After Liberalism Read online

  A clear weakness of American counterrevolutionary populism, however, is its inability to find moral or cultural consensus. Contrary to what populism’s advocates, particularly on the religious Right, claim, most Americans no longer exhibit either fixed moral habits or deep communal loyalties. They are footloose, perpetually acquisitive, and in varying states of transition from nineteenth-century familial patterns. They do not, by and large, fit the culture which is now conducive to European populism. What resonates among Americans is not the identitarian democracy featured by European populist movements. It is, rather, a stripped-down populism, which captures concerns about physical safety and the standard of living. Both California governor Pete Wilson and Canadian Reform Party leader Preston Manning exemplify the electoral appeal of this populism. They express the concerns of a mass democracy with less and less cultural unity but with an intensifying dislike for administration that seems oblivious to popular fears. Term limits, crime, indiscriminate immigration, and the effects of affirmative action are all issues that animate this populism, one that is giving a new edge to the rhetoric of the two major American parties.

  It is entirely possible that this populist wave will be absorbed and neutralized. Also conceivably the managerial state in its present therapeutic phase will continue well into the next millennium. Its material and mass communications assets remain formidable, and while budgetary problems have arisen in terms of financing entitlement programs, the dismantling of the welfare state does not seem likely in societies where most inhabitants live off as well as support the state. At a time of unparalleled population movement, multinational economies, and massive public sectors, administered democracies operate in a favorable social context. What must be questioned, however, is whether this order is truly liberal.8 Does it recognize an inviolable sphere of social freedom from which public administrators are to be kept from meddling? Or, do administrators and judges define as social freedom whatever they wish to privilege at a given time? Moreover, is being administered and socialized by a custodial class the defining aspect of democracy? Though this may be the closest that our own society can come to self-rule, nonetheless one may be justified in asking whether administrators should be the prime actors in a democratic society. It may be the case that most people have little interest in ruling themselves or in practicing liberties that are unacceptable to a political elite. All this may be true, but it does not gainsay the need to question the claims being made about a “liberal democratic” regime that may in fact contain less and less of either characteristic. The very raising of these critical and by now unseasonable questions, can be described as an exercise in honesty. And honestum, as Cicero explained in De Officiis, is more than an intellectual virtue: it is equally a civic duty, especially for those who wish to occupy themselves with public affairs.

  After Liberalism

  CHAPTER ONE

  In Search of a Liberal Essence

  LIBERALISM AS A SEMANTIC PROBLEM

  THE history of liberalism in the twentieth century has been one of growing semantic confusion. This has resulted from two interrelated problems. First, liberalism has not been allowed to keep any fixed and specific meaning. It has signified dramatically different and even opposed things at different times and places in the course of this century, from a defense of free-market economics and of government based on distributed powers to a justification of exactly the opposite positions. Self-described liberals in the Western world during the last seventy-five years have been nationalists, internationalists, socialists, libertarians, localists, bureaucratic centralizers, upholders of Christian morality, and advocates of alternative lifestyles. They have treated these identities not as random individual choices but as true expressions of their liberal convictions.

  Second, the term “liberal” has by now assumed a polemical sense, with the result that its antithesis “antiliberal” has come to overshadow any positive definition it may have had. Particularly during the Second World War and its cultural aftermath, a practice came to prevail among journalists and academicians to brand their opponents as antiliberal. Special measures were seen as necessary to curb antiliberal politics and statements, lest they lead to the illiberalism of imperial Germany or, worse yet, Nazism. And as early as 1937, the American Political Science Review devoted fifty pages to a monitory essay by Karl Loewenstein, “Militant Democracy and Fundamental Rights.” Loewenstein, taking up a theme that would be further developed by David Reisman in the Columbia Law Review in 1942, called for the creation of a “militant democratic” America that would counter antiliberal forces by being affirmative about its “values.”1

  By the 1930s liberals were themselves engaged in disputes about the direction in which liberalism should be moved. There was heated disagreement between the Progressive educator John Dewey and the sociologist Lewis Mumford about the role of absolutes in a liberal society. In The Failure of Independent Liberalism, 1930–41, R. Alan Lawson shows that liberals became increasingly divided in the thirties between pragmatists and the advocates of “absolute values.”2 The emergence of an antiliberal enemy in the form of fascism therefore provided feuding liberals with a welcome source of unity. “Militant democracy,” which would be propagated in postwar Germany as “die wehrhafte Demokratie” by the occupying forces, was an embattled liberalism as defined by an absolute enemy, antiliberal fascism. Social psychological texts, such as Theodor Adorno’s and Max Horkheimer’s The Authoritarian Personality (1950), became important for liberal educators and policymakers bent on protecting their fellow citizens and rallying fellow liberals against reactionary attitudes. The intractability of such attitudes was seen to reflect both the force of traditional religion and faulty child-rearing. Such cultural influences offered a challenge to liberal reformers, one that demanded the adoption of a vigorous social policy.3 In this therapeutic literature the discussions centered on attitudes and values and on the need for proper socialization. Without such planning, traditional “authoritarian” attitudes, it was feared, would persist and lead to the kind of repressive society which had existed under European fascists.

  Such argumenta ad Hitlerum have characterized the charge of antiliberalism brandished by liberal advocates since the forties. Invariably this line of attack relies on some form of the slippery slope, by which any serious assault on liberal social planning is condemned as a plunge into the rightist past. This tactic of debate, for example, was favored by prominent liberal intellectuals responding to The Bell Curve, a study of the genetic sources of intelligence, in the October 31, 1994, issue of the New Republic. The Bell Curve’s authors, Charles Murray and (the late) Richard Herrnstein, argue in excruciating detail that there are “intractable differences in I.Q. that cannot be accounted for entirely by environment.” They suggest that social policies intended to remove these cognitive disparities will fail in the end and that American society in the future will likely organize itself hierarchically and multiculturally, along lines of intelligence.4 Whatever the merits of these debatable propositions, nowhere do Herrnstein and Murray call for the eugenic planning that their liberal respondents ascribe to them. One critic, Michael Lind, traces their research to a “brave new right” that favors “Nazi eugenic policies.”5 Another respondent, New Republic senior editor John Judis, offers the opinion that the unwillingness to bring up hereditarian causes of intelligence is “not a taboo against unflinching scientific inquiry but against pseudo-scientific racism. Of all the world’s taboos, it is most deserving of retention.”6

  Judis, Lind, and the other respondents do not demonstrate that The Bell Curve is “pseudo-scientific.” Rather, they perform a kind of liberal exorcism by attempting to drive their debating partners out of the community of respectable scholars. The New Republic also published a highly revealing response by the Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer on the danger of inquiry to a liberal culture. After the agonized admission that Herrnstein and Murray might be right in their conclusions, Glazer goes on to say that there may be higher value in
telling noble lies than unsettling facts: “Some truths may not be worth knowing. Our society, our polity, our elites, according to Herrnstein and Murray, live with an untruth. I ask myself whether this untruth is not better for American society than the truth.”7 This truth, we are told, is that “smarter people get more and properly deserve more” and though there is nothing in this view that might offend a free-market or meritocratic liberal, it does not fit together with the current liberal emphasis on social engineering.

  This recommendation of teaching through concealment that turns up in the New Republic’s defense of liberalism comes from a desperate inherited situation. Liberalism is increasingly adrift. Having gone over to social planning earlier in the century, it had to jettison its nineteenth-century heritage in return for humanitarian and “scientific” goals. Liberalism now survives as a series of social programs informed by a vague egalitarian spirit, and it maintains its power by pointing its finger accusingly at antiliberals. The depiction of sinister enemies has enabled liberals to hold on to those who may be wavering in their faith. In the Anatomy of Antiliberalism (1993), for example, Princeton political theorist Stephen Holmes goes after a string of “antiliberal thinkers” on the left as well as on the right who have been communitarian critics of liberal individualism. All of them, from Joseph de Maistre to Christopher Lasch, from Catholic counterrevolutionaries to socialists formerly on the New Left, are thought to resemble “fascist philosophers whose rhetoric is often indistinguishable from their own.”8 Holmes does respond thoughtfully to some of the accusations raised against the Enlightenment by nineteenth-century conservatives, and he is especially effective in pointing to the real absence of individual autonomy that John Locke and the French philosophes criticized.

  What he fails to prove is that the same liberal tradition has been around for centuries. He ignores the changing character of liberal doctrine when he scolds Christopher Lasch for having antiliberal reservations about fair housing laws and for preferring ethnic enclaves to racial integration. Holmes considers those positions as being at odds with the “liberal universalism” that he traces back to his liberal heroes. But contrary to what he suggests, many past liberals, starting with David Hume and Thomas Jefferson, were not racial egalitarians. It is also hard to find examples of pre-twentieth-century liberals who worried more about racial integration than about property rights. In the History of European Liberalism (1927), Guido Ruggiero, a self-described Italian liberal, shows the persistent regard of his numerous subjects for private property and constitutional liberty; yet none seemed driven by any concern to integrate social and ethnic groups residentially or educationally.9 In a glaringly anachronistic spirit, Holmes takes Locke’s maxim “No man in civil society can be exempted from the laws of it” to mean what Locke never intended. This statement is made to reflect a “liberal universalism” that goes from teaching that “each citizen must play by rules that apply equally to all” to a variety of modern democratic practices, from state-subsidized universal education to universal suffrage.10 What is never made clear is how the “disallowance of self-exemption for citizens from the law,” which Locke did stress, mandates those measures Holmes would like to enforce. The term “universal,” for Holmes, takes on an aura. It is not merely coextensive with authorized citizens but made to envelope humanity in general.

  Locke himself was explicit about why civil society was created and repeats the same rationale several times in The Second Treatise of Government. In chapter 9 he asserts, after what is taken to be a sufficient demonstration of his argument, that “the greatest and chief end, therefore, of men’s uniting into a commonwealth and putting themselves under government is the preservation of their property.” The commonwealth, we then learn in chapter 11, need not be “a democracy or any form of government but any independent community,” providing, as Locke states repeatedly in chapter 11, it manages to protect property.11 In Holmes’s improved version of Locke, “the enjoyment of property in peace and safety” takes a backseat to twentieth-century democratic rights, all of which are inferred from Locke’s alleged attachment to liberal universalism. Holmes goes as far as attributing to Locke the thoroughly modern view that everyone in a country should have the right to vote, regardless of race, gender, or religious persuasion.12 Such a position was not the one that Locke had in mind when he argued for the equality of legal obligations for all citizens. He was making this judgment about a particular and quite limited group, those who were recognized as citizens by the community in which they resided. His judgment did not apply to those who were not recognized citizens, even though in the state of nature all people were presumed to claim the same rights to life, liberty, and property.13

  Contemporary liberals, such as Holmes, who undertake the task of devising a usable liberal heritage from John Locke on, have their work cut out for them. Often they begin by imagining that their position has a venerable pedigree, but as they look around for its presence in other times and places, they are drawn into a search that is eventually abandoned. Without an authentic and cohesive heritage, these liberals turn to a contrived one that, we are told, is the real essence of liberalism. We are bidden to focus our attention on this essence or spirit to make sense of an otherwise disjointed patrimony. This essence, we are told, is ample enough to embrace a varied company, from English Old Whigs and French aristocratic opponents of monarchical absolutism to the American civil rights movement and feminist spokeswomen. In one particularly frenzied attempt at liberal comprehensiveness, J. Salwyn Schapiro, in his anthology Liberalism: Its Meaning and History (1958), compiles, in defense of his own liberal faith, excerpts from Socrates, Erasmus, Peter Abelard, the German nationalist historian Heinrich Treitschke, Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, Voltaire, Adam Smith, and labor union advocate Louis Brandeis. All of these anthologized figures supposedly share one or more of several defining liberal characteristics, starting with secularism and rationalism.14 Since Treitschke and Voltaire both despised the Catholic Church and since Bismarck and Brandeis both advocated state support for the working class, all of them are made to illustrate Shapiro’s liberal typology. Significantly, free-market liberals are excluded from it, if they had the misfortune of living and working after the rise of the welfare state. In all of this moving about of historical settings, the same persistent concern is evident: All liberalism must be shown to hang together. Otherwise two suspicions may be confirmed: that liberalism lacks a univocal meaning and that it should be replaced by a timelier term of reference.

  The need for semantic clarification that this chapter seeks to underline is brought home to me on each successive visit to the Canadian city of Toronto. Public vehicles there exhibit signs with the message “Homophobia is a disease!” The provincial government of Ontario has made it a criminal act to publish statements offensive to racial and ethnic groups, and under the New Democratic Party provincial administration of Premier Bob Rae, which fell in 1995, initiatives were taken to “educate” the public about Canadian multinationalism. Extensive social services operate for which Torontonians and other Canadians pay with almost half their yearly earnings. When asked to characterize their municipal and provincial governments, however, most educated Torontonians of my acquaintance will usually answer “liberal” or “liberal democratic.”

  Behind this new multicultural and bureaucratically administered Canadian society stands an older one, which is still evident in Toronto. It is the Canada that points back to an English imperial past. Its heritage is kept alive by parks, monuments, and various landmarks. Examples of Victorian and Edwardian architecture abound in downtown Toronto, and the public celebration of the birthdays of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and other figures out of the Canadian-English past preserves the connection between sight and memory. Some of those for whom Toronto’s streets and landmarks have been named were English statesmen, and most of them, like William Gladstone, Robert Peel, and Henry John Temple Palmerston, were associated with nineteenth-century liberal politics, even if their formal af
filiations were Tory. These politicians opposed the sacrifice of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres in British India, the imposition of tariffs on imported grains, and other practices that they believed interfered with personal freedom. But they did not believe in political equality and considered the quest for social equality incompatible with both liberty and the integrity of the family. They were also proudly and resolutely patriotic. They found nothing wrong, as Lord Palmerston bluntly told his people in the mid-nineteenth century, with pursuing English interests abroad.15

  The question that keeps returning to me in observing the two Torontos, one ascendant and the other vestigial, is: what connection is there between their political worlds? Both are thought to be, in some sense, “liberal,” but it is hard to discern the common ground between these political worlds. Would Palmerston (1784–1865), for whom the street was named where my late wife grew up and where my children still own property, recognize himself in those self-described liberals living on Toronto’s Palmerston Boulevard? Would he and they share some kind of worldview despite their obvious differences? Palmerston was, after all, a proper Victorian, free-marketeer, and self-consciously English man; while today’s residents of Palmerston Boulevard, from what I can tell, are predominantly multiculturists and socialists, with a sprinkling of Sikh converts. Symbolic of the distance between the old and new liberalisms is the massive stone gateway at the entrance to the boulevard, dating from the 1890s, and the center for multicultural education that lies a stone’s throw away. Both betoken liberal eras: one from the middle of the last century and the other designating our own time, one associated with imperial England and a Victorian society and the other with a managed and multicultural democracy.