Liberalism is the tie that binds the nation.
It is imperfect – it has frayed and nearly come undone numerous times throughout history. Since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, centuries of spilled blood and enormous intellectual heft have to fulfill its essential pronouncement: that all men are created equal. It has taken generations of sacrifice to bridge the rift between liberal ideology’s egalitarian principles and America’s shameful inertia in actualizing them.
The march of progress has been grueling and oftentimes disheartening, but we owe it to liberalism – the emergent ideas of the Enlightenment that restrict the authority of the state and assert that government legitimacy is tied to the consent of the governed – for the fact that even when those marching stagger and bleed, they still move forward with the enduring promise of a freer world.
Contempt for liberal ideals has become more pronounced in the last decade. It is a pernicious byproduct of both parties’ descent toward the extreme tails of their respective politics. On the left, for instance, ire over Supreme Court decisions has increasingly included calls to expand and pack the Court during Democratic presidencies – an illiberal and myopic ploy to ensure Democratic legislation passes muster against constitutional challenges.
But it is not the Democrats who currently control the government. It is Donald Trump and a sycophantic Republican Party, and they are keen on demolishing what even conservative intellectuals have considered to be the most important source of American vitality: our government’s structure.
The gravamen of the charge leveled by Trump and the broader conservative movement against the “system” is neither novel nor unreasonable: lax oversight has resulted in bureaucratic bloat that has impeded efforts to improve the effectiveness of our institutions.
What is new and dangerous is Trump’s unique characterization of the problem, as a rot that runs incorrigibly deep.
Liberalism, in the words of English philosopher John Gray, is meliorative: it rests on the faith that institutions can be improved, where compromise is the lifeblood by which self-government is sustained. This premise has been soundly rejected in favor of a timid, impuissant legislative branch and a judiciary whose independence is compromised when they rule disfavorably.
In 1992, former president Richard Nixon was interviewed on the television program Inside Washington. The theme of the interview was the United States’ hegemony in the twilight of the Soviet Union’s recent collapse. Nixon, although forever cast in the penumbra of the Watergate scandal, remained highly respected for his geopolitical acumen and insight into foreign affairs. In one of his most prescient moments, he spoke about the United States’ responsibility to guide formerly communist states into the new era of liberalization – a mantle much of the American people were reluctant for their government to take up. He criticized the folly of total contentment with the West’s Cold War victory. The West needed to ensure that newly democratic nations did not merely accept democracy as fiat in the new era, but also believed that the system was good. That it worked. That self-government was capable of meeting the people’s needs even at the expense of autocratic efficiency. “The ideas of freedom now are on trial,” as Nixon saliently put it. Liberalism had not yet won.
Indeed, Nixon was proven right: first when the hopeful fervor of a liberal Russia was snuffed out by Putin’s ascension to power, then when the U.S. took up the challenge directly, occupying Afghanistan in hopes of establishing a self-sufficient democracy. After twenty years of expert guidance and over $2 trillion in funding, the Taliban immediately seized control of the nation upon the United States’ departure in the most damning indictment of liberal complacency in history. The problem lies in the hubris of the United States, and its unfailing belief that every society can be refashioned in the American mold, regardless of history, culture, or structural realities. The truths we take to be self-evident are in reality the climax of centuries of humanist progress.
The same complacency that doomed Kabul can undo Washington if Americans begin to see liberalism as a burden. If too many confuse the necessity for arduous compromise as a hardship instead of a virtue. We could very well collapse under the immense pressure of impatience or fall victim to the charismatic strongman who cares more about making a decision than making the right decision.
What unites these domestic and international examples is the growing perception that liberal institutions are dispensable when they appear to obstruct efficiency. At home, this manifests in the casual acceptance of executive overreach, and abroad, in our retreat from cooperative efforts that cost negligible dollar amounts for incalculable soft power, influence, and scientific and political advancement. Both tendencies rest on the same misapprehension: that the value of governance lies only in the speed and convenience of its outcomes, when in reality, its value lies precisely on its restraints.
The challenge, then, is not that liberalism has ceased to function, but rather that its virtues no longer command instinctive loyalty from a society so prosperous off of liberal principles, it invites the belief that a strong executive can deliver what a fractious legislature cannot. If we forget, we create a vacuum that the impatient demagogue will gladly fill. What makes the American experiment extraordinary is that it asks ordinary people to defend the ordinary processes of politics against extraordinary temptations to cut corners. The defense of liberalism lies in cultivating a public temperament that sees restraint as strength.
If years from now we have escaped this chilling assault and return to some semblance of pre-Trump politics, history will record how America faced and overcame a sobering trial of its own.
Featured Image Source: Architect of the Capitol
