Jonathan Rauch on Liberalism
a spirited defense, but he omits higher ed
Its central philosophy is that all persons are born free and equal. Its operational principles include the rule of law, pluralism, toleration, minority rights, distributed authority, limited government, and (subject to the other requirements) democratic decision-making. Its distinctive method of social organization is to rely on impersonal rules and open-ended, decentralized processes to make collective decisions.
…Finally: the challengers are authoritarian. Liberalism is the only method of large-scale social decision-making that is inherently decentralized, depersonalized, consensual, and self-correcting. It understands that humans can be ambitious, biased, and greedy, but it protects us from our worst selves by using checks and balances to restrain ambition, experiment and criticism to identify bias, and the profit motive to domesticate greed. By contrast, while the illiberal and post-liberal contenders come in many varieties, they all, at the end of the day, require the elevation of a person or party to godlike status. In the end, they serve whomever is most ambitious, most biased, and most greedy.
He says that liberalism is wrongly blamed for ills that reflect the decline of various key institutions.
For all kinds of reasons beyond the scope of this article, society’s meaning-making institutions have not stepped up. In particular, the secularization and politicization of American Protestantism—perhaps still, despite its travails, America’s spiritual taproot—has proved catastrophic. (That’s the subject of my next book, so I won’t elaborate here.) But more generally, if churches preach politics, if schools neglect citizenship, if businesses are mercenary, if politics becomes performative, if voters become cynical, if media becomes propagandistic, if communities crumble, and if families fragment—well, in that case, liberalism will not save us.
I’m looking forward to that next book.
The counter-argument to Rauch that the NatCons would make is that liberalism sits back and lets the deterioration take place. They would say that we need the visible hand of government to step in.
Rauch fails to mention higher education as one of the key institutions that has been deformed. That is a significant oversight, and I hope that his book does not make the same omission. If the universities remain diseased, our society will not be healthy.
One way I look at the last fifty years is that society faces two challenges. One challenge is to assimilate women into the world of higher education and careers. Another challenge is to deal with ethnic diversity, especially migration pressures from the Global South.
Higher education has demonstrated how not to include women. We should have shown women how to adapt to an impersonal, meritocratic environment (essential elements of Rauch’s liberalism), not let the environment adapt to women’s illiberalism.
We need to find an orderly approach for handling migration pressures. That means being selective, gradual, and with a focus on assimilation. The United States and Western Europe have failed in all aspects of this.
Higher education has also demonstrated how not to deal with ethnic diversity. It does not help to denigrate white people and give up on meritocracy. Liberalism requires treating people as individuals, and promoting people based on individual attributes.
Another thought I have about institutions is that decay is natural. Over time, people learn how to game a system, and then the institution becomes dominated by those who are good at gaming it. Think of Google getting gamed by “search engine optimization” experts.
Can institutions be nimble enough to fend off being gamed? Or does institutional renewal only take place in desperate times, when they either solve their problems or die?
My view of academia is that it will not renew itself. The rot is too deep.
substacks referenced above:
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Another point of disagreement here could be that democratic decision-making is an element of liberalism. Paul Cartledge's recent book on the political history of democracy makes the point cogently that this attempt to graft on democracy as a term to liberalism is a recent rhetorical flourish that doesn't really make sense either etymologically of philosophically. Democracy is a Greek word that means, essentially, the grasp of power (kratos) by the people (demos). In Athens, the people exercised power through the assembly (what we would call a direct democracy today), through juries (their jury system was different from the Anglo-Nordic-Germanic system but same basic concept) and by the assignment of important offices through lottery.
J.S. Mill's On Liberty is inflected with the classical critique of democracy; quoting Cartledge on p. 303: "Mill . . . greatly feared what he envisaged as the tyranny of the unenlightened, ignorant, fickle majority, and he was therefore, like Grote, much keener on representative than direct democracy." In the context of Athenian democratic political institutions, it doesn't really make sense to call representative government "democracy" at all: that's one of the overarching points in Cartledge's book.
My point here is just that political writers should take seriously Cartledge's points about word choice. He argues in his book that contemporary authors tend to use "democracy" as a term to disguise how kratos actually operates in our system as it actually functions. Kratos does not mean a mere consultation; rather it means that when the jury votes to kill Socrates, Socrates will be executed. So when authors like Rausch try to make the point that liberalism prizes the kratos of the demos, it's a straw man argument, but perhaps one that the supposed lions of liberalism have invited by shabby vice of promoting a pretense of popular control of the state.
Rauch confuses cause and effect. liberalism has been captured by authoritarians.
Liberalism doesn’t need the visible hand of government to prevent a drift into authoritarian rule.
The visible hand of government IS the authoritarian rule we see when enough of the polity seeks and tolerates authoritarian rule.