Leesfragment: Liberalism and Its Discontents

Nu in onze boekhandels: Francis Fukuyama’s nieuwste, Liberalism and Its Discontents. Lees bij ons de Preface.

A defence of liberalism by the renowned political philosopher.

• ’We need more thinkers as wise as Fukuyama digging their fingers into the soil of our predicament’ — The New York Times
• ’A brilliantly acute summary of the way some aspects of liberal thought have consumed themselves’ — The Guardian
• ’One of the West's most interesting public intellectuals’ — Times
• ’Hard to think of a better case for liberal centrism’ — FT

Liberalism - the comparatively mild-mannered sibling to the more ardent camps of nationalism and socialism - has never been so divisive as today. From Putin's populism, the Trump administration and autocratic rulers in democracies the world over, it has both thrived and failed under identity politics, authoritarianism, social media and a weakened free press the world over.

Since its inception following the post-Reformation wars, liberalism has come under attack from conservatives and progressives alike, and today is dismissed by many as an 'obsolete doctrine'. In this brilliant and concise exposition, Francis Fukuyama sets out the cases for and against its classical premises: observing the rule of law, independence of judges, means over ends, and most of all, tolerance.

Pithy, to the point, and ever pertinent, this is political dissection at its very best.

N.B. Lees ook Tim Wagemakers bespreking van Identity en Misha Velthuis over The Origins of Political Order, deel 1. Lees een fragment uit het tweede deel van De oorsprong van onze politiek. En lees een fragment uit Deirdre McCloskey's Why Liberalism Works.

Preface

This book is intended to be a defense of classical liberalism, or, if that term is too fraught with certain historical connotations, then what Deirdre McCloskey labels “humane liberalism.” I believe that liberalism is under severe threat around the world today; while it was once taken for granted, its virtues need to be clearly articulated and celebrated once again.
By “liberalism,” I refer to the doctrine that first emerged in the second half of the seventeenth century that argued for the limitation of the powers of governments through law and ultimately constitutions, creating institutions protecting the rights of individuals living under their jurisdiction. I do not refer to liberalism as it is used today in the United States as a label for left-of-center politics; that set of ideas, as we will see, has diverged from classical liberalism in certain critical ways. Nor does it refer to what in the United States is called libertarianism, which is a peculiar doctrine founded on hostility to government as such. I am not using liberal in the European sense either, where it designates centerright parties skeptical of socialism. Classical liberalism is a big tent that encompasses a range of political views that nonetheless agree on the foundational importance of equal individual rights, law, and freedom.
It is clear that liberalism has been in retreat in recent years. According to Freedom House, political rights and civil liberties around the world rose during the three and a half decades between 1974 and the early 2000s, but have been falling for fifteen straight years prior to 2021 in what has been labeled a democratic recession or even depression.
In established liberal democracies, it is the liberal institutions that have come under immediate attack. Leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Poland’s Jarosław Kaczyński, Brazil’s Jair Bolsanaro, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and America’s Donald Trump were all legitimately elected, and have used their electoral mandates to attack liberal institutions in the first instance. These include the courts and justice system, nonpartisan state bureaucracies, independent media, and other bodies limiting executive power under a system of checks and balances. Orbán has been quite successful in packing the courts with his supporters and bringing the bulk of Hungarian media under the control of his allies. Trump was less successful in his attempts to weaken institutions like the Justice Department, the intelligence community, the courts, and the mainstream media, but his intention was much the same.
Liberalism has been challenged in recent years not just by populists of the right, but from a renewed progressive left as well. The critique from this quarter evolved from a charge - correct in itself - that liberal societies were not living up to their own ideals of equal treatment of all groups. This critique broadened over time to attack the underlying principles of liberalism itself, such as its positing of rights in individuals rather than groups, the premise of universal human equality on which constitutions and liberal rights have been based, and the value of free speech and scientific rationalism as methods of apprehending truth. In practice, this has led to intolerance of views that deviate from the new progressive orthodoxy, and the use of different forms of social and state power to enforce that orthodoxy. Dissident voices have been ousted from positions of influence and books effectively banned, often not by governments but by powerful organizations that control their mass distribution.
Populists on the right and progressives on the left are unhappy with present-day liberalism not, I would argue, because of a fundamental weakness in the doctrine. Rather, they are unhappy with the way that liberalism has evolved over the last couple of generations. Beginning in the late 1970s, economic liberalism evolved into what is now labeled neoliberalism, which dramatically increased economic inequality and brought on devastating financial crises that hurt ordinary people far more than wealthy elites in many countries around the globe. It is this inequality that is at the core of the progressive case against liberalism and the capitalist system with which it is associated. Liberalism’s institutional rules protect the rights of everyone, including existing elites who are reluctant to give up either wealth or power, and who therefore stand as obstacles to the march towards social justice for excluded groups. Liberalism constituted the ideological basis for a market economy, and hence in the minds of many is implicated in the inequalities entailed by capitalism. Many impatient young Gen Z activists in America and Europe regard liberalism as an outmoded baby boomer perspective, a “system” that is incapable of reforming itself.
At the same time, the understanding of personal autonomy expanded relentlessly, and came to be seen as a value that trumped all other visions of the good life including those put forward by traditional religions and culture. Conservatives saw this as a threat to their most deeply held beliefs, and felt that they were being actively discriminated against by mainstream society. They felt that elites were using a host of undemocratic means—their control over the mainstream media, universities, the courts and executive power—to advance their agenda. The fact that conservatives won any number of elections in this period in the United States and Europe did not seem to make any difference in slowing the tidal wave of cultural change.
These discontents with the way that liberalism has evolved in recent decades have led to demands from both right and left that the doctrine be replaced root and branch by a different kind of system. On the right, there have been efforts to manipulate the electoral system in the United States in order to guarantee that conservatives remain in power, regardless of democratic choice; others have flirted with the use of violence and authoritarian government as a response to the threat they see. On the left, there are demands for a massive redistribution of wealth and power, as well as recognition of groups rather than individuals based on fixed characteristics such as race and gender, as well as policies to equalize outcomes between them. Since none of this is likely to happen on the basis of a broad social consensus, progressives are happy to continue to make use of courts, executive agencies, and their substantial social and cultural power to further this agenda.
These threats to liberalism are not symmetrical. The one coming from the right is more immediate and political; the one on the left is primarily cultural and therefore sloweracting. Both are driven by discontents with liberalism that do not have to do with the essence of the doctrine, but rather with the way in which certain sound liberal ideas have been interpreted and pushed to extremes. The answer to these discontents is not to abandon liberalism as such, but to moderate it.
The plan of this book is as follows. Chapter 1 will define liberalism, and put forward the three major historical justifications for it. Chapters 2 and 3 will look at how economic liberalism evolved into the more extreme form “neoliberalism” and provoked strong opposition and discontent with capitalism itself. Chapters 4 and 5 will examine how the basic liberal principle of personal autonomy was absolutized, and turned into a critique of the individualism and the universalism on which liberalism rested. Chapter 6 deals with the critique of modern natural science that was pioneered on the progressive left but soon spread to the populist right, while chapter 7 describes how modern technology has challenged the liberal principle of free speech. Chapter 8 questions whether either the right or left have viable alternatives to liberalism; chapter 9 looks at the challenge to liberalism posed by the need for national identity; and chapter 10 lays out the broad principles required to rebuild faith in classical liberalism.
I do not intend this book to be a history of liberal thought. There are dozens of important writers who have contributed to the liberal tradition, and there have been just as many critics of liberalism over the years as well. There are hundreds if not thousands of books explicating their respective contributions. I want to focus instead on what I regard as the core ideas underlying contemporary liberalism, as well as some of the grave weaknesses afflicting liberal theory.
I am writing this book in a period when liberalism has faced numerous critiques and challenges, and appears to many people as an old and worn-out ideology that fails to answer the challenges of the times. This is hardly the first time it has been criticized. No sooner did liberalism become a living ideology in the wake of the French Revolution than it was attacked by Romantic critics who considered it to be based on a calculating and sterile worldview. It was further attacked by nationalists who, by the time of the First World War, had swept the field, and by the communists who opposed them. Outside of Europe, liberal doctrines sank roots in some societies like India, but were quickly challenged by nationalist, Marxist, and religious movements.
Nonetheless, liberalism survived these challenges and became the dominant organizing principle of much of world politics by the end of the twentieth century. Its durability reflects the fact that it has practical, moral, and economic justifications that appeal to many people, especially after they have been exhausted by the violent struggles engendered by alternative political systems. It is not, as Vladimir Putin suggested, an “obsolete” doctrine, but one that continues to be necessary in our present diverse and interconnected world. It is for that reason that it is necessary to restate the justifications for liberal politics, but also to articulate the reasons that many people today find it wanting.
Especially since 2016 there have been a plethora of books, articles, and manifestos analyzing liberalism’s shortcomings and proffering advice on how liberalism needs to adapt to present circumstances. I have spent a great deal of my life researching, teaching, and writing about public policy, and have no end of ideas about specific initiatives that could be undertaken to improve life in our contemporary liberal democracies. Rather than offering such a laundry list, however, the present volume will focus more narrowly on the basic principles that underlie a liberal regime, to expose some of their shortcomings, and, based on that, propose ways in which they could be addressed. Whatever the shortcomings, I want to show that they remain superior to the illiberal alternatives. I leave it to others to draw more specific policy conclusions from the general principles.

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Copyright © Francis Fukuyama, 2022