Why Liberalism Failed Page 5

  Liberalism rejects the ancient conception of liberty as the learned capacity of human beings to conquer the slavish pursuit of base and hedonistic desires. This kind of liberty is a condition of self-governance of both city and soul, drawing closely together the individual cultivation and practice of virtue and the shared activities of self-legislation. A central preoccupation of such societies becomes the comprehensive formation and education of individuals and citizens in the art and virtue of self-rule.

  Liberalism instead understands liberty as the condition in which one can act freely within the sphere unconstrained by positive law. This concept effectively brings into being what was merely theoretical in its imaginary state of nature, shaping a world in which the theory of natural human individualism becomes ever more a reality, now secured through the architecture of law, politics, economics, and society. Under liberalism, human beings increasingly live in a condition of autonomy in which the threatened anarchy of our purportedly natural condition is controlled and suppressed through the imposition of laws and the corresponding growth of the state. With humanity liberated from constitutive communities (leaving only loose connections) and nature harnessed and controlled, the constructed sphere of autonomous liberty expands seemingly without limit.

  Ironically, the more completely the sphere of autonomy is secured, the more comprehensive the state must become. Liberty, so defined, requires liberation from all forms of associations and relationships, from family to church, from schools to village and community, that exerted control over behavior through informal and habituated expectations and norms. These controls were largely cultural, not political—law was less extensive and existed largely as a continuation of cultural norms, the informal expectations of behavior learned through family, church, and community. With the liberation of individuals from these associations, there is more need to regulate behavior through the imposition of positive law. At the same time, as the authority of social norms dissipates, they are increasingly felt to be residual, arbitrary, and oppressive, motivating calls for the state to actively work toward their eradication.

  Liberalism thus culminates in two ontological points: the liberated individual and the controlling state. Hobbes’s Leviathan perfectly portrayed those realities: the state consists solely of autonomous individuals, and these individuals are “contained” by the state. The individual and the state mark two points of ontological priority.

  In this world, gratitude to the past and obligations to the future are replaced by a nearly universal pursuit of immediate gratification: culture, rather than imparting the wisdom and experience of the past so as to cultivate virtues of self-restraint and civility, becomes synonymous with hedonic titillation, visceral crudeness, and distraction, all oriented toward promoting consumption, appetite, and detachment. As a result, superficially self-maximizing, socially destructive behaviors begin to dominate society.

  In schools, norms of modesty, comportment, and academic honesty are replaced by widespread lawlessness and cheating (along with increasing surveillance of youth), while in the fraught realm of coming-of-age, courtship norms are replaced by “hookups” and utilitarian sexual encounters. The norm of stable lifelong marriage is replaced by various arrangements that ensure the autonomy of the individuals, whether married or not. Children are increasingly viewed as a limitation upon individual freedom, which contributes to liberalism’s commitment to abortion on demand, while overall birth rates decline across the developed world. In the economic realm, the drive for quick profits, often driven by incessant demands for immediate profitability, replaces investment and trusteeship. And in our relationship to the natural world, short-term exploitation of the earth’s bounty becomes our birthright, even if it forces our children to deal with shortages of such resources as topsoil and potable water. Restraint of these activities is understood (if at all) to be the domain of the state’s exercise of positive law, not the result of cultivated self-governance born of cultural norms.

  Premised on the idea that the basic activity of life is the pursuit of what Hobbes called the “power after power that ceaseth only in death”—which Alexis de Tocqueville later described as “inquietude” or “restlessness”—the endless quest for self-fulfillment and greater power to satisfy human cravings requires ever-accelerating economic growth and pervasive consumption. Liberal society can barely survive the slowing of such growth, and it would collapse if economic growth were to stop or reverse for any length of time. The sole object and justification of this indifference to human ends—of the emphasis on “Right” over “Good”—is the embrace of the liberal human as self-fashioning expressive individual. This aspiration requires that no truly hard choices be made. There are only different lifestyle options.

  Liberalism’s founders tended to take for granted the persistence of social norms, even as they sought to liberate individuals from the constitutive associations and education in self-limitation that sustained these norms. In its earliest moments, the health and continuity of families, schools, and communities were assumed, while their foundations were being philosophically undermined. This undermining led, in turn, to these goods being undermined in reality, as the norm-shaping power of authoritative institutions grew tenuous with liberalism’s advance. In its advanced stage, passive depletion has become active destruction: remnants of associations historically charged with the cultivation of norms are increasingly seen as obstacles to autonomous liberty, and the apparatus of the state is directed toward the task of liberating individuals from such bonds.

  In the material and economic realm, liberalism has drawn down on age-old reservoirs of resources in its endeavor to conquer nature. No matter the political program of today’s leaders, more is the incontestable program. Liberalism can function only by the constant increase of available and consumable material goods, and thus with the constant expansion of nature’s conquest and mastery. No person can aspire to a position of political leadership by calling for limits and self-command.

  Liberalism was thus a titanic wager that ancient norms of behavior could be lifted in the name of a new form of liberation and that conquering nature would supply the fuel to permit nearly infinite choices. The twin outcomes of this effort—the depletion of moral self-command and the depletion of material resources—make inevitable an inquiry into what comes after liberalism.

  If I am right that the liberal project is ultimately self-contradictory and that it culminates in the twin depletions of moral and material reservoirs upon which it has relied, then we face a choice. We can pursue more local forms of self-government by choice, or suffer by default an oscillation between growing anarchy and the increasingly forcible imposition of order by an increasingly desperate state. Taken to its logical conclusion, liberalism’s end game is unsustainable in every respect: it cannot perpetually enforce order upon a collection of autonomous individuals increasingly shorn of constitutive social norms, nor can it provide endless material growth in a world of limits. We can either elect a future of self-limitation born of the practice and experience of self-governance in local communities, or we can back inexorably into a future in which extreme license coexists with extreme oppression.

  The ancient claim that man is a political animal, and must through the exercise and practice of virtue learned in communities achieve a form of local and communal self-limitation—a condition properly understood as liberty—cannot be denied forever without cost. Currently we attempt to treat the numerous social, economic, and political symptoms of liberalism’s liberty, but not the deeper sources of those symptoms, the underlying pathology of liberalism’s philosophic commitments. While most commentators regard our current crises—whether understood morally or economically—as a technical problem to be solved by better policy, our most thoughtful citizens must consider whether these crises are the foreshocks of a more systemic quake ahead. Unlike the ancient Romans who, confident in their eternal city, could not imagine a condition after Rome, the rising barbarism within the city forces us now t
o consider the prospect that a better way awaits.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Uniting Individualism and Statism

  THE basic division of modern politics since the French Revolution has been between the left and the right, reflecting the respective sides of the French National Assembly, where revolutionaries congregated to the left and royalists gathered to the right. The terms have persisted because they capture two basic and opposite worldviews. The left is characterized by a preference for change and reform, a commitment to liberty and equality, an orientation toward progress and the future, while the right is the party of order and tradition, hierarchy, and a disposition to valorize the past. Whether described as left vs. right, blue vs. red, or liberal vs. conservative, this basic division seems to capture a permanent divide between two fundamental human dispositions, as well as two worldviews that are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive of political options. If one of the first questions posed to new parents is whether the baby is a girl or a boy, the question likely to define us from young adulthood is whether we place ourselves on the political left or the political right.

  Much contemporary life is organized around this basic division—not only the political machinery, with its plethora of liberal or conservative commentators, media, consultants, pollsters, and politicians sorted according to these labels—but neighborhoods, professions, schools, even one’s choice of religion.1 People are apt to feel more in common with others who share a political outlook even if they are from a different area of the country (or even foreigners), a different ethnic or racial background, and—remarkably, given the history of religious warfare—a different religion. Today, a conservative Protestant evangelical is more likely to befriend and trust an Orthodox Jew or traditionalist Catholic than a liberal Lutheran. A white liberal southerner is likely to be more comfortable revealing political outlooks to a black northern Democrat than to a white conservative in his neighborhood. A progressive homosexual and a liberal Christian will quickly recognize commonalities. More than ever, as we enter an era when the use of sexually differentiating pronouns is discouraged on college campuses and regional differences dissipate into the stew of our national monoculture, political alignment seems to be the one remaining marker that is inescapable and eternal, even natural and inevitable, defining the core of our identity.

  Given the extent to which this basic divide shapes the outlooks of nearly every politically aware person living in an advanced liberal society today, it seems almost unthinkable to suggest that it is far less than it seems—and indeed that the apparent unbridgeability of the chasm separating the two sides merely masks a more fundamental, shared worldview. The project of advancing the liberal order takes the superficial form of a battle between seemingly intractable foes, and the energy and acrimony of that contest shrouds a deeper cooperation that ends up advancing liberalism as a whole.

  The modern American landscape is occupied by two parties locked in permanent battle. One, deemed “conservative,” advances the project of individual liberty and equality of opportunity especially through defense of a free and unfettered market; the other, deemed liberal, aims at securing greater economic and social equality through extensive reliance upon the regulatory and judicial powers of the national government. Our dominant political narrative pits defenders of individual liberty—articulated by such authors of the liberal tradition as John Locke and the American Founding Fathers—against the statism of “progressive” liberals inspired by figures like John Stuart Mill and John Dewey. The two worldviews are regarded as irreconcilable opposites.

  These apparently contrary positions are familiar to even the casual observer of contemporary American politics, with conservatives—heirs to classical liberalism—typically decrying statism and liberals—heirs to progressivism—criticizing individualism. The two sides contest every policy over this basic division, touching on contemporary debates over economic and trade policy, health care, welfare, the environment, and a host of hotly contested issues. These battles often come down to a basic debate over whether the ends of the polity are best achieved by market forces with relatively little interference by the state, or by government programs that can distribute benefits and support more justly than the market can achieve.

  Thus classical liberals claim that the individual is fundamental and, through an act of contract and consent, brings into existence a limited government. Progressive liberals claim that the individual is never wholly self-sufficient, and that we must instead understand ourselves to be more deeply defined by membership in a larger unit of humanity. Because the two sides appear to be defined not only by a gaping policy divide but by different anthropological assumptions, their deeper shared undercurrent can be difficult to discern.

  Individualism and statism advance together, always mutually supportive, and always at the expense of lived and vital relations that stand in contrast to both the starkness of the autonomous individual and the abstraction of our membership in the state. In distinct but related ways, the right and left cooperate in the expansion of both statism and individualism, although from different perspectives, using different means, and claiming different agendas. This deeper cooperation helps to explain how it has happened that contemporary liberal states—whether in Europe or America—have become simultaneously both more statist, with ever more powers and activity vested in central authority, and more individualistic, with people becoming less associated and involved with such mediating institutions as voluntary associations, political parties, churches, communities, and even family. For both “liberals” and “conservatives,” the state becomes the main driver of individualism, while individualism becomes the main source of expanding power and authority of the state.

  This deeper continuity between right and left derives from two main sources: first, philosophical, with both the classical and progressive liberal traditions arguing ultimately for the central role of the state in the creation and expansion of individualism; and second, practical and political, with this joint philosophical project strengthening an expansion of both state power and individualism. In the previous chapter I briefly limned how the two “sides” of liberalism, while apparently locked in intense contestation, together advance the main objects of the liberal project. In this chapter, I explore this deeper cooperative endeavor in more detail, with particular attention to both the philosophical sources within the liberal tradition and their application in the American context.

  Both “classical” and “progressive” liberalism ground the advance of liberalism in individual liberation from the limitations of place, tradition, culture, and any unchosen relationship. Both traditions—for all their differences over means—can be counted as liberal because of this fundamental commitment to liberation of the individual and to the use of natural science, aided by the state, as a primary means for achieving practical liberation from nature’s limitations. Thus statism and individualism grow together while local institutions and respect for natural limits diminish. For all their differences, this ambition animated thinkers ranging from John Locke to John Dewey, from Francis Bacon to Francis Bellamy, from Adam Smith to Richard Rorty.

  PHILOSOPHICAL SOURCES AND PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS—CLASSICAL LIBERALISM

  This might be a surprising claim, since the philosophy of classical liberalism appears to suggest the opposite: not that the state helps to create the individual, but rather—according to social contract theory—that individuals, free and equal by nature, through consent bring into existence a limited state. Hobbes and Locke both—for all their differences—begin by conceiving natural humans not as parts of wholes but as wholes apart. We are by nature “free and independent,” naturally ungoverned and even nonrelational. As Bertrand de Jouvenel quipped about social contractarianism, it was a philosophy conceived by “childless men who must have forgotten their own childhood.”2 Liberty is a condition of complete absence of government and law, in which “all is right”—that is, everything that can be willed by an individual can be done
. Even if this condition is shown to be untenable, the definition of natural liberty posited in the “state of nature” becomes a regulative ideal—liberty is ideally the agent’s ability to do whatever he likes. In contrast to ancient theory—which understood liberty to be achieved only through virtuous self-government—modern theory defines liberty as the greatest possible pursuit and satisfaction of the appetites, while government is a conventional and unnatural limitation upon this pursuit.

  For both Hobbes and Locke, we enter into a social contract not only to secure our survival but to make the exercise of our liberty more secure. Both Hobbes and Locke—but especially Locke—understand that liberty in our prepolitical condition is limited not only by the lawless competition of other individuals but by our recalcitrant and hostile natures. A main goal of Locke’s philosophy is to expand the prospects for our liberty—defined as the capacity to satisfy our appetites—through the auspices of the state. Law is not a discipline for self-government but the means for expanding personal freedom: “The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.”3 We accept the terms of the social contract because it will actually increase our personal liberty by eliminating customs and even laws that can be thought to limit individual freedom, even while expanding the prospects for human control over the natural world. Locke writes that the law works to increase liberty, by which he means our liberation from the constraints of the natural world.

  Thus, for liberal theory, while the individual “creates” the state through the social contract, in a practical sense, the liberal state “creates” the individual by providing the conditions for the expansion of liberty, increasingly defined as the capacity of humans to expand their mastery over circumstance. Far from there being an inherent conflict between the individual and the state—as so much of modern political reporting would suggest—liberalism establishes a deep and profound connection: its ideal of liberty can be realized only through a powerful state. If the expansion of freedom is secured by law, then the opposite also holds true in practice: increasing freedom requires the expansion of law. The state does not merely serve as a referee between contesting individuals; in securing our capacity to engage in productive activities, especially commerce, it establishes a condition in reality that existed in theory only in the state of nature: the ever-increasing achievement of the autonomous individual.