Challenges to Liberalism
Here is the second installment of my engagement with Rauch's stirring defense of liberalism, the freedom doctrine.
Challengers to the liberal order are rising within a “veritable bestiary,” writes Rauch in “Why You Should Feel Good About Liberalism.”
Nationalism is not inherently inconsistent with liberalism (nations have been the seedbeds and protectors of liberalism), but national conservatism, its sharper variant, claims that liberal cosmopolitanism and universalism undermine the very possibility of a nation-state with a common culture.
As I warned in my critique of Christopher Rufo’s manifesto, creating a monoculture requires a velvet glove on an iron fist. And, of course, I warned that Patrick Deneen—the pillar saint of national conservatism—complements Rufo’s role as the boy pharaoh.
But let me not digress.
Rauch goes on to say imperialism is a contender, and, unfortunately, he wants to hang that around Putin’s neck (Russia) with no mention of Uncle Sam (America). (Given how long he’s been in Washington, Rauch can be forgiven for the oversight.) There is communism, which still governs about 20 percent of the world’s people. Or what about authoritarian populism, the bugaboo of the Beltway? Viktor Orbán is not exactly goosestepping through Europe, although there are strong nationalist populist sentiments blazing in countries where the borders are perceived as too porous. Finally, Rauch says social justice fundamentalism is a contender, too, given its viral penetration of media, the academy, and TikTok.
Let’s go through Rauch’s four-stage argument that none of these alternatives comes close to liberalism.
“First: the challengers are either proven failures or vaporware,” he writes.
The proven failure category includes Christian rule, which led to stultification and bloodbaths across Europe; Islamism, which is internally oppressive and outwardly aggressive; imperialism, a zero-sum quest for domination which relies on war and coercion; authoritarian populism, which begins with false promises and ends in corruption and anti-democratic machinations; and communism, the most blood-soaked form of government in all of history. The vaporware category includes “common good” conservatism, Christian nationalism, and Catholic integralism, which have yet to explain how a rump of Christian conservatives could rule a diverse and largely secular country like the United States; and wokeness, which has never governed anything and only knows what it is against (practically everything).
I would add to Rauch’s list managerial technocracy—which removes the D from the DNC and the R from the RNC—adding corporate statism, or corporatism, where Mama Money and Papa Power find a coital bed from which actual fascism eventually slinks.
“Second: the challengers are enemies of equality,” writes Rauch.
Christianism and Islamism explicitly privilege their own faiths, forswearing equality from the get-go. Imperialism explicitly asserts its right to dominate whomever it can. Populism may claim to speak for “the people,” but its defining characteristic is to privilege the real people—meaning its own clients—over everyone else. Communism is doctrinally egalitarian, but it invariably privileges a corrupt nomenklatura. While wokeness does not have much of a governing record, it, too, belies its egalitarian claims, stereotyping and demonizing alleged oppressors and bullying and silencing opponents.
Rauch is not wrong about the challengers, but he’s moving too fast to separate the illiberal forms of “equality” from liberal forms. There are way too many forms of illiberal egalitarianism not to draw this distinction, particularly in an era where half the country worships technocratic elites and so-called experts. At the same time, the other half seethes on the way to work real jobs only to see their purchasing power diminish by the day as the elites call them racist or deplorable.
Anti-elitism is real, and it is justified, notwithstanding the faux egalitarianism of the chattering classes.
“Third: the challengers can’t self-correct,” writes Rauch.
Instead, they always compound their errors. Liberal democracies, liberal markets, and liberal science all make mistakes, because they are human; but they have built-in mechanisms for identifying and rectifying them. Liberal democracy provides for political competition and rotation in power; markets let firms and entrepreneurs fail and be replaced; liberal science connects millions of investigators in a collective search for error. By contrast, faith-based regimes claim godly infallibility; communism and imperialism claim historical inevitability; authoritarian populists don’t believe they ever really lose an election or make a mistake; social justice warriors live in what Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott call a “perfect rhetorical fortress,” impervious to evidence and hostile to dissent.
Meh, sort of.
In my last installment, I took Rauch to task on his faith in democracy. I agree with him generally, but I still say he’s much too sanguine about the U.S. as a liberal democracy, not to mention most E.U. member states.
First, it’s not clear that the U.S. is a liberal democracy anymore. But even if it were, the weird and wicked Nick Land is right to warn us about the enervating, zombifying effects of sustained majoritarian rule:
By cropping out all high-frequency feedback mechanisms (such as market signals), and replacing them with sluggish, infra-red loops that pass through a centralized forum of ‘general will’, a radically democratized society insulates parasitism from what it does, transforming local, painfully dysfunctional, intolerable, and thus urgently corrected behavior patterns into global, numbed, and chronic socio-political pathologies.
As we approach an absurd contest between a Cackling Stepmom and a Bombastic Boor, it reminds us that democracy’s infrared loops are indeed sluggish, and all my kids will be grown before we see meaningful civic correction—you know, like the one that would prevent our accelerating decline.
“Finally: the challengers are authoritarian,” writes Rauch.
Liberalism is the only method of large-scale social decision-making that is inherently decentralized, depersonalized, consensual, and self-correcting. It understands that humans can be ambitious, biased, and greedy, but it protects us from our worst selves by using checks and balances to restrain ambition, experiment and criticism to identify bias, and the profit motive to domesticate greed. By contrast, while the illiberal and post-liberal contenders come in many varieties, they all, at the end of the day, require the elevation of a person or party to godlike status. In the end, they serve whomever is most ambitious, most biased, and most greedy.
If we could only live in a “system of large-scale social decision-making that is inherently decentralized, depersonalized, consensual, and self-correcting.” At best, living in the U.S. or the E.U. is one step forward, two steps back relative to this ideal. Rauch is right that such a decentralized system would be better.
The problem is we don’t live in that system anymore.
Sino-Forming the West
In terms of challenges to liberalism, Rauch turns East:
Having said all that, one must reckon with what may appear to be an important counterexample. Whatever else Chinese communism might be, it is not a proven failure. By combining rapid economic growth with single-party rule and totalitarian surveillance, it has seemingly done what liberal theorists speculated might be impossible. As The Economist reports, China’s aggressive mercantilism, party-led investment, manipulated currency and interest rates, and controls on capital defy liberal economic theory, yet are being imitated by other countries seeking “reassurance [that] they do not need to become more democratic in order to grow.”
Whatever pitfalls China faces today, what we have found since China’s economic liberalization—starting with Deng Xiaoping—is not that countries are keen to mimic entrepreneurial capitalism fused with liberal democratic decision-making.
Instead, Western countries—including ours—are keen to Sinoform themselves.
This started in earnest in the US with Thomas L. Friedman’s fawning admiration of Chinese-led technocracy (corporate statism) starting in the early 2000s. Since then, the permanent bureaucracies of Washington and Brussels have tried to centralize authority as a managerial regime that manipulates, controls, censors, and surveils. China does it all with more gusto, so they grudgingly admire it.
Rauch says it is too early to tell if the Chinese model will come to dominate. I’d argue it’s too late to stop it unless we drastically upgrade liberalism and create more significant counterpower. Rauch writes,
[A]dvanced technology aside, the Chinese communist model is not really new, and we have plenty of reason to doubt its superiority. China achieved its rapid economic growth by playing technological catch-up and manipulating its markets—strategies which are self-limiting as China reaches technological parity and other countries act in economic self-defense.
What Rauch seems to miss is that Western authorities, far from embracing liberal means, seem hellbent on engaging in a mercantilist-managerial-militarist arms race with the Chinese. Competition through mimicry.
Its growing militarism alarms other countries and leads them to balance against it. Its political system is in thrall to a single person who may make catastrophic errors (such as a war against Taiwan). Its demographics are crashing and its society is unattractive to immigrants. Its ideology assumes that its now well-educated, mostly middle-class population can be subjugated forever, probably a bad bet. If I were a Chinese leader, I would be more frightened than smug.
If I were an American leader, I’d be more frightened than smug, too, notwithstanding the cocksure ravings of Peter Zeihan.
I say this as an optimist by disposition. Things just ain’t looking good. We have to be realistic about that so that we—like the old hound dog moaning because there’s a porch nail sticking into his belly—will overcome our torpor and do something to stop the pain.
For reasons that may be good, bad, or indifferent, a lot of people are just plain unhappy with the modern liberal order, and they respond by lashing out at politicians and institutions and, too often, each other.
Indeed. So we are left with a mercantilist populist party in Trump’s GOP and militarist social justice fetishism in Pelosi’s DNC. Both sides attract armies of useful idiots animated by empty tribal chants of “USA!” and “Vibes!” respectively. So much for liberal democracy—even if *the Glob* weren’t calling the shots, which it is, liberalism is in retrenchment.
Despite sucking, they challengers are winning. But Rauch’s glass is half-full.
While discontent, alienation, and ennui in liberal societies are worrisome, they are not new. Tocqueville remarked on the flattening mediocrity of democratic culture; Nietzsche claimed that modernity saps vigor, creativity, and ambition.
Rauch reminds us that Hillary Clinton, in 1993, pointed to an “undercurrent of discontent” and a “crisis of meaning.”
We realize that somehow economic growth and prosperity, political democracy, and freedom are not enough—that we lack meaning in our individual lives and meaning collectively; we lack a sense that our lives are part of some greater effort, that we are connected to one another. ... [T]he signs of alienation and despair and hopelessness … are all too common and cannot be ignored.
If Rauch ran in my circles, he’d be treated to an endless string of commentary about the “meaning crisis” or the “polycrisis,” including all manner of decidedly anti-whig critiques of progress. Behind such critiques are rarely anything positive about liberalism.
It’s true that liberalism does not “adequately provide for people’s moral and spiritual needs.” And Rauch is right in this regard. We can certainly add that heavy-handed central authority cannot provide for moral and spiritual needs, despite such a sharp turn to the Church of State.
So, most Americans remain morally and spiritually undernourished.
I have wondered whether an upgraded liberalism can and should provide some moral and spiritual nourishment. While Tocqueville noticed the “flattening mediocrity of democratic culture,” he also noticed that Americans were willing to find their own way and join associations comporting with their particular conceptions of the good.
Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools.
Tocqueville saw the power of mutual aid and association, which I believe invites people into moral and spiritual practice with one another. Of course, mutual aid arrangements and voluntary associations get crowded out by the Welfare-Warfare State and the Department of Gimme Gimme. These redirect people’s focus to electoral spectacles and social media ephemera.
But Rauch wants to know if American moral and spiritual malnourishment is liberalism’s fault:
After all, liberalism was designed not to provide for our moral and spiritual needs. It deliberately leaves the transcendent questions open. From the beginning, liberal theorists emphasized that liberalism can provide space for individuals, families, communities, and faiths to make meaning in their own ways, but it cannot, does not, and should not do that work itself. Liberalism promises the pursuit of happiness, not the actual thing.
We can grudgingly agree with this up to the point of conjuring Hegel’s methodology. In other words, is there a synthesis or sublation that respects liberalism’s neutrality at the level of the individual’s pursuit—but also allows for a deeper sacralization of the individual, local community, and the expanding sovereignty of self-organization? (The Grey Robes say we have to try.)
Still, Rauch is right that moral and spiritual matters are the purview of civil society.
[T]he American project and its foreign cousins do not merely allow civil society to construct meaning and provide connection and purpose; they depend upon it to do so. John Adams said: “Liberty can no more exist without virtue and independence than the body can live and move without a soul.” James Madison echoed: “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.” A liberal republic, they warned, requires virtue but does not necessarily furnish its own supply.
Rauch is right to argue that only we can become our best selves by returning the locus of control to our breasts. The Founders understood that only we can cultivate civil society and be practitioners of virtue.
But more generally, if churches preach politics, if schools neglect citizenship, if businesses are mercenary, if politics becomes performative, if voters become cynical, if media becomes propagandistic, if communities crumble, and if families fragment—well, in that case, liberalism will not save us.
Indeed.
Yet that is why my glass is a little more half-empty. The above description is the status quo. We will need a liberal tent revival if we’re going to prevent such social malaise and corruptive malignancy from metastasizing.
Rauch’s remedy? Stop taking criticisms on the chin.
When we are lectured that liberalism dissolves faith, tradition, community, and family, we should respond that no other social arrangement offers remotely as much room to freely—and thus virtuously—practice our faiths, sustain our traditions, and build our communities and families.
Here, here! We must criticize by creating. And we must communicate the truth, beauty, and goodness of our doctrine.
But we mustn’t stop there.
We must practice subversive innovation to underthrow the illiberal regime that has grown upon the people's backs and prompts us to fight over the scraps that the powerful have left. We must find the courage not only to defend the liberal order but also to build newer, better liberal institutions—on land, sea, or in the cloud—that circumvent and defang the managerial regime and weaken its supplicants. This will take politics, policy, and punditry. But these are not nearly enough. We will also need creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation.
And we will need to rediscover our moral clarity.
While it is true that liberal values place emphasis on impersonal rules and procedural safeguards, theorists from John Locke to William Galston have pointed out that liberalism is not merely neutral; to the contrary, it is a value-rich environment. It elevates and requires virtues such as truthfulness, lawfulness, forbearance, civility, reciprocity, generosity, and respect for the intrinsic worth of every individual.
We must defend ourselves and find solidarity in our doctrine.
If you don’t think liberalism propounds life-enhancing, freedom-giving, justice-advancing values, ask a homosexual who was born at a time when homosexuality was a crime, a sin, and a mental disease. Ask an atheist who was born at a time when atheists faced widespread discrimination and were unelectable to high public office. Ask a Jew who was born at all because his Polish grandparents found welcome in our liberal republic. And don’t try to tell that person—me, as it happens—that liberalism is hollow, value-free, or without courage, meaning, and hope.
Rauch closes by saying that liberals need to learn to tell better stories about ourselves. And he’s right. If we don’t lock arms with gay, atheist Jews or anyone else prepared to underthrow the powerful, we will be crushed under their cloven hooves.