This article was originally published in Vol. 4 No. 4 of our print edition.
Towards a Conservative Liberalism for the Twenty-First Century
Liberalism, Triumphant — and Blind
It is customary, when analyzing the history of post-liberalism, to recall the euphoric mood of the years after the end of the Cold War: the joyful, eager blindness that characterized the thinking of the intellectual leaders of the victorious West, who envisioned the ultimate triumph of liberal democracy over rival ideologies and social arrangements. Liberalism had won the clash of ideas, the cataclysm of the twentieth century. After the fall of fascism and communism, it was at last clear to all that the path to prosperity, peace, and a stable social order lay through the institutions of modern liberalism. And even if the values of democracy, humanism, and rationality had not yet spread everywhere, the institutions of liberalism would slowly mold them into the mindset of the society in question (to use the well-known American foreign policy aphorism, whether in Deng Xiaoping’s China or in the countries of the Middle East that were later attacked). Capitalism would create prosperity, prosperity would create democracy, and history would ultimately converge around liberalism.
We now know what an empty hope it was. But what exactly was the delusion in this thinking? Most of all, it was the complacent clinging to the absence of an alternative: this had not only intellectual but also practical significance. It deprived liberalism of the intellectual impulse to be sensitive and receptive to the changes of its time and to try to renew itself in time, before the post-Cold War world, which was rapidly closing in around it, gradually dismantled its hegemony and its system of norms.
Indeed, it seems true that nothing certain can be inferred about the stability of various systems from the absence of conceivable alternatives. We might say that on the long road towards world domination, what counts is not at all the particular ‘best feasible system’, which in the imagination of philosophers will bring history to an end. Rather, it is the extremely complex and delicate relationship between society and its form of government, which, even in the absence of any concrete alternative, can, by mere anomie, jump off a modus vivendi, thus destroying the legitimacy and moral force of the existing regime. The philosopher’s enthusiasm has been buried over time by Michel Houellebecq’s daily, petty fears of decline; the ideological and moral superiority that liberal democracy once enjoyed now seems dwarfed by the far-reaching changes that threaten its entire cultural fabric. Liberalism became king but has been dethroned.
The rest is just the endgame. As in Houellebecq, from decomposition may come submission, from anomie, resistance, and metaphysical emptiness transubstantiation.1 In place of the withering set of cultural references, a vacuum emerges which new ideas and movements—whether Islam, identity politics, or something else—fill at will, thus creating the real alternative. It is through the political confrontation between the system in decline and the system under construction that the tragedy of modern liberalism unfolds, in that it gradually ceases to exist as the paradigm of public life.
But let us note that this may also have happened precisely because haughtily clinging to the absence of an alternative has prevented liberalism from undergoing that necessary change of content and language which could have enabled it to address the problems and anxieties of our time and of our entire post-liberal age. If there are no viable alternatives, there is no longer a competition of ideas—so why engage in needless intellectual work? Although some have relatively quickly turned their initial optimism on its head and attempted to formulate a post-liberal liberalism, what has remained is, for the most part, the liberalism of the late twentieth-century ideal world, with its own lack of intellectual preparation and suspicion. As for the socialist states that were liberated, the belief in the post-historical hegemony of liberalism was embodied here in an uncritical confidence in the successful implementation of Western-style democracy. Here, too, intellectual acceptance of the lack of an alternative has stood in the way of liberalism’s adaptation to the accumulated knowledge and the historical experience of societies, so that it can then confront the nationalisms that are emerging from the sudden intersection of mass democracy, the competitive market, and semi-peripheral historical development.
However, the liberal euphoria surrounding the collapse of communism was not only a big mistake in terms of the superficial thinking about the concept of an alternative. The processes that led to the accelerating decline of the whole normative world of liberal democracy—whether at its infancy (East) or at the apparent peak of its development (West)—were already in place at the time of the regime changes. The triumphalism of the 1990s was, for that very reason, all the less justified.
Of course, it is difficult to pick out the wolf when everyone is admiring the proud spectacle of freedom: in the ever-expanding milieu of consumerism that has seeped into the place of citizenship; in the ever-growing information revolution that has ultimately virtualized politics and created in its place the ‘hyperrealities’2 of digital postmodernity or in the apolitical, incomprehensible emptiness of the international organizations that have been built over our heads, which have only alienated people from themselves and, ultimately, the great objectives of liberalism.3 At the same time, by the 1990s the world of ideas and politics, and the arenas of knowledge production and democracy, had been visibly permeated by the ominous loss of substance in liberalism. The liberalism in the name of which the intellectuals of the turn of the century closed the book on history was, in fact, no more than a system of ideas in torment. It was already living through a phase of decay set in motion by its own intrinsic logic and not corrected in time—even if this decline was somewhat obscured by the triumph of the free world and the Kantian dream that seemed to be coming true.
This decline has not only been felt outside the borders of the free world, in the failure of the liberal world hegemony it sought to achieve: in the counter-movements against secularization and in the Iranian Islamist revolution. On the contrary, the decline of liberalism began in the free world, in democracy’s centre of gravity, the United States. Make no mistake; the intellectual processes that have led to the decline of liberalism were carried out in no small part through the synergy between American and European intellectual spaces. However, it is in the United States that these processes have seeped into politics with the greatest force and responsiveness. Moreover, these changes not only originated from the intellectual centre of liberalism but also from within liberalism, gradually emptying out its intellectual and normative world, thus depriving it of any grounding in the realities of our post-liberal era.
A Dialectical Interpretation of Liberalism
To successfully model and understand this story, it seems essential to reflect on how ideas and systems of ideas are not necessarily at their full strength when the movements bearing their names attain electoral or political success. Indeed, a hegemonic role in democracy and world politics—as in the market—can easily entail a decline in the strategic need for constant self-renewal. The other element is a constant in democracies: the will of the people and its instinctive servicing, which tends to subordinate the otherwise rich moral, intellectual, and linguistic worlds of the various systems of ideas, often to the point of overwhelming them.
However, liberalism has been impoverished not only by mass democracy and its own growing dominance. It has also followed its internal, hereditary trajectory to its present crisis of content, thereby corroding the normative, value-based foundations of democracy. This characteristic is evident in the particular statist character of liberalism: the notion, and even more the instinct, that the state is the arena and instrument of liberation associated with egalitarianism. Whatever the chronic fear of state power, for liberalism the state is the de facto origin of free existence. Once upon a time, the liberalism of the Enlightenment used the state to lift people of the time out of their traditional, often oppressive, bonds (such as ecclesiastical and feudal constraints) and to give them political and constitutional equality. In this way, it steered them towards an impersonal system of relations in a bourgeois and competitive society. Over time, various social rights were added to the corpus of constitutional and political rights, with the declared aim of strengthening citizens against the upheavals and critical moments of socio-economic modernization, such as crises and major structural upheavals.4
‘It is through the political confrontation between the system in decline and the system under construction that the tragedy of modern liberalism unfolds’
The social contract, which encompassed the natural rights of individuals—freedom of conscience, assembly, speech, the press, and property—gradually expanded over the twentieth century to include ‘freedom from fear’, as Roosevelt proclaimed in his State of the Union Address in January 1941. However, it is important to remember that while the emphasis of liberalism may have shifted over time, it did so along the same pattern that underpins its special Weltanschaaung: society is made up of the state and individuals, and the state’s job is to ensure that individuals have an equal basis for free existence. The special logic of liberalism—one of the great liberating projects of the Enlightenment—is rooted in precisely this state-centred, unshackling egalitarianism, rather than in any of the groups of rights that its various currents have foregrounded.
It is this logic that has ensured the success of liberalism over the centuries. First, it allowed it to become intertwined over time with the other great, more radical ideologies of the Enlightenment, namely socialism and mass democracy. Second, and closely related to this, it endowed it with the capacity to adapt itself plastically to the social anxieties and tensions generated by the otherwise self-induced modernizing project, by performing ever more and greater political acts of emancipatory egalitarianism. At the same time, this logic is also the cause of its increasingly perceptible weaknesses. By this, I mean the crisis of substance within which liberalism now finds itself. Liberalism has not only come, seen, and conquered, but has also devoured itself.
Foundations of a Post-Liberal World
Menopause arrived in America in the 1960s. Following in the footsteps of the great progressives of the past, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programme built a methodology of bureaucratic planning and administration in an ever-expanding section of society. In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which ended the de facto segregation of black Americans. Meanwhile, an increasingly unsuccessful war raged on the other side of the world in Vietnam, tarnishing the moral standing of the US and the ‘free world’.
All of a sudden, liberalism became empty. It had reached a kind of substantive deadlock: it had apparently failed to win the battle against its great ideological adversary, communism, and had carried out its last great constitutional-emancipatory project with the Civil Rights Act, but its own ideological logic, liberatory equalization, seemed to have consumed liberalism itself, replacing civil liberty with bureaucracy and the state.
The great changes of the following decades were each a response to these three developments in liberalism. They did not, however, solve the problem, but merely delayed the total crisis. Moreover, they actually deepened that crisis, still looming in the shadows of time, by redefining freedom itself along the lines of certain absolutes—the market, Americanism, or, most ominously, the various identities of oppression. In so doing, these changes only further impoverished the normative world of liberalism, stifling its capacity to renew itself. In so doing, they prepared the ideological and political climate for the age of post-liberalism.
Neoconservatism
Neoconservatism is one of the great ideological heirs of liberalism. Neoconservatism (contrary to its name and its outcome four decades later) started out as a project of the liberal and staunchly anti-communist left. As we have seen, initially it may best be interpreted as their reaction to worrying developments within the great mainstream of American progressivism in the 1960s. Its primary frustration was the Vietnam debacle and the breaking point it subsequently symbolized in American foreign policy: a policy of self-restraint, even neglect, towards the Soviet Union and the danger it represented for the free world. For the earliest generation of neoconservatives such as the great Irving Kristol, this development stood in a very concerning contrast with the hawkish mentality of the post-war years, the Truman Doctrine, and so-called ‘Cold War Democrats’.5
Moreover, this political self-restraint seemed to intersect with the collapse of America’s moral authority and of the world order it pioneered. Indeed, as neoconservatives saw it, Vietnam was not a challenge to the military capabilities of the United States alone. At stake was the very moral and ideological superiority of America and the democratic world. Importantly, this precious gold standard of the struggle against communism was already being eroded by the violence that paved the way for the civil rights movement and the corresponding Soviet propaganda that American democracy was hypocritical and dishonest. Not to mention a mounting countercultural movement which grew up in the wake of the war and summed up the invasion as ’whites sending blacks to battle against yellows’.
At the beginning of its expansion, neoconservatism was far from the intellectual enthusiasm for the market embodied in the second great ideological movement, neoliberalism, which would be the second great reaction to the loss of substance in liberalism. This was also one of the ‘secrets’ of neoconservatism’s success: although it confronted the endlessly planned, managerial model of the Great Society, it did not challenge the basic economic consensus of the decades following the New Deal. Its primary opponents were communism and moral decadence; Roosevelt was as much a hero as Reagan.6 It was therefore able to equip itself with the strategic advantage of building its own intellectual base and infrastructure from within the status quo.
Its intellectual camp gradually emerged from the world of the anti-communist left until it conquered the imagination of the anti-communist right. It served first as the intellectual vault of Reagan’s foreign policy and then, after the Cold War, of the key players in the Bush administration. By this time, with the dawn of the new century, neoconservatism was clearly calling for an American civilizing mission and the global dominion of liberal, market democracy. Soon afterwards, as the bombs fell upon Iraq and the balance of power in the Middle East collapsed, it became identified with ‘democracy export’, quickly losing its moral authority and general appeal.
How are we to assess this phenomenon of neoconservatism and the emergence of post-liberalism? First of all, it seems reasonable to interpret the great adventure of neoconservatism, from invasion to invasion, as a snake biting its tail. Neoconservatism, immersed in the ethos of civilization, extricated the United States and the liberal world order from one moral vacuum, only to immerse them in another such crisis.
Just as in the case of Vietnam, this renewed moral crisis is easily observable both inside the free world and outside it. It manifests itself, first of all, in the mentality of some Western intellectuals, who at times seem to compete with one another to deny the moral superiority of Western democracies. At the same time, the loss of the moral appeal of the free world is exploited most by the psychological strategies of its various rivals. In their hands today, Iraq and its many analogues—Vietnam, Afghanistan, Serbia, and so on—have become the perennial language game of post-truth politics and its inherent moral relativism. They became linguistic tools the Russian and other post-liberal regimes readily play within their cynical rebellion against the United States and the liberal world order, whether in pursuit of psychological legitimization for the invasion of Ukraine or the ideological conquest of the Third World.
It was likewise neoconservatism that squandered not only the United States and the Western world, but also the intrinsic moral superiority of freedom over despotisms of all kinds. For neoconservatism, the goal of maintaining the historical hegemony of liberal democracy, and of America in particular, sanctioned authoritarian means, including the temporary overriding the constitutional and natural norms of freedom. Historically, neoconservatism offered a path from the confusion and anarchy of the post-Cold War world by retrieving the fundamental étatisme hidden within the ideological logic of liberalism. Since freedom follows, practically speaking, from the state, it is the state, not freedom, that is paramount. And yet, If democracy is brought by fighter jets, what is democracy for? If freedom is only guaranteed by mass surveillance of citizens by the state, what is freedom for? If freedom can be overridden for the sake of power, is it freedom at all?
In our digitalizing, globalizing world, it may be increasingly true that the system of ordered liberty is humanity’s only hope for creating and sustaining a future worthy of human life. Yet freedom as a moral product is becoming less and less trendy or inspiring. And American neoconservatism has undoubtedly played a special role in this turn of events.
Neoliberalism
If neoconservatism transformed freedom into an ideal of domination, neoliberalism has detached it from the adventure of the republic and reduced it to an empty slogan of globalization, which is eroding the very soul of democracy. Its greatest sin is that it has separated freedom from all that is political. Neoliberalism is the ever-depoliticized language of the market and the rational individual: it has taken away the ability of freedom to declare itself a set of moral imperatives for a community.
Just like the later movement of postmodern justice, neoliberalism was formulated through the intellectual channels that connected the North Atlantic world. Its first institutional forums emerged after the Second World War and the collapse of the Nazi reign of terror. It was at this time that Friedrich Hayek, an economist of the Austrian School, popularized the view that totalitarianism and the planned economy go hand in hand.7 Under Hayek’s leadership, a large European ‘colony’ of neoliberalism was soon established. The Mont Pelerin Society set a counter-paradigm to the post-war welfare consensus. Within two decades, its appeal was consolidated across the ocean. It was then that the Philadelphia Society was formed, bringing together neoliberals from across the Atlantic world.
Inherent in the rise of neoliberalism in the United States is the political and intellectual environment in which it has found itself here, across the ocean. To begin with, President Johnson gave it a natural adversary in the form of the Great Society. However, in America, neoliberalism could also find itself an important ally in the fight against the welfare state and the planned economy that was simply not available in Europe: the political religion of constitutionalism and the heroic epic of the Founding. Successive revolutions, the expansionist state, totalitarianism, and its ideological metaphor, collectivism, had long since bled the constitutional aesthetic of the old continent. In the United States, by contrast, the Constitution was a living tradition, a cornerstone of political culture. This tradition may have been challenged by statist social engineering, but it could not be completely impoverished. Neoliberalism, to a much greater extent than the neoconservatism of left-wing origin, could thus be intertwined with the discursive bloodstream of the Anglo-Saxon Enlightenment, the Republic, the Constitution, and the Founding.
The merger was successful; constitutional, free-market discourse quickly seeped into American politics, especially the Republican Party. Although his ideological predecessor Barry Goldwater was defeated by President Johnson in 1964, in 1980 Ronald Reagan, campaigning on a constitutional and free-market basis, won the race for the White House. Under the ideological and economic leadership of the United States, the next two decades saw many countries around the world introduce free-market reforms, while the increasingly colourful institutions of economic globalization also set the flattening globe on a course of ever-freer trade and capital accumulation. Theories celebrating the triumph and hegemony of liberal democracy conquered the minds of intellectuals during this period, as neoliberals took it for granted that greater economic freedom would build democracy everywhere.
As is well known, and as we have stressed before, those hopes were naïve and blind. However, it is not this disappointment that is at the heart of this inquiry, but rather the profound impoverishment of the concept and very ideal of freedom under this new stream of thought and policy. For neoliberalism, freedom is defined strictly by the rational individual; the less constraining the limits of an individual’s private life and economic activity vis-à-vis the community, public affairs, and, above all, the state, the greater his or her freedom. Meanwhile, market discourse has quietly detached itself from the Constitution, which became more a grandiose, celebratory event of the past than a guiding star of the future. The meaning of freedom was thus largely reduced from a public and historical adventure to economic atomism. As Margaret Thatcher proclaimed, ‘There is no such thing as society’.
Whatever its justified criticisms of the economic role of the state and of planning, the rise of neoliberalism has meant an ideological transformation by the end of which freedom has been separated from everything political. But if freedom is not a political value—not part of the great adventure of the republic—how can the cause of freedom be politically competitive? The world of neoliberalism is a globe without borders, of international organizations spanning the globe; its language is the clatter of the stock exchange, its freedom the rapid movement of capital. How could this freedom win the hearts and minds of citizens? This great question mark has perhaps also been perceived by the political leaders of neoliberalism, along with the actors of the neoliberal economy they have created. For some of them have quickly made friends with that third herald of a post-liberal world.
The Postmodern Cult of Identity
When the US Congress decided overwhelmingly to pass President Johnson’s Civil Rights Act, it paradoxically undermined American liberalism. As we have seen, the ideological logic of liberalism is liberatory egalitarianism. But if every individual is now guaranteed the political and constitutional rights to which he or she is entitled by the laws of nature; if emancipatory liberalism has now fulfilled its creed and has achieved its original ends; if it has reached the limits of its own imagination, then what of liberalism itself? Without goals and a mission, liberalism cannot exist.
One solution to this situation was, of course, to continue the progressive tradition of reorganizing the project of liberatory egalitarianism into an economic and social space. But this, as we have seen, ultimately proved weak in the face of the conservative counter-movement, which built its concerns about state over-extension on American constitutionalism. It was only a matter of a few decades before constitutionalism, as a discursive weapon, was completely transferred to the right (although neoconservatism would corrupt it in time).
The second solution to the content crisis was to politicize the cultural space. And this is exactly what happened. However, ‘the politicization of the cultural space’ is not a complete formulation. A more far-reaching shift has taken place than simply transplanting the programme of liberatory egalitarianism into culture. Since the realm of culture is at heart a collective enterprise, the new wave of emancipation implied a struggle not for individuals or even socioeconomic groups, but for much more delicate and subjective categories of historical suffering, such as race or gender. The new object of emancipation was no longer the individual, but group identity; its language would not be individualism and universalism but collectivism and subjectivism. The psychic category of the individual withers away; the indivisible person is replaced by the trivial components of human existence. The elementary image of man that Christianity brought to the world and that the Enlightenment preserved—and, arguably, destabilized—by transplanting it into a secular ideological context, shattered. In the 1960s, the fundamental metaphysical formula of liberation was being remade.
Of course, this realignment could not have happened if American history had not left behind certain structures that conveyed a sense of oppression long after their political dismantling. Without overt representations of oppression, the desire for emancipation can hardly conquer minds. However, the political and intellectual movements that began to organize in the 1960s gave these legitimate grievances a certain semantic dimension in which oppression itself, rather than the community’s autonomy and responsibility to overcome that oppression, became the central driving force of history. Whether in opposition to absolutism or to the Soviet Union, the liberal project of liberation had succeeded by having a clear vision of what should replace oppression—constitutionalism and civil liberty. It painted a civilizational counter-image to the times it found itself in; it could become great because it sought to transcend, metaphysically, linguistically, and politically, the oppressive conditions against which it stood. It was motivated by the progressive act of liberation in this sense.
The turnaround of the sixties outlined the radical opposite of this logic. A regressive turn, one might say. For the new programme of liberatory egalitarianism did not seek to raise our consciousness, our language, or our cognition to the new age it prophesied. On the contrary, it wanted to bring them down, so that we ourselves could enter into contact with the discursive world of historical oppression; so that we could realize that everything is oppression and that there is no way out of this oppression other than the ruthless dismantling of the sediments of the oppressive universe. The new turn commanded us not to dare to think in terms of individuals, because in doing so we would be building the discursive world of the very oppression we sought to fight. We must, like our oppressive predecessors, see the world through the lenses of race, gender, and sexuality. Through a radical re-examination of the norms of our linguistic and intellectual milieus and institutions, we must unravel and then eradicate the cobwebs of oppression. We must liberate identity from the yoke of culture, for it is in this oppression that all the destructive dynamics of history are anchored.
The world of politics and the metaphysics of the individual once provided liberalism with a solid, traversable space for action, a history of its own. At the same time, however, it necessarily carried with it the moment of ultimate liberation, of the end, of 1964. Postmodern deconstruction resolved this problem of finitude by rendering oppression itself infinite through the medium of culture and the new metaphysics of identity. Meanwhile, politics as a communicative art demanded that postmodernism carry out the ultimate irony: becoming a narrator itself. It answered by constructing—not without historical legitimacy—a story of oppression. The great, common motifs that had once accompanied the cause of freedom now all conveyed the lies of oppression. The orientation point of American history is no longer 1776, but 1619; not the Founding, but the arrival of the first slave ship.8
Complemented by the wild pulse of the post-industrial, neoliberal economy that has been organized for the new century, the postmodern turn of liberalism has created one of the most significant cultural and political movements of our time. Indeed, digitalization and data capitalism have democratized the possibility of hyper-expression, bringing it down from the ivory tower of the art movement to the depths of the mass psyche. Our screens have given us the power to construe our own identities; today’s consumer society is on an endless psychic adventure of self-production and self-experimentation. Therefore, whereas from the 1960s onwards ‘identity’ was defined by the historical dynamics of repression, today it is increasingly the user who constructs, assembles, and colours his or her own disenfranchised avatars. It is the interaction of these two processes that generates the spirit, the language, and the whole functioning of the postmodern movement for justice. Inextricable from all this seems to be the post-material economy organized out of the extreme marketization of desires, anxiety, loneliness, stimuli, and bodily or spiritual needs.
The question rightly arises: what is so ‘liberal’ about all this? How can these developments be discussed under the umbrella term ‘liberalism’ when the inner psyche and convictions of the postmodern cult of identity are all so sharply at odds with the fundamental values of liberalism? But the very purpose of this examination is to show that liberalism is not only a particular set of values but also a historical dynamic. Its driving force is the statist logic of liberatory egalitarianism once promulgated by the Enlightenment, which was otherwise largely suspicious of state power, and which was first embodied in the two great revolutions of the eighteenth century. This statist, liberatory egalitarianism had by 1964 achieved what was achievable within the finite—classical, if you like—framework of liberalism, and so it necessarily had to step outside that framework to survive. First, at the turn of the twentieth century, it moved out into the economic sphere, and then, from the 1960s onwards, into the cultural sphere. In the process, the metaphysics of individualism was dismantled.
Therefore, like neoconservatism and neoliberalism, the postmodern cult of identity confronts us with the thesis that from the beginning liberalism carried within itself the spectre of post-liberalism. Neoconservatism transcended liberalism through liberalism’s étatisme; neoliberalism did so through a radically market-based interpretation of freedom, thus detaching it from the political world. Finally, the postmodern cult of identity has come to dissolve the metaphysics of the free individual as the driving force behind liberalism’s own desires and hopes through a necessary extension of the limits of liberatory egalitarianism.
Conclusion: Regrounding Liberalism
It did not take long for the main contours of post-liberal politics to emerge from the substantive, rapidly escalating crisis of liberalism. It is no coincidence that Trumpism articulates itself precisely through opposition to the triad of neoconservatism, neoliberalism, and postmodern identity politics. In other words, Trump is equally opposed to the ‘neocons’ who invaded Iraq, the neoliberals who outsourced industrial production to China, and the postmodernists who at a gut level deny America’s greatness. For these are the movements from the world of ideas that have undermined the fabric of liberal democracy. They generated a crisis of content within the civilizational order of freedom that the anointed champions of post-liberal politics could easily exploit.
Meanwhile, Trumpism itself has taken on a distinctly ‘postmodern’ aura. With its rise, the relationship between speaker and language rapidly disintegrates—after all, it is a multi-billionaire showman who gave shape and form to the anti-elitist revolt of post-liberal politics. The American right has lost its constitutionalist references, replaced by a convulsive, angry nationalism that seems uninterested in the traditions that uplift, ennoble, and moderate the nation, the object of its yearning. The ivory tower has collapsed in two stages: first, it buried those who believed that the cause of freedom could not be drowned out because there would always be someone to liberate; second, it turned on those who hoped that postmodern politics could remain a project of cultural liberation and historical justice.
Granted, there is a simpler reading of the emergence of post-liberal politics, whether in the United States or in the rest of the West, than the ideological one. It is common, for example, to explain the weakening of the normative foundations of liberal democracy and the advent of the post-liberal era by a series of crises, the psychological and economic contradictions of globalization, and the behaviour of ‘elites’ questioning their own legitimacy. All this may be true. But could these crises and phenomena have inflicted such a wound on liberalism’s norms if its content had not first been subject to an ominous process of emptying out and wearing away?
The liberalism of an earlier era was great precisely because it was able to reframe and reformulate itself in the face of crises and critical moments; because it was able to present its inherited vision of the world to the age in which it found itself. But today, with liberalism’s ideological logic of emancipatory egalitarianism having achieved its fundamental goals, liberalism stands idly by and allows itself to be overwhelmed by successive crises.
What follows from all this, I hope, is already outlined in the reader’s mind, or at least has passed through it. If liberalism is to be adapted to its times, its whole ideological logic, liberatory egalitarianism, must be reevaluated. It was along this ideological logic that liberalism achieved what it could—and that it subsequently ran into a series of self-contradictions; its central passion, freedom, became subject to a conceptual atrophy that ultimately upset its entire system of norms.
And the solution? First and foremost, liberalism must set a new course. It must learn to see that any further act of liberation could destabilize the civilizational formula of ordered liberty. Freedom today must not be extended but grounded, anchored, and deepened; it must be increased in quality rather than quantity. This, however, entails the intellectual task of concretizing freedom, and the social essence of freedom, by identifying it primarily with a certain thread of historical development rather than with the freedom of the individual to do with that freedom as he or she wishes. The Judeo-Christian image of the human person, invariably precious and unique; corresponding ethics grounded in dignity, care, and the citizenly thirst for knowledge; the civic bonds and attitudes of patriotism: it is these, not mere rights alone, that form the substance of our freedom. Only bricks, cement, and mortar can be protected and deepened—not an abstract, universal desire for freedom, which in itself is a vain word.
Liberalism can only begin its attempt to find a solution after this change of approach. Step by step, it has to explore the social embeddedness of freedom: the structure of the contexts in which freedom could be established and maintained. Freedom, understood concretely, is a civilizational, not a natural, construct. This essentially conservative argument could provide the very basis for the continuation of a certain political tradition without which we, modern souls, would live in a much more cruel and inhumane world.
NOTES
1 Michel Houellebecq, Soumission (Flammarion, 2015).
2 ‘Hyperreality’: a concept used by Mikhail Epstein in his book Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture (Berghahn Books, 1999), 12.
3 For an illuminating study of the dysfunctionality of the European Union as a moral and political community, see: Francisco Pérez, Political Communication in Europe: The Cultural and Structural Limits of the European Public Sphere (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
4 Thomas H. Marshall and Tom Bottomore, Citizenship and Social Class (Pluto Press, 1992), 3-46.
5 Justin Vaïsse, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010).
6 Irving Kristol, The Neoconservative Persuasion: Selected Essays, 1942–2009 (Basic Books, 2011).
7 Friedrich von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Routledge, 2001).
8 As The New York Times’s ‘The 1619 Project’ clearly states, the project ‘aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative’. The New York Times Magazine (14 August 2019), www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html.
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