Renewing Liberalism for Modernity
The election of Donald Trump, Brexit, the war in Ukraine, the crisis of human movement out of the Middle East and Africa. These events, in singularity and in concert have contributed to a growing sense of unease in the liberal democratic order. A raft of data shows that people living in, and benefiting from, democracies are feeling increasingly weary or distrustful of those systems. The number and quality of democracies globally has been in decline, year-over-year, since 2006. And increasingly democracies have turned towards authoritarian candidates to solve what they see as societies grave ills
There are many potential explanations, and they tend to fit nicely inside one’s political world view. Real wages have stagnated while the cost-of-living has ballooned, comfortable jobs have been replaced by the gig economy and a constant sense of unease, global powers like the United States have abused their strength and been shown to be unable to enact lasting social change in the countries it’s mettled in, the fight for racial equality has led to a reactionary backlash, increased immigration and the movement of people has caused demographic worries, the erosion of traditional or religious values has accelerated, the media environment has become extremely fractured, the internet has allowed for people with radical viewpoints to congregate and spread their message, the creation of increasingly sophisticated AI, and the psychological capitalism of social media has pushed controversial and divisive content into everybody's feed.
Our divisions and disagreements feel like they’ve never been stronger even as real world conditions are likely the best the human race has ever experienced on the whole.
Why do people in democracies feel so bad and can we ever capture the post-war glow again?
Liberalism and its decline
In 2018, Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen wrote the provocative titled book Why Liberalism Failed. His thesis revolved around liberalism as a driving political force (not the generic term for the ideology of Democratic voters in America). He wrote that the logical extents of liberalism had pushed a pure market and individualist ideology which was damaging to families, communities, and ultimately whole societies and cultures. As a conservative, his solution tended towards more religion, a retreat by like minded communities, and a return to a sense of values rooted in family and spiritualism. But it doesn’t take much imagination to see a similar argument from the left which has gone from broadly supporting Scandinavian style welfare capitalism to some advocating for full on communism.
Deneen’s central point, I think, is correct. Our excesses of liberalism has indeed led to a society in which we are atomized and quantified for our economic potential. A place where the information we consume is tailored to our attention and uses our fear, anger, and concerns against us to ensure our eyeballs stay locked on their platforms and advertisements. A liberalism played out to its maximum is little more than a loneliness machine. Everything in life is about the individual which means everything in life is about me. Times that mentality by 8 billion and you’ve got a cloud of atoms, not a world community.
Ultimately none of us are that important, but liberalism as it’s extended into the 21st century has done everything it can to make us feel that way. As internet platforms gather more and more information about each of us individually, they are able to custom target ads at us that they think will lead us to spending more. Self-help has always been about the individual but increasingly is used as an exclusion tool. Don’t align 100% with a partner or friend? Time to send them to the curb, block their number, and move on.
An extension of this atomization is the growth of a corrosive identity politics. As I’ve written before, identity politics are inseparable from regular politics and we shouldn’t expect people to not vote based on the multitude of identities they have. But the form of identity politics that has become so dangerous is existentialism draped identity politics. This form of politics is one in which a person’s identity is under constant threat from outside political forces and thus any means necessary can be used to protect that identity, including anti-democracy, anti-pluralistic, and anti-human rights means and methods.
Identity politics is oftentimes labeled as a form of ‘group’ politics because an identity is shared with others of the same identity. So how can that be a product of individual atomization? This corrosive form of identity politics, being rooted in the pressure of constant threat, is shaped by atomization of larger group identities. When politics is more concerned with one’s race or political identity, it is harder to find a shared larger identity from which to build trust in the system overall or to create zones of understanding.
Return to social trust
In light of the collapse of social trust and the extreme atomization in democratic societies we must actively work to re-establish liberal values. But hold on, if liberalism's decline has led to a decline in our democracies then it seems paradoxical to suggest that the solution is a return to liberalism. Well I believe it is, and maybe this is an argument doomed to sanctimonious failure, but let me try anyway.
The liberalism described by Deneen and tacitly accepted by many on both the political right and left is a version of individualism which actually departs from the classical description of liberalism. If we want to return to an era of constructive politics and mutual trust, we have to return to a belief in liberal values, namely, the importance of the individual in concert with society, the state, and the market.
The liberalism that has gone too far has been in the realm of economics where capitalistic aims have forgotten the buffer inherent in liberalism. The classic definition of liberalism ensures the rights of the individual in the face of the coercive effects of the state and by extension religion. It is from this value base that we get freedom of speech, freedom from religious persecution, freedom of thought, and freedom of the press. If we want to reclaim liberalism as the accepted consensus of the people we need to reaffirm liberalism as having a buffer versus, not only the state and organized religion, but also capitalism and the markets. We need a bill of rights which protects individual liberties from all the coercive organized powers in society.
A liberalism for the digital age
In order to claim and renew liberalism for the 21st century we need to focus on how liberalism has been used to decay democracy. Various techno-utopianists, and silicon valley types have used their digital wealth to push politicians and political movements which focus on divisions in order to break democracy and leave a sort of survival of the fittest, winner-take-all form of liberalism. This can best be exemplified by people like Peter Thiel who has openly talked about his disgust of democracy and his desire to reshape politics, using his immense wealth, to one of unfettered capitalism or technocratic autocracy.
The liberalism of the 18th century is not equipped for the world of the 21st. John Locke, Thomas Paine, Montesquieu and Thomas Jefferson offer lessons for us today, but they did not write and promote liberalism in an era where the internet can instantly connect people from Siberia to the Mojave desert. Likewise, and just as crucially they didn’t live in a world where capital controls corporations and the only value in business is unrelenting growth.
Liberalism is the glue to our democracies, it is the value set on which people with conflicting views and identities can coalesce and promise to one another that they respect and value their opposite viewpoints even if they disagree vigorously. The loss of liberalism as a protection between conflicting opinions is why populists have sprung to the fore in democracies around the world. It’s why companies have run roughshod over communities. It’s the reason why families dread getting together on Thanksgiving or Christmas.
Our renewal of liberalism requires us to first reaffirm our beliefs in the foundational tenets of liberalism, protection of inalienable rights for the individual from the state, followed by a new commitment to extend those rights to areas of social coercion and power which have not traditionally felt the need to protect against. The individual has rights from the state but so too should they have rights from the market, and towards community. When we reestablish a liberalism that both people on the political right and left can again respect and value then we can hopefully reclaim our trust in democracy and not fear every election as potentially the last.
