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.
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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.
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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.
In that sense, you are right. However, I would consider the parliament to be a part of the bourgeois state. It's function in class repression is to divide and divert working class political power while consolidating ruling class political power. It is not so much an administrative organ (that would be the executive), and could be thought of as the highest of the "ideological state apparatuses", although I guess this is just semantics.