Progressives (Liberals)

I’m grateful Booker and Harris stepped up.

AntiFa Brutally Assault Journalist During Portland Protest

AntiFa militants robbed and assaulted journalist Andy Ngo during a livestreamed demonstration in downtown Portland on Saturday.

The largely Social Democrat European states ...

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But however warped Putin’s vision of liberalism, it is incontestably facing challenges it rarely has before. From America to the Philippines, the rise of populist movements reveals a yearning for belonging and identity that liberalism cannot satisfy. The emergence of non-liberal economic powers such as China calls into question the postwar “liberal order”. Putin, FT editor, Lionel Barber, told Radio 4’s Today programme, “feels he is on the right side of history”. Many liberals fear that, too. Hence the global impact of Putin’s comments.

The real issue, though, is not that social attitudes have become more illiberal, but that liberalism has been unable to address the fundamental issue of the relationship between the individual and society even as that issue has become one of the most salient.

As a philosophy, liberalism exists in many, often competing, forms. At the heart of most forms, however, stands the individual. Humans, wrote John Locke, the 17th-century philosophical founder of liberalism, naturally exist in “a State of perfect Freedom to order their Actions… without asking leave, or depending on the Will of any other Man”.

Classically, liberals held that society comprises free individuals who come together in voluntary rational agreement. Any restraint placed on an individual’s liberty, including the right to own property, had to be both justified and minimal.

Critics pointed out that humans do not live merely as individuals. We are social beings and find our individuality and discover meaning only through others. Hence the importance to political life not just of individuals but also of communities and collectives.

The critique of liberal individualism adopted both conservative and radical garb.

Conservatives saw history, tradition and the nation as the means by which the individual became part of a greater whole. A nation, as Edmund Burke, the founder of modern conservatism, wrote, is found not just in a set of values but also in “an idea of continuity, which extends in time as well as in numbers and in space”.

For radical critics of liberalism, particularly socialists and Marxists, an individual realised himself or herself not through tradition but rather through struggles to transform society, from battles for decent working conditions to campaigns for equal rights. These struggles created organisations, such as trade unions and civil rights movements, which drew individuals into new modes of collective life and forged new forms of belonging and common purpose.

Conservative and radical ways of thinking about belonging have long coexisted in tension. The idea of a community or of a nation inevitably draws upon a past that has shaped its present. But the existence of movements for social change transforms the meaning of the past and of the ways in which one thinks of identity. “Britain” or “Russia” means something different if defined in terms of what we want the nation to be, rather than just of what it has been.

The tension between liberalism and radicalism has been even more important. Liberalism ensured that the issue of individual rights and liberties remained central to many strands of the left, even as socialists rejected liberal notions of private property. Radicalism injected into liberalism a social conscience. Over time, many strands of liberalism modified both the classical attachment to private property as sacrosanct and the distaste for state intervention.

The relationship between liberalism, radicalism and conservatism began to change in the last decades of the 20th century, largely as the left disintegrated. The idea of an alternative to capitalism seemed to many chimerical, more so after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Even before the Berlin Wall had come down, a new kind of economic liberalism, unstitched from the restraints of social need, had emerged – what many now call “neoliberalism”. At its core was a philosophy of deregulation, privatisation and the introduction of market forces into virtually every nook and cranny of social life.

At the same time, the organisations that had provided working-class people with hope and dignity crumbled. Trade unions were crushed and radical social movements eroded. Societies became atomised and much of the social architecture essential for people to flourish was dismantled. It was a process not confined to the west, but visible across the globe.

Against this background, many of those looking to recreate a sense of social solidarity have been drawn to conservative, even reactionary, ideas of belonging, rooted in nation, tradition and race. And, in an age in which there exist few transformative social movements, many have turned to strongmen to do the job. In the 2016 US presidential elections, just a quarter of Trump voters thought their candidate had “good judgment”, but four out of five thought he could “bring about change”. Much the same is true of authoritarian leaders across the globe, from Putin to Erdoğan, from Salvini to Duterte.

The irony is that the problem faced by liberalism is less the retrenchment of social liberalism than that the retreat of the left has allowed for the success of the ugly side of individualism. The irony, too, is that what is exposed by this is not simply a problem for liberalism, but an even bigger problem for the left.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the United States found itself the sole superpower of the world. Instead of relishing this great stroke of luck; instead of enjoying this “unipolar moment”; instead of reducing its military footprint around the world; instead of focusing on its people, their health, education, and opportunity, it decided to embark on the ambitious project of transforming the world into a liberal wonderland. This “new world order” was supposed to replace the belligerence of politics with the pacific effects of “free trade” and economic prosperity.

More than twenty-five years later, we can safely say that the liberal order has been a failure. The debacles in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and elsewhere have destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives and cost trillions of dollars. Not surprisingly, Americans have soured on these costly “military adventures.” Meanwhile, the Europeans are weary of the refugee crisis that these wars have created. The result has been the rise of autocratic leaders in Turkey, Russia, Poland, Hungary, Italy, and the United States—promising to bring an end to the liberal world order. These new autocratic leaders are harbingers of a resurgence of traditional conservative values: nationalism, religiosity, community, and stability.

The election of Donald Trump was in part due to his promise to end the “stupid wars” and focus on the homeland. Unfortunately, he has surrounded himself with a collection of neoconservative hawks: Mike Pence, John Bolton, Gina Haspel, Brett Cavanaugh, Mike Pompeo, and Elliott Abrams—these people doom any hope of disentangling the United States from the quagmire of endless wars. As Stephen M. Walt asked in his recent book, The Hell of Good Intentions, how is it that the very people who led the country into these dreadful military debacles are still peddling the same disastrous policies in government and think tanks?

To his credit, Robert Kagan, who is by far the most eloquent defender of the policies that have led to the endless wars, has had the courage to respond to the current disenchantment with the liberal world order. In his recent book, The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World, Kagan declares that “the world America made,” the title of another one of his books, is unlike anything that history has ever seen. No other superpower in history could send its military all over the world, enforcing its peace without fear of being threatened on its native soil. This was made possible by the unique geography of the United States—protected with two oceans on its eastern and western borders and with weak nations on its northern and southern ones.

Kagan has no illusions that history is moving inexorably toward liberal democracy. He bravely admits that the West, led by the United States, will never enjoy a relaxed and irreversible triumph over the forces of barbarism. He admits that it has turned out to be harder and more expensive, but it is no reason to give up. In the absence of American power keeping the peace, the alternative would be terrifying—back to the balance of power politics that brought us both World Wars. Now that the nations are armed with nuclear weapons, the world would be poised on the precipice of Armageddon.

Kagan compares “the world America made” with a garden that must be tended continuously and protected against the infringements of the “jungle” that perpetually and relentlessly “grows back.” The liberal order must be backed by a power great enough to destroy any threats.

While I welcome this candid transcendence of the puerility of inevitable progress, it seems to me that the whole image of the garden is fallacious. The point of tending a garden and beating back the jungle is to preserve a manicured human ideal that is at odds with the natural and unruly wilderness. In contrast, a global garden that is determined to obliterate the jungle is at war with nature. It is a mad and misguided garden that is oblivious to its reliance on the creative harvest of the jungle to rejuvenate itself.

Not only is this garden determined to obliterate the jungle, it denounces all other gardens that harbor different plants and a different aesthetic as threats that must be destroyed or transformed. However, in the absence of the juxtaposition of the garden with the wilderness, the garden is bereft of all its charm. Besides, a garden that refuses to allow other gardens to thrive is not a liberal garden but a totalitarian one. To insist that only one flower can bloom destroys the allure of the flower in question.

Kagan is not just a champion of unregulated capitalism; he is a true liberal at heart, which is why something does not add up. On one hand, Kagan insists on the unsurpassed value of the liberal world order. On the other hand, he realizes that the triumph over communism was easy because liberalism and communism emerged from the same intellectual tradition. They both promised, equality, liberty, and prosperity. Communism collapsed because it could not deliver. Today, the liberal world order is up against a resurgent authoritarianism that has wedded itself to traditional conservative values. Kagan acknowledges the intellectual validity of these values and their power of attraction. In fact, he claims that liberalism is at a disadvantage in relation to these conventional values.

I share Kagan’s partiality for liberalism. I also agree with him that liberal values are at a disadvantage in comparison to the resurgent authoritarian conservatism. The new authoritarianism promises community instead of individuality, virtue instead of liberty, religiosity instead of secularism, and stability instead of change. The old values are familiar and comforting. It follows that those who prefer liberalism should make every effort to make it attractive. Making it the basis of a totalitarian global order is no way to highlight its charms.

George,

You mention Venezuela almost every time you discuss Bernie’s policies.

I think you should expand your thinking on Social Democracies AND take a look at how OTHER people are living in the US.

https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2019/3/22/1844139/-Democratic-Socialist-Countries-Rank-Highly-in-Happiness-US-Drops-Again

Anytime anyone says what we need is ‘a woman’, the comment and the sentiment behind it is inherently sexist.

Brooks is a well-known "almost-conservative" and his take on the race was predictable. But I would like to see his points answered. How is taking away people's private insurance going to play? How are they going to explain what's wrong with the apparently strong economy? Immigration reform — sorry, "open borders" is a stupid idea. Any Dem who tries to out-populist Trump is going to look like the worst sort of rabble-rouser.

Quote:

The debates illustrate the dilemma for moderate Democrats. If they take on progressives they get squashed by the passionate intensity of the left. If they don’t, the party moves so far left that it can’t win in the fall.

This reflects the structural problem in how we choose our candidates, but I don't know how it can be solved.