#post-liberalism

The title of this interesting essay is misleading, I think. The “post-liberal” movement within conservatism has called attention to the “fusionist” label/slogan from the early days of the conservative movement. Fusionism meant the cooperation and collaboration in practical matters of those conservatives who were more influenced by libertarian and individualistic strains of thought, and those who were more influenced by traditional and moralistic/religious strains of thought. Frank Meyer, who coined the term, thought that both groups could work together for practical politics, since Communism abroad and socialism at home threatened what both groups held dear. Post-liberals try to argue that after the fall of the Soviet Union, the reason for that coalition doesn’t work any more, that today’s libertarians are  not just uninterested in tradition, morality, and religion, but opposed to them for the same reasons that the progressive left is (roughly, “because Science, LGBT”).  

The title of this essay tries to tie its thesis to that debate. But 85% of it is a fascinating comparison of two books and their authors: C. S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man, and F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. Both came out during WWII, one cleanly representing the side of tradition and morality, the other libertarian individualism. But both saw the mistakes and tendencies they opposed, not just in Communism and socialism, but also in technocratic progressivism more broadly. Both Lewis and Hayek foresaw that technocratic progressivism would be a powerful threat to the societies of England and the U.S. in the future, since their intellectual and political momentum seemed to be growing even as the War was dealing fatal blows to Nazism and the Soviet Union. 

“The Planners and Conditioners

“The project of Lewis and Hayek was to delineate just how the planner-conditioners, guided by their faith in science as an ultimate guide to all reality, would steer the nations they administered, by degrees, into a totalitarian dystopia. In the end, they would oversee and determine every facet of life, and would do so without regard to law. Lewis and Hayek described how, if they did not speedily rouse themselves, America, England, and others would go too far down the “road to serfdom,” or to the “abolition of man,” to turn back...”

It’s a provocative and persuasive comparison of two thinkers who are almost never read together. 

The essay would have been stronger had it come back to the present. Covid laid bare the political problems with technocracy, when “trust the science”--a most unscientific slogan, since scientists never believe in the science, and certainly don’t trust their colleagues without verification--morphed into “obey Anthony Fauci”. And the Great Awokening of 2020 laid bare the tyrrannical streak of progressivism, with cancelling and riots and physical threats to anyone who wasn’t sufficiently on board. Technocratic progressivism is as strong today as Lewis and Hayek predicted it would become. Which suggests that the heirs of Lewis and the heirs of Hayek actually do have reason to continue to join their forces, to fight the common enemy. A stronger essay would have followed with some suggestions to make the coalition more intentional and practical, rather than simply having religious groups cheering on Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. 

Yesterday I suggested that the right can’t keep doing the same old thing in response to the new reality.  

We need a platform which addresses our real concerns, and which is more attractive than passing corporate tax cuts.  

If you fire a man because he is gay, he will be able to prosecute you.  If you refuse a black family from eating at your restaurant, charges will be brought against you.  Who can disagree with this?  Like his lifestyle or not, the gay person has a human right to earn a living, and the black family has every right to eat at a restaurant which serves the general public.  While exceptions can be made for certain conflicts (e.g. The Human Rights Campaign should not be forced to employ social conservatives as such views are antithetical to their cause, just as a Catholic organization should not be forced to employ someone who is outwardly homosexual), in general these things should hold true.     

Meanwhile, Sarah Sanders was kicked out of a restaurant because of her work in politics.  Conservatives are often censored or banned on the web.  We may detest the ideals of Nazis or Communists or Democrats or Republicans, but for that reason alone they shouldn’t be denied the right to earn a living.  

We should insist that the Civil Rights Act be updated, with political views and legal speech to become fully protected.  

In essence, if it is legal to say something or voice an opinion in the town square, no one will be able to fire you or refuse you service for that reason.  In fact, the recent revelation of a controversial political opinion should serve as much as to protect you as recently coming out of the closet should protect you from being fired.  Social media organizations will be prohibited from any censorship: to the degree they have concerns with content posted on their site, they are free to forward to posts to relevant legal authorities, and if such speech doesn’t directly incite violence the person should be allowed to go on posting, regardless of our opinion of the content.

In light of recent events, the right must take stock after a difficult period and put together a clear platform that will appeal to people, while also defending our ability to live out good, healthy and virtuous lives.  

In America, people describe the left as liberals and the right as conservatives, but in practice nearly everyone is a liberal.  There are left-wing and right-wing versions of liberalism.  Each side cares greatly about freedom above all, but emphasizes freedom in different ways.  Right liberals care about freedom to keep what one earns, the freedom to defend one’s self with firearms, and the like.  Left liberals care about freedom to live however one wants, freedom from severe poverty, and such.  

We on the right should abandon our reflexive liberalism.  Freedom is good, but it is only one good among many.  

When our views are suppressed on social media, we shrug and say “oh it’s okay, it was a private company.”  

When people are deplatformed and lose their jobs for merely expressing a political opinion, we think first of the right of a business to be free to fire employees, rather than the right of a person to be able to earn a living.  

When drag queen story hour comes to the local library, you can find right wingers championing viewpoint neutrality and even claiming it is right and just that drag queens interact with children at the library.  

The signature legislative achievement of the Trump years was a corporate tax cut.  Lower corporate taxes, we are told, are a big win for the free market (or Woke Corporate America, depending on your point of view).  

Freedom is a good, but it is one good among many.  Moreover, the freedom that is advertised today is often a bastardized one, the idea that freedom is the ability to do whatever we want, rather than freedom to life a good life, free even from slavery to vices.  Some pretend that a man would be more free if the state would stand aside and allow him to become a slave to dangerous addictive drugs.  Others insist a woman is only free if she has the right to condemn her own children to death before they leave the womb.

Being reflexively liberal has led people on the right to say and advocate harshness against the poor and the needy, to defend rampant student loan usury, which has trapped people in paying off large loans when they should be forming households and families. 

Now this does not mean we need to agree with Democrats on all fiscal issues.  While we can support a higher minimum wage, a $15 minimum wage applied across the country, even in low wage rural areas, and despite the advent of labor saving robotics in the service sector, may be unwise.  Having the government control all of health care through the tax system may be less efficient (and come with more side effects if the government mismanages health care) than creating a true safety net with public hospitals and clinics.  At the same time, we don’t have to pretend that a desperate woman agreeing to work for $4/hr is a contract freely entered into, or that the government has no role to play in health care, as we watch pharmaceutical prices skyrocket or people suffer for want of adequate care.  

The post-liberal can acknowledge that liberalism has some advantages.  Despite recent events, politically liberal nations tend to produce greater political stability and economically liberal nations tend to produce great wealth, which while it does not make for a healthy society on its own, certainly offers great advantages relative to a poor society.  Yet we also see that liberalism tends to result in anti-social outcomes.  Civil society has been weakening over the past few generations.  We see ever increasing degeneracy, and healthy family formation has been in long decline, devastated by the sexual revolution and no fault divorce.  

By now, Sohrab Ahmari is familiar to TAC readers. The life story of someone who was born to Muslim parents in Iran, moved to the U.S., worked in the neoconservative vineyards—The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, and now The New York Post where he’s the op-ed editor—would be interesting enough. And yet his conversion to Catholicism and his feud with National Review’s David French adds even more interest. (Ahmari started at least the public portion of that feud when he published an article in First Things titled “Against David French-ism.”)

…

Ahmari’s goal—winning the culture war and restoring a conservative cultural order—is, um, audacious. And if that order is intended to be defined, more specifically, by Catholic integralism, well, that’s doubly audacious. Yet there’s been a lot of successful audacity lately, from The Audacity of Hope, by Barack Obama, to The Audacity of Trump, by Donald Trump.

So while the percentage of Americans who support a truly conservative order is tiny, the level of dissatisfaction with the status quo is far from tiny. In their different ways, figures as diverse as Trump (surely the most anti-incumbent incumbent in presidential history), Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Josh Hawley, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez all speak to a deep-seated dissatisfaction with business as usual. And while it’s possible that these divergent leaders will simply cancel each other out, leaving the status quo intact, it’s also possible that some new political and cultural synthesis will eventually emerge.

For clues about any such synthesis, Americans might study the right-leaning “post-liberal” leaders who have been freely elected to top offices in countries as disparate as Poland, Hungary, Italy, Brazil, India, and the Philippines. Needless to say, American liberals—including libertarians—are horrified at the thought of any such anti-liberal politics making its way to our shores. And liberals in all those foreign countries were horrified, too, but that didn’t stop the illiberals from winning.

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So if one takes the long view—as Hawley did when he nuked that ancient scribbler—it’s possible to see that with the passage of enough time, anything is possible. That is, just as liberalism blossomed in the 17th and 18th centuries thanks to Locke, Voltaire, and Jefferson, so, too, could it wilt, perhaps even in this century. Of course, the post-liberals might put the matter differently; they would likely say that they are simply restoring good health to the body politic.

…

Ahmari put his own cards on the table when he observed, “Part of our work is recovering the Hispano-Catholic Founding of America,” which preceded, he added, “the second, Anglo Founding.” So we can see: Ahmari aims to position the Catholics of South and Central America as prior to the Protestants of North America. The apparition of Mary at Guadalupe, just outside of Mexico City, came in 1531, and the slowpoke Pilgrims didn’t get to Plymouth Rock until 1620.

Okay, but is that precedence just an historical fun fact, or will it matter politically? That’s hard to know, but we can know this much: it matters demographically. To illustrate this, on June 22, Ahmari retweeted a tweet highlighting photos of a Catholic confirmation ceremony at Santa Margarita Church in Pharr, Texas—a little town hard on the banks of the Rio Grande. Those in the picture appear to be all, or almost all, Hispanic. Indeed, the tweet was written in Spanish.

So we can start to see a vision of North and South America united culturally, if not politically—but maybe politically, too, perhaps in some sort of Holy Roman Empire of the Americas.

…

Without a doubt, the U.S. will be more Hispanic, a result of higher birth rates as well as immigration. And while there’s no certainty about their Catholicism—Ahmari’s Church, after all, is embroiled in sex scandals that some deem lethal, and Protestantism has been on the rise—it’s a given that Hispanic Americans will have at least a Catholic heritage, which will help shape their political outlook.

All these demographic changes might seem to be good news for Democrats, even if, say, Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio would beg to differ. At the same time, the growth of Hispanic Democrats might not bode well for liberal Democrats. After all, there aren’t a lot of Planned Parenthood members in Pharr, Texas.

 There is always something that makes each particular point in time unique. And ours is rather scary.

In the past there has been really three ways of responding to perceived injustice: the injustice is justified (the conservative view), the injustice needs reforming (the liberal view) and the system causes the injustice (the radical view). Take for example racial issues in the 1960s, there was the view amongst conservative mostly Southern White Democrats that blacks were inferior so their mistreatment is justified, then there was a liberal view that African-Americans were deserving of extended rights in this system that mostly benefits me but we should be more welcoming of everyone and finally the radical view that was mostly marginalized that the system was flawed and only by restarting the system can true equality could be achieved.

In another more recent example, on a similar vein, the response to the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson. The conservative view that Michael Brown was guilty and got what he deserved, the liberal view that Michael Brown was shot by a sort of rogue racist, police officer in a horrible tragedy and the radical view that the system is setup against young Black men like Michael Brown and only by tearing down the system of the State can we tear down the system of racism. The first two views are the ones commonly portrayed in the mainstream media, the classic liberal versus conservative ideologies. In alternative media, the leftist views will be explored. Yet it is important to recognize the rise of a new field of opinions. There now exists a new ideology sort of in this neo-liberal framework that suggests that we have made enough progress. It is sort of a post-liberal ideology. Using the Michael Brown example, the post-liberal would say something along the lines of “Well we no longer have an institution of racism as it was repaired in the 1960s, Michael Brown could not have died from any sort of structural racism”.

The 21st century may have not invented the post-liberal view but it certainly has managed to popularize it. Any literate person opposes racism, sexism and homophobia and it feels very comfortable for these people to call out discrimination. Yet, we as a society have come to accept this post-liberal idea that we have made enough change to no longer warrant any discrimination.

Let me take for a second to actually address the post-liberal argument: if liberalism has provided a solution to every social issue, why do problems still exist socially? Statistics of course indicate an unfair treatment for African-Americans in this country. Critics would say this is because of poverty. Well then why do African-Americans still make up a large portion of the impoverished? Systematic racism is the only answer. While I would agree with the post-liberal that many race issues also corresponds with class issues, this also poses a question for the post-liberal. If liberalism has solved all of our problems, why do class issues still exist? The post-liberal could argue that class issues should always exist in a liberal utopia (for whatever bizarre reason). The question still remains, why is the unfairly inflicted upon blacks? The problem with claiming the problems no longer exist is when they arise it makes you look stupid. And this is only one segment of the range of social issues. Evidence also suggests women make less money than men. LGBT people are still waiting for equal rights. What more can crush the post-liberal utopia than problems against social groups?