Authentic liberals need to muscle up for the fight of their lives
By K.N.C.
IN THE 19TH century, liberals freed the slaves and freed trade. In the 20th century, they won women the right to vote, introduced social security, secured civil rights and helped beat back bloody dictatorships. In the 21st century, they are depicted as sniveling wimps and are reviled. What happened?
James Traub, an American journalist and historian, asks this question in his latest book, “What Was Liberalism? The Past, Present and Promise of a Noble Idea” (Basic Books, 2019). After tracing its history, the book considers the current day, when human dignity and freedom is under assault, and the very idea of truth is imperilled.
Yet society has been there before, as Mr Traub explains in the short interview below. It is followed by an excerpt from the book on the reaction to totalitarianism, notably by George Orwell.
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The Economist: What is liberalism?
James Traub: At the root of the liberal tradition lies a faith in the individual, and thus a deep regard for his or her rights—political, economic, personal. Liberalism thus lives in tension, usually healthy, with democratic majoritarianism. As John Stuart Mill wrote, you have a right to speak your mind even if everyone thinks you’re wrong. And so with the right to behave as you wish.
But what happens when your liberty limits mine? This is where the branches of liberalism separate. Are unions bad because they impede the liberty of employers? In the left-of-centre American liberal tradition in which I was raised, workers have a right to protection from the free market even as they benefit from the market. My liberalism is not libertarianism.
Liberalism is an intellectual tradition rather than a text. You can fight over what it is, but in the end, you choose from that tradition what seems most salient to you.
The Economist: What happened, that in many places in the West, we are now in danger of losing it?
Mr Traub: I would say that the optimism, rationalism, pragmatism that underlie all forms of liberal thinking depended on conditions that no longer obtain. Majorities were more prepared to protect the economic and political rights of minorities—think of the American civil rights movement or the European absorption of immigrants—when a rising tide was lifting all boats. Liberalism cannot flourish in a world defined by zero-sum calculations. The sheer volume of people seeking access to liberal societies has left natives fearing for their own heretofore-unquestioned centrality.
What is more, as the excerpt below suggests, liberal rationality is threatened by the pervasive loss of faith in the neutral principles of science, fact, expertise and reason itself. Political leaders like Donald Trump or Hungary’s Viktor Orban offer easy answers to citizens’ economic and cultural fears. They succeed because their audience no longer accepts the legitimacy of reasoned responses. We can blame social media—or ourselves.
The Economist: Has liberalism ever been at risk of being lost before (other than by outside forces such as in the second world war), and if so, how was it restored?
Mr Traub: The Great Depression promoted the rise of extreme parties of the right and left in Europe. Some took power; others, thankfully, didn’t. America, in perhaps its most glorious moment, preserved political liberty while cushioning the blow of economic calamity. In a 1932 campaign speech, Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, “Equality of opportunity as we have known it no longer exists.” America was in the grip of an “economic oligarchy”. The time had thus come for “a new economic declaration of rights”.
Thus was born The New Deal, a statist monstrosity for free-market liberals who imagined that greater economic collectivism would inevitably lead to totalitarianism. They were wrong; FDR proved that the welfare state could be fully compatible with political liberty. So doing, he reset the terms of American liberalism. Many on the left would say that the free-market “neoliberalism” of the 1990s eviscerated FDR’s contract and ushered in the illiberal era.
The Economist: What needs to happen today to restore liberalism?
Mr Traub: If my answer to the second question is right, liberalism as I understand it may be defunct. Perhaps the coming age will feature populist illiberalisms of the left and right, with one side or the other essentially disenfranchised. (The British election looks something like that.) That’s a very ugly prospect.
My formula for liberal revival, at least in the Anglosphere, starts with an intense focus on economic and social mobility, whose decline has done so much to fuel the populists. That means reforms to higher education, job and skills training, minimum wage laws, the revival of unions, progressive taxation to reduce inequality.
It is much harder to find the tools for non-economic issues. How do you restore the faith in reason? I don’t know. How do you assuage the bitterness of working-class whites who feel dispossessed by great historical forces? Let me know if you have a good answer.
The Economist: Perhaps what’s needed is to push back against illiberalism with the same tactics as the populists use, if only temporarily, to restore liberal values? What if not being willing to “darken” ourselves this way means we keep our virtue but lose liberalism altogether?
Mr Traub: Liberal populism is a contradiction in terms. Populism is unhindered majoritarianism and liberalism is the hindrance. That said, liberals don’t deserve any sympathy if they choose suicide out of sheer high-mindedness. As Machiavelli said, the imperilled state needs a good man willing to act badly. In American terms, that meant Bill Clinton—but not Al Gore. Perhaps today that means Emmanuel Macron. But “act badly” means “seek power”, not “traduce principle”.
Most of the Democratic candidates for president have refused to forswear the use of “fake news”. That strikes me as ultra vires; liberals can’t stir more poison into the pot. They shouldn’t counter Donald Trump by saying that people on the right hate America. But should they blame the plutocracy for subordinating the public good to the pursuit of lucre? Damn right! Teddy Roosevelt did, and so did FDR. Did that mean that they committed populism? No, they just told the truth.
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The reaction to totalitarianism
From “What Was Liberalism? The Past, Present, and Promise of a Noble Idea” (Basic Books, 2019) by James Traub.
The threat of totalitarianism compelled every liberal thinker in the middle of the twentieth century to confront the tension between liberty and equality, or liberty and justice, or liberty and decency. Yet fascism and communism also posed a dire threat to something so elemental to society that political thinkers of earlier generations had barely needed to take account of it: the very idea of truth.
In Darkness at Noon, the 1940 novel that exposed the reality of the Soviet show trials, Arthur Koestler furnished a terrifying picture of a society based on slogans universally understood to be grotesque lies. The struggle to vindicate liberal principles had to be waged not only on political or economic lines but on cognitive ones as well. This conviction lay at the core of Karl Popper’s idea that the “open society” depended above all on the preservation of the spirit of scientific inquiry.
The great prophet of the totalitarian assault on truth was, of course, George Orwell, who first came to recognize the danger during the Spanish Civil War, when he saw that the newspapers of all sides described events that bore no relation to reality. In an unpublished essay apparently written in 1942, he recalled having said to Koestler, “History stopped in 1936”—the year of the Soviet show trials. Thereafter one would never know what was true and what had been fabricated. The experience, Orwell wrote, had left him with the feeling that “the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.”
This fear came more and more to preoccupy Orwell. In 1947 he wrote that because totalitarian regimes insist that the leadership is infallible, history must be perpetually rewritten in order to eliminate evidence of past mistakes. Totalitarianism thus “demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.” Orwell added darkly that “to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country”; one simply had to surrender to certain habits of thought.
Orwell’s novel 1984, published in 1948, is many, many things, but at the core of its dystopian narrative is the struggle of one man to hold on to the freedom that lives inside his own mind even as he is surrounded, and soon swallowed up, by a totalitarian leviathan. The hero, Winston Smith, can survive anything so long as he knows that such freedom remains possible.
“They could not alter your feelings,” he thinks. “For that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.” Winston comes to understand that he has underestimated the Party, which has dedicated itself to penetrating even the inner hearts of citizens.
The Party is, of course, the Communist Party of Russia; Big Brother is Stalin; the rebel Goldstein is Trotsky. But 1984 is not a parable of Soviet society like Animal Farm, Orwell’s 1943 novel. It is a parable of totalitarianism itself. The regime that rules Winston Smith’s Oceania has reduced totalitarianism to an exact science, turning the empire into a vast jail from which no individual, and no thought, can escape—save for the boisterous, völkisch “proles.” The Party has evolved beyond any recourse to the romantic ideologies in the name of which citizens willingly yield up their liberty; as a senior leader explains to Winston, it believes in nothing save power itself. It is totalitarianism in the name of totalitarianism.
Winston works in a branch of the Ministry of Truth that rewrites history, the totalitarian preoccupation Orwell had envisioned in his essay of a year earlier. The Party has invented a past in which England groaned under injustice. A children’s textbook sports a parody-Marxist version of midcentury England: “The capitalists owned everything in the world, and everyone else was their slave. They owned all the land, all the houses, all the factories, and all the money.” The Party is at pains to prove that economic freedom under capitalism was a fraud; its alleged ideology, Ingsoc, is a corruption of English socialism, from which it grew. […]
The novel 1984 was meant as a warning to liberals: it could happen here. What Orwell feared, of course, was not socialist planning but totalitarian thinking. He feared the growing separation between language and meaning that he described in his famous essay “Politics and the English Language”—the corruption of words that in turn corrupts thought. He feared the distortion of history in the name of ideology and, above all, the abandonment of the very idea of objective truth. […]
Totalitarianism did not expand and finally disappeared. In our own time, however, the idea of objective truth does, indeed, seem to be fading out of the world. Orwell could not imagine any force save the state that would have both the will and the capacity to eliminate truth; today’s social media gives all of us access to the tools that blur and finally bury the truth, though autocratic and illiberal states have seized on those tools for their own use. In an ironic development that Orwell would have sardonically savored, the coinage “fake news,” devised in order to reinforce the bright line between facts and fabrications, has been repurposed by cynics like American president Donald Trump to undermine the very idea of fact.
Liberal values never faced so dire, so existential, a threat as they did in the middle decades of the twentieth century. And because communism— unlike fascism—was not only a form of social organization but a doctrine with deep roots in European political philosophy, anti-totalitarian liberals like Berlin and Popper and (perhaps to a lesser extent) Orwell felt compelled to reconsider the foundations of liberalism in order to construct a countertheory of equal force and depth.
Against Marxian collectivism they posed the sanctity of the individual and of individual freedom, and against Marx’s historical materialism they insisted that people shaped their own history, including through ideas about how to act. Liberals defended a commitment to truth and reason in the face of the big lie, and to incrementalism in the face of visionary madness. It is true that the threat they faced has long since faded; ours is of a different nature. But we have learned, as they knew, that the liberal virtues of reason, pragmatism, and tolerance are always in jeopardy—not from outside forces, but from ourselves.
