Tag: Book Review

Posted on

Liberalism Uplifts, Democracy Levels.

Autocracy Threatens When the Two Can’t Come Together.

One of the principal conceits of liberalism—the political doctrine, not the agenda—is that it places great faith in human reason and rationality. Yet if humans are so rational, why then does liberalism seek to curb the collective power of humans?

In his new book, Anger, Fear, Domination: Dark Passions and the Power of Political Speech, political theorist William A. Galston explains that when using the term “liberal democracy,” the antithesis of liberal is not conservative, but “total.” Liberal democracy means “limited democracy, a form of government in which the power of democratic majorities is limited in multiple ways.”

To restrain democratic majorities, liberalism reserves for itself the power not only to establish the rules of the game—as in the case of the U.S. Constitution—but also to set the boundaries of political action and public debate. By establishing the limits within which debate can occur and the norms under which it is discussed, liberalism can take certain political topics off the table, determine the language used when permitted subjects are discussed, and otherwise frame whatever matter to which the public is ultimately asked to give its consent.

For most of its short history, liberalism also sought to limit government in the interest of increasing the sphere of individual or group freedom. Limiting government power, particularly in the realm of culture and morality, allowed for a variety of incompatible minority worldviews to coexist more or less peacefully under a—more or less—morally neutral state.

This type of modus vivendi liberalism worked well—particularly for minorities—and, in the western world, often triumphed against more insular, parochial power bases. But with those triumphs, particularly in the United States, a more assertive liberalism began to drop its goal of governmental neutrality and insert itself in the private sphere, the very realm it once sought to keep separate.

Arguing that the “personal is political,” political liberals began to use the government that they had once hoped to be neutral to actively reconstitute family, gender and sexual norms. Once liberalism invaded the private realm, it brought with it its rules of engagement, its right to set the boundaries of debate, even determine the language we use.

While regulating racial speech in the public square was normalized rather quickly and considered successful, the monitoring of more intimate speech and behaviors in the private realm was always more problematic. Historically, the relative neutrality of a secular liberal state allowed traditional religions to operate unimpeded. But once the secular liberal state began to espouse secular liberalism as the preferred universal norm for all citizens it placed the state in opposition to the beliefs and behaviors of many religions. A political doctrine that first emerged as a call to curb the abuse of power evolved into a full on dispensation, or even, as one enthusiastic scholar recently called it, “a way of life.”1

Today’s surge of populism is the democratic reaction against the growth of liberal agenda setting in what was once considered the private sphere. What began as the establishment of the rules of the game of public life devolved into proscriptions on speech and behavior in everyday life.

***

I have to say upfront that I found an eminent political theorist needing to argue that humans are not always driven by reason and self interest a bit sad. (At one point, Galston himself acknowledges that he finds is “almost embarrassing.”) That he felt the need to cite the likes of Aristotle and Thucydides to prove the point also made it a little ridiculous. The book’s second major point, that “persuasive speech” is the core of politics, is also painfully obvious. What is fascinating, however, is the extent to which he felt the need to throw himself at the altar of common sense.

But desperate times call for desperate measures. Liberal democracy, Galston writes, is currently under the most pervasive attack than at any time since the 1930s. Yet, despite the “gathering strength of its external enemies,” this form of government is still “more likely to perish from within—from public dissatisfaction with its vulnerabilities, from demagogues’ ability to mobilize popular passions against it, and most of all, from the myopia and naïveté of its defenders.” In other words, those who adhere to liberalism have helped to bring this moment upon themselves.

A combination of their “unrealistic understanding” of human psychology and their naive belief that the movement toward tolerance at home and abroad was inexorable has provoked a far reaching negative reaction against liberalism as well as rendered liberals incapable of defending themselves against it.

If liberal democracy is to survive, Galston argues, its defenders “must set aside their illusions about human nature and history” and drop their “mistaken faith in historical progress.” That’s because “the dark side of our nature is here to stay, and liberal democracy” . . . “can buckle under pressure from the passions. Noble dreams have their place, but rigorous realism offers the best defense against the threats we now face.”

This adjustment of assumptions, however major, seems pretty straightforward until you realize that one’s baseline assumptions about human nature and history deeply influence whatever political objectives liberalism will seek to achieve on the ground.

The person who believes that people are essentially reasonable and make decisions largely on the basis of their self interest is more likely to place his faith in the type of utopian political goals that seek to remold and reinvent human nature. Conversely, liberals who have witnessed great political evil tend to be more pessimistic about the nature of man and therefore more suspicious of utopian goals to mettle with his nature. Pessimistic liberals, to borrow from philosopher Hans Jonas, should “give the prophecy of doom priority over the prophecy of bliss.”2

But is liberalism stripped of its optimism still liberalism? Yes, if you believe that the historical core of liberalism is the distrust of power and a broad commitment to protect individual autonomy.

Is liberalism stripped of its optimism worthwhile? Not entirely if one believes that liberalism should place its faith in the perfectibility of man.

The point here, once again, is that one’s assumptions about the essential nature of humans predetermines how ambitious one thinks political liberalism should be in the cause of freedom. Put another way, how the broader public assesses human nature predetermines how much “change”—to use that lazy, loaded term—it is willing to tolerate.

Lest he fall prey to critics who believe that pessimistic liberalism undercuts calls for transformative change,3 Galston threads the needle and insists that “realism about the dark side of the human soul does not rule out an aspirational liberal politics.” After all, he reminds us, Lyndon B. Johnson, a man who “was hardly naive about human motivation,” was the architect of the Great Society.

***

In addition to never forgetting that humans are often driven by irrational, negative emotions, realism, Galston insists, calls for liberals to acknowledge that “human beings bring themselves in full to politics.”

As I stated up top, liberalism restrains majorities and constrains debate. One of those constraints came to include the expectation that people refrain from bringing their religious beliefs into the public square. Galston, however, now concludes that liberals have often underestimated “the persistent power” of religion. He concedes that “culture and religion will not lose their independent power to shape understanding and motivate action.” Thus, if liberals don’t want to “continue to be surprised by political events,” they had better “make the effort to understand the enduring influence of religion and traditional morality in the hinterlands.” If nothing else, it may help them understand how “the exercise of liberty shades over into what many see as license or outright moral anarchy.”

In the end, Galston never clearly states what kind of political objectives a realistic liberalism would seek to promote. He only implies that cultural issues are their weak flank, the place where angry populists hit the hardest and most effectively. “They advance their cause by battling their liberal adversaries on the terrain of culture,” he writes, “invoking traditional gender roles and moving such issues as homosexuality, same-sex marriage, and transgenderism to the front lines of the struggle. They oppose most immigration, not only on economic grounds but also because immigrants can challenge, and eventually change, long-established cultural traditions.” What Galston is hinting at, but never dares utter, is the question lurking beneath this important yet imperfect book: How much toleration will the public tolerate?

Galston delivers many sophisticated kernels of truth that can ultimately be boiled down into common sense lessons one would hope a child would learn on a playground. “People can be mean.” “You can’t win ‘em all.” “The world isn’t fair.” “Pick your battles.” You don’t have to read Saint Augustine or Reinhold Niebuhr to reach these conclusions. What’s astonishing is that it took Galston until 2025 to pull the alarm.

I say that, because the late social critic Christopher Lasch made the same argument way back in 1991, long before the attack on liberal democracy had become so severe. Lasch warned liberals that “in their eagerness to condemn what is objectionable” in lower-middle-class culture, evils “such as “racism, nativism and anti-intellectualism,” they had “lost sight of what is valuable” in it, namely its “moral realism, its understanding that everything has its price, its respect for limits, [and] its skepticism of progress.”4

***

Political scientist Giovanni Sartori understood the relationship between liberalism and democracy in terms of geometry. “Liberalism has a vertical impetus,” he wrote, “while democracy is a horizontal diffusion.”5 Although liberalism first emerged in the 18th century in opposition to the established powers of aristocracy and the Church, it nevertheless retained the view of “ethical truth as a universal norm linked in a hierarchical chain of increasing purity.”6

Liberalism, in other words, is high-minded and tends toward elitism because its ideals are generally interpreted, taught, and monitored by enlightened elites. (John Stuart Mill suggested that liberal democracy required “philosophers” to “enlighten the multitude.”)7

But because democracy is about public opinion and participation, it tends toward the parochial and the visceral. The multitude can be anarchic. While liberalism uplifts, democracy levels. Each puts constraints on the other.

For liberal democracy to work, the former and the latter have to meet at some point to form an axis. It’s when the union between the two breaks that autocracy is most likely to threaten the entire enterprise.

Galston is right, “liberal democracy is the best form of government possible in our current circumstances.” Liberalism without democracy becomes elitist. Democracy without liberalism lacks foundational ideals. If realists don’t soon wrest liberalism from the hands of naive utopian-minded optimists, we may not be able to enjoy the benefits of the combination much longer.

Liberals can either continue to castigate the public for its intolerance and backwardness—thereby alienating them further—or the political demands of liberalism can be brought more into line with what the public is willing to tolerate.

***

  1. Alexandre Lefebvre, Liberalism as a Way of Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2024). ↩︎
  2. Hans Jonas, Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), x.
    ↩︎
  3. Samuel Moyn. Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023). ↩︎
  4. Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 17. ↩︎
  5. Giovanni Sartori, Elementi di Teoria Politica (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995), 145-146. ↩︎
  6. Barry Alan Shain, The Myth of American Individualism: The Protestant Origins of American Political Thought (Princeton, N.J. Princeton University Press, 1994), 85. ↩︎
  7. G.L. Williams, ed., John Stuart Mill on Politics and Society (London: Harvester, 1976), 184. ↩︎

Posted on

Does the Future Belong to America’s Lawyers or China’s Engineers?

When I picked up a copy of Dan Wang’s Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, I had no clue how much it would teach me about the United States.

Wang, a Chinese-Canadian tech analyst and writer, doesn’t merely tell the story of China’s meteoric economic rise. He compares and contrasts the strengths and pathologies of the world’s two great economic superpowers. What’s more, his focus is not on abstract measures of economic or military dominance.  He could care less about sources of national vanity. 

Instead, he assesses the countries by how well they work for the people living in them.  He builds on this decidedly humane approach by drawing on his family’s emigrant story and by mixing in his own experiences of having lived and worked equal amounts of time in both the U.S. and China. (Wang was also a fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center.)

The result is an astonishingly lucid, fair, fun-to-read analysis of two nations grappling with very different types of flaws. And lest you think he gets stuck in the usual rote comparisons of two opposing systems—one democratic, one authoritarian, blah, blah, blah—be aware that Wang wields his Canadianness brilliantly and insists that “no two peoples are more alike than Americans and Chinese.”

If that declaration doesn’t wake you up, his explanation will:

“A strain of materialism, often crass, runs through both countries, sometimes producing veneration of successful entrepreneurs, sometimes creating displays of extraordinary tastelessness, overall contributing to a spirit of vigorous competition. Chinese and Americans are pragmatic: They have a get-it-done attitude that occasionally produces hurried work. Both countries are full of hustlers peddling shortcuts, especially to health and to wealth. Their peoples have an appreciation for the technological sublime: the awe of grand projects pushing physical limits. American and Chinese elites are often uneasy with the political views of the broader populace. But masses and elites are united in the faith that theirs is a uniquely powerful nation that ought to throw its weight around if smaller countries don’t get in line.” 

Stunning. Wang’s analysis is both humane and independent.  Yet, for all its insights on China, what struck me most about Breakneck was its critique of—and advice for—America.

***

The primary, and most stark, contrast Wang explores is that, for better or for worse, China is a nation run by engineers while the U.S. is run by lawyers. Because of that fact, China can build monumental projects in a short amount of time while the U.S. has become a “vetocracy” obsessed with proceduralism.  Because lawyers know how to obstruct, he argues, the U.S. has lost sight of how government can and should build in the service of people. 

On the flip side, lawyers can curb government power and protect individual rights, while engineers tend to employ ham-fisted, “literal minded” solutions to social issues, which not only make matters worse but “smother” people with political control.  It stands to reason that a state that moves fast and breaks things can also “break people.”

Of course, once upon a time the United States was also an engineering nation.  It would not have become a global power otherwise.  But in the 1960s, in response to social problems, elite lawyers shifted course. “As Americans grew alarmed by the unpleasant by-products of growth—environmental destruction, excessive highway construction, corporate interests above public interests—the focus of lawyers turned to litigation and regulation. The mission became to stop as many things as possible.”  So, while the lawyerly society emerged as a “necessary corrective” to America’s social problems, over time it “became the cause of many of its present problems.” 

In addition to complicating—and rendering incomprehensible—the rules governing nearly every realm of society, lawyers are “too often the servants of the rich.” While  in principle a lawyerly society serves to protect the rights of many, in practice it serves primarily to insulate and protect the wealthy. Furthermore, its ability to slow and stop countless public projects has made average Americans “lose faith that the government can meaningfully improve their lives.”  Today, writes Wang, Americans live “in the ruins of an industrial civilization, whose infrastructure is just barely maintained and rarely expanded.”

To earn back the faith of its people, Wang argues, the United States must stop catering to the wealthy, “recover some of its engineering prowess and make room for nonlawyers among its ruling elites.” There’s a lot about China that Americans would never want to emulate, but over the past two decades, the Chinese have been beating the Americans at their own game: optimism in the future, an outlook “in large part driven by physical dynamism.”  Ultimately, Wang concludes, Americans will never again feel that kind of optimism unless the United States commits to relearning how to make and build big things.

Verified by MonsterInsights