without direct state intervention.
Liberalism in ideological wartime is not different in this respect. Remember that the socialist state is just the same as the liberal state other than the change of ruling class. The functions of the state are identical, merely pointed at a different target.
Remember that the socialist state is just the same as the liberal state other than the change of ruling class. The functions of the state are identical, merely pointed at a different target.
I agree with you mostly but this is just wrong. A socialist state will have to be very different from a liberal state in order to be able to process the vast amounts of information needed to plan the economy, and it would also have to get rid of parliamentarianism, a disastrously failed approach to democracy.
The "state" is made up of the functions of government that exist to perform repressive and/or violent measures against one class by another class for the purposes of upholding the ruling class' position and status.
Administration of government is not actually considered "the state" in socialist thinking. When Marx discusses the withering away of the state he does not discuss the withering away of governance, he considers administration and organisation of society to continue but for the branches that exist that are considered "the state" to be slowly dissolved over time as their function becomes obsolete (police/prisons/secret police/intelligence/militaries/etc etc).
When I speak of the state I am speaking in these terms. The method of governing and administrating society are obviously quite different, particularly under a fully socialised economy.
This is the guy who 100% didn't realize he was playing a parody of himself in the opening scene of Tár.
Wow I was certain it was Remnick.
I mean if we're really gonna use the Titanic argument, let's also note that communists knew the iceberg was coming since the boat left port, have drawn up plans for everyone to safely evacuate the boat, and have outlined a totally new iceberg proof boat that we can all sail in.
Meanwhile the liberals barricaded in the control room have been busy sipping champagne and shooting anyone trying to steer the ship on a new course.
I much prefer the love that dares to spell it's name and goals and is willing to suffer for it but you do you, liberal
It has been some time since I responded to an essay. This will be a long one.
Liberal thinkers hardly improve matters, since the first thing they will say is that the thing called “liberalism” is not actually a thing. This discouraging reflection is, to be sure, usually followed by an explanation: liberalism is a practice, a set of institutions, a tradition, a temperament, even.
So liberalism is a thing then? And how is this different from any well established system of government such as feudalism (which very much had its practies, traditions, institutions, etc)?
A clear contrast can be made with its ideological competitors: both Marxism and Catholicism, for instance, have more or less explicable rules—call them, nonpejoratively, dogmas. You can’t really be a Marxist without believing that a revolution against the existing capitalist order would be a good thing, and that parliamentary government is something of a bourgeois trick played on the working class.
And you can't be a liberal without thinking that monarchy is full of shit, so what the fuck is this guy saying? Literally the opening paragraph of this essay tells us to call "liberalism" as "republicanism". Legit this essay is simultaneously arguing that liberalism doesn't have ideological content (lmao), all while telling us what ideological content liberalism has.
You can push either of these beliefs to the edge of metaphor—maybe the rabbi was only believed to be resurrected, and the inner experience of that epiphany is what counts; maybe the revolution will take place peacefully within a parliament and without Molotov cocktails—but you can’t really discard them.
No you can't. I won't speak for Catholocism, but Marxism is a scientific doctrine with a specific empirical and theoretical content. It's content can be made into a metaphor as much as Newton's laws of motion can be interpreted as metaphors. Even if you disagree with Marxism, at least acknowledge that it is not a fucking vibe. The falling rate of profit, reproduction model of the economy, the modes of production, none of it is a fucking metaphor.
Liberalism, on the other hand, can include both faith in free markets and skepticism of free markets, an embrace of social democracy and a rejection of its statism. Its greatest figure, the nineteenth-century British philosopher and parliamentarian John Stuart Mill, was a socialist but also the author of “On Liberty,” which is (to the leftist imagination, at least) a suspiciously libertarian manifesto.
Maybe this is why Liberals are so susceptible to Fascism? Because liberal ideology has no actual content, and can be molded to fit whatever interests the person arguing for it wants? It would very much explain how the liberals I know can so easily talk about the equality and freedom of all human beings while explicitly cheering on for imperial conquest.
For Kagan, that “again” in the title is the crucial word; instead of seeing Trumpism as a new danger, he recapitulates the long history of anti-liberalism in the U.S., characterizing the current crisis as an especially foul wave rising from otherwise predictable currents. Since the founding of the secular-liberal Republic—secular at least in declining to pick one faith over another as official, liberal at least in its faith in individualism—anti-liberal elements have been at war with it.
Even by liberal standards, America has only been a "liberal republic" for a very short period of time. The republic was literally founded as a slave republic. Not until at least after the abolition of segregation can America be considered a liberal democracy at all. The anti-liberal elements weren't at war with the liberal republic, it was the other way around.
Chandler emphasizes programs of reform, and toys with the many bells and whistles on the liberal busy box: he’s inclined to try more random advancements, like elevating ordinary people into temporary power, on an Athenian model that’s now restricted to jury service. But, on the whole, his is a sanely conventional vision of a state reformed in the direction of ever greater fairness and equity, one able to curb the excesses of capitalism and to accommodate the demands of diversity.
Lmao, nothing short of a communist revolution could ever allow a sortion system that "curbs the excesses of capitalism" to be implemented. The current ruling class cannot even be convinced to give universal healthcare or proportional voting.
Yet the problem with state ownership is not a theoretical one: Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister because of the widely felt failures of state ownership in the nineteen-seventies. The overreaction to those failures may have been destructive, but it was certainly democratic
No.
Lefebvre, on the other hand, wants to write about liberalism chiefly as a cultural phenomenon
I will not dignify this part of the essay with a response.
“Imagine: You are designing a society, but you don’t know who you’ll be within it—rich or poor, man or woman, gay or straight. What would you want that society to look like?” Lefebvre’s “reflective equilibrium” is borrowed from Rawls, too. Rawls’s classic “A Theory of Justice” (1971) was a theory about fairness, which revolved around the “liberty principle” (you’re entitled to the basic liberties you’d get from a scheme in which everyone got those same liberties) and the “difference principle” (any inequalities must benefit the worst off).
Nobody gets to design a society, especially not from scratch so all of these principles, while nice of paper are moot. And since liberals have a complete "inability" (lack of desire really) to defend democracy from capture by wealthy, these principles are nothing more than liberal masturbation.
Indeed, readers may feel that the work of reconciling Rawls’s very abstract consideration of ideal justice and community with actual experience is more daunting than these books, written by professional philosophers who swim in this water, make it out to be. A confidence that our problems can be managed with the right adjustments to the right model helps explain why the tone of both books—richly erudite and thoughtful—is, for all their implication of crisis, so contemplative and even-humored. No doubt it is a good idea to tell people to keep cool in a fire, but that does not make the fire cooler.
Wow, I thought this writer was incapable of making a sensible point. I guess I can give some congratulations for him pointing out the obvious.
Rawls devised one of the most powerful of all thought experiments: the idea of the “veil of ignorance,” behind which we must imagine the society we would want to live in without knowing which role in that society’s hierarchy we would occupy. Simple as it is, it has ever-arresting force, making it clear that, behind this veil, rational and self-interested people would never design a society like that of, say, the slave states of the American South
And yet the people who "design" any given society know very much what position in the social hierarchy they will occupy. This shit is why liberals are categorically incapable of doing class analysis even when they recognize the existence and damaging effects of class.
It’s telling that in neither of these Rawlsian books is there any real study of the life and the working method of an actual, functioning liberal politician.
You don't say?
The reason is that theirs are not ideal stories about the unimpeded pursuit of freedom and fairness but necessarily contingent tales of adjustments and amendments—
This whole section assumes that these liberal politicians believed in the ideals of liberalism and were operating from a place of sincerity. I have literally never seen a liberal ever question the idea that their dear leaders were committed and sincere.
Oscillation of power and points of view within that common framework are what makes liberal democracies liberal. It has less to do with the ideally just plan than with the guarantee of the right to talk back to the planner. That is the great breakthrough in human affairs, as much as the far older search for social justice. Plato’s rulers wanted social justice, of a kind; what they didn’t want was back talk.
If these liberals will for once in their lives try to analyse the cause of these oscillations, they will realize that it has jack shit to do with "the right to talk back to the planners" and everything to do with material conditions. Liberal society's only real "breakthrough" is managing to convince its leaders and population that they are above natural forces and above social forces because of their mighty rational powers. This kind of "rationality" is even worse than believing in the existence of God, as at least that can confer some level of humility and acknowledgement that not everything is under our control.
The rights of sexual minorities are uniquely protected in Western liberal democracies, but this gain in social equality is the result of a history of protected expression that allowed gay experience to be articulated and “normalized,” in high and popular culture.
Not only does this ahistorical view forget that it was the "western liberal democracies" that spread homophobic beliefs around the world in the first place, it also completely ignores the fact that gay rights were won through immense militant struggle after decades of fighting against the police, liberal politicians and the majority view.
Liberals are at a disadvantage when it comes to authoritarians, because liberals are committed to procedures and institutions, and persist in that commitment even when those things falter and let them down. The asymmetry between the Trumpite assault on the judiciary and Biden’s reluctance even to consider enlarging the Supreme Court is typical. Trumpites can and will say anything on earth about judges; liberals are far more reticent, since they don’t want to undermine the institutions that give reality to their ideals.
The people of Gaza beg to differ. I swear, fuck this author. What a removed.
As for Dostoyevsky’s positive doctrines—authoritarian and mystical in nature—Gray waves them away as being “of no interest.” But they are of interest, exactly because they raise the central pragmatic issue: If you believe all this about liberal modernity, what do you propose to do about it?
The trick is not to have unified societies that “share values”—those societies have never existed or have existed only at the edge of a headsman’s axe
So, current liberal society? Where most people believe in the project of liberalism, even many self-described communists?
Americans were far more polarized in the nineteen-sixties than they are today—many favored permanent apartheid (“Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”)—and what happened was not that values changed on their own but that a form of rights-based liberalism of protest and free speech convinced just enough people that the old order wouldn’t work and that it wasn’t worth fighting for a clearly lost cause.
Deeply unserious author
When the book appeared, it may have seemed unduly overgeneralized—depicting liberalism as a humane generosity that flared up at moments and then died down again. But, as the world picture darkens, her dark picture illuminates. There surely are a set of identifiable values that connect men and women of different times along a single golden thread: an aversion to fanaticism, a will toward the coexistence of different kinds and creeds, a readiness for reform, a belief in the public criticism of power without penalty, and perhaps, above all, a knowledge that institutions of civic peace are much harder to build than to destroy, being immeasurably more fragile than their complacent inheritors imagine. These values will persist no matter how evil the moment may become, and by whatever name we choose to whisper in the dark.
Motherfucking liberals can just take "values" and declare them to belong to them. What the fuck. It's like me saying that the color red belongs to communism. Fantastic note to end this turd of an essay on.