By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal
The eminent American Political theorist Michael Walzer recently speculated about the future of liberalism in Dissent, the influential periodical he used to edit.
From democratic socialists to right-wing populists, it seems like everyone agrees that liberalism is in trouble. In his latest book, The Struggle for a Decent Politics, Walzer argues that Americans can, and should, rescue the virtues of the liberal tradition from the crisis of liberalism.
“A liberal is someone who’s tolerant of ambiguity, who can join arguments that he doesn’t have to win, who can live with people who disagree, who have different religions or different ideologies,” he stated in an interview in the journal March 21.
For more than 250 years liberalism as a theory and as a political movement has been dedicated to the cause of social and political freedom and the pursuit of happiness as a material end.
From the early nineteenth century until the middle of the twentieth, liberalism was a proud, optimistic, and confident intellectual, political, and social project. But its limitations as a political system have become more apparent. That is why classical liberalism has come under fire from critics like political philosopher Patrick Deneen, who see within it seeds of the current loss of freedom.
The world that classical liberalism made is now being rejected by the forces of economic neoliberalism and progressive liberalism. While the incendiary domestic activism of the 1960s subsided, it did not expire. It moved forward in new directions, among them those of multiculturalism and identity politics.
The American left has been on what the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci called a “long march through the institutions,” gaining hegemony in much of government, law, academia, and the media. This cultural revolution has accomplished what the abortive revolution of the proletariat failed to do.
Classical liberal Democracy in America developed safeguards to avoid the tyranny of the majority. Citizens limited the power of elected governments by entrenching the individual liberties of citizens, including the freedoms of opinion, religion, speech, press, association, and political participation.
They did so by codifying those limits and liberties in a constitution to which the government of the day can be held accountable by the independent courts to which citizens have redress.
But what of a tyranny of the minority? Until the democratic revolutions of the 18th century, this, in one form or another, was the only form of rule, whether by kings, priests or aristocrats. Everyone assumed that liberal democracy had vanquished such forms of governance.
Yet today, all over the western world, many fear we are being ruled once again by an alliance of plutocrats and leftist radicals. Elites, corporate and cultural, right and left, seem to be joining together. A so-called “woke” capitalism is allied with an identity-obsessed cultural left.
We are living through the capture of institution after institution by economic, political and cultural elites which rarely have majority support. They are imposing their designs and preferences on the so-called “deplorables” and “bigots” over whom they rule. Using a myriad of mechanisms, they are pushing more and more kinds of power, decision-making, and policy-making beyond the reach of the vote.
“The failure of the left in most of Europe, and very much here, to address the growing inequality produced by contemporary capitalism is a very important explanation for the rise of a certain version of nationalist, right-wing populism,” asserts Walzer. “I think I understand the ordinary Americans and Europeans who have become angry at the reigning elites, falsely identified with a centre-left doctrine.”
Thus, what we call “populism” serves as a reaction to the democratic deficit that now confronts American political institutions. Majorities feel shut-out and coerced, by a global economy they experience as rigged against them; by laws and treaties that seem to originate in far-away bodies and which they do not feel they can influence; and by an ever-spreading identity politics they do not support, imposed on them by activist minorities.
The new concept of “diversity,” for instance, replaced the older view of affirmative action. Whereas affirmative action was an attempt to remedy past discrimination, diversity means equality of result for groups as an end in itself, irrespective of past discrimination.
Governments now divide ethnic, racial, gender, and linguistic groups into essentially two categories: dominant and marginalized. Any laws that have a negative disparate impact on a marginalized group is ipso facto discriminatory. The goal is to fundamentally transform the United States.
Yes, populist democracy can be leveraged to impose the tyranny of the majority. But elite democracy, a hollowed out, bureaucratic, and “progressive” version of representative government, can be equally overbearing.
As Walzer defines it, liberalism “constrains majoritarian rule” but is also “a constraint on the ideologically correct minority” which claims the vanguard role in society. “There has to be room for competing groups and for disagreement.”
All educated Americans know of French political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville’s influential two-volume work Democracy in America, published in 1835 and 1840 after his travels in the United States. It remains a touchstone for those attempting to understand American democracy.
Democracy, he contended, is two things simultaneously: both a system of popular suffrage and a condition where privilege has been abolished and “equality of conditions” prevails. He thought one could not succeed without the other. This still holds.
