I feel like you are describing a liberalism that just doesn't exist. In many cases "the liberals" are on the opposite side of some of the things you describing.
Looking at this list of thinkers Vance likes, what are we likely to end up with that is such a challenge to liberalism.
1) Reform Civil Rights Law
2) Tough on Crime
3) Curb immigration, especially third world and illegal immigration
4) Tax and legal incentives to families and children vs singles
5) School choice
6) Tariffs vs other ways of raising revenue
7) Generally more pro-building/low regulation (red state vs blue state)
8) Anti-Woke
While some of these are bugaboos to liberal purity, they hardly seem like the end of all good things. Some are very firmly in the liberal camp versus what "liberals" have actually cooked up.
That was my first thought on reading these excerpts, too, along with why is what Vance and others are proposing not seen as a self-correction that should be incorporated in some fashion (not wholesale) in "liberal" governing practices and policies? This sounds very much like a defense not really of liberalism as a philosophy but as a defense of the Current Thing, without having to actually defend the Current Thing from specific criticisms for bad policy outcomes.
Agree that this list is all in the realm of reasonable policy debate. But isn't this larger question of liberalism/post-liberalism also about the how? Like to what degree limited government and federalism are respected and reinforced in pursuit and implementation of these goals?
Let's take some recent liberal vs post-liberal debates.
1) To what extent should the president use Executive Orders to make policy? What about reversing previous Executive Orders? In Hanania's recommendations via Civil Rights Law, a lot of it is about changing executive orders. Is that liberal or illiberal?
2) To what extent should the courts be able to make or interpret policy? Was Oberfegell liberal or illiberal? Or (insert your particular court ruling here)? If a court acts illiberally, should the legislature comply or say "the justice has made his ruling, let him enforce it"? How would the legislature differentiate liberal from illiberal court rulings?
3) Is Civil Rights Law liberal or illiberal. The OP claims that they are liberal, but I think a lot of people here disagree. Would implementing Hanania's policy in The Origins of Woke be liberal or illiberal? Or (insert your own changes to civil rights law)?
4) Bukele is clearly "illiberal" as regards his crime policy. So was Lee Kuan Yew. At least as defined by "liberals".
5) Is the legislature trying to mold public education policy "illiberal"? Was DeSantis saying they can't teach woke gender theory to kindergarders "illiberal"? Is taking pornography out of school libraries "illiberal"? Was giving a third rate Marxist public university over to Chris Rufo to clean house "illiberal"? Is saying we aren't going to have drag queen shows in public libraries "illiberal"? I read many op-eds in the NYTimes by "liberals" telling me all these things are "illiberal"?
6) To what extent should the legislature and executive have power over the "permanent bureaucracy"? Is it liberal or illiberal for that permanent bureaucracy to have more or less power? Is is liberal or illiberal for them to be more or less permanent (can the president fire them)?
7) Is spreading "liberalism" abroad a necessary part of liberalism (war on terror, Arab Spring, Ukraine, etc)?
I could go on and on.
To me "liberalism" in the modern context means nothing more then "there is a subset of people that are considered "the liberals" and they should have the power to do what they want based on whatever rationalizations they come up with, and the rest of us should get out of their way."
I think Arnold is identifying the disconnect between the anti-liberal rhetoric you need to use to get elected and the policies that sophisticated observers infer you will actually support in office. Given the system we have, you have to say things that sound good but would be bad to get into office, and we have to have a little faith rather than lingering on the populist rhetoric.
Wright's thesis reads like a case of lazily 'winning' an argument by straw-manning the opposition. This Liberalism vs Post-liberalism debate is way too complex to be argued out on a Substack comment thread but two remarks:
1) avoid lazy hyperbole....no intellectual worth the name ever argues that Anything is "the source of everything that is wrong with the world"
2) the essential post liberal argument as I understand it is not that political Liberalism is wrong but rather that political Liberalism is no more. That, in other words, to everything there is a season.
Way too complex as I say but I offer this essay as doing a better job of it than Wright's:
Nothing you wrote is wrong, but IMO it’s missing two things:
1) It is *freedom* that is under attack - by both the PLI and the left today. You can label that “liberalism” and you’re not technically wrong, but in the U.S. today, and *certainly* outside academia, liberalism roughly equals leftism. Freedom being under attack makes the point much more clearly.
2) The political left is inarguably much more il-liberal than the political right today, and *arguably* more il-liberal than even the center of what you and she dub the PLI.
There are some old-school (mostly older) liberals in the current Dem party, but the clear majority of them are simply hard leftists who believe in nanny state authoritarianism and censoring speech they don’t agree with, not traditional liberalism.
It is a true statement but I would agree our federal government has shown little to none of that ability for many decades. I believe that is the primary reason you don't see it.
A couple days ago I listened to an interview of Trudeau, mostly about immigration. Say what you will about Canada's mass immigration, he made the point that they makes lots of small changes to their policies while the US tends to make big, infrequent changes. In this regard, they come closer to a self-correcting liberal society.
It's true that Congress does large infrequent changes, but I think the executive branch and regulatory agencies can move quickly when they want. For example, repealing Trump's border policies and then re-instating them 6 months before the election. Maybe that's even an example of self-correction
“ …Trump’s border policies and then re-instating them 6 months before the election”
Even this statement is false. Biden has NOT reinstated Trump’s border policies. He merely changed his policy from illegally horribly unbelievably awful to merely illegally horribly awful…
It is true that our govt makes some changes as you say. And our big changes routinely leave a lot of details to be worked out by similar methods. I thought I was acknowledging all of that with the words "tend to." Either way, I'd still argue we lean far too much toward big, hard to reverse changes more than Canada and some other countries, not that I'm necessarily partial to the way they accomplish that.
It is all easy to understand once you realize the government is a system designed to defeat itself. Otherwise, what would we do with all the useless bureaucrats and politicians?
There is some truth in that but I'd argue the more important reason our govt is designed to defeat itself is to protect us against tyranny of the majority. Doesn't work perfectly but could be far worse.
This is starting to seem more and more like a cop out and lazy justification of the status quo. It’s true, it could always be. ALWAYS. You could have used the same argument in defense of the late USSR.
Emily should be linking to and citing the actual works by the postlibs and not the opposition briefs to be persuasive.
There are always lots of silly problems involved with criticizing informal associations. In legal jargon, there's a tendency to hold all of the people under an informal descriptor like "postliberal" or "new right" as joint and severally liable for some imagined list of bad acts, when in reality they all did different things at different times and are not closely associated with each other. People do this in real life court all the time too because it is so effective.
E.g. here is a claim from Deneen's first book on the ostensible failure of liberalism: "Taken to its logical conclusion, liberalism’s end game is unsustainable in every respect: it cannot perpetually enforce order upon a collection of autonomous individuals increasingly shorn of constitutive social norms, nor can it provide endless material growth in a world of limits." (pg 41-42 of the Kindle edition). These are hard claims for Defenders of Actually Existing Present Day Not Yet Post-Liberalism to defend. They need to be addressed directly to be convincing to people already in their camp.
This claim is a real issue for our system as it actually exists. It is one of the reasons why you can stab people, get convicted of felonies repeatedly, and not wind up in prison even in small town America. The reason is our communities are full of people like this who do not follow social norms and that do not respond to the Benthamite system of punishments and rewards that our system proffers. "Try that in a small town" and actually you won't go to jail either. The reason for this is the Deneen reason, but it also meshes with the Rene Girard explanation of religion. If X% of a society just decides that it's stabbin' time all the time, liberal philosophy does not have a good answer (See also the books of Theodore Dalrymple on this topic).
Going to Emily, she writes "According to the PLI, a new elite must emerge, one that sets aside the separation of powers, seizes the administrative state, and flexes its authority to impose political control over the economy and a pre-modern notion of “the common good” as the country’s governing ideal."
OK, where does it say this in "Common Good Constitutionalism"? I can see how you could stretch it here and there, but Vermeule does not write "The Riggs v. Palmer principle of discarding controlling legal text when it contradicts the common good should apply to the separation of powers. I and my gang of postliberal vampires will bring back Montesquieu from the dead just to kill him again to end the separation of powers until the end of time." This is not what it says.
This is a major problem with internet writing in that it encourages people to gang up to bash some imaginary image of a person or group without actually dealing directly with the ideas. You can't say this about the postlibs themselves because they're all professors who tend to write to a reasonable level of academic defensibility.
> I am very skeptical that government intervention is the solution for troublesome social trends.
But government intervention is quite literally a key driver of several of these troublesome social trends. And government intervention is already mandating "top-down direction" on these issues. It's just the top down direction advocated for by the left.
In simple terms, the left is and has been using government policy as a tool of social engineering. Government is neck deep in issuing top-down direction on social trends.
Failing to see this, and clutching pearls at the scattered and inconsistent awakening of the right to this reality is more part of the problem than the solution.
Just because I agree with y that most of the problems are caused by leftist government policy, it does not *necessarily* follow that the answer is for the right to use government policy towards its own goals.
The right should, of course, when in power eliminate all such leftist policy social engineering, but that is not at all the same thing as the right using government power to serve its objectives.
Liberalism is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the creation of a thriving society like we have enjoyed in the West. The other key ingredient is morality. You called it social norms, but “norms” is too generic - it has to be the right kind of norms. Whether mediated through religion or natural law, there must be some powerful basis for morality if a society is to maintain a high level of cohesion, prosperity, and progress. Having lost that, Our sense of a society in decline and fragmentation is directly linked to the loss of this moral foundation.
In practice neither liberals nor conservatives have the moral foundation thing right. I'd argue in theory they don't either. As Haidt, Peterson, and others have argued, I'd say our best path includes aspects of both. I'd also agree we don't have the right bits of both and that one set of wrong bits are obvious to conservatives and another wrong set are obvious to liberals. I'd also argue that as obvious, and numerous, as these wrong bits are, they don't take us nearly as far from where we'd be if we got it right as it seems.
“ In practice neither liberals nor conservatives have the moral foundation thing right.“
If by this you mean neither leftists nor social conservatives have the moral foundation thing right, I would mostly agree with you.
OTOH classical liberals/libertarians DO have “the moral thing” right, and I’d also argue that the average self-described “conservative” in the U.S. (who does not subscribe to the label “social” before conservative) has it about right.
Yes, there are some no safety net at all libertarians. There are also anarchists. So what? But I stand by my assertion that most classical liberals have it about right. Lesser social safety net than we have now, more than zero.
That many many libertarians are on the side of no abortions is not an argument either way. Reasonable people will disagree on that issue (for the record, I am a radical centrist on abortion: of course early term abortions should be legal, of course late term abortion is murder, pure and simple, and in between is in between. So to me both leftists and social conservatives are wrong on abortion, but making murder legal, as many leftist states have done, is the more immoral position). Claiming that being anti-abortion is immoral I find an abominable stance, even as I agree that making all abortions illegal would be bad/unwise public policy.
But to be even clearer: if your position is/was that the political center (whether center-left or center-right) circa 1998 had the “moral foundation thing” best of all, I would find that quite reasonable.
But that you seem to be claiming that most classical liberals / libertarians / (other than social) conservatives don’t have *a* fundamentally moral foundation strikes me as ridiculously arrogant of you [as opposed to merely very judgemental, a charge for which I readily plead equally guilty 😁]
And since there is virtually no center-left remaining today at the national level or in most coastal blue states, your implicit claims that leftists are about as correct on moral foundation as those right-of-center I find borderline preposterous.
If you want to argue with my last claim, than other than early-term abortions, name even two policy positions where the left today is more pro-freedom than the right.
Ignoring that there's understandably lots of missing detail in what you say that creates ambiguity, I accept that the attributes you assign to libertarians and not-social conservatives are entirely moral. But that's based on your individual moral foundations. Someone with a different set of moral foundations will see that very differently and there is absolutely no basis for saying your moral foundations are better (or worse) than someone else's.
“Someone with a different set of moral foundations will see that very differently and there is absolutely no basis for saying your moral foundations are better (or worse) than someone else's.‘
Well, this at least is a fair statement - but ‘twas *you* yourself who violated it first with your “In practice neither liberals nor conservatives have the moral foundation thing right” claim!
My quibble is that I never said *entirely*. I said *generally*.
Separately, while perhaps a fair enough statement, I don’t agree with “there is absolutely no basis for saying your moral foundations are better (or worse) than someone else's”, and the moral relativism it implies.
ANY of the moral foundations we have discussed are without question morally superior to that of Islamic jihadists, to pick a non-trivial example, or Hitler’s Nazis.
I am indeed judgmental. But on this axis I think the following wise axiom applies: there are ten right ways, and a hundred wrong ways, to do almost anything.
To me, your initial statement (“in practice neither liberals…”) violates the first half of that axiom….
…while your last statement above (there is absolutely no basis…”) violates the second half.
The USA originally had something like a market for government. Police powers were reserved for the local and state governments. This limited the inevitable local tyrannies. People could leave town if things got too bad.
We have been centralizing _everything_ since the New Deal. Victory in WW2 gave the federal government the prestige of obvious success. The Cold War required compromises that further eroded federalism.
We centralized other things, too. Most school districts are too large for effective parental control. School officials cite state and federal requirements whenever convenient.
I have always found it ironic that many of the same people who almost worship the self organizing system of systems we call ecology hate the self organizing systems we call a market economy. Economics and ecology are two aspects of the same subject.
Similarly, a society needs enough flexibility that people who want to do things their own way socially can. That goes both ways.
Now _everybody_ seems to turn to the federal government to fix anything.
The words liberal and liberalism have become sheep's clothing for the wolves. This is where Chamlee-Wright really goes wrong either intentionally to create a strawman with which to joust or out of ignorance. See in the comments this confusion when someone below talks about liberals vs conservatives. It is a tragedy that we now have to explicitly list our personal definitions of such words when engaging in discussion.
A plant in nature spends a huge amount of its resources on just trying to survive threats from and competition with other forms of life (including competitors from its own species), such that there is barely enough left at the end of the day to produce the parts humans find valuable, and even then, these parts are often loaded with various kinds of toxins or substances intended to make the plants unpalatable.
David Friedman once asked hopefully whether it might be possible to breed or genetically modify weeds to be edible because they grew so much faster and hardier than garden plants without any need to human assistance, indeed, humans can barely keep up with the need to control their growth. The answer is no*, because what makes something a weed is precisely the fact that it puts everything it has into being a weed, because, if it didn't, it couldn't compete with something even more dedicated to being a weed.
A human looks at something that could be a useful crop, sees all that allocation of resources for the sake of security and survival and competition as a kind of "waste" (cf. the New Dealers' use of the term "wasteful competition"), and wishes it were possible for the plant to just put everything it has into making more of the stuff that humans like. "Why can't we have nice things?"
And the plant tells the human that it -is- possible, if the human is willing to take a deal: symbiosis.
The plant will stop allocating all its resources to survival and competitiveness and become a crop that puts everything it has into making as much of the stuff humans like as it can, so long as the humans take over all those other functions for it. If the humans will dedicate a piece of land exclusively to the plant, kill all the competitors, weeds, parasites and pests, quarantine and eradicate diseases, and provide as much water and fertilizer as the plant can absorb, then the crop will produce nothing but the good stuff year after year in quantities per acre that would blow the minds of even our fairly recent ancestors and absolutely make the heads of ancient peoples or hunter-gatherers explode. For example, modern maize is hardly recognizable compared to wild-type proto-teosinte. Same goes for almost all modern crops, and livestock too.
The catch, however, is that, being utterly dependent on human help, these things could not survive on their own in the wild for ten minutes and their lines would quickly go extinct.
But as in any arms race and competition for survival, nature is not just going to throw up its hands and give up, and will keep trying to discover some way to eat those calorific crops before the humans do.
And so, on occasion, you are going to see things like the blight that led to the 19th century potato famines in much of Northern and Central Europe in the "Hungry Forties" during which Belgian yields collapsed by 87% in a year and over one million Irish died of starvation - one of the worst ways to go.
"But things will adjust!" Sure, but not in time to save millions from starving to death. Not even in time for their grandchildren, who mostly existed abroad. It took generations of persistent effort to develop safe, effective, and economical chemical treatments and other new growing techniques, and to cultivate new breeds resistant to the pseudofungus oomycete, a struggle which continues to this day.
Now, imagine watching the blight almost completely wipe out your potato crop, and literally decimate your potato-dependent population, and saying, "The former, seemingly-sustainable state of affairs in which we had nice things, when it was easy and cheap to grow a reliably large supply of calories at Northern European climate and latitude from a monoculture of Irish Lumpers, has proved unsustainable in the face of the enemy's breakthrough biochemical innovation, which had overcome all the old sources of natural resistance. If we are to survive and salvage what we can of that nice thing, the potato needs our help in the fight against the Phytophthora's insidious but effective methods of attack. Unfortunately, we can't go back to easygoing, carefree, light-touch way things were before, because now if we lower our guard for a minute, the stamenophiles will immediately use their new superweapons to wipe us out again."
Now imagine further that such people started getting viciously criticized as being "post-potato farmers" betraying our ideals, values and traditional, organic methods of farming, not to mention our beloved Irish Lumper, supreme of spuds, from which "our mothers made colcannon in the little skillet pot," in those happy days when troubles we had not. You ever try to make colcannon from setantas or robintas? Ghastly! You can barely taste the leeks! What kind of monster would ever think ...
Imagine the attempt to make a defense that will fall on ears deafened by the fingers pushed deep into their canals and by the repeating droning of "Na na na, can't hear you!" - "No, you morons. You're missing the point, listen. We aren't post-potato. You are the true post-potato-heads! Because if we do things your way, the old way, we will have no potatoes left at all! Looks at the track record of all the years of potatoes succumbing worse and worse to the blight! 'Old-Potato-Ways-ism' isn't a philosophy that is a terminal objective and an end unto itself! It is -instrumental- goal, intended to help support the higher value of our survival and flourishing, for which we need calories, for which we need potatoes, for which we need to provide NEW METHODS OF SUPPORT, because of threats against which the old potatoes grown the old way are no longer naturally self-defending. Wouldn't it be best if we just do things the old way and get the old good results? OF COURSE, DUH! Guess what, we can't, which, also, duh! Look around!"
It seems that the "anti-post-liberal intellectuals" answers to dealing with the blight are, "Maybe hope is a plan after all," or "Assume a can-opener," (a solution which doesn't take generations and stops the progressive encroachments and doesn't involve using the state or sparking a long-term low-level civil war) or, "It's not my job to create; I'm a critic." It is easy to criticize, but if one wants to be taken seriously, one ought to propose a alternative plan for which there is reason to believe that it would be more likely to produce a superior outcome on a meaningful time scale.
*At least, not while still being a "weed". There are some historical examples of weeds adapting to the problem of humans removing them by a strategy of mimicry of appearance of the crops the humans are trying to grow, sneaking themselves into next year's "seed corn". One irony is that with the additional factor of human horticultural selection of the most valuable offspring of these weeds, eventually they -were bred and domesticated- into-actual distinct new crops which themselves had to be protected from other weeds, as happened in the case of both rye and oats. There is a wheat-mimic called "darnel" (or literally "false wheat", the "tares" of the parable in the Book of Matthew) which has been known about and caused all kinds of trouble since ancient times but which never had its toxins bred out of it.
I think the fundamental tension is that these things all have different answers;
1. "what people want"
2. "what's good for people"
3. "what's good for society"
A liberal society biases towards "what people want", which is often "entertainment, and nothing else" in the short term. However, that way leads to depression.
My ideal solution is society norms that push people to do what's good for them (work full time, have a family), but freedom under the law (the government does not compel anything). I used to think that was perfectly workable, but now I'm not sure. The current state is that healthy norms are practically taboo and alternatives are promoted / glamorized.
“A liberal society biases towards ‘what people want’”
Even if we accept your premise of the 3 tensions, the above statement is simply not a truism. What you are describing is a truism in majoritarian pure democracy
I do agree with your “ideal solution” premise; the challenge is how we get there.
That said, I assert that *part* of how we get there is to return to the classical liberal limited government that the founders gave us, which had more checks and balances and much more decentralized power than we have now.
I’m more than fine that we have centralized military power as we have - in fact it was a necessary thing - and that as a percentage we have a far greater central government than we did 250 years ago, but we’ve taken it much too far. Heck, just bring the aggregates of regulation and levels of government spending (even ex-entitlements) back to where we were in 1968 or 1986 and we’d be enormously better off
I feel like this debate is about 100 years too late. Liberalism died in the 1930s and the corpse was incinerated in the 1960s. Defending liberal society is a bit like defending the privileges of the 2nd Estate in 1913.
To be honest, I was thinking in a "music not the words" sense. Muddy Waters' "Got My Mojo Working" is words of sadness and frustration--his usually powerful love charm won't work on the woman he intensely desires--but in live performance it became a happy sounding rocker.
But to try to make sense of the words: there is obviously the anti-individualism, driven by what seems to me like an equivalent of the left's "false consciousness". People don't know what's really good for them, what will truly make them happy--or make them truly happy. So they make crappy choices, driven by the corrupt society they live in. But there are people who do know--US!--and we should be be able to reform society to what we know is in people's best interest. Which means a strong government which tells people what to do and is controlled by us.
It feels like they feel there is no legitimate separation between government and "civil society", though it would be impractical to fuse them.
"The corporations" are an enemy of humanity. Behind the scenes, they run things and screw up the world.
Now, this may be totally wrong. I'm going off what the essay says and the little I've picked up in other places.
FWIW, Commenter Thomas L. Hutcheson below thinks that "PLIs" and "Progressive Intellectuals" both have a "zero-sum mentality, socially and economically".
Mr. Kling; as usual, I had to give AA quick scan of your column to pin down the definition of “Liberal(ism)”. Since being hijacked mid-20th-century by “progressives” and “anarchists” the term is in disrepute. The clearer title is; “Classical Liberal”.
I feel like you are describing a liberalism that just doesn't exist. In many cases "the liberals" are on the opposite side of some of the things you describing.
Looking at this list of thinkers Vance likes, what are we likely to end up with that is such a challenge to liberalism.
1) Reform Civil Rights Law
2) Tough on Crime
3) Curb immigration, especially third world and illegal immigration
4) Tax and legal incentives to families and children vs singles
5) School choice
6) Tariffs vs other ways of raising revenue
7) Generally more pro-building/low regulation (red state vs blue state)
8) Anti-Woke
While some of these are bugaboos to liberal purity, they hardly seem like the end of all good things. Some are very firmly in the liberal camp versus what "liberals" have actually cooked up.
That was my first thought on reading these excerpts, too, along with why is what Vance and others are proposing not seen as a self-correction that should be incorporated in some fashion (not wholesale) in "liberal" governing practices and policies? This sounds very much like a defense not really of liberalism as a philosophy but as a defense of the Current Thing, without having to actually defend the Current Thing from specific criticisms for bad policy outcomes.
Agree that this list is all in the realm of reasonable policy debate. But isn't this larger question of liberalism/post-liberalism also about the how? Like to what degree limited government and federalism are respected and reinforced in pursuit and implementation of these goals?
Let's take some recent liberal vs post-liberal debates.
1) To what extent should the president use Executive Orders to make policy? What about reversing previous Executive Orders? In Hanania's recommendations via Civil Rights Law, a lot of it is about changing executive orders. Is that liberal or illiberal?
2) To what extent should the courts be able to make or interpret policy? Was Oberfegell liberal or illiberal? Or (insert your particular court ruling here)? If a court acts illiberally, should the legislature comply or say "the justice has made his ruling, let him enforce it"? How would the legislature differentiate liberal from illiberal court rulings?
3) Is Civil Rights Law liberal or illiberal. The OP claims that they are liberal, but I think a lot of people here disagree. Would implementing Hanania's policy in The Origins of Woke be liberal or illiberal? Or (insert your own changes to civil rights law)?
4) Bukele is clearly "illiberal" as regards his crime policy. So was Lee Kuan Yew. At least as defined by "liberals".
5) Is the legislature trying to mold public education policy "illiberal"? Was DeSantis saying they can't teach woke gender theory to kindergarders "illiberal"? Is taking pornography out of school libraries "illiberal"? Was giving a third rate Marxist public university over to Chris Rufo to clean house "illiberal"? Is saying we aren't going to have drag queen shows in public libraries "illiberal"? I read many op-eds in the NYTimes by "liberals" telling me all these things are "illiberal"?
6) To what extent should the legislature and executive have power over the "permanent bureaucracy"? Is it liberal or illiberal for that permanent bureaucracy to have more or less power? Is is liberal or illiberal for them to be more or less permanent (can the president fire them)?
7) Is spreading "liberalism" abroad a necessary part of liberalism (war on terror, Arab Spring, Ukraine, etc)?
I could go on and on.
To me "liberalism" in the modern context means nothing more then "there is a subset of people that are considered "the liberals" and they should have the power to do what they want based on whatever rationalizations they come up with, and the rest of us should get out of their way."
I think you fail to distinguish Liberals (and I do not mean just chemically pure "classical" liberals) from "Progressives."
I used what I feel is the "most popular" use of the term. Words are what society defines them as.
I agree with you and hope you're right.
I think Arnold is identifying the disconnect between the anti-liberal rhetoric you need to use to get elected and the policies that sophisticated observers infer you will actually support in office. Given the system we have, you have to say things that sound good but would be bad to get into office, and we have to have a little faith rather than lingering on the populist rhetoric.
Wright's thesis reads like a case of lazily 'winning' an argument by straw-manning the opposition. This Liberalism vs Post-liberalism debate is way too complex to be argued out on a Substack comment thread but two remarks:
1) avoid lazy hyperbole....no intellectual worth the name ever argues that Anything is "the source of everything that is wrong with the world"
2) the essential post liberal argument as I understand it is not that political Liberalism is wrong but rather that political Liberalism is no more. That, in other words, to everything there is a season.
Way too complex as I say but I offer this essay as doing a better job of it than Wright's:
https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/take-me-to-your-experts
Nothing you wrote is wrong, but IMO it’s missing two things:
1) It is *freedom* that is under attack - by both the PLI and the left today. You can label that “liberalism” and you’re not technically wrong, but in the U.S. today, and *certainly* outside academia, liberalism roughly equals leftism. Freedom being under attack makes the point much more clearly.
2) The political left is inarguably much more il-liberal than the political right today, and *arguably* more il-liberal than even the center of what you and she dub the PLI.
Adult freedom requires the responsibility to pay for the mistakes, where child freedom is the freedom from responsibility for paying.
Current Dem party liberals want many to have freedom to act without those acting having to pay/ suffer any consequences.
There are some old-school (mostly older) liberals in the current Dem party, but the clear majority of them are simply hard leftists who believe in nanny state authoritarianism and censoring speech they don’t agree with, not traditional liberalism.
“liberal society’s capacity to self-correct”
Ok, that’s where you lost me.
It is a true statement but I would agree our federal government has shown little to none of that ability for many decades. I believe that is the primary reason you don't see it.
A couple days ago I listened to an interview of Trudeau, mostly about immigration. Say what you will about Canada's mass immigration, he made the point that they makes lots of small changes to their policies while the US tends to make big, infrequent changes. In this regard, they come closer to a self-correcting liberal society.
It's true that Congress does large infrequent changes, but I think the executive branch and regulatory agencies can move quickly when they want. For example, repealing Trump's border policies and then re-instating them 6 months before the election. Maybe that's even an example of self-correction
Self correction?! More like party preservation.
And they were NOT all reinstated!
Particularly the critical “Remain in Mexico” one
“ …Trump’s border policies and then re-instating them 6 months before the election”
Even this statement is false. Biden has NOT reinstated Trump’s border policies. He merely changed his policy from illegally horribly unbelievably awful to merely illegally horribly awful…
It is true that our govt makes some changes as you say. And our big changes routinely leave a lot of details to be worked out by similar methods. I thought I was acknowledging all of that with the words "tend to." Either way, I'd still argue we lean far too much toward big, hard to reverse changes more than Canada and some other countries, not that I'm necessarily partial to the way they accomplish that.
It is all easy to understand once you realize the government is a system designed to defeat itself. Otherwise, what would we do with all the useless bureaucrats and politicians?
There is some truth in that but I'd argue the more important reason our govt is designed to defeat itself is to protect us against tyranny of the majority. Doesn't work perfectly but could be far worse.
This is starting to seem more and more like a cop out and lazy justification of the status quo. It’s true, it could always be. ALWAYS. You could have used the same argument in defense of the late USSR.
Excellent point/example.
Your justification of status quo is my appreciation of what we have. Sorry your life is so sad.
I'm curious what rights do you think USSR protected by not having majority rule.
Tyranny from the MAJORITY?
It’s the very few we’ve foolishly bowed to.
Why does my daughter have to share a public bathroom with a 40-year old man who pretends to be a woman?
That idiocy didn’t come from the masses, I guarantee.
What you point out may be true but it in no way invalidates what I stated.
Uhm, actually, it kinda does.
A crucial lesson that any liberal society must learn is "obedience to the unenforceable."
The phrase is from Lord Moulton's classic, eloquent speech, "Law and Manners" (1924, reprinted in The Atlantic, 1942):
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1942/07/law-and-manners/654181/
Today, we would say that a free society wants both tolerance and wise norms.
See the lively EconTalk podcast discussion by Michael Munger and Russ Roberts:
https://www.econtalk.org/michael-munger-on-obedience-to-the-unenforceable/
I'd be hard-pressed to remember any of Munger's example but I liked the podcast. I hope I remember to listen to it again.
Paging Virginia Postrel .. https://a.co/d/8LHiVJ1
Emily should be linking to and citing the actual works by the postlibs and not the opposition briefs to be persuasive.
There are always lots of silly problems involved with criticizing informal associations. In legal jargon, there's a tendency to hold all of the people under an informal descriptor like "postliberal" or "new right" as joint and severally liable for some imagined list of bad acts, when in reality they all did different things at different times and are not closely associated with each other. People do this in real life court all the time too because it is so effective.
E.g. here is a claim from Deneen's first book on the ostensible failure of liberalism: "Taken to its logical conclusion, liberalism’s end game is unsustainable in every respect: it cannot perpetually enforce order upon a collection of autonomous individuals increasingly shorn of constitutive social norms, nor can it provide endless material growth in a world of limits." (pg 41-42 of the Kindle edition). These are hard claims for Defenders of Actually Existing Present Day Not Yet Post-Liberalism to defend. They need to be addressed directly to be convincing to people already in their camp.
This claim is a real issue for our system as it actually exists. It is one of the reasons why you can stab people, get convicted of felonies repeatedly, and not wind up in prison even in small town America. The reason is our communities are full of people like this who do not follow social norms and that do not respond to the Benthamite system of punishments and rewards that our system proffers. "Try that in a small town" and actually you won't go to jail either. The reason for this is the Deneen reason, but it also meshes with the Rene Girard explanation of religion. If X% of a society just decides that it's stabbin' time all the time, liberal philosophy does not have a good answer (See also the books of Theodore Dalrymple on this topic).
Going to Emily, she writes "According to the PLI, a new elite must emerge, one that sets aside the separation of powers, seizes the administrative state, and flexes its authority to impose political control over the economy and a pre-modern notion of “the common good” as the country’s governing ideal."
OK, where does it say this in "Common Good Constitutionalism"? I can see how you could stretch it here and there, but Vermeule does not write "The Riggs v. Palmer principle of discarding controlling legal text when it contradicts the common good should apply to the separation of powers. I and my gang of postliberal vampires will bring back Montesquieu from the dead just to kill him again to end the separation of powers until the end of time." This is not what it says.
This is a major problem with internet writing in that it encourages people to gang up to bash some imaginary image of a person or group without actually dealing directly with the ideas. You can't say this about the postlibs themselves because they're all professors who tend to write to a reasonable level of academic defensibility.
> I am very skeptical that government intervention is the solution for troublesome social trends.
But government intervention is quite literally a key driver of several of these troublesome social trends. And government intervention is already mandating "top-down direction" on these issues. It's just the top down direction advocated for by the left.
In simple terms, the left is and has been using government policy as a tool of social engineering. Government is neck deep in issuing top-down direction on social trends.
Failing to see this, and clutching pearls at the scattered and inconsistent awakening of the right to this reality is more part of the problem than the solution.
But, but, but…
Just because I agree with y that most of the problems are caused by leftist government policy, it does not *necessarily* follow that the answer is for the right to use government policy towards its own goals.
The right should, of course, when in power eliminate all such leftist policy social engineering, but that is not at all the same thing as the right using government power to serve its objectives.
Liberalism is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the creation of a thriving society like we have enjoyed in the West. The other key ingredient is morality. You called it social norms, but “norms” is too generic - it has to be the right kind of norms. Whether mediated through religion or natural law, there must be some powerful basis for morality if a society is to maintain a high level of cohesion, prosperity, and progress. Having lost that, Our sense of a society in decline and fragmentation is directly linked to the loss of this moral foundation.
In practice neither liberals nor conservatives have the moral foundation thing right. I'd argue in theory they don't either. As Haidt, Peterson, and others have argued, I'd say our best path includes aspects of both. I'd also agree we don't have the right bits of both and that one set of wrong bits are obvious to conservatives and another wrong set are obvious to liberals. I'd also argue that as obvious, and numerous, as these wrong bits are, they don't take us nearly as far from where we'd be if we got it right as it seems.
“ In practice neither liberals nor conservatives have the moral foundation thing right.“
If by this you mean neither leftists nor social conservatives have the moral foundation thing right, I would mostly agree with you.
OTOH classical liberals/libertarians DO have “the moral thing” right, and I’d also argue that the average self-described “conservative” in the U.S. (who does not subscribe to the label “social” before conservative) has it about right.
Do you mean the no-safety-net libertarians?
Just curious, are not-social conservatives and libertarians on the same side of the abortion issue?
Should I go on?
Yes, there are some no safety net at all libertarians. There are also anarchists. So what? But I stand by my assertion that most classical liberals have it about right. Lesser social safety net than we have now, more than zero.
That many many libertarians are on the side of no abortions is not an argument either way. Reasonable people will disagree on that issue (for the record, I am a radical centrist on abortion: of course early term abortions should be legal, of course late term abortion is murder, pure and simple, and in between is in between. So to me both leftists and social conservatives are wrong on abortion, but making murder legal, as many leftist states have done, is the more immoral position). Claiming that being anti-abortion is immoral I find an abominable stance, even as I agree that making all abortions illegal would be bad/unwise public policy.
But to be even clearer: if your position is/was that the political center (whether center-left or center-right) circa 1998 had the “moral foundation thing” best of all, I would find that quite reasonable.
But that you seem to be claiming that most classical liberals / libertarians / (other than social) conservatives don’t have *a* fundamentally moral foundation strikes me as ridiculously arrogant of you [as opposed to merely very judgemental, a charge for which I readily plead equally guilty 😁]
And since there is virtually no center-left remaining today at the national level or in most coastal blue states, your implicit claims that leftists are about as correct on moral foundation as those right-of-center I find borderline preposterous.
If you want to argue with my last claim, than other than early-term abortions, name even two policy positions where the left today is more pro-freedom than the right.
Ignoring that there's understandably lots of missing detail in what you say that creates ambiguity, I accept that the attributes you assign to libertarians and not-social conservatives are entirely moral. But that's based on your individual moral foundations. Someone with a different set of moral foundations will see that very differently and there is absolutely no basis for saying your moral foundations are better (or worse) than someone else's.
“Someone with a different set of moral foundations will see that very differently and there is absolutely no basis for saying your moral foundations are better (or worse) than someone else's.‘
Well, this at least is a fair statement - but ‘twas *you* yourself who violated it first with your “In practice neither liberals nor conservatives have the moral foundation thing right” claim!
My quibble is that I never said *entirely*. I said *generally*.
Separately, while perhaps a fair enough statement, I don’t agree with “there is absolutely no basis for saying your moral foundations are better (or worse) than someone else's”, and the moral relativism it implies.
ANY of the moral foundations we have discussed are without question morally superior to that of Islamic jihadists, to pick a non-trivial example, or Hitler’s Nazis.
I am indeed judgmental. But on this axis I think the following wise axiom applies: there are ten right ways, and a hundred wrong ways, to do almost anything.
To me, your initial statement (“in practice neither liberals…”) violates the first half of that axiom….
…while your last statement above (there is absolutely no basis…”) violates the second half.
Cheers.
The USA originally had something like a market for government. Police powers were reserved for the local and state governments. This limited the inevitable local tyrannies. People could leave town if things got too bad.
We have been centralizing _everything_ since the New Deal. Victory in WW2 gave the federal government the prestige of obvious success. The Cold War required compromises that further eroded federalism.
We centralized other things, too. Most school districts are too large for effective parental control. School officials cite state and federal requirements whenever convenient.
I have always found it ironic that many of the same people who almost worship the self organizing system of systems we call ecology hate the self organizing systems we call a market economy. Economics and ecology are two aspects of the same subject.
Similarly, a society needs enough flexibility that people who want to do things their own way socially can. That goes both ways.
Now _everybody_ seems to turn to the federal government to fix anything.
The words liberal and liberalism have become sheep's clothing for the wolves. This is where Chamlee-Wright really goes wrong either intentionally to create a strawman with which to joust or out of ignorance. See in the comments this confusion when someone below talks about liberals vs conservatives. It is a tragedy that we now have to explicitly list our personal definitions of such words when engaging in discussion.
Liberalism has been killed and replaced by Leftism.
Yeah, it's a pain to do so, but better than to talk past each other because we have different definitions.
Here is an agricultural metaphor.
A plant in nature spends a huge amount of its resources on just trying to survive threats from and competition with other forms of life (including competitors from its own species), such that there is barely enough left at the end of the day to produce the parts humans find valuable, and even then, these parts are often loaded with various kinds of toxins or substances intended to make the plants unpalatable.
David Friedman once asked hopefully whether it might be possible to breed or genetically modify weeds to be edible because they grew so much faster and hardier than garden plants without any need to human assistance, indeed, humans can barely keep up with the need to control their growth. The answer is no*, because what makes something a weed is precisely the fact that it puts everything it has into being a weed, because, if it didn't, it couldn't compete with something even more dedicated to being a weed.
A human looks at something that could be a useful crop, sees all that allocation of resources for the sake of security and survival and competition as a kind of "waste" (cf. the New Dealers' use of the term "wasteful competition"), and wishes it were possible for the plant to just put everything it has into making more of the stuff that humans like. "Why can't we have nice things?"
And the plant tells the human that it -is- possible, if the human is willing to take a deal: symbiosis.
The plant will stop allocating all its resources to survival and competitiveness and become a crop that puts everything it has into making as much of the stuff humans like as it can, so long as the humans take over all those other functions for it. If the humans will dedicate a piece of land exclusively to the plant, kill all the competitors, weeds, parasites and pests, quarantine and eradicate diseases, and provide as much water and fertilizer as the plant can absorb, then the crop will produce nothing but the good stuff year after year in quantities per acre that would blow the minds of even our fairly recent ancestors and absolutely make the heads of ancient peoples or hunter-gatherers explode. For example, modern maize is hardly recognizable compared to wild-type proto-teosinte. Same goes for almost all modern crops, and livestock too.
The catch, however, is that, being utterly dependent on human help, these things could not survive on their own in the wild for ten minutes and their lines would quickly go extinct.
But as in any arms race and competition for survival, nature is not just going to throw up its hands and give up, and will keep trying to discover some way to eat those calorific crops before the humans do.
And so, on occasion, you are going to see things like the blight that led to the 19th century potato famines in much of Northern and Central Europe in the "Hungry Forties" during which Belgian yields collapsed by 87% in a year and over one million Irish died of starvation - one of the worst ways to go.
"But things will adjust!" Sure, but not in time to save millions from starving to death. Not even in time for their grandchildren, who mostly existed abroad. It took generations of persistent effort to develop safe, effective, and economical chemical treatments and other new growing techniques, and to cultivate new breeds resistant to the pseudofungus oomycete, a struggle which continues to this day.
Now, imagine watching the blight almost completely wipe out your potato crop, and literally decimate your potato-dependent population, and saying, "The former, seemingly-sustainable state of affairs in which we had nice things, when it was easy and cheap to grow a reliably large supply of calories at Northern European climate and latitude from a monoculture of Irish Lumpers, has proved unsustainable in the face of the enemy's breakthrough biochemical innovation, which had overcome all the old sources of natural resistance. If we are to survive and salvage what we can of that nice thing, the potato needs our help in the fight against the Phytophthora's insidious but effective methods of attack. Unfortunately, we can't go back to easygoing, carefree, light-touch way things were before, because now if we lower our guard for a minute, the stamenophiles will immediately use their new superweapons to wipe us out again."
Now imagine further that such people started getting viciously criticized as being "post-potato farmers" betraying our ideals, values and traditional, organic methods of farming, not to mention our beloved Irish Lumper, supreme of spuds, from which "our mothers made colcannon in the little skillet pot," in those happy days when troubles we had not. You ever try to make colcannon from setantas or robintas? Ghastly! You can barely taste the leeks! What kind of monster would ever think ...
Imagine the attempt to make a defense that will fall on ears deafened by the fingers pushed deep into their canals and by the repeating droning of "Na na na, can't hear you!" - "No, you morons. You're missing the point, listen. We aren't post-potato. You are the true post-potato-heads! Because if we do things your way, the old way, we will have no potatoes left at all! Looks at the track record of all the years of potatoes succumbing worse and worse to the blight! 'Old-Potato-Ways-ism' isn't a philosophy that is a terminal objective and an end unto itself! It is -instrumental- goal, intended to help support the higher value of our survival and flourishing, for which we need calories, for which we need potatoes, for which we need to provide NEW METHODS OF SUPPORT, because of threats against which the old potatoes grown the old way are no longer naturally self-defending. Wouldn't it be best if we just do things the old way and get the old good results? OF COURSE, DUH! Guess what, we can't, which, also, duh! Look around!"
It seems that the "anti-post-liberal intellectuals" answers to dealing with the blight are, "Maybe hope is a plan after all," or "Assume a can-opener," (a solution which doesn't take generations and stops the progressive encroachments and doesn't involve using the state or sparking a long-term low-level civil war) or, "It's not my job to create; I'm a critic." It is easy to criticize, but if one wants to be taken seriously, one ought to propose a alternative plan for which there is reason to believe that it would be more likely to produce a superior outcome on a meaningful time scale.
*At least, not while still being a "weed". There are some historical examples of weeds adapting to the problem of humans removing them by a strategy of mimicry of appearance of the crops the humans are trying to grow, sneaking themselves into next year's "seed corn". One irony is that with the additional factor of human horticultural selection of the most valuable offspring of these weeds, eventually they -were bred and domesticated- into-actual distinct new crops which themselves had to be protected from other weeds, as happened in the case of both rye and oats. There is a wheat-mimic called "darnel" (or literally "false wheat", the "tares" of the parable in the Book of Matthew) which has been known about and caused all kinds of trouble since ancient times but which never had its toxins bred out of it.
I think the fundamental tension is that these things all have different answers;
1. "what people want"
2. "what's good for people"
3. "what's good for society"
A liberal society biases towards "what people want", which is often "entertainment, and nothing else" in the short term. However, that way leads to depression.
My ideal solution is society norms that push people to do what's good for them (work full time, have a family), but freedom under the law (the government does not compel anything). I used to think that was perfectly workable, but now I'm not sure. The current state is that healthy norms are practically taboo and alternatives are promoted / glamorized.
“A liberal society biases towards ‘what people want’”
Even if we accept your premise of the 3 tensions, the above statement is simply not a truism. What you are describing is a truism in majoritarian pure democracy
I do agree with your “ideal solution” premise; the challenge is how we get there.
That said, I assert that *part* of how we get there is to return to the classical liberal limited government that the founders gave us, which had more checks and balances and much more decentralized power than we have now.
I’m more than fine that we have centralized military power as we have - in fact it was a necessary thing - and that as a percentage we have a far greater central government than we did 250 years ago, but we’ve taken it much too far. Heck, just bring the aggregates of regulation and levels of government spending (even ex-entitlements) back to where we were in 1968 or 1986 and we’d be enormously better off
I feel like this debate is about 100 years too late. Liberalism died in the 1930s and the corpse was incinerated in the 1960s. Defending liberal society is a bit like defending the privileges of the 2nd Estate in 1913.
Much of the post-liberal critique sounds to me like a leftist critique, just in a different key.
Which is perhaps why it exists and has a certain popularity.
How does it sounds like a leftist critique?
To be honest, I was thinking in a "music not the words" sense. Muddy Waters' "Got My Mojo Working" is words of sadness and frustration--his usually powerful love charm won't work on the woman he intensely desires--but in live performance it became a happy sounding rocker.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hEYwk0bypY
But to try to make sense of the words: there is obviously the anti-individualism, driven by what seems to me like an equivalent of the left's "false consciousness". People don't know what's really good for them, what will truly make them happy--or make them truly happy. So they make crappy choices, driven by the corrupt society they live in. But there are people who do know--US!--and we should be be able to reform society to what we know is in people's best interest. Which means a strong government which tells people what to do and is controlled by us.
It feels like they feel there is no legitimate separation between government and "civil society", though it would be impractical to fuse them.
"The corporations" are an enemy of humanity. Behind the scenes, they run things and screw up the world.
Now, this may be totally wrong. I'm going off what the essay says and the little I've picked up in other places.
Reasonably well said.
To chime in with a slogan, Roger’s “rhyme/music” is to the old-school progressive left, not the current woke leftists.
FWIW, Commenter Thomas L. Hutcheson below thinks that "PLIs" and "Progressive Intellectuals" both have a "zero-sum mentality, socially and economically".
Mr. Kling; as usual, I had to give AA quick scan of your column to pin down the definition of “Liberal(ism)”. Since being hijacked mid-20th-century by “progressives” and “anarchists” the term is in disrepute. The clearer title is; “Classical Liberal”.